Interzone ordinance restricting Islam Inc. meetings

The Interzone ordinance restricting Islam Inc. meetings prohibits the organization from meeting within five miles of the city limits. The rule does not end the gatherings described in the book; instead, it marks a boundary around them, while their proceedings remain defined by spectacle, violence, and the authorities’ careful management of public order.

The Restriction and Its Setting

The ordinance specifies a five-mile exclusion zone around Interzone for meetings of Islam Inc. The text presents it as a concise municipal prohibition amid a far broader and more unruly political landscape: the rule establishes where the organization may not meet, without suggesting that it has dissolved or that its adherents have stopped assembling.

Meetings Beyond the Boundary

The gatherings are attended by a crowded rank and file: mullahs, muftis, musseins, caids, glaouis, sheiks, sultans, holy men, and representatives of numerous Arab parties. Senior figures prudently stay away from the actual meetings, while delegates are searched at the door. These precautions do not prevent the assemblies from ending in riots.

Violence and Political Spectacle

The meetings’ disorder takes several forms. Speakers are sometimes doused with gasoline and burned to death; a sheik may open fire on opponents with a machine gun concealed in a pet sheep; and nationalist martyrs carrying grenades concealed in their bodies explode among the assembled delegates, causing heavy casualties. In one episode, President Ra throws the British Prime Minister to the ground and forcibly sodomizes him, an assault televised throughout the Arab world. The account’s escalating grotesquerie makes the ordinance’s modest geographical limit stand against violence that is not contained by procedural precautions.

Meaning of the Boundary

The five-mile rule is a specific instance of Interzone regulating political assembly through territorial exclusion. Yet the description offers no evidence that the restriction produces peaceful meetings: searches, abstention by senior leaders, and the ordinance coexist with recurrent riots and spectacular violence. The contrast leaves the law looking less like a resolution of the conflict than a formal line drawn around a disorderly political arena.