Jamilah Koury knew that it was all over the minute the stranger moved into the house across the street. It had all happened too quickly, too stealthily. The Qureshi family, who had lived there for decades, were there one day and gone the next. Most suspiciously, they did not take any of their furniture with them.
Jamilah had heard the rumours. They had been circulating for months--cities overtaken by Fulani Jihadists; their ruling elites efficiently replaced by the devotees of the zealous reformist, Usman dan Fodio. In Jamilah's household, the rumours had been met with great fear. Her family enjoyed a comfortable status among the educated ruling class of the city, but their position could be easily unsettled by the Fulani invaders. Dan Fodio's Islam was a newfangled brand of Islam, they said, one that had no room for old-fashioned practices like ancestor worship. Those unfortunates who still clung to the old ways--who, like Jamilah's family, practiced a loose hybrid of Islam and indigenous religion--were being quickly dispossessed of their property and status. The fear of it hung in the air of the city of Katsina, as thick as a sandstorm.
What would she be without her house, Jamilah wondered? This house, with its white clay exterior and cool interior, its tapestries and pillows and books, had been a constant in Jamilah's life. Sitting on the pillows in the main room, she had read its books voraciously, then then read them again. She had meticulously copied mathematical proofs from the books on the shelves and written her own. She had memorized pages from the ornate Qur'an that stood on the wooden stand in the corner. From this house, Jamilah felt as if she could grasp the whole world. Jamilah had had more than her fair share of failed romances, but her house and her books and her beautiful things had always been there. Until now.
The Qureshi family was gone. Would the Koury family be next? All evening, Jamilah's father and brother sat in the back room, discussing their options: was now the time to get out of town? Where would they go if they did? What could they sell?
As they spoke to each other in hushed voices, Jamilah took the opportunity to spy out the front door at the new resident of the house across the street. After all she had heard about the fearsome Fulani invaders, she had expected this new neighbor to show obvious outward signs of his sinister nature. This man, however, seemed distressingly amiable. He smiled at his servants as they loaded his books and tapestries into the house and offered them water when they were done. He was a tall, thin man with bright, penetrating black eyes, made all the more prominent by the absence of ornamentation on his plain white clothing. Jamilah found the severity of his appearance striking, and as she watched him disappear into his house, she noticed that he did not seem to have a wife. Jamilah shook herself off and walked toward the back room.
"Would Kwaku have us?" Her brother was asking. "We could stay at his farm in the north."
"No good," her father replied. "Dan Fodio has already captured the northern provinces." He looked up to see that Jamilah hovering in the doorway. "Go to bed, Jamilah. We'll keep you safe, don't worry." His voice quavered as he said it, as if he were trying to convince himself that the words were true.
Jamilah bit her lip and turned away. She walked to the bedroom, where her mother sat, lighting an oil lamp for the ancestors. Her mother looked up when Jamilah came in and offered her a tight-lipped sigh. "I always thought we'd have married you away by now," she said with resigned sadness. Jamilah looked down, guilty. "It was not in Allah's plan."
All that night, Jamilah tossed and turned in bed, kept awake by the fear of the reversal of her family's fortunes. If only the jihadists could be reasoned with, she thought. If she could just talk to the man across the street, perhaps she could convince him to let her family stay where they were. And why not? He was human, after all, and all humans had their weaknesses. If only she could find out what his was, then maybe, just maybe, she could exploit it.
***
Yusuf sat in the main room of his new house, trying to get comfortable on the unfamiliar furniture. He held a quill in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, and on it he was writing a list of Muslim infidels who would have to be taken care of if the swift takeover of Katsina were to run smoothly. There were five family names written on the paper: Qureshi, Ahmed, Bangura, Musa, and Koury. He would pass along this list to the Emir, and each family would be relocated forthwith. It was a shame, really, but it must be done.
Yusuf sighed, set the list aside, and took up the book he had been reading: Thabit ibn Qurrah's treatise on the geometry of conic sections. Mathematics made sense to Yusuf. Politics and theology were too messy for his taste. Even under the guidance of the Qur'an, there were far too many moral ambiguities in the world of politics. When he found himself too caught up in the details of political affairs (which happened quite often these days), he liked to return to the world of numbers and shapes. Here, it was clean and unencumbered by the dirt, sweat, and blood of everyday life. There were right answers, and there were wrong ones, and one did not have to feel guilty if the solutions one came up with displaced a few families from their homes.
He had just begun to reorient himself in his reading when the door of his living room burst open with a loud bang. Startled, Yusuf shrunk backward in his chair and shielded his face with his arms. A peek through his fingers, however, informed him that the intruder was not an armed assailant but a woman, armed only with a fiery, determined expression. Yusuf collected himself quickly, sitting up and taking on an expression of cool nonchalance, but he could see that it was too late to feign nonchalance: the woman had disarmed him with her sudden appearance, and she knew it.
He examined the strange woman, attempting to read her. She was clearly a woman of wealth, evidenced by her richly patterned dress, sash, and jewelry. And she was obviously not a particularly orthodox Muslim, as her hair was uncovered. Yusuf's eyes lingered on the sight of her hair, braided elaborately across her head and into a thick knot at the top. It made him uncomfortable, the sight of it, a glimpse of forbidden beauty that stirred something within him he would rather have left undisturbed.
"You ought to cover your head," he told her. "A nice girl like you would do well to comport herself more modestly."
"Oh I am not a nice girl," she replied, walking over to Yusuf and standing over him. If he stood up now, he would be taller than she was, he thought. He could easily overtake her physically. Yet for some reason, he felt threatened by her, as if this woman knew something he did not. He stayed where he was. "My name is Jamilah Koury," she said. "Let me cut to the chase. I want you to let my family keep their house."
He laughed. So this was it. She had come from the house next door, begging him to leave her family alone, in the most abrasive of ways. "I am Yusuf Noor. I am pleased to make your acquaintance." He crossed his legs and looked up at her amiably, making a point of not answering her query.
Jamilah was steadfast. "My family keeps their house," she repeated.
"What makes you think I have the power to do that?"
"You're from the new government, aren't you?"
"I don't make the rules. I just enforce them."
"Then enforce them differently." Her conviction was unrelenting. She stared down at him, her eyes boring into him, apparently determined not to leave until she had won him over.
Yusuf felt guilt churn in his stomach. His job was easier when he did not have to stare into the faces of the families he displaced, particularly not the beautiful and intimidating face of this woman. He fidgeted in his seat, then stopped himself. "I'm sorry," he said at last. "I can't help you." Impulsively, he added, "Would you like some coffee? I can have the servant bring it up."
Jamilah, however, was not to be drawn off her course. In answer, she squatted down in front of Yusuf in such a position that he could see underneath her skirts, straight at her uncovered genitals. Yusuf's eyes widened. He drew in a sharp, involuntary breath and backed up in his seat, as if to escape the threat of Jamilah's body's magnetism. Even so, he could not bring himself to draw his eyes away from the sight of her genitals. They were beautiful--moist and pink and framed by smooth, fat legs. Yusuf felt his mouth water just looking at them. It was a crass move on her part, but an effective one. She had seen his discomfort at the sight of her hair and was now using this discomfort against him by baring this most potent of body parts.
Genital cursing was an ancient weapon, practiced very rarely nowadays and only in the most desperate of circumstances. Jamilah knew full well the shameful power of this particular region of her body, and she knew that a pious Muslim woman would never utilize its power. But she did not care. She wanted to disarm Yusuf, and she saw clearly that it was working.
