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possible to hear the sonorous drone of the evening call to prayer.

8
A man he is of honesty and trust.
To his conveyance I assign my wife.…
—William Shakespeare, Othello , act 1, scene 3
    I supposed that Tom Drill’s partner, Strand, would be Othello, but I was made to face my own literal-mindedness, or what ever you would call it, to have assumed that because he was African American he would fit the part best. (Were the others mired in a retro form of political correctness that assumed it would embarrass Strand to be cast as Othello? I’ve been out of the U.S. for a while, uncertain about the changes in P.C. nuance.) After Strand, I would have picked Khaled for his fierce nose and warlike bearing. But I had forgotten that Othello is also the best part, and so it went to Ian, who I could see did have the best voice, a deep baritone, like Orson Welles, and the actorly English diction, being an English man.
    Nancy Rutgers said a few pedantic words about the sources of Othello. “From the Ecatommiti, the sixteenth-century collection of tales by Giovanni Battista Giraldi. We don’t know whether Shakespeare read the Italian or the French translation of 1584,” and so on.
    I was not Emilia, as someone had foreseen, but a courtesan, Bianca, perhaps because Bianca has less to say. There was some oblique discussion of American accents. Posy Crumley was Emilia, and Gazi was to be Desdemona, but she objected. “I’ve always hated her, so docile and trusting, stupid really,” she said. “Make Mrs. Crumley be Desdemona. I’d rather be nobody.”
    “It’s only a play, Gazi,” said Ian sternly, seconded by her husband.
    “No, no, no,” she said.
    Posy Crumley also refused, on the grounds that to be Desdemona might hurt her unborn child. In the end, Desdemona was played by Marina Cotter, whose incisive British upper-class tones, once she modulated them into a more pitiable sweetness, were not wrong for the part, any more than Ian’s for Othello, and the two gave the whole production a satisfying sort of professional patina.
    Wonderful it was to hear all our voices gain in resonance and confidence, reading out the immortal lines. It seemed that the theater, as a genre, fulfilled its real raison d’être in this situation, re-creating for English people, exiled from their native isle, the epitome of its genius, the language of its principal Bard. (As Americans, in Paris, get together at Christmas and defiantly sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and other songs the more dignified French don’t even know the words of.)
    Khaled, the Saudi husband, reading Cassius, said to me afterward, as we drank tea in the patio, “The language of your Bard and the language of the Prophet have something in common—could Shakespeare have been inspired by a reading of the Koran?”
    “Do you think it’s possible?” I said, not knowing if Shakespeare could have read the Koran. As Khaled spoke, I was wondering if he thought my sundress horribly immodest. I had read that Muslim men are offended by us. At the same time, I was telling myself not to be self-conscious, I am not immodest. Odd that the thought had crept in on me.
    “Yes, yes! As where the Book says, ‘Seest thou not those who turn in friendship / To such as have the wrath of Allah upon them? / They are neither of you nor of them, / and they swear to falsehood knowingly.’ Cassius might have spoken those very words to warn Othello about Iago.”
    And indeed, at moments during the reading, as the horror of the story mounted, I had been seized by a sudden bleak sense of dislocation to find myself in this unexpected, faraway corner of Islam with strangers reciting poems, without any real sense yet of the warm welcome I’d been looking forward to. As happy and excited as I was to see Ian, there was a little stab of dismay at the impossibility of what I had to do, tasks that seemed as far beyond my own powers as flying a jet would be, in a land I knew nothing of