Byron traveled to Newark on the PATH train from Penn Station in Manhattan to Penn Station in this old, eternally decaying city. From the station, he walked to the intersection of Broad Street and Raymond Boulevard. The Al Sunni Mosque glowed brilliantly in the early afternoon sunlight. The crescent-moon symbol fixed at the top of the dome glinted like a curved sword, dazzling.
He saw Khalid Hussein standing near the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the mosque. Just above Khalid was a horizontal screen, at least twenty feet long, on which sentences in English were electronically displayed, moving from left to right like a zipper-message strip in Times Square. The words All are welcome to worship Allah slid across the display board again and again.
Khalid was in a business suit, a somber, heavy-set man noticeably different in appearance and presence from his brother. Now that Byron had seen Ali Hussein three times, he believed there was a possibility that these two men were half-brothers.
Byron knew from his first meeting with Khalid in the diner in Union City that he didn’t shake hands. So Byron didn’t offer his hand as he said, “It’s good to see you, Khalid.”
“How is my brother?”
Byron had also learned that Khalid had zero interest in pleasantries. “Your brother’s a very unhappy man.”
Khalid’s voice was much heavier, far more determined than his brother’s. “Wait until we go inside to tell me more. I want the Imam to hear this.”
Without speaking, Byron walked at Khalid’s side toward the ornate entrance to the mosque. Khalid slipped an identity card through a slot on the fence, and the gate made a magnetic clicking noise as it disengaged from the frame. Between the fence and the mosque’s circular wall was a lush lawn, totally unique in this area of the city, where every bleak surface was either cement or tar. There were fresh, newly planted weeping willows on the lawn. As he walked, Byron touched in his pocket the piece of paper on which the night before he had written words from the ninth chapter of the Koran, words he had found himself reading several times on the train from Manhattan here: Those who were left behind rejoiced at sitting still behind the messenger of Allah, and were averse to striving with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way. And they said: Go not forth in the heat! Say: The heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood.
Every night for the past several weeks Byron had steadily read three pages of the Koran, and from time to time he wrote down passages for no particular reason. Ali Hussein had recently been allowed, because Byron had persisted in asking permission for it, to have a paperback copy of the Koran, in English only because the government wanted to know precisely what its prisoner was reading. Byron wasn’t interested in books that interpreted or explained Islam, a subject to which he had never paid attention beyond what he’d read from time to time over the years in newspapers and magazines. Always with the instincts of a genuine student, he decided to read the Koran itself, without guidance, without preparation for what he might expect, and without any external explanation. What was it, he wanted to know, that this book said? More than two hundred pages into the text, he was baffled. He kept returning to earlier pages, reading out loud, underlining passages, and sometimes putting question marks in the margin. And now he had taken to writing down sentences and paragraphs. What did the words mean? The heat of hell is more intense of heat, if they but understood. In the two hours Byron was now allowed to spend with Ali Hussein on his trips to Miami, Ali had quoted the passage from memory, and it had taken Byron two days to find it. When he did, it was precisely as Ali Hussein had recited. Ali had even recalled the numbers of the separate books of the Koran, the chapter numbers within each book, and the numbers of the verse lines within each chapter that he repeated from memory.
The mosque’s interior was not as ornate as the outside walls and the bronzed, glinting dome. The inside was plain, almost utilitarian, with cinderblock walls, like a public high school cafeteria. Byron, carrying nothing, followed Hussein down a hallway. There seemed to be no other men in the building. Byron, when he had asked Hussein to make arrangements for a visit to the Imam, imagined for some reason that there would be as many guards protecting the Imam as Louis Farrakhan always seemed to have. Certainly Byron never imagined that he could simply walk through a door into the almost bare room in which the Imam sat at a simple wooden desk.
He was smaller and younger than Byron expected, probably no older than thirty-five. When Ali Hussein, at their meeting a week earlier in Miami, told Byron that he was certain his brother could arrange a meeting with the Imam (“Please do this for me, see him and convey my respects to him,” Ali had said), Byron had cruised through the miraculous Internet to search for more information about him. He easily located many entries, mainly copies of news articles and pictures of the man. The photographs were not posted by the Imam or anyone around him; instead, they were pictures posted by people Byron assumed were right-wing American men, who added messages such as “Is this bin Laden’s brother?” and “Put a hole-a-in-the-Ayatollah.”
The man was in a robe. He wore heavy glasses. He had a beard. Somehow he had the look and demeanor, Byron thought, of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Byron nodded slightly, respectfully, not knowing if this was the proper way to greet a Muslim holy man. He waited for some signal that he should sit. Khalid translated the words the Imam spoke, “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Johnson?”
Byron was surprised that Khalid translated. On one of the Internet sites devoted to the Imam, Byron had seen and heard a video, obviously surreptitiously made, of him speaking in clear English to an audience. In that Internet video, the Arabic translation of what he was saying ran across the lower screen.
Although his face was somber, his voice almost had a lilt, was almost in fact effeminate. Khalid translated, “You have seen our brother Ali?”
Byron was uncomfortable. This was a strange setting-a bare room in a mosque. These men were also strange: a brooding man in typical American clothes and an Arabic-speaking Imam in a robe. This mosque, too, was for Byron otherworldly. He tried to convey nothing of his discomfort, but he was aware of the quaver in his voice. He wondered whether the other men detected it.
“Ali isn’t happy. And I can’t say that he looks healthy.”
And then the soft voice spoke, followed immediately by Khalid’s abrupt-sounding, harsh translation. “The people who did this to our brother are not good people.”
“It’s not those people who concern him,” Byron said. “Ali is very concerned about his wife and children.”
It was Khalid who answered, not the Imam. “They are well taken care of.” Khalid seemed to resent the question.
“But he wants to know where they live, what they’re doing, what’s happened to them.”
Khalid translated Byron’s words, listened to the Imam, and then translated. “You can tell Ali that they have been well cared for.”
“Ali isn’t asking that. He wants to know where they are, what their health is, what schools his children are in.”
Khalid didn’t translate. There was silence in the room. The Imam spoke, and then Khalid said, “What has our brother told you?”