A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

Catholic. In any event, Seth, the important issue is not whether your eyes have rested for a moment on a naked woman, but whether you can play your part in ushering in the new caliphate.'
    When it was his turn to leave the house and walk back to the Tube station, Hassan also felt 'uneasy'. There were a large number of Muslim girls at his college and when some of them took to wearing the hijab, he supported them, as did the other serious male students. What he didn't dare admit was that he found the black covering attractive, particularly with girls he had previously seen in Western clothes. Rania, for instance, used to wear grey skirts and leather boots, so her dress was modest, revealing only her knees, shiny beneath navy blue tights, when she sat down in the lecture hall. On her upper half she wore a white blouse, buttoned high, and a cardigan or jacket. There was nothing to distress her parents in all this. But in her eyes ... She applied a thin line of black and a trace of mascara in the Ladies after she'd arrived in the morning, and her lashes were long. The grey skirt, though knee-length, did cling to her hips, and if Hassan happened to be watching when she innocently crossed her legs, he glimpsed for a moment the deep blue thighs and the darkness beyond. He had the contours of Rania's body so deeply etched in his mind that when she took to wearing the hijab it wasn't, to begin with, any hardship for him. He saw through it. The clean white bra and underpants that he could picture beneath, the thighs presumably still in the same navy blue nylon, the curve of the hips and the smallish, firm breasts ... Now the eyes had no trace of liner or mascara, but when the long lashes were lowered over the dark brown iris there was still a message of invitation.
    The scriptural reference to 'looking' was one that had been popular among his friends, as it seemed to excuse so much. One of them pointed out to Hassan a passage from a Koranic scholar that read: 'The dual nature of what is shown and what is concealed is fundamental to the understanding of God; and this double aspect is explicitly linked in at least one place to sexuality, where the female genitals are identified with the concealed aspect of the divine. There are no Islamic monks. The Prophet had many wives, and we are urged to copulate and procreate. Many scholars have seen orgasm as a foretaste of paradise, where the sensation will not be brief, but eternal.'
    One of the boys at college, who had a large collection of topshelf magazines, told Hassan it was fine if the girls in the pictures were kafirs . Hassan thought this was making a virtue of necessity, since Muslim women simply didn't pose nude. His own aesthetic taste was always for dark-haired women of his own background; leaving aside his sinful thoughts about Rania's body, he simply liked the elegance and colouring of these women, their femininity.
    It was a torment that seldom let up. At the age of nineteen, before he became religious, he had had a kafir girlfriend, a white Londoner called Dawn who was in the same year at college. It seemed to be just his luck that he had found the only sexually reticent kafir in London. Parts of the West End were no-go zones on Friday and Saturday nights with drunken girls in tiny skirts showing their breasts to passers-by before they threw up in the gutter. Friends of his at college told awed tales of the licentiousness of ever-willing kafir girls. But Dawn, for some reason she couldn't properly explain, allowed Hassan only limited access. He could put his hands beneath her clothes and touch her between the legs, but that was all. She refused to reciprocate. It was only when he (to his self-admitted shame) suggested to her that her reluctance was due to some atavistic racial prejudice that she tearfully relented. It was in a flat she shared with three other girls in Stamford Hill, with the thump of noisy dance music coming from the lounge. Dawn was rigid with resistance, then