Caliphate

Nuremberg, Federal Republic of Germany,

10 July, 2022

Gabi had done her best to raise Amal to be kind, sensitive, considerate of the feelings of others, tolerant, accepting . . . in all, a human monument to multicultural decency. She was also, and this had come rather harder to both mother and daughter, a good student. In her school, of course, she had friends of all stripes and persuasions; boyfriends, as well.

In fact, Amal had a lot of boyfriends. And why not? She was one of the, if not the, prettiest girls in the school. From her mother and father she'd garnered a meter, seventy-five in height . . . and she still had a couple of years to grow. Her baby-blond hair had darkened to a lustrous auburn not untypical of the province of Franconia. Her body was already that of a woman, enough so to set young boys to daydreaming in class, much to the detriment of their grades.

Between the height, the hair color, such features as she'd inherited from Mahmoud, her slightly darkened skin and light brown eyes, and her Arab given name, she could pass for an Arab or a Turk easily enough and was often taken for one. In the peculiar circumstances of Germany in the year 2021, this could be a problem.

"There's the slut now," whispered Abdul-Halim to his four friends, Taymullah, Mansur, Zahid, and Jabir. Of the five boys, two, Mansur and Jabir, were sons of German reverts to the faith. They were, if anything, more devout than the other three.

"Shameless," said Mansur. "The cunt should be veiled properly, her hair covered properly."

"It's the filthy Germans, polluting the world," added Zahid. "It will be a better place once it belongs to us, once the law of God replaces the nonsense they adhere to."

"And that is our job," said Taymullah, clutching a blanket in both hands. "As the imam said yesterday at the mosque, it is up to us to bring the word and the ways of Allah to this Godless place."

Amal was only human and thoroughly female. She enjoyed the admiration she received from people, men and women both, as she walked the street toward home.

Thus, it came as quite a shock to her, so much of a shock that she didn't even cry out, when five boys surrounded her, exclaimed, "This is our sister," dropped a blanket over her head and pulled her into a cellar.

Germans and German law had, long since, stopped defending Muslim women. Turks and Arabs, often terrified of retribution and having lost any faith that German law would protect them, simply turned away.

The "smiley," the cutting of a Muslim girl's face from one ear to the corner of her mouth in retribution for her dressing as a westerner, had been something of an urban legend in the early part of the century. Many had written and spoken of it yet no examples had ever been produced, no criminal cases had ever been launched.

Yet life can imitate art. Barraged with reports of the phenomenon, the urban legend had been adopted and turned into horrific reality. There were girls with "smileys," now, and in every corner of western Europe.

It was, after all, an excellent way to make a girl cover her face, in accordance with the hadiths and the sunna.

"You can't do this," Amal wept. "I'm not a Moslem. I've never been a Moslem."

"In the name of Allah we can do as we wish," insisted Abdul-Halim. "Besides, everyone is born a Moslem, that's what the imam says. It's just that some of them, like you, are apostate."

"You see," added Zahid, "there are only two kinds of women in the world. There are those who follow the law of God, and then there are sluts. Which are you?"