Zeitoun

by Dave Eggers

She read the Qur’an and was struck by its power and lyricism. The Christian preachers she’d heard had spent a good amount of time talking about who would and wouldn’t go to hell, how hot it burned and for how long, but the imams she began to meet made no such pronouncements. Will I go to heaven? she asked. “Only God knows this,” the imam would tell her. The various doubts of the imams were comforting, and drew her closer. She would ask them a question, just as she had asked questions of her pastors, and the imams would try to answer, but often they wouldn’t know. “Let’s look at the Qur’an,” they would say. She liked Islam’s sense of personal responsibility, its bent toward social justice. Most of all, though, she liked the sense of dignity and purity embodied by the Muslim women she knew. To Kathy they seemed so wholesome, so honorable. They were chaste, they were disciplined. She wanted that sense of control. She wanted the peace that came with that sense of control.