They lay silently for a long time, each of them alone with his thoughts. Nick’s mind whirled. His heart burned with thoughts and desires, like a furnace. Yet Zaid’s words, like the night, were so clear, so simple. The world only made sense if you accepted yourself. A man was only a man, he thought, his gaze lost in the pinpoints of light which were millions upon millions of worlds, each vaster than our own. They glittered above him, as real as anything could be, in an immutable and perfect order fixed for all time. Understanding lay in seeing that what is real is just that—real. That was the truth and all that was required of him was to perceive it as such and submit. That was what the word “Moslem” meant. One who submits.

“How does one become a Moslem?” Nick asked.

“You only have to say the shahadah that there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet, and you will be of the Brotherhood of the Faithful forever,” Zaid said, his heart beating. He had waited for a long time to hear the boy ask that question.

“That’s all?” Nick asked, surprised.

“Well,” Zaid replied, a twinkle in his eyes, “you have to mean it.”

All that night the boy didn’t sleep. He lay awake wrestling with his thoughts. Ideas wheeled around his head like the stars he gazed at. He felt himself pinned to the earth, a whirling rock in space, caught in the same immutable dance as the worlds he could see, burning in the night.

He never revealed to anyone what he thought about that night. But in the morning, as the false dawn broke, he silently knelt beside Sheikh Zaid as he prepared to perform the morning salat. As the first rays of morning cast their shadows far across the desert, Nick bowed his forehead to the still-cool sand and said the shahadah for the first time.

Al Aramah

Al Aramah

ABDUL SA’AD IRRITABLY TOSSED the report aside. The Russian plan was nonsense. Idiots! Sending more Palestinians after the Scorpion was like sending an army of men with butterfly nets to capture the wind. The Scorpion was a true Bedu. He could disappear among the desert tribes at will. And should he choose to return to the Mutayr, it would take an army to get at him.

This was a dangerous development, now when everything was poised. A faint breath of desert wind rustled the palm fronds high above him. It whispered of jihad and in his mind’s eye he saw the desert tremble under the tank treads as the armies of Allah surged across the East in holy war, flags unfurled in the wind.