The summer I rediscovered it, during that bleak time after 9/11, shrill voices proclaimed a 'clash of civilizations' between the Islamic world and the West. By the time I found it, I knew enough to be embarrassed for having wrapped someone else's scripture in my own childish concerns. But somehow I did find that booklet, amid the spoils of my father's avid collecting from the Middle East and Asia: mosque lamps from Cairo, stacks of Indian brocades and embroideries, Bokhara samovars, lapis lazuli boxes, mounds of tribal jewelry, and hundreds of carpets.Īmid all this, my Quran chapter survived. It was a major miracle that I'd found it at all, in a three-story house so crammed with exotic souvenirs that friends called it Aladdin's Cave. It was a minor miracle that such a flimsy item from a market stall had endured so long. Louis, wrapped in a jewelry box in my parents' house. The little book outlasted the doll: I found it over a quarter century later, one sticky summer afternoon in St. Bronte.' I then placed the book in the waxy hand of my doll, which sat stiffly on a high shelf in my Cairo bedroom. My family and I were living in Egypt at the time, and back at home I taped a bit of paper over the cover and crayoned a woman in a long blue dress, writing on top, 'Jane Eyre by C. The stall's proprietress watched me bemusedly as I cooed over the matchbox-sized book. I was neither Muslim nor literate in Arabic I bought it not for the words inside but for its dainty proportions.

The amulet was designed to be tucked into a pocket to comfort its owner throughout the day. When I was eleven years old, I bought a tiny book containing a verse from the Quran from a stall outside a Cairo mosque.

If the oceans were ink