“It is a sad thing,” the representative began, “to see the faithful living in such poverty.”
“It has always been so, but today we can practice our religion in freedom. My people are coming back to the Faith. Our mosques have been repaired, and every day they are more full. What are material possessions compared to the Faith?” the local leader responded, with the reasonable voice of a teacher.
“So true that is,” the representative agreed. “And yet Allah wishes for His Faithful to prosper, does He not?” There was general agreement. Every man in the room was an Islamic scholar, and few prefer poverty to comfort.
“Most of all, my people need schools, proper schools,” was the reply. “We need better medical facilities–I grow weary of consoling the parents of a dead child who needed not to have died. We need many things. I do not deny that.”
“All these things are easily provided–if one has money,” the representative pointed out.
“But this has always been a poor land. We have resources, yes, but they have never been properly exploited, and now we have lost the support of the central government–at the very moment when we have the freedom to control our own destiny, while that fool of a president we have gets drunk and abuses women in his palace. If only he were a just man, a faithful man, for then we might bring prosperity to this land,” he observed, more in sadness than in anger.
“That, and a little foreign capital,” one of the more economically literate of his retinue suggested modestly. Islam
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has never had a rule against commercial activity. Though it is remembered by the West for spreading by the sword, it had gone east on the ships of traders, much as Christianity had spread through the word and example of its own adherents.
“In Tehran, it is thought that the time has arrived for the faithful to act as the Prophet commands. We have made the error common to unbelievers, of thinking in terms of national greed rather than the needs of all people. My own teacher, Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, has preached of the need to return to the foundations of our Faith,” the representative said, sipping his tea. He spoke as a teacher himself, his voice quiet. Passion he saved for the public arena. In a closed room, sitting on the floor with men as learned as himself, he, too, spoke only with reason’s voice. “We have wealth–such wealth as only Allah could have awarded by His own plan. And now we have the moment as well. You men in this room, you kept the Faith, honored the Word in the face of persecution, while others of us grew rich. It is now our obligation to reward you, to welcome you back into the fold, to share our bounty with you. This is what my teacher proposes.”
“It is good to hear such words,” was the cautious reply. That the man was primarily a man of God did not make him naive. He guarded his thoughts with the greatest care – growing up under Communist rule had taught him that–but what he had to be thinking was obvious.
“It is our hope to unite all Islam under one roof, to bring the Faithful together as the Prophet Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, desired. We are different in place, in language, often in color, but in our Faith we are one. We are the elect of Allah.”
“And so?”
“And so, we wish your republic to join our own so that we may be as one. We will bring you schools and medical assistance for your people. We will help you take control of your own land, so that what we give you will be returned to all many-fold, and we shall be as the brothers Allah intends us to be.”
The casual Western observer might have remarked that these men all appeared unsophisticated, due to their less-
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than-splendid clothing, their simple mode of speech, or merely the fact that they sat on the floor. Such was not exactly the case, and what the visitor from Iran proposed was hardly less startling than an embassy from another planet might have been. There were differences between his nation and this one, between his people and theirs. Language and culture, for starters. They had fought wars over the centuries, there had been banditry and brigandage, this despite the most serious strictures in the Holy Koran about armed conflict between Islamic nations. There was, in fact, virtually no common ground between them at all–except for one. That one might have been called accidental, but the truly Faithful didn’t believe in accidents. When Russia, first under the czars and then under Marxism-Leninism, had conquered their land (a lengthy process rather than an event), they’d stripped so much away. Culture, for one. History and heritage; everything but language, a sop to what the Soviets for generations had uneasily called “the nationalities question.” They’d brought schooling aimed first at destroying everything and then at rebuilding it in a new and godless mode, until the only unifying force left to the people was their Faith, which they’d tried hard to suppress. And even that was good, they all thought now, because the Faith could never be suppressed, and such attempts only made the truly Faithful more determined. It might even–had to have been a plan from Allah Himself, to show the people that their one salvation could only be the Faith. Now they were coming back to it, to the leaders who had kept the flame alight, and now, all in the room reflected, as their visitor knew they must, Allah Himself had washed away their petty differences so that they could unify as their God wished. So much the better to do so with the promise of material prosperity, as Charity was one of the Pillars of Islam, and so long denied by people calling themselves faithful to the Holy Word. And now the Soviet Union was dead, and its successor state crippled, and the distant and unloved children of Moscow left largely on their own, all of them governed by an echo of what was gone. If it were not a sign from Allah that this opportunity should present itself, then what was it? they all asked themselves.
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They only had to do one thing to bring it all about. And he was an unbeliever. And Allah would judge him– through their hands.
“AND ALTHOUGH I can’t say that I liked the way you treated my Boston College Eagles last October,” Ryan said, with a smile, to the assembled NCAA football champions from the University of Oklahoma at Norman, “your tradition of excellence is part of the American soul.” Which hadn’t been much of a pleasure for the University of Florida in the last Orange Bowl, in a 35-10 blowout.
And the people applauded again. Jack was so pleased by this that he almost forgot the fact that the speech was not really his. His smile, crooked teeth and all, lit up the arena, and he waved his right hand, this time not tentatively. One could tell the difference on the C-SPAN cameras.
“He’s a fast learner,” Ed Kealty said. He was objective about such matters. His public face was one thing, but politicians are realists, at least in the tactical sense.
“He’s very well coached, remember,” the former Vice President’s chief of staff reminded his boss. “They don’t come any better than Arnie. Our initial play got their attention, Ed, and van Damm must have laid the word on Ryan pretty hard and pretty fast.”
He didn’t have to add that their “play” had gone nowhere fast after that. The newspapers had written their initial editorials, but then reflected a little and backed off–not editorially, since the media rarely admits to error, but the news stories coming from the White House press room, if not praising Ryan, hadn’t used the usual assassination buzzwords: unsure, confused, disorganized, and the like. No White House with Arnie van Damm in it would ever be disorganized, and the whole Washington establishment knew it.
Ryan’s major Cabinet appointments had shaken things up, but then the officials had all started doing the right things. Adler was another insider who’d worked his way to the top; as a junior official he’d briefed in too many foreign-affairs correspondents over the years for them to
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turn on him–and he never lost a chance to extol Ryan’s expertise on foreign policy. George Winston, outsider and plutocrat though he was, had initiated a “quiet” reexam-ination of his entire department, and Winston had on his Rolodex the number of every financial editor from Berlin to Tokyo, and was seeking out their views and counsel on his internal study. Most surprising of all was Tony Bre-tano in the Pentagon. A vociferous outsider for the last ten years, he’d promised the defense-reporting community that he’d clean out the temple or die in the attempt, that the Pentagon was wasteful now as they’d always proclaimed, but that he, with the President’s approval, was going to do his damnedest to de-corrupt the acquisition process once and for all. It was a singularly uncharming collection of people, Washington outsiders all, but, damn it, they were charming the media in the best possible way, quietly, in the back rooms of power. Most disturbingly of all, the Washington Post, an internal spy had told Realty earlier in the day, was preparing a multipart story about Ryan’s history at CIA, and it would be a canonization piece by no less than Bob Holtzman. Holtzman was the quintessential media insider, and for reasons unknown, he liked Ryan personally–and he had one hell of a source inside somewhere. That was the Trojan horse. If the story ran, and if it were picked up around the nation–both likely, since it would increase the prestige both of Holtzman and the Post–then his media contacts would back away rapidly; the editorials would counsel him to withdraw his claim for the good of the nation and he’d have no leverage at all, and his political career would end in greater disgrace than he’d accepted only a short time before. Historians who might have overlooked his personal indiscretions would instead focus on his overreaching ambition, and instead of seeing it as an irregularity, would then fold it back into his entire career, questioning everything he’d ever done, seeing him in a different and unfavorable light at every step, saying that the good things he’d done were the irregularities. Kealty wasn’t so much looking into his political grave as at eternal damnation.