Previously:
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It took The Judge two years of constant effort to memorize the Quran. In that time, he heard a hundred cases. They came from across the country, rich businesspeople from the metropolises whose children had all made aliyah but who could not break themselves from the work of their lives and pastoralists who couldn’t imagine scraping together the money to get a bus to the airport, much less a plane ticket to Israel, made up the bulk of his cases. They came to meet his discerning gaze and speak their peace to him, before he made up his mind. There was no one left to share the load, and the judge himself conceded it was getting small.
Not in the 998 year history of the program of religious study at Al-Azhar University had a non-Muslim been admitted. Perhaps that was because no non-Muslim had ever thought to become a Hafez, to memorize the Quran. The Judge had given the idea to The General, originally.
The General took the idea first to the mosque. As He had on every occasion except the death of the General’s daughter in a jetski accident, God had nothing to say to the General, so he took the problem to the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Toufik Abdlkrim. It was the trap, he knew, that would finally out the Sheikh.
Sheikh Abdelkrim’s office had been redecorated. His secretary, a young man of Amazigh heritage whose aptitude for languages had propelled him to the attention of the ministerial headhunters, had introduced the aging Sheikh to the concept of interfaith organizations, a concept the old man had taken to with gusto, having lost his own faith a decade earlier when he read (for the first time) reports of the horrors of the Holocaust, and then saw them for himself.
While grappling with the theological questions, Sheikh Abdelkrim (whose reputation was still staked to his history as a radical firebrand who lent his religious legitimacy to the King in the postwar chaos of almost-accidental decolonization) still kept up appearances. He had, he often told his aides, nowhere to go but in the ground.
And so it was that a man recognized as a central theologian of a not-altogether-modernizing branch of Islam in the 20th century had come to have a portrait of himself with Cardinal Albino Lucciani and one with the Dali Lama in his office. Though he could never maintain his credibility and hang a portrait with a major rabbinical figure, he had framed a letter from Yad Vashem, in Hebrew, thanking him for nominating Oufkir Msensen, an Amazigh herdsman who had hidden three dozen Jewish children among his many grandchildren and great grandchildren as Rommel swept through the hills toward Dar Al-Aswad, as Righteous Among the Nations.
Sheikh Abdelkrim lit a candle when the General asked him the question, and opened the Hadith of Al-Bukhari. “Have you asked him,” asked Sheikh Abdelkrim, “If he would be ashamed of this course of action?”
“I have not, why would I ask him that?” said the General. “He has no shame as it is, to come to me with this.”
“Well then he would not be ashamed, and the Messenger of God, peace be upon him,” and he glanced down to read the passage he had memorized as a child and recited it to his mother whenever she disapproved of his actions, “ tells us, ‘If you would not be ashamed, do what you would like.’” He blew the candle out. “I will ask His Majesty so that you don’t have to. This is a proud man, from a line of proud people.”
“One day, Sheikh, someone will ask you about God. Maybe His Majesty.”
“One day, General, I may have to answer a vengeful God for having spurned him these past ten years. If you had seen, if you had only seen Majdanek like I did when I was on my mission to the Palestinian refugees in Poland, you would not be able to believe either.”
“This is a bad idea.”
“It is, but it was your bad idea originally.”
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