American Taliban by Pearl Abraham

his Rumi:
    Start a huge, foolish project like Noah.
    It doesn’t matter what people think of you.
     
    So he determines to expand his project, though he is way behind. He determines to become a student of Arab literature. He links to powells.com and orders
Beginning and Intermediate Arabic
and also a Penguin Classics edition of the Qur’an.

 
     
    AT TENNIS , John sat in the shade of the white gazebo and half listened to the off rhythm of the bazooka ball, called the score when it stopped, love—thirty, love—forty. Barbara and Bill were losing fast, fulfilling his expectations. Since social life, not tennis, was what they were after, they weren’t good at tennis. Socially they were managing fine.
    While the ball bopped to and fro to nonglory, he threw his head back to see the tops of the towering trees surrounding the tennis court like tall toy soldiers playing siege. They were loblolly pine, the tallest, straightest pines of the South, their canopies all at the top, one hundred fifty feet away. Loblollies. He liked them for their lanky height, their straightness, being of similar build. At age fifteen when he’d shot tall and grown his coarse hair out to big hair, someone had called him a loblolly, and though the name hadn’t stuck, too many syllables, he’d developed a kinship with this tree. Its essence might be his essence. It had the advantage of height, as he did. Though rooted at the base, it reached high. And rooted at the base as he, too, was for now, immobilized by his double casts, he could still think himself up to their highest points and float aloft in their upper breezes, near the heavens.

From: Noor Bint-Khan [email protected]
    To: Attar [email protected]
    Date: August 21, 2000
    RE: Middle Ages
    Salaam Attar,
    I’m sorry to hear about your double injuries, but if it means you have more time to read, then maybe it’s for the best, as my mom likes to say of anything bad even when there’s nothing good about it, like when my Cairo grandfather had a stroke and we all went to Egypt.
    I’ve been mostly at home in Brooklyn this summer except when I’m at the library or at work, where I wait tables at a café on Mott called Gitane. Do you know it? It’s really really popular. On weekends, the line wraps around the block. The food’s Middle Eastern, so hummus and couscous and yogurt dishes, and stews with raisins and cumin and lemon, the kind of food I eat at home, too, so it’s a good thing I like it.
    My dad thinks working in a café will corrupt me, but I really wanted to do this, and my mom finally said do it without telling him. When he asks, she tells him I’m at NYU, taking a summer class in order to graduate sooner, which is a little true I guess since I’m at the library trying to get a head start on my reading for comp lit. which is like a double major in history and literature, with a focus on Arab and Mid-East culture. My adviser suggested I hit the books right away.
    Anyway, it’s interesting to me that you’re not Muslim though your name is Attar and you’re a student of Arab literature in translation. I grew up with Arabic, but I no longer use it so much, and though I can totally read and understand it, it becomes harder to speak it. My mom says I’m just rusty because mybrother and I speak Een-zhlee-zee-yah at home, which helps my mom learn it, which is, I guess, a good thing, but makes my dad unhappy because it also helps my brother and me forget. My dad took English classes when he moved here since he had to prove his knowledge in order to drive a cab, his first job in America, but he’s really old-fashioned and anti-assimilationist though he’s also an immigrant lawyer who helps Arabs get their green card and become U.S. citizens, which really is a contradiction of sorts, as I try to tell him.
    Which school are you going to in the fall and what will you study? Noor

From: Jilly [email protected]
    To: GoofyFootJohn [email protected]
    Date: August 22, 2000
    RE: