The Command

God is most great!.. God is most great.
I testify that… I testify that
There is no god but God!.. There is no god but God!
And that Mohammad … And that Mohammad
Is the Prophet of God…. Is the Prophet of God.
Come to the Prayer!.. Come to the Prayer!
Come to the Salvation!.. Come to the Salvation!
Prayer is better than sleep…. Prayer is better than sleep.
God is most great…. God is most great.
There is no god but God! There is no god but God!

As they rose from their salaams they glanced at the man in the shadows. “You do not join us?” said one.

He shook his head. “I am not worthy.”

“Truly, you are.”

“Truly I am not, my brothers.” Malik spoke quietly. “Today you are His true and beloved soldiers, who will purify the earth of those who defile the true Islam with this false cult of saints. Remember what the Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, said before his death: that a curse be upon those who took the graves of their prophets as mosques. We are all His instruments. But you are His firstborn sons. I bow down to honor you, and wish you the tranquillity that comes before battle.”

“Truly, it is so. That we are but His instruments,” said the man who would drive the truck. He licked his lips, frightened, but making his voice bold. “But you’re still one of us, brother. May His peace be upon you.”

They recognized this as more compliment than truth. This man had come from far away. And Malik probably wasn’t his real name; Malik was the angel in charge of hell. Yet he knew his dangerous trade. His clear, liquid Arabic marked him as educated, but he also spoke good Farsi and reasonable Pashto and no doubt other languages, too. But there was a gulf between them.

“I am merely the willing servant of God. God is great!”

“God is great!” Their shouts echoed in the loading bay, under the glare of the electric light.

* * *

The city was the holiest in Iran, a country drunk with holiness since an aged ayatollah had toppled a dictatorial emperor. Here lay Ali Riza, great-grandson of the Prophet, and the eighth holy and infallible imam, who had been murdered in 817 A.D. Beside him slept the storied Caliph Harun al-Rashid, scholar, poet, warrior, the most magnificent of all the caliphs, correspondent with Charlemagne, hero of A Thousand and One Nights. Omar Khayyam was another poet buried not far away, at Nishapur; but in Mashhad, poets, though respected, did not rank with imams.

Imams were holy leaders in line of succession after Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom the Shi’a held had been blessed by the Prophet as his rightful inheritor. Great merit could be earned by pilgrimages to their tombs. Especially to that of the shah-i-ghariban, Emperor of the Exiled, patron of the lost, the hopeless, and the damned. So that as centuries ebbed, marbled courtyards, golden-domed mosques, museums, and minarets had risen. Its library gathered the largest collection of handwritten Qur’ans in the world. British and Russian had played the Great Game in its alleyways, and in 1912 a bomb had ripped through the sanctuary, permanently estranging the Shi’ite world from the Muscovite bear.

Today was a holy day of mourning for Hussein, grandson of Muhammad. All over the city, at hundreds of inns and hotels, thousands of pilgrims rose and washed and prayed. They streamed into the streets, where first a trickle, then a flood floated through the predawn darkness, converging in an echoing shuffle and the sigh of prayer.

* * *

The team scrambled up into the truck. Malik kept looking to the eastern sky. The silhouettes of mountains loomed against the gray light of coming day.

The chain-link gate swung open, and the Fiat pulled out onto Quarani Tohid, Quarani Street, a wide, spotlessly swept boulevard. It roared slowly south, teetering heavily on overloaded springs. Malik followed in a white Datsun sedan with a battered-in fender. He stayed well behind the truck, blinking involuntarily each time it bottomed out.

His hands tightened on the wheel. A green pickup had pulled out from a side alley. It accelerated up to the Fiat, paralleling it on the four-lane street. In it he could see two of the feared and omnipresent Iranian religious police — the komiteh. They could stop any vehicle, question or jail anyone, simply on suspicion.

It moved up alongside the roaring, smoking truck, and he took his foot off the gas, dropping back even farther as one of the komiteh leaned out, looking it over. Then relaxed as the police vehicle pulled off and vanished down another street.