Caliphate

Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,

16 January, 2004

Gabrielle shook all the way home from the mosque. She'd torn her burka off and thrown it in the gutter scant steps after passing the mosque door. "They hate us that much? I can't believe it," she said, over and over.

"Believe it, Gabi," Mahmoud said. "They despise everything about you . . . and about me, since I love you."

She missed that admission. Hands waving widely, she said, "But surely those . . . those . . . lunatics are a tiny minority. Mahmoud, I know Muslim people who are nothing like that."

"You think you know them," he corrected. "But you do not know that you know them. We have no problem lying to or hiding our beliefs from the 'infidels' when necessary . . . or just useful."

Gabi shook her head. "But most of our Moslems come from Turkey, which is secular. A lot of them, too, come from the Balkans which didn't take religion seriously anyway."

"And why do you suppose they left, then, some of them? Maybe because secularism and indifference to religion were not very comfortable to them, hmmm?"

"But we're even more secular than Turkey and more indifferent than Bosnians."

"That's true," he admitted, slowly shaking his head in quasi- agreement. "For now, it's true. Yet the Turkish army stands as a bulwark against mixing church and state, if only to preserve its own power. Does your army? As for the Bosnians . . . well, being Moslem there was a decidedly dangerous thing. Little wonder some of them left. And then, too, several thousand Germans convert to Islam annually."

Gabrielle stopped walking and turned to face him. "You keep speaking as if religion mattered. I don't understand that. It doesn't matter to you."

"Just because I'm not devout doesn't mean I'm an atheist, Gabi." He held his hands up defensively. "Yes, yes, I know you claim to be— something I hope to talk you out of, someday, by the way. Yet I've seen you clasp your hands sometimes in what looks to the casual outside observer to be much like prayer. You say things like, 'God help us,' and 'God damn them'—usually with regards to the Americans, of course."

"Childhood conditioning with no faith behind it," she insisted.

"Of course," Mahmoud said dryly.

Ignoring the sarcasm, Gabi turned and began walking again, quietly at first. When she resumed speaking, she said, "It's all because we treat them as second class people here. No wonder they hate us when they see the fat and idle rich drive by in their Benzes. No wonder they hate us when we relegate them to jobs we think are beneath us. They have a right to hate us when we deprive them of the vote, even though they pay taxes, and refuse to let them become full citizens."

"Well," Mahmoud said, in a deliberately neutral voice, "you've changed the law to do that."

"Yes," she hissed, "but with such unfair restrictions that only a few can qualify. What? Fifty-six thousand Turks allowed to join our blessed Reich last year? Fewer, so they say, this year. Out of almost three million?"

"Ah, so you would prefer to be more like the Americans," he chided.

She started to answer and then stopped, mouth half open. When she did speak it was only to say, "Fuck you, Mahmoud."

At that he nodded vigorously. "Excellent idea. Your apartment or mine? And while we're on the subject, why are we still paying for two apartments?"

It was only at that point that she realized what he had said earlier: "since I love you."