“Don’t forget, we fathers are fourth in respect, after mothers: your mother, then your mother, then your mother, then your father.”

Muneer loves this saying of the Prophet. But he wishes Uncle Fareed had not spoken it, and asks God’s forgiveness for the thought.

“Ya’qub went blind when he lost his child Yusuf,” Muneer says. He understands the English expression of “blood boiling.” Heat surges in his body.

“God forbid,” Fareed says. “Thank God, we are healthy. We have our sight.”

“Our sight, but not our children. Let me give you something for the investigator.”

“I won’t take your money.”

Muneer sits a beat longer. “You have to tell me when you hear from her. Swear you will, Uncle.”

“Of course. God willing, we’ll tell you,” Fareed says. “And may God give your upstart paper great success. Competition is good for us newsmen.”

Fareed sucks on the shisha, and then smiles for the first time during this meeting. He lets the smoke come out the corners of his mouth and tells a story Muneer has heard before: how Fareed’s father came up with the idea of an upstart paper in the 1920s while he was smoking shisha with fellow veterans of the Hejazi army, in the open air of a café in downtown Jidda, which was a small yet important port city at the time. Their breath infused with apple-scented smoke, their minds animated by camaraderie and regional pride, the friends imagined a broadside that would tell the truth about everything and reflect their cosmopolitan city, the most vital organ of their beloved Hejaz, which they saw as a strip of land containing everything: mountains, plains, valleys, coastline, oases, agriculture, and the two holiest sites in the world. An English merchant named Fitzworth financed the partners. They told him, “One day, one of us will own Harrods, and we’ll pay it back.”

“None of those guys ever owned Harrods,” Fareed says. “The Egyptians beat us to it, like they beat us to everything else.” He always tells this joke when he talks about the founding of his paper. Muneer found it funny once.

At first, they called the paper Voice of the Hejaz, but soon, the Hejaz belonged to the Saudi kingdom, and the paper belonged to the new nation. It became, in the 1930s, al-Sharqiyah.

“That was my father’s idea, too,” Fareed says. “A paper to unite the people of our whole region.”

Many years later, Imad and Muneer had started Akhbar al-’Urus—News of the Bride—with big aspirations, too: a paper for the people of Jidda, where Eve was said to be buried, a city affectionately called the Bride of the Red Sea.