The Caliph respected their purity, but his range of experience was far greater, and necessarily so: the master’s tools would be needed to dismantle the master’s house. After attending college at the University of Hyderabad, he had spent two years obtaining a graduate degree in engineering from the University of Maryland, in College Park; he had been, he liked to say, to the heart of darkness. His time in the States taught the Caliph—Ahmad Tabari, as he was then called—how Westerners viewed the rest of the world. It introduced him to men and women who grew up in households of power and privilege, where the main struggle was over the remote control, and the greatest danger they faced was boredom. For them, places such as Anura or Sri Lanka or Lebanon or Kashmir or Myanmar had been flattened into metaphor, mere emblems of the pointless barbarity of non-Western peoples. In each case, the West enjoyed the great gift of obliviousness: obliviousness to its complicity, obliviousness to the fact that its barbarity dwarfed any other.

Westerners! He knew they remained an abstraction, ghostly and even demonic, to many of his followers. But they were no abstraction for the Caliph; he could see them and feel them, for he had. He knew what they smelled like. There was, for instance, the bored wife of an associate dean he had met during his school days. At a get-together the administration held for foreign students, she drew out of him his tales of hardship, and as he talked he had noticed how her eyes widened and her cheeks flushed. She was in her late thirties, blond and bored; her comfortable existence was a cage to her. What started as a conversation next to a punch bowl was followed, at her insistence, by coffee the very next day, and then by much more. She had been excited by his stories of persecution, by the cigarette burns on his torso; no doubt she was also excited simply by what she perceived as his exoticism, though she owned up only to an attraction to his “intensity.” When he mentioned that electrodes had once been attached to his genitals, she looked both horrified and fascinated. Were there any lasting effects? she had asked solemnly. He had laughed at her ill-disguised interest and said he would happily let her decide for herself. Her husband, with his fecal breath and comical, pigeon-toed walk, would not be home for hours.

That afternoon, Ahmad performed a salat, the ritual prayer, with her juices still on his fingers. A pillowcase served as his prayer mat.