“A man who claims that he can gaze at a handsome beardless youth without feeling lust is lying.” –Unnamed Islamic Scholar, 12th Century
They were fifteen when they were first introduced, informally and secretly, to the concubines decorating Masyaf’s garden. Al Mualim had no hand in it- Nasir took his students to the garden after one of their routine classes, and showed them the concubines sitting under their pavilions in the garden. With a wide sweep of his arm, Nasir opened the door to a false paradise: ‘see these women?’ he said to the young men, whose eyes were bulging wide with lust, ‘they are yours for your pleasure.’
Like how in war, soldiers were allowed the company of prostitutes in exchange for the company of their wives, assassins were also allowed these women to satisfy their lust.
Nasir paused to let the young men take in the sight- these women who were forbidden to them before were suddenly all theirs! As if they knew they were being watched, the prostitutes pulled their bright veils closer to their faces and turned towards each other, a desperate show of modesty despite their work. Nasir turned on his heel and pushed the gawking boys back. “It is permitted by the Prophet Mohammed, Peace be Upon Him, and now let us move on to the next lesson.”
Within two weeks, most of the young men had made… acquaintances with the concubines. Over their food, they shared lewd stories of their sexual explorations, boasting against each other who was the manlier man and who was able to please their woman better. The older and more experienced assassins took their food elsewhere so they wouldn’t have to hear about such nonsense. After all, their days of gloating were over. Altair, too, started to separate himself from the novices and even took to eating alone some days, dipping his bread in hummus and taking his food very quietly and contemplatively.
“What’s wrong with Altair?” Abbas faked concern, and then broke into sniggers. “Maybe he can’t get it up!” He pushed Malik playfully on the arm, but the other novice didn’t laugh. “What, Malik? …Ay!” Abbas grabbed at Malik’s sleeve, but couldn’t stop him from getting up off his cushion and making his way to Altair.
Said novice, now already proving himself beyond his peers, made space for Malik to sit beside him under the shade of the lime tree. The two of them were always either in a state of amiable peace undercut with a tenuous current of mutual jealousy, or they were full-blown enemies. However, even after their fights, they always seemed to forgive each other for the vicious circle to begin all over again.
Malik was going to say something about the weather (but what was there to say? Every day was hot, hot, hot) but then Altair gushed very abruptly, “I can get it up, you know.”
“I-” how was someone supposed to respond to that? Malik flushed and sputtered, “y-yes I know you can.”
“You know?” Altair’s eyes darted from left to right in a panic, looking everywhere but at Malik.
Catching on to how he’d been misinterpreted, Malik practically dropped his food trying to back away- “N-no! No I don’t know, I mean- I guess I’d like to know, but-” wait, what was he saying?
“You’d like to know? Ya Allah what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know!”
“Fine!”
Abbas was laughing that ugly laugh, like the sound a camel makes when it throws up.
Altair was always very direct in his own way- blunt. Malik was often the one to break eye contact out of shame or humiliation (sometimes frustration), so this time he made a point of keeping the other one's gaze until they were mutually embarrassed and had to go about doing their own things. With a swish of robes, Altair was up and walking away to the field kitchen. There wasn’t enough time for a second helping, so Malik knew Altair wouldn’t be back.
He closed his eyes and took a deep, unfulfilled breath. The concubines were fine, but there weren’t much to them. Malik would much prefer to spend time with Altair instead, if only they could somehow stop fighting and misunderstanding each other. Malik mainly lusted after women, but Altair had been the predominant exception.
Here he had to stop his thoughts, close a door in his brain, and look around to see that no one could somehow hear him in his head. What a curious thought. Yes, there were times when Malik found himself entranced by the way a certain courtesan’s hips swayed as she walked (Fatimah was his favourite by far), but then he’d get breathless just watching Altair read! His ‘little Malik’ came out to play when he smelled Fatimah’s subtle perfume on her neck, but ‘little Malik’ also rudely made himself known during heated debates with Altair! He couldn’t make sense of it.
To make matters worse, Altair was not a sexual creature- Malik was willing to wager that none of the concubines even knew who he was. Here was one more rift that separated them, another wide gaping chasm between them that Malik couldn’t hope to cross.
He came again and again to what was said by the Qur’an to the people of Lot: “You approach men with lust instead of women. Nay, you are a people who exceeds all bounds.” He pondered day and night, and wondered if the key word here was not ‘men’ but ‘lust’. What if he said he truly loved a man? Would Allah say to his people then: “You approach men with love instead of women. Nay, you are a people who exceeds all bounds.”? No… It all sounded wrong to Malik. Allah, in his Great Mercy and Benevolence, surely would not condemn love!
How else, then, could he explain his urges? If Allah did not will it, why was Malik being tortured like this? It didn’t bother him that he was attracted to member of the same sex; such a thing was natural when there were no women around… But why did he still desire Altair despite the beautiful women in the gardens? He strongly desired to act on his lusts, and that action was haram, forbidden.
They were sparring one day with swords- Malik against Abbas for their examination, when the former suddenly came to the realization that he loved Altair.
The young man was shouting names at him from the sidelines- petty insults- teasing, mostly. Irritated, Malik turned his back on Abbas and came after Altair, his left hand raising with an open palm… but at the last second, it became a fist and knocked Altair upside the head. While Altair stumbled back against the pulsing crowd and shouted his displeasure, Malik stared at his traitorous left hand. He had full intention to slap Altair, but he punched him instead. Fists were not for enemies. Fists were for equals.
Altair was escorted away to the infirmary (fighting the entire time), and Malik noted a sour taste coming to his mouth. He shouted a stunted apology, but the one it was meant for never heard it. I love him, he realized with horror, how can this be? Yes, it was love- but not like how a man loved his wife (a man who hit his wife was no man at all), but like the love between two mystics, between two Kings. The epiphany made him falter, and he failed to deflect the swing Abbas issued from the back- toppling sideways and landing on his knees, Malik surrendered.
“What?” Cried their instructor, stunned. Malik never surrendered.
Malik failed the exam and had to be re-tested against Nasir himself. The instructor pushing hard against him and finishing confused- “why didn’t you fight like that before, Malik?”
The thought was a living thing, and it ate away at Malik’s mind. He stopped eating properly, couldn’t sleep at night… couldn’t even find pleasure between Fatimah’s legs. He couldn’t focus, was slow to join in on a conversation, forgot simple things like how to strap his dagger… it wasn’t long before Altair noticed and started to pick on him.
“You are in love, Malik,” he teased with a twinkle in his eye, and only God knew how right Altair was. The other man could only stare back at Altair, a thousand words left unsaid dying upon his lips, a hundred daggers tearing at his heart.
Kadar, Allah bless that child, spoke words of gold: “Allah does not condemn love!” he spread his arms wide to emphasize his point. And then just as Malik was about to launch into a life-changing tirade on what love is and how Kadar is too idealistic and didn’t know anything, the boy got distracted and ran off to play.
Malik, then, had to reconcile these conflicting ideals in his own finite mind… A sodomite applied to the perpetrator of an act of sodomy- someone who was tempted to commit sodomy but refrained out of moral or religious considerations was hence not a sodomite. Was he destined, then, to yearn from a distance…?
~ x ~
"I kissed a downy-cheeked youth with sweet dark-red lips and looked at that primeval beauty. And asked for a lover’s rendezvous with him, so he answered: The time for my compassion or coquetry is past. The water of beauty has dried up from my cheeks, and prettiness has disappeared from the branch of my upright physique. I said: The description of a garden [the rosy cheeks] only becomes attractive if it is surrounded by sprouting vegetation." -Aṭāllah al-Ṣādiqī, Allepine Judge, 12th century
An informer was staring at him. His face was covered by a white kuffiyah but for the strip of skin around his eyes, and what eyes they were. Malik kept that gaze and his body turned towards him. The informer took the hint and slowly strode forward, keeping their eyes dead set on each other.
Are you like me? They asked each other in silence. People came and went in their periphery, but they only saw each other. They didn’t bother to ask for names, didn’t bother to even utter salaam. They merely looked at each other and they knew-
Malik extended his hand as an invitation at the exact same time the informer did. Oh. They looked down and up again, and waited for the other to put down their hand. Neither of them moved. Finally the anonymous informer reclaimed his hand and forcefully pulled down the front of his kuffiyah, showing Malik his impressive beard- “I don’t bottom,” he mouthed, and the cloth went up again.
Malik barely had a beard, so he couldn’t compare with that. He also hadn`t thought the informer was so aged. Originally he pinned the other to be around his age. He liked men, yes. He’d had time to come to terms with that. But he wasn’t… he wasn’t a woman. And he certainly wasn’t about to be fucked by a man ten years his senior.
“That’s too bad, then,” he said.
“Too bad,” echoed the informer sadly, eyeing Malik hungrily all the while. “You would have enjoyed it.”
Pushing the image from his mind, Malik cleared his throat and asked if there was anyone else…
“I can’t tell you any names, are you stupid?”
Right. He apologized, and the informer turned around and went about his duties. Watching him leave, knowing that he might never see him or speak to him again, Malik wondered if he could declare jihad on himself.
~ x ~
“Perhaps the time will come when you will tire of kisses I shall be happy even for insults from you I only ask that you keep some attention on me.” -Rumi
In the siege towers, Malik carefully separated and counted a bundle of arrows into one-and-half scores. Altair then arrived with some cord and bound the arrows into bundles. Afterwards, they loaded the bundles into crates made of lath and wire while the system repeated.
“I’m confused, Altair.”
“You always are, Malik.”
“…idiot.”
“Dumb goat!”
“Stop!”
“You started it!”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m ten, Altair. I’m ten and seven years added to that.”
“You could be ten years times five, and I’d still say the same thing.”
Two months later, with the crescent moon hanging above them, Altair and Malik found themselves in Acre and without any food to eat. It was too late to head back to Masyaf and it was too dark to find the Bureau (they’d only been there once or twice thus far), so they found an abandoned house. They made do with a lice-infested bedroll, holding their growling stomachs and staring at each other. A single candle lit the room.
“We’re missing iftar…”
“Why can’t we just go to some random house and beg for food?”
“…are you serious, Malik? No, don’t even answer that. Let’s get up early tomorrow and find the Bureau…”
“But we’d miss suhoor then, too!”
“Then I guess we die!” Altair hissed venomously, pulling up the scratchy quilt and going to sleep. After a slight pause, “Insha’Allah we don’t kill each other before that.”
While the jab would have been funny a few years ago, now it just served to rip the gasping hole in Malik’s chest even bigger. “I wouldn’t hurt you,” he slurred, his head filled with cotton because of how hungry he was, “in fact, I actually love you.”
Altair just chuckled. On a bad day, he might have made a witty remark or just ignored the confession (which was obviously not serious). But today he was compelled to say the following in response, almost thoughtlessly: “I love you too, Malik. Good night.”
And it was the most devastating thing that Malik ever heard.
Fish Out of Water (2)
–Unnamed Islamic Scholar, 12th Century
They were fifteen when they were first introduced, informally and secretly, to the concubines decorating Masyaf’s garden. Al Mualim had no hand in it- Nasir took his students to the garden after one of their routine classes, and showed them the concubines sitting under their pavilions in the garden. With a wide sweep of his arm, Nasir opened the door to a false paradise: ‘see these women?’ he said to the young men, whose eyes were bulging wide with lust, ‘they are yours for your pleasure.’
Like how in war, soldiers were allowed the company of prostitutes in exchange for the company of their wives, assassins were also allowed these women to satisfy their lust.
Nasir paused to let the young men take in the sight- these women who were forbidden to them before were suddenly all theirs! As if they knew they were being watched, the prostitutes pulled their bright veils closer to their faces and turned towards each other, a desperate show of modesty despite their work. Nasir turned on his heel and pushed the gawking boys back. “It is permitted by the Prophet Mohammed, Peace be Upon Him, and now let us move on to the next lesson.”
Within two weeks, most of the young men had made… acquaintances with the concubines. Over their food, they shared lewd stories of their sexual explorations, boasting against each other who was the manlier man and who was able to please their woman better. The older and more experienced assassins took their food elsewhere so they wouldn’t have to hear about such nonsense. After all, their days of gloating were over. Altair, too, started to separate himself from the novices and even took to eating alone some days, dipping his bread in hummus and taking his food very quietly and contemplatively.
“What’s wrong with Altair?” Abbas faked concern, and then broke into sniggers. “Maybe he can’t get it up!” He pushed Malik playfully on the arm, but the other novice didn’t laugh. “What, Malik? …Ay!” Abbas grabbed at Malik’s sleeve, but couldn’t stop him from getting up off his cushion and making his way to Altair.
Said novice, now already proving himself beyond his peers, made space for Malik to sit beside him under the shade of the lime tree. The two of them were always either in a state of amiable peace undercut with a tenuous current of mutual jealousy, or they were full-blown enemies. However, even after their fights, they always seemed to forgive each other for the vicious circle to begin all over again.
Malik was going to say something about the weather (but what was there to say? Every day was hot, hot, hot) but then Altair gushed very abruptly, “I can get it up, you know.”
“I-” how was someone supposed to respond to that? Malik flushed and sputtered, “y-yes I know you can.”
“You know?” Altair’s eyes darted from left to right in a panic, looking everywhere but at Malik.
Catching on to how he’d been misinterpreted, Malik practically dropped his food trying to back away- “N-no! No I don’t know, I mean- I guess I’d like to know, but-” wait, what was he saying?
“You’d like to know? Ya Allah what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know!”
“Fine!”
Abbas was laughing that ugly laugh, like the sound a camel makes when it throws up.
Altair was always very direct in his own way- blunt. Malik was often the one to break eye contact out of shame or humiliation (sometimes frustration), so this time he made a point of keeping the other one's gaze until they were mutually embarrassed and had to go about doing their own things. With a swish of robes, Altair was up and walking away to the field kitchen. There wasn’t enough time for a second helping, so Malik knew Altair wouldn’t be back.
He closed his eyes and took a deep, unfulfilled breath. The concubines were fine, but there weren’t much to them. Malik would much prefer to spend time with Altair instead, if only they could somehow stop fighting and misunderstanding each other. Malik mainly lusted after women, but Altair had been the predominant exception.
Here he had to stop his thoughts, close a door in his brain, and look around to see that no one could somehow hear him in his head. What a curious thought. Yes, there were times when Malik found himself entranced by the way a certain courtesan’s hips swayed as she walked (Fatimah was his favourite by far), but then he’d get breathless just watching Altair read! His ‘little Malik’ came out to play when he smelled Fatimah’s subtle perfume on her neck, but ‘little Malik’ also rudely made himself known during heated debates with Altair! He couldn’t make sense of it.
To make matters worse, Altair was not a sexual creature- Malik was willing to wager that none of the concubines even knew who he was. Here was one more rift that separated them, another wide gaping chasm between them that Malik couldn’t hope to cross.
He came again and again to what was said by the Qur’an to the people of Lot: “You approach men with lust instead of women. Nay, you are a people who exceeds all bounds.” He pondered day and night, and wondered if the key word here was not ‘men’ but ‘lust’. What if he said he truly loved a man? Would Allah say to his people then: “You approach men with love instead of women. Nay, you are a people who exceeds all bounds.”? No… It all sounded wrong to Malik. Allah, in his Great Mercy and Benevolence, surely would not condemn love!
How else, then, could he explain his urges? If Allah did not will it, why was Malik being tortured like this? It didn’t bother him that he was attracted to member of the same sex; such a thing was natural when there were no women around… But why did he still desire Altair despite the beautiful women in the gardens? He strongly desired to act on his lusts, and that action was haram, forbidden.
They were sparring one day with swords- Malik against Abbas for their examination, when the former suddenly came to the realization that he loved Altair.
The young man was shouting names at him from the sidelines- petty insults- teasing, mostly. Irritated, Malik turned his back on Abbas and came after Altair, his left hand raising with an open palm… but at the last second, it became a fist and knocked Altair upside the head. While Altair stumbled back against the pulsing crowd and shouted his displeasure, Malik stared at his traitorous left hand. He had full intention to slap Altair, but he punched him instead. Fists were not for enemies. Fists were for equals.
Altair was escorted away to the infirmary (fighting the entire time), and Malik noted a sour taste coming to his mouth. He shouted a stunted apology, but the one it was meant for never heard it. I love him, he realized with horror, how can this be? Yes, it was love- but not like how a man loved his wife (a man who hit his wife was no man at all), but like the love between two mystics, between two Kings. The epiphany made him falter, and he failed to deflect the swing Abbas issued from the back- toppling sideways and landing on his knees, Malik surrendered.
“What?” Cried their instructor, stunned. Malik never surrendered.
Malik failed the exam and had to be re-tested against Nasir himself. The instructor pushing hard against him and finishing confused- “why didn’t you fight like that before, Malik?”
The thought was a living thing, and it ate away at Malik’s mind. He stopped eating properly, couldn’t sleep at night… couldn’t even find pleasure between Fatimah’s legs. He couldn’t focus, was slow to join in on a conversation, forgot simple things like how to strap his dagger… it wasn’t long before Altair noticed and started to pick on him.
“You are in love, Malik,” he teased with a twinkle in his eye, and only God knew how right Altair was. The other man could only stare back at Altair, a thousand words left unsaid dying upon his lips, a hundred daggers tearing at his heart.
Kadar, Allah bless that child, spoke words of gold: “Allah does not condemn love!” he spread his arms wide to emphasize his point. And then just as Malik was about to launch into a life-changing tirade on what love is and how Kadar is too idealistic and didn’t know anything, the boy got distracted and ran off to play.
Malik, then, had to reconcile these conflicting ideals in his own finite mind… A sodomite applied to the perpetrator of an act of sodomy- someone who was tempted to commit sodomy but refrained out of moral or religious considerations was hence not a sodomite. Was he destined, then, to yearn from a distance…?
~ x ~
"I kissed a downy-cheeked youth with sweet dark-red lips and looked at that primeval beauty.
And asked for a lover’s rendezvous with him, so he answered: The time for my compassion or coquetry is past.
The water of beauty has dried up from my cheeks, and prettiness has disappeared from the branch of my upright physique.
I said: The description of a garden [the rosy cheeks] only becomes attractive if it is surrounded by sprouting vegetation."
-Aṭāllah al-Ṣādiqī, Allepine Judge, 12th century
An informer was staring at him. His face was covered by a white kuffiyah but for the strip of skin around his eyes, and what eyes they were. Malik kept that gaze and his body turned towards him. The informer took the hint and slowly strode forward, keeping their eyes dead set on each other.
Are you like me? They asked each other in silence. People came and went in their periphery, but they only saw each other. They didn’t bother to ask for names, didn’t bother to even utter salaam. They merely looked at each other and they knew-
Malik extended his hand as an invitation at the exact same time the informer did. Oh. They looked down and up again, and waited for the other to put down their hand. Neither of them moved. Finally the anonymous informer reclaimed his hand and forcefully pulled down the front of his kuffiyah, showing Malik his impressive beard- “I don’t bottom,” he mouthed, and the cloth went up again.
Malik barely had a beard, so he couldn’t compare with that. He also hadn`t thought the informer was so aged. Originally he pinned the other to be around his age. He liked men, yes. He’d had time to come to terms with that. But he wasn’t… he wasn’t a woman. And he certainly wasn’t about to be fucked by a man ten years his senior.
“That’s too bad, then,” he said.
“Too bad,” echoed the informer sadly, eyeing Malik hungrily all the while. “You would have enjoyed it.”
Pushing the image from his mind, Malik cleared his throat and asked if there was anyone else…
“I can’t tell you any names, are you stupid?”
Right. He apologized, and the informer turned around and went about his duties. Watching him leave, knowing that he might never see him or speak to him again, Malik wondered if he could declare jihad on himself.
~ x ~
“Perhaps the time will come
when you will tire of kisses
I shall be happy
even for insults from you
I only ask that you
keep some attention on me.”
-Rumi
In the siege towers, Malik carefully separated and counted a bundle of arrows into one-and-half scores. Altair then arrived with some cord and bound the arrows into bundles. Afterwards, they loaded the bundles into crates made of lath and wire while the system repeated.
“I’m confused, Altair.”
“You always are, Malik.”
“…idiot.”
“Dumb goat!”
“Stop!”
“You started it!”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m ten, Altair. I’m ten and seven years added to that.”
“You could be ten years times five, and I’d still say the same thing.”
Two months later, with the crescent moon hanging above them, Altair and Malik found themselves in Acre and without any food to eat. It was too late to head back to Masyaf and it was too dark to find the Bureau (they’d only been there once or twice thus far), so they found an abandoned house. They made do with a lice-infested bedroll, holding their growling stomachs and staring at each other. A single candle lit the room.
“We’re missing iftar…”
“Why can’t we just go to some random house and beg for food?”
“…are you serious, Malik? No, don’t even answer that. Let’s get up early tomorrow and find the Bureau…”
“But we’d miss suhoor then, too!”
“Then I guess we die!” Altair hissed venomously, pulling up the scratchy quilt and going to sleep. After a slight pause, “Insha’Allah we don’t kill each other before that.”
While the jab would have been funny a few years ago, now it just served to rip the gasping hole in Malik’s chest even bigger. “I wouldn’t hurt you,” he slurred, his head filled with cotton because of how hungry he was, “in fact, I actually love you.”
Altair just chuckled. On a bad day, he might have made a witty remark or just ignored the confession (which was obviously not serious). But today he was compelled to say the following in response, almost thoughtlessly: “I love you too, Malik. Good night.”
And it was the most devastating thing that Malik ever heard.
~ x ~