Vess laughed.
Chiddy bowed them into the elevator. “Not far,” he said. “Not far at all.”
In Afghanistan—TUESDAY
Mustapha ibn Daud shut his door against the noises in the room beneath him where a rancorous debate continued, without letup, as it had for hours.
“If we do not feel lust, it is the will of Allahl” the old imam was still saying, over and over. Likely it had been decades since he had been able to feel anything of the kind, but now he championed the cause of the hideous women. “If these otherworldly afrits have changed our women, then they have done Allah’s work whether they know it or not! Nothing happens that is not the will of Allah! We are being rebuked for our lusts, which burned more hotly the more the fuel was hidden!
“Listen to me! We refused to see our women as people like ourselves,- we hid them to make them titillating, to think of them only as vessels for our lusts, servants for our kitchens, breeders of our sons! Let us free the women to walk as we do, with their faces uncovered. Let us see if this does not please Allah.”
And, as he had done over and over, another, younger man attacked him: “Though he cannot lastingly prevail, Satan can do what Allah does not will! We are being tested! We should never change our ways! In time, Allah will restore our own to us.”
“And if He does not?” asked the old man. “If our women continue as they are? If my sons are unable to beget children? Is our lineage to stop with this generation? Do not say we are not changing our ways. It was agreed in the Taliban that we would eschew all modern gadgetry, was it not? And yet now, we have laptops. We have telephones. These things are needed in a modern state. Why should we not have modern women, too? They can be modern and still virtuous . . .”
Mustapha had held up his hand for silence, waiting until it fell. “I disagree. Our wives have been replaced by demons. Since Satan makes it impossible for us to kill these demons who have taken the places of our wives and daughters, let them go where they will! Some of our men have already gone to the Pakistan border to take women from there. We will bring women from elsewhere to serve our needs. Our ways are righteous! Our ways are proper! To protect the purity of our womenfolk…”
“They are pure now,” shouted the old man, shaking his fist at Mustapha. “They are not demons. I have talked with them. They are our women, and they are more pure now than they have ever been! When they were hidden, they were lusted after.Now, no one lusts afar them!”
A murmur of discontent ran through the room. No man here had touched a woman for some time. Every one of them had in his house at least one woman of supreme and utter repulsiveness, a woman he gagged to look at or smell. A woman who was hideous to the senses.
The old man spoke again. “Listen to me. You cannot deny that the women in our houses are pure. Untouched. Let us achieve some consistency. We have said this is what we desire, that our wives and daughters be pure. That they not be raped, that they not be looked upon with lascivious eyes. Well, now they are pure, they are not raped, no one looks at them with desire, yet we complain! This causes me to wonder whether their purity was really our aim. Or did we want something else? By hiding them did we increase their erotic allure? Did we arouse ourselves with the idea of their subjugation? Is this something of which Allah approves?”
That was when Mustapha ibn Daud had left the room in disgust. To hear a teacher of the Koran speak so! To hear their culture so disparaged! He stood in the window looking out at the silent darkness. There was something here he did not understand, an enemy he could not bring down with a gun, and it made him feel trapped and angry.