Where Pigeons Don't Fly by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

leading sheikhs and
muftis
to come and pray behind him, nor how he was able to announce that one of them would be giving an address at his humble mosque. This won him considerable renown; men such as these were the unsullied of the earth, their honesty and purity doubted by no one. So not one of the congregation could find it in themselves to take Abu Ayoub to task if he missed the odd prayer or made use of the mosque for his agarwood oil and incense business.
    He put a door in the room that led to the mosque’s courtyard and after prayers he would open it to welcome his guests. Brushing the back of a worshipper’s hand and suffusing his
ghatra
with the fragrance from the sweet white smoke, he would make him a gift of one of the minute vials that held less than three grams of oil, while the Bangladeshi mosque guard served coffee and preserved dates.
    Abu Ayoub and the Bangladeshi guard had perfected the art of stalking worshippers and running them to ground. After the free gifts Abu Ayoub would leave it until another day to show his wares to the victim, who would be forced to buy more oil or quarter of a kilo or more of fragrant agarwood sticks, either because he liked them or out of a sense of embarrassment and good manners. Guests were impressed by the fact that Abu Ayoub had taught the Bangladeshi to wear a pressed white
thaub
and new red
ghatra
and to comb his sparse beard exactly like a Saudi; he even spoke their dialect. ‘Greetings, by God! Wonderful to see you. A cup of coffee in God’s name. Taste these dates, God grant you Paradise.’
    Abu Ayoub, who invited the great sheikhs to his mosque, had so spun and extended his web of contacts within the Call and Guidance Centre that he had secured a fully subsidised annual trip to India and Eastern Europe. His ostensible purpose for travel was to call non-Muslims to Islam, but it was there that he obtained large quantities of agarwood oil jars and boxes full of huge, high quality incense sticks to sell in the mosque. His motto: ‘Go on pilgrimage and sell prayer beads while you’re at it.’
    He would be gone a whole month and sometimes longer if there was a wife to marry. ‘Marry women of your choice, two or three or four.’ He would mutter in front of others(and argue to himself) that he married women from East Asia, Eastern Europe and the impoverished villages of India for two reasons: to safeguard himself against the more heinous sins such as adultery and to educate the unenlightened bride in matters of the Faith—how to wash before prayer, pray and fast and the other tenets of Islam—so that she might teach other women, not to mention the man who would marry her next. His evangelising mission complete, he would return to his mosque in Quds having divorced the Indian, the Ukrainian or the Filipino.
    He was careful to marry young girls because they were quicker to learn than older women, but he never claimed, as others might, that they were more passionate or that they restored his lost youth. He would instruct them how to lie back and open their thighs and repeat with him the prayer of copulation. ‘In the name of God. God keep us from Satan and keep Satan from what you have provided to us,’ he would say, as he knelt to enter them.
    He would teach them the correct way to wash themselves, taking great pleasure in coaching them on how to clean the vagina then, unable to control himself, would leap on them again. Such moments presented him with no great difficulties. ‘There is no shame in the Faith,’ he would say, pointing out the sentence in the translated text then leading them to the bathroom to become conversant with the method of achieving true cleanliness in Islam, his hands playing ceaselessly with their chests’ ripe fruits like an Indian gardener assessing the yield on the mango tree.
    Abu Ayoub had no qualms about taking two new wives at once. All the better to teach them simultaneously and thus