The Imam Mowaffak of Naishapur, vanguard of distinguished visitors to Dunia Town, was himself, though old, scholarly, gentle, tolerant, not particularly distinguished. He had come quietly and without fuss to this rather quaint territory, living quietly in a small hot room in the local hotel, squalid, its air unconditioned, overlooking the yard where the fowls were, most un-Islamically, strangled at all hours. He rose early, prayed, took syrupy Chinese coffee, spoke a word or two of Persian with the Chinese clerk at the desk, and then went out and strolled to the medan to look at the Mosque. Many of the commonalty, including infidel Chinese and Indians on their way to work, gaped towards Mecca. The glory came: the stained-glass windows raged with a score of suns; the golden dome writhed in an agony of light. The Imam Mowaffak smiled and nodded, thinking of his fellow-townsman, Omar the tent-maker, and his witty verses. There was a quatrain apposite to this dawn moment — the king of day sending a whistling lariat through the air and strangling the dome; but barn, or roof, made Omar think of jam, or cup: the bam was an inverted jam. Either the Cyrus of the day could not pour wine into it, or else the wine had already been drained and the empty bam or jam turned down. He smiled further as he thought of the naughty Omar making the bilal cock-crow "Ishrabu!" That meant "Have a drink." There was room for naughtiness in Islam; there was room in Islam for everything and everybody.
The sun stretched an arm up from the amber blanket. The sun lit a tiny figure standing high in the minaret. The figure raised some kind of drinking vessel to its lips. "Aaaaah," said some of the loitering workmen, "he drinks." The Imam Mowaffak saw a small man he took to be an Arab standing on the verge of the medan. He addressed courteous words to him in Arabic. But the Arab knew no Arabic; he smiled and shook his head. Three generations in this land; he knew no other tongue than the National Language. But then the loudspeakers all over the town belched like a volcano. And through the loudspeakers a voice, like the voice of God, called, "Mio padre. Malta cattivo. Bloody robber."
Workmen of the Electrical Department began again their search for the main switch of the Mosque. It was hidden somewhere in a niche behind a marble panel that was supposed to open like a door. The voice cried to all the town:
"One ticket Italy."
The Imam Mowaffak went on his way, shaking his head good-humouredly. They seemed to use the vernacular here. Perhaps the drinking was symbolic. There were, perhaps precedents for all these things. But he had always suspected that the vision of Islam held by the barbarous peoples of East Africa was not a true one. Here one saw the dangers of Protestantism. He walked along the main street, charmed by the strangeness of this exotic country. He murmured to himself verses of the seventieth Surah, about Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways, by which the Angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years.
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