Free Contract With God by Juan Gómez-Jurado

twenty years older than him. Nazim had been flattered that someone so mature, and a college graduate besides, would speak to him.
    Now he opened the car door and struggled into the passenger seat, which is not easy when you are six foot two inches tall.
    ‘I only found a burger bar. I got salads and hamburgers.’ He gave the bag to Kharouf, who smiled.
    ‘Thanks, Nazim. But I must tell you something, and I don’t want you to become angry.’
    ‘What?’
    Kharouf took the hamburgers out of their boxes and threw them out of the window.
    ‘Those burger bars add lecithin to their hamburgers and there’s a chance they could contain pork. That’s not halal ,’ he said, referring to the Islamic restriction on pork. ‘I’m sorry. But the salads are fine.’
    Nazim was disappointed but at the same time he felt reassured. Kharouf was his mentor. Whenever Nazim made a mistake, Kharouf corrected him respectfully and with a smile, which was the complete opposite to the way Nazim’s parents had treated him over the past few months, constantly yelling at him ever since he’d met Kharouf and started attending another mosque that was smaller and more ‘committed’.
    In the new mosque the imam not only read from the sacred Koran in Arabic, but also preached in that tongue. Despite the fact that Nazim had been born in New Jersey, he read and wrote the prophet’s language perfectly. His family was from Egypt. Through the hypnotic preaching of the imam, Nazim began to see the light. He broke away from the life he had been leading. He got good grades and could have begun studying engineering that year, but instead Kharouf found him a job in an accounting firm run by a believer.
    His parents disagreed with his decision. They also didn’t understand why he locked himself in the bathroom to pray. But as painful as these changes were, they slowly accepted them. Until the incident with Hana.
    Nazim’s remarks were becoming increasingly aggressive. One evening his sister Hana, who was two years older than him, came in at two in the morning after having drinks with her friends. Nazim was waiting for her and scolded her about the way she was dressed and for being a little drunk. The insults went back and forth. Finally their father stepped in and Nazim pointed his finger at him.
    ‘You’re weak. You don’t know how to control your women. You let your daughter work. You let her drive and you don’t insist that she wear a veil. Her place is in the home until she has a husband.’
    Hana started to protest and Nazim slapped her. That was the last straw.
    ‘I may be weak, but at least I am master of this house. Get out! I don’t know you. Leave!’
    Nazim went to Kharouf’s with only the clothes on his back. That night he cried a little, but the tears didn’t last. Now he had a new family. Kharouf was both his father and his older brother. Nazim admired him a great deal because Kharouf, who was thirty-nine, was a real jihadist and had been in training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He shared his knowledge with only a handful of young men who, like Nazim, had suffered countless insults. In school, even on the street, people mistrusted him the instant they saw his olive skin and hooked nose and realized he was an Arab. Kharouf told him it was because they feared him, because Christians knew that the Islamic faithful were stronger and more numerous. Nazim liked that. It was time that he commanded proper respect.
     
    Kharouf raised the window on the driver’s side.
    ‘Six minutes and then we’ll go.’
    Nazim gave him a worried look. His friend noticed that something wasn’t right.
    ‘What’s the matter, Nazim?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘It’s never nothing. Come on, you can tell me.’
    ‘It’s nothing.’
    ‘Is it fear? Are you afraid?’
    ‘No. I’m a soldier of Allah!’
    ‘Soldiers of Allah are allowed to be afraid, Nazim.’
    ‘Well, I’m not.’
    ‘Is it firing the gun?’
    ‘No!’
    ‘Come on, you’ve had forty