I was as addicted to my dreams as my father was to his opium. I imagined changing everything around me and shaping it anew: I swept the gravel market, sprinkled the streets, and dried up the ever-flowing sewers; I tore down old houses and replaced them with towering apartment blocks; I smartened up the policemen, improved the conduct of the students and teachers, condemned drugs and drink, and conjured food from the air.

One afternoon the two of them were sitting in the hall, Father plucking his mustache with a pair of tweezers, Tariq darning his socks.

“Don’t be taken in by the destitution of the poor,” Tariq was saying. “This country is full of rich people no one knows about.”

“Al-Hilaly is mining gold,” said Father.

“Don’t talk to me about al-Hilaly and his gold. Talk about women—and the petrodollar glut!”

“This scheme appeals to me. But our hands are tied.”

“Abu al-Ala*1 used to live on a diet of lentils,” I piped up.

“Deliver these pearls of wisdom to your mother!” Father yelled at me.

I fell silent, telling myself that they were just a couple of savages.

—

There was Tahiya, standing right in front of me, so incredibly attractive with her captivating eyes that I looked at her in a daze, not believing what I was seeing.

During the period before exams I used to stay up late at night and sleep in the daytime. The door had opened while I was pacing up and down in the hall studying, and Tahiya had come in, with Tariq Ramadan close behind. Father and Mother had already gone to bed. I knew Tahiya. I’d often seen her onstage, doing bit parts, like Tariq, and I stared at her now in bewilderment.

“What’s keeping you up at this late hour?” she said, smiling.

“He’s a striver. He stays up at night in the pursuit of learning, and next week he is going to take the middle school exams.”

“Good for you.”

They went upstairs to Tariq’s room. My head spun; my blood boiled. Was he bringing her to his room behind my parents’ backs? Didn’t she have a house they could go to? Was our house being brought down to the lowest depths? I couldn’t concentrate. My head was aflame with all the unquenchable desires of puberty. Temptation had launched an attack, which, in my struggle for purity, I fought off by sheer willpower: my whole being raged furiously until at last sleep overcame me.

In the afternoon, when they were sitting in the hall, I approached my parents, and at the sight of me Father asked apprehensively, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Something very strange! You’d never imagine!” I burst out heatedly. “Tariq brought Tahiya to his room last night!” His heavy eyes turned toward me, fixing on me. He said nothing, so I assumed he didn’t believe me. “I saw it with my own eyes!”