Write the Most Controversial Story You Can -- The Test of the Prophet

Once upon a time, a friend wanted to do an anthology as a fundraiser. For reasons that made sense at the time, she asked people to write the most controversial story they possibly could.

So I did.

I tried to make it controversial in every way I could think of…male/female relations, religion—in several different ways, involving a number of controversial ideas I had come upon over the years. I poured everything I could into it.

Sadly, she did not actually go forward with the anthology, but the story did appear in Forbidden Things, a now-defunct anthology. In the time the story was available, I did have one Muslim complain about it, until I explained why I had written it. But I also shared it with a Muslim friend, and she loved it and shared it with her whole family, who also loved it.

So, I guess I am not particularly skilled at writing something controversial.

But you can judge for yourself:

Test of the Prophet

Shazia adjusted her wet hijab for the fifth time and lay the thick wool rug over the barbed wire covering the low fence. She glanced left and right through the rainy gloom, but there was no one around—neither men nor ghosts. Placing both hands on the top of the rug, she confidently swung both legs over the fence. Vaulting had been one of her specialties, back on her high school gymnastics team.

The skirts on the tunic part of her gold and teal salwar-kameez encumbered her, catching on the rug. Her left foot struck the fence instead of clearing it, plunging her face first toward the cement.

Catching herself with her hands, she curled into a roll. Lying on the abandoned street, her palms smarting, rain falling onto her face, Shazia wondered, not for the first time, if coming to Peshawar to save her cousin Kabir had been a tremendous mistake.

* * *

“I remember when our city was known as an open city,” Kabir’s older sister Chana had told her four days earlier, as they rounded a corner at breakneck speed, barely avoiding a rickshaw and a brightly-painted bus that looked like a work of tribal art. The two young women were driving to the market to buy fresh fruit, chicken, and perhaps a syrupy Jalebi or two. “Peshawar was a jewel in the crown of Pakistan. The City of Flowers! Travelers came from all over the world to see the Khyber Pass and learn about our place in the Silk Road. And now?” She gestured out the window at the tall, dangerous-looking fence they were passing. “Checkpoints everywhere. Barbed wire. Sandbags. Blast walls. Cousin, it is terrible!”

Shazia did not answer immediately. Another near miss—this time with an entire family of four all perched on one bicycle—had caused the car to lurch so violently that it felt as if her stomach were stuck somewhere in her throat. It did not help that the Pakistanis drove on the left side of the road, like the British who had once colonized the land. To Shazia, it looked as if all the oncoming cars were in the wrong lane heading right for them.

“Zahilda Kasmi came from Peshawar, you know?” Chana said, noticing Shazia’s discomfort. She turned her head and grinned out from under her red headscarf. “Maybe I will emulate her when my children become old enough for school, hmm?”

It was clear that Chana’s intent was to tease, but Shazia had no idea what the comment meant. All she knew was that there was a horse-drawn vegetable cart coming around the corner, and her cousin was not looking at the road.

“Who?” she yelped, pointing ahead.

“You do not know Zahilda Kasmi?” Chana deftly avoided slaughtering the horse with her automobile. “She is famous! She is Pakistan’s only female taxi driver. No other woman drives a taxi. At the age of thirty-three, her husband died. Taxis were not very expensive, so she bought one and began carrying passengers to support her four daughters and two sons. Her family hated this. They threatened her with death, but she did not yield.”

“No other women drive taxis?”

“None.” Chana shook her head hard for emphasis. “At first, Zahilda wore a burka, to protect herself from unwanted attention, but when she realized her customers were all good people, she stopped wearing it. Eventually, she became president of the Pakistan Yellow Cab Drivers Association—and remained president for twelve years.”

Ahead was a checkpoint. Chana merely looked annoyed, but Shazia’s heart beat rapidly. She was carrying her Pakistani passport, from before she became an American citizen, but it was old, and technically, it was illegal.

She was supposed to have turned it in when she obtained her first return visa. But she had forgotten it that day. So rather than make the long trek to the embassy another day, she had pretended that she had always been American and just handed the clerk her American passport. Now, traveling in Pakistan, she found that she was harassed less if people did not know she was American. She lived in a constant fear, however, that someone would discern something wrong with her old passport and detect her deception.

Despite her trepidations, the guards merely glanced at her name and nodded. Shazia breathed a sigh of relief as they drove on. She wiped her sweaty hands on the silk of the bright peach and gold tunic of her salwar kameez, which she wore for the same reason that she carried her old passport.

It was easier to blend in when she looked like a local.

She sighed.

How cowardly she was being. No one seeing her sweating in a car would have believed that she was the same Marine Lance Corporal Hayak who had distinguished herself so ably in Afghanistan.

She even had a medal—just like the Cowardly Lion.

It was strange how much tiny things like outward garments mattered. It had been easy to feel brave and competent in fatigues and combat boots. Somehow, it was much harder when dressed in pretty silk trousers and a long gold-embroidered, dress-like tunic. She needed to pull herself together, salwar kameez or no salwar kameez. If she did not, she would not be able to accomplish what she had come to do.

Shazia glanced over at her pretty, vivacious cousin, one of her favorite childhood playmates from before her family moved to America. Chana was now the mother of two little ones, with a third one on the way. She looked so calm and self-possessed in her cream and fuchsia crepe silk salwar-kameez and her bright red hijab.

“Chana, why do you wear this thing?” Shazia leaned over and tugged on her cousin’s hijab. “You did not do that when we were young. You had such thick, luxurious, black hair! There is no law saying women have to wear head coverings in Pakistan. Why do you wear one?”

Chana’s animated face grew even prettier as she lowered her lashes. “It pleases my husband.”

“But…why?” cried Shazia. “Because it shows he is a bully who can push his wife around? Because it makes him look good in front of his buddies?”

“No! Nothing like that!” Chana looked appalled. “It honors him. He loves knowing that no man but him sees my hair. I tell you, Shazia. Is it annoying? Yes. Sometimes. But not as annoying as high-heeled shoes.”

Shazia gave a grudging grunt of acknowledgement. She, too, hated high-heels. Of course, she still wore them when the occasion required.

“It may be annoying at times,” Chana continued, “but it is worth it.”

“Worth it for…what?”

Chana smiled mysteriously. It was a feminine expression, a mixture of secret joy and demureness. With a start, Shazia realized that, while she had read about such expressions in books and seen them in movies, she had never seen it on a real living person before.

“For that moment, behind closed doors, when I take off the scarf,” Chana’s dark eyes shone, “when my hair comes down, all shining, like a black waterfall, and I glance at him over my shoulder.

“Oh, Shazia! You should see his face! It is erotic. It is romantic. You have nothing like that in the West. All the romance has been sucked out of your lives because everything is naked. The hair. The bosoms. The thighs. You have no mystery left.”

“There is more to life than mystery,” retorted Shazia. “I don’t want mystery. I want forthrightness.”

“And that is why you are not yet married,” her cousin replied firmly. “Without mystery, there is nothing between a man and woman but rutting bodies. That I do not want.”

Shazia stared out the window at a man selling green parrots, which he kept under a large wire cage attached to a stick, so the whole device looked like a giant stiff butterfly net. She wanted to object, but she thought of her past relationships with men she had known in high school, at college, while she was serving in the military. There had been no mystery, and, for the most part, there had been no romance.

Her freedom-loving soul cried out against the hijab and all that it represented; however, some tiny part deep inside of her argued that maybe Chana had a point.

* * *

They spent the next hour walking among the brightly-colored booths of the market and eating sweet, sticky, vaguely pretzel-shaped jalebi, one of Shazia’s favorite childhood treats. Vegetables of all kinds, including some she had not seen since she was a child, filled the street-side market, the top of which was covered over with ripped burlap that blocked out the sky—so that it almost felt as if they were shopping inside. Other booths held cascades of fish, sizzling round naan cooked over flames in a fire pit built into the floor, ripe mangos and huge yellow melons, and woven baskets overflowing with fluffy, peeping goslings. The sights, the smells, the jabbering in many languages, it was all familiar and yet overwhelming.

As they returned to the car, their arms laden, Shazia found the courage to ask the question she had flown halfway around the world to have answered.

“And Kabir? How is he?” She wanted to sound casual, but her voice shook.

“Oh, Shazia,” Chana’s whole face crumpled. She put down her packages on the back seat of the car and grabbed her cousin’s arm. “I am so worried for my little brother! He has joined the Taliban! Here! In Peshawar! Where those monsters, those butchers, killed over a hundred and thirty of our children—while they were studying in school! They burned the teachers alive and made the children watch! One class was even in the auditorium, studying first aid. And one of the butchers cried out, ‘The children are under the benches. Kill them all.’”

“Oh, Chana!” Shazia put her own bags into the car, before they slipped from her arms.

“They killed our cousin Umar! You never met him, Shazia. He was just a baby when you were last here. But, he was such a good boy! Reliable and strong. He had made house captain!”

Chana shook with rage. Shazia hugged her cousin. The two young women held each other and rocked back and forth, both crying.

“Shazia!” wailed Chana. “I don’t know what to do about Kabir!”

“I will talk to him,” Shazia assured her. “That is why I came.”

* * *

In the end, speaking to Kabir turned out to be harder than she had expected. Chana sent a message. Shazia was certain that the moment he heard that she was here, her favorite cousin and dearest childhood playmate would drop everything and rush to her side.

Kabir did not come.

After four days, she could not wait any longer. Her visit would soon be over. Like Mohammad and the mountain, if Kabir would not come to her, Shazia must go to Kabir.

Using Google Earth from her tablet, she mapped out the way to the lot where Chana said Kabir and his cronies gathered. She scoped it out twice, once on foot and once by taxi—Chana’s story of the female taxi driver had given her the idea. She noted all the checkpoints, guard posts, and barbed wire fences. Then, she sat down and made a list of what she would need, relying on her experience serving in Afghanistan.

She had limited her walking and taxi rides to places she could see without having to pass through a checkpoint. The main reason for her convoluted approach was that she did not want to meet any guards when she was alone. Without Chana, she might be called upon to talk, and she was not certain she could remember her old accent. If they caught an American woman traveling alone, she would be retained for questioning for sure.

This had not been the case when she was a girl. When she had first planned this trip, she had not been afraid to use her American passport. Two weeks ago, however, she had run into her neighbor, Sumaira Elahi, who had just returned from visiting Pakistan with her husband. They came from a village not too far from Peshawar. Taliban fighters who had been pushed out of Afghanistan now resided in their village. Her husband had been forced to spend his entire visit hiding in his family home. They would have hanged him in the town square had they caught him, merely for the crime of living in America.

Things were not as bad in Peshawar; at least she did not think so.

Still, she would rather not put the matter to the test.

When the next day dawned chilly and gray, Shazia greeted it with a grin. A cold, rainy day was just what she needed. In times of relative peace, she knew, guards had a tendency to get sloppy. They did not like to venture out of their posts when the weather was nasty.

This meant that of the three routes she had considered, the one that ran close to the old tenth-century Khyber Gate would be the best. The nearest guard posts were farthest from the places she wanted to go. It was her best chance of crossing over undetected.

Eager to draw as little attention as possible, Shazia had chosen a dull teal and gold salwar kameez. Then, taking up a matching dull teal scarf, she had asked Chana to show her how to wear a hijab. Her cousin had been delighted to do so, demonstrating how to put up one’s hair and chatting on about the joys of catching a good husband.

When Chana had withdrawn to put her children down for a nap, Shazia had grabbed her bag and slipped away.

* * *

Now she lay on her back on the wet street, in the shadow of the Bab-e-Khyber—an immense, castle-like gate that marked the beginning of the Khyber Pass, beyond which was the no man’s land between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This ancient pass through the Spin Ghar Mountains had been part of the trade route known as the Silk Road. The pass was so old that it had been traveled by the forces of Alexander the Great.

Beyond the towering stone gate, with its round, crenellated pillars and top bridge, stretched the barren wastes of the Spin Ghar. From her vantage point, as she rolled to her knees and rose, she could see the muzzle of machine guns nestled between the crenellations on the top of the round towers.

Shazia stuck her rug back in her large cloth bag and hurried onward. Crossing the road that ran east of the great, stone Khyber Gate, Shazia headed toward the old fort. She walked head down with a brisk sense of purpose. She had learned as a young girl that if you acted as if you were in your rightful place, giving no sign of furtiveness or uncertainty, you could go many places that might otherwise be off limits.

It was Kabir who had taught her this.

Her thoughts wandered backward, recalling a time, two decades before, when she had been a little girl, and Peshawar had still been a happy place to live. This was before her family had moved to America. Having but one sibling of her own, a much older brother, Shazia had spent all her time with her cousins, Chana, her older sister Fabiha, and their younger brother, Kabir.

Of all of them, of everyone alive, Kabir had been her favorite.

They had been inseparable.

Memories flooded her: Kabir laughing as they rode a bicycle together, nearly crashing into their uncle’s longsuffering donkey; Kabir squatting in the dust, teaching her to shoot marbles like a boy; Kabir seated beside her at the feet of their great grandmother, listening with huge eyes to tales of Arabian Nights of Saladin and Solomon and Aladdin and dangerous djinn.

Great-grandmother Anahita was of Persian blood. Her family claimed descent from the Magi of old. This, she explained to her spellbound great-grandchildren, was why they could see ghosts. She charged them never to speak to anyone, who was not of Magi blood, of what they saw—not even their fathers—or they would find themselves the recipients of a very unhappy fate. She emphasized this point with six grisly stories of the tragic fates that befell those who revealed that they could commune with spirits, stories that had caused Kabir and Shazia to shiver with horrified delight.

Hunching beneath the cold rain, Shazia moved swiftly across an open area behind a line of houses, passing a muddy garden and brightly-colored laundry someone had forgotten to take in before the rains started. She passed an old lady tending an old cart with faded blue wheels, overflowing with grapes, and a cart selling brightly-colored magazines. At the corner, dark stains on the pavement marked the place where a woman had recently been stoned to death for adultery.

Shazia thought of all her girlfriends back home who dated married men, of her co-workers and fellow Marines who had cheated on their wives. She shuddered. Sometimes, even she had trouble believing America and Pakistan could exist in the same century.

To the side of the blood-stained rock had been the spot where Shazia had vomited two days ago, when the nausea that came with seeing ghosts had struck her. It was because she had seen the poor woman’s ghost that she knew what had caused the dark stain on the street. Chana had gotten them past the guard’s checkpoint that time, so she had not needed to climb over the barbed-wire fence. Seeing her cousin’s distress, Chana had inquired whether Shazia had eaten something that did not agree with her, or, with a sweet but wicked smile, if she might be pregnant? Apparently, Chana had forgotten about such incidents from their youth.

If only Shazia had thought to ask Great-Grandmother Anahika, while she was still alive, why it was that seeing spirits always made her feel so ill.

Until recently, Shazia and Kabir had kept in touch by Skype. It was when he stopped calling that she began to suspect something was wrong. It had been over a decade since she had seen Kabir face to face. The flight to Pakistan was so long that the family had decided on a reunion in London, with Shazia’s family traveling from the US to England, and Kabir’s coming from Pakistan.

They had met up at Trafalgar Square. Shazia had been an awkward, budding girl of thirteen. Kabir had been tall and lanky, with a veneer of teenage cool. A few minutes together, however, had revealed the same vibrant boy she had loved. She remembered the two of them running through the pigeons with their arms stretched, watching the startled birds fly up into the air. She remembered seeking out a birdseed vendor and laughing as they watched their avian companions mob the seed. And then, laughing again when their antics caused Kabir to slide on the stones covered with pigeon droppings, his arms windmilling as he fell. How funny he had looked when he stood up again, his garments streaked with white.

During her recent flight, she had scheduled a day’s layover in London. When she returned to Trafalgar Square, the pigeons were gone. The city had outlawed the selling of birdseed and chased the birds away. A man with a fierce-looking hawk was on patrol to make certain that no pigeons returned.

The surface underfoot was less treacherous, true. Yet, the memory of the empty square without its mob of feathered friends made Shazia’s eyes prick with tears.

Shazia shook her head. Rain in her eyes was bad enough. She needed to stay alert, focused. And yet, as she rounded the corner and started across an abandoned parking lot toward where she believed Kabir and his associates to be, she could not help recalling her favorite memories of her favorite cousin.

Her clearest memories of Kabir were of walking to and from school. Shazia’s family had been progressive enough to send their daughter to school. That was one reason they had eventually moved to America. While they lived in Peshawar, however, Shazia and Kabir had attended the same form, so they walked to and from school together.

She could remember Kabir striding beside her so proudly, in his role as her male protector. Most of all, however, she remembered the day they came upon the cockfight.

They had been coming home from school on a lovely spring day. Blossoms were everywhere in the City of Flowers, and the air was heady with perfume. They had been walking together along the packed dirt road that led down the hill to their neighborhood, swinging their book bags and singing a song that they had learned in class.

Ahead of them was a gathering of grown men, all shouting and cheering. Eager to investigate what was causing such excitement, the two children had run forward, darting through the crowd.

“Remember,” Kabir had whispered to her as they slipped between the grown men, “look like you’re supposed to be here. No one ever bothers you if you do that.”

The mass of men had turned out to be a hollow ring. At the center, two black roosters strutted and pecked at each other. All around, men hollered encouragement and called out bets. Kabir had stood for a moment, watching one bird try to peck out the eyes of the other, then he had turned away, dragging Shazia by the hand.

“Come away,” he had said in disgust. “This is no place for a girl.”

But he did not say it the way boys said such things in movies, as if girls were not worthy to be present. Rather, he said it with respect, as if she were made of finer stuff than the brutes who shouted and howled around them—as if the good things in life were worth cherishing, worth protecting.

It had made her feel very good.

“When I grow up, I am not going to do stupid things like that, making poor animals fight,” Kabir had said confidently. Shazia knew he loved their chickens. “Only a swine would behave so. A barbarian. Someone with no civility. When I grow up, I am going to put a stop to such cruelty. I will make the world a better place.”

At that moment, as they walked along the dusty, flower-hemmed road, Shazia had sworn a solemn vow, the most solemn vow of her life. She had vowed to Allah above that, when she grew up, she would help her cousin accomplish his goal.

That was why she had become a Marine—because when the time came for Kabir to make the world better, she wanted to be capable of helping.

Under the shadow of the sandy walls of the old Jamrud Fort, Shazia lifted her bowed head and looked around at the broken concrete, the sandbags, the weary faces of the lone old man heading in the other direction with his cart and his patient donkey. She thought of the City of Flowers as it had been in her youth.

It did not look like a better place.

* * *

She heard their voices before she saw them. Using her military training, she crept forward slowly, staying behind cover. Of course, back in Afghanistan, she had worn city camo, not a teal and gold flowing dress with pants that looked like something out of I Dream of Jeannie.

A cold black hatred of all things Taliban gripped her heart.

This may have been a good thing, because when she peered around the corner from behind a low cement wall, in the midst of her hatred, she was thinking like a Marine—so she did not cry out.

Lance Corporal Hayak never cried out.

She was not so sure about Shazia, the young woman in the hijab. She might have called out. It was hard to remember who she was when dressed in these clothes.

Ten young men stood around a kneeling figure, arguing with each other. They were not dressed in turbans and dirty robes of the Taliban, but in the tight black paramilitary garb of Islamic State extremists, with black headgear and black scarves across their faces. One young man held a naked scimitar. The kneeling figure wore the uniform of a Pakistani soldier. A burlap bag covered his head.

No!

Shazia slipped out of sight and pressed her back against the concrete wall, her heart hammering. They were going to behead the soldier. And Kabir was among them. Even at this distance, she had recognized his eyes.

He was the young man with the scimitar.

Kabir was going to behead a man!

How different those eyes were. Where was his compassion? His clever wit? Where was the joy that had set him apart from all others she knew? His eyes, the eyes of all those young men, had been filled with a rabid, feverous hate.

Think, she told herself, breathe, stay calm.

She moved back until she could see them again, peering from behind her cover. She had planned to wait until the meeting broke up and then approach Kabir. But she could not let this murder go forward.

She wanted to save the soldier, but, even more than that, she wanted to save Kabir—save him from becoming the very kind of man he had vowed, the day of the cockfight, that he would never be.

But save him…how? Here he stood, part of a crowd that surrounded a hapless victim, even as those men had ringed the fighting birds.

Shazia moved behind the wall again and sat there, struggling not to weep. Marines did not weep.

What had become of her hero? Why had she suffered so, forcing herself to face things no young woman should ever have to face—death, mutilated children, the smell of burnt flesh, and worse horrors she did not like to recall—just to be worthy to aid him? Had all her hopes and dreams come to this?

Were they to die today on the edge of a scimitar?

The very thought made her ill. She doubled over with nausea.

As she squatted behind the cement wall, her head between her knees, a searing pain shot through her head. Her vision became double. The broken glass and pebbles on the ground before her seemed to reproduce themselves, producing their twin.

No! No! Not now!

The waves of nausea grew stronger. Leaning against the cement wall, her fingers pressed against her temples, she made herself breathe deep, slow breaths. She had managed to control herself during her entire tour of duty, even though the war-torn countryside of Afghanistan had been full of ghosts. If she could keep herself together then, she could do it now.

The nausea retreated, but her head still throbbed. Slowly, she turned and leaned around the corner of the wall, looking back at the young men to see what the “gift” passed down to her from her Magi ancestors would show her.

The air above Kabir and his fellows swarmed with monstrosities. Some were horrible, ugly creatures with horns and forked tails. Others looked like snakes or scorpions. Still others were black clouds with fiery eyes. The marid towered over the others, tall as giants—cruel horns jutting from their foreheads or huge tusks thrusting from their upper lips.

She recognized each kind of evil djinn from her great-grandmother’s tales. There were five types of djinn in all. Four of them were here: bad djann, wicked shaitans, evil ifrite, and, worst of all, five terrible, huge marid. They swarmed over Kabir and his friends, hooting and cackling. From time to time, they swooped down and whispered into the ears of the young men. Each time they did so, the young men’s eyes became more fevered, more fanatical. Their argument grew louder. One of the young men in black shoved another.

Shazia had seen dark djinn before on Muslim battlefields. She had seen evil qareen—the companion djinn that urged each mortal to give into base desires—whispering to their masters, inciting wrath, lust, hatred. Her Irish bunkmate could see them, too. She called them by another name: demons.

“Allah, Lord of Jibreel, Mikail and Israfil protect me!” she prayed fervently, mouthing the words she did not dare to speak aloud, lest she be overheard. “Save my cousin from this terrible sin. Send your angels to drive away these wicked djinn.”

The young man who had been shoved lunged at his attacker. Only he never reached him. Instead, he stopped mid-step, his hand outstretched, motionless. His attacker, too, stopped moving, as if caught in the frozen frame of a movie. The other young men, too, were motionless.

As was the rain.

Amazed, Shazia reached up and touched one of the silvery drops that hung suspended in mid-air. It gave slightly under her finger. Everything was quiet, hushed, everything but the wicked djinn, who still squawked and cackled. That was the only sound.

What was happening?

Footsteps sounded in the utter quiet of the frozen world. A figure walked into the grass and broken glass of the clearing in front of the frozen young men. He was seven feet tall with hair of gold that shone like a second sun. His coat was a white so brilliant that it hurt her eyes. When he came forward, the smallest of the djinn, the bad djann, fled away, shrieking. The larger ones hissed and cawed, but they continued to swarm around the heads and shoulders of the young men.

The newcomer stopped and smiled at Shazia. His face was very handsome, but his expression was kindly, like a loving father.

“Who…” she faltered.

“I am the Angel Gabriel.”

Shazia’s jaw dropped. “You…came?”

“Angels always come when they are called. It is just that mortals do not usually see us.”

“Why can I see you?”

“That is your family’s gift.”

“But I have never seen an angel before!”

“Have you ever called for one?”

Shazia opened her mouth and closed it again. She could not recall that she had.

“Can you drive away the Evil Ones?” she asked hopefully.

The angel shook his head. “I can protect you. But those are the qareen of these young men, and other dark entities whom they have invited. The young men would have to ask for my protection themselves. I may not act otherwise.”

“Not even to save them?” pleaded Shazia.

“My Father has granted free will to the Race of Adam.”

“Your…father?” Shazia took a step back in confusion. “But Allah has no children!”

She suddenly became aware of how heavy and cold her wet garments were. She began to shiver. The angel regarded her wordlessly.

Shazia played with the hem of her hijab. “Is that not why the good djinn converted to Islam? Because they overheard the Prophet explaining that Allah had no wife and no son?”

Great-Grandmother Anahika had seen to it that she and Kabir were familiar with all the Quran had to say about djinn.

“Does it not say in Sura Al-Jin,” she continued. “Say: It has been revealed to me that a group of Jinn listened and said, ‘Verily we have heard a marvelous Quran. It guides unto righteousness so we have believed in it. And, we will never make partners with our Lord. He—exalted by the glory of our Lord— has not taken a wife nor a son. What the foolish ones among us used to say about God is a horrible lie.”

A terrible, horrible cacophony came from the gathering of dark djinn. It took a moment for Shazia to realize that this terrible din was an expression of mirth.

“No son!” They laughed outrageously, striking each other violently. “Oh yes. We like that part! Tell more pathetic worms of human beings. The Unaccursed One has no Son!”

She looked from the chortling fiends to the glorious, calm angel. “Are you… You are the Muslim Angel Jibrail, right?”

The angel gave her such an odd look. “Without me, there would be no Islam. I am he who spoke to Mohammad, thus making him a prophet.” He frowned at the gathered crowd of evil djinn. “What Mohammad wrote down is another matter.”

“What do you mean?” Shazia drew herself up, eyes flashing. “Is not the Quran ‘Allah’s perfect and complete word’?”