Bilal X

Bilal X’s voice makes him more than a follower of the exiled Imam: it becomes the means by which the Imam’s message crosses from a guarded London refuge into Desh. Once a successful American singer, Bilal is recast as a convert and muezzin, carrying revolutionary speech over radio. His role also brings a tension into focus. He identifies himself with an oppressed people, while the Imam argues that a person can absorb the habits of power even when power is used against them.

Identity and Background

Bilal X is an American convert who had once been a successful singer, with a voice that had reached the top of the hit parade twelve times. In the Imam’s circle he is known as one of the Imam’s favorites. The change in his public function is striking: a voice formed in popular entertainment becomes an instrument of religious address, and the singer is called upon not simply to perform but to transmit a political and spiritual program.

The narrative gives Bilal two connected roles in that program. He is a muezzin, whose voice calls listeners to attention, and a radio broadcaster, whose words can reach people far beyond the room in which he speaks. His history in music is not discarded when he joins the Imam’s movement. Instead, the Imam selects him precisely because his voice is beautiful, trained, confident, and accustomed to being heard. The skills that once served a mass audience are redirected toward a new one.

Broadcaster for the Imam

In the Imam’s London sanctuary, Bilal speaks into a radio transmitter on an agreed frequency, sending the day’s message to Desh. The broadcast is clandestine, but its movement through the air gives it the scale of a public address. Bilal begins with denunciations of Empress Ayesha and her state, then delivers the Imam’s call for revolution. The Imam remains physically still and does not visibly speak; the voice heard in Desh is Bilal’s, carrying the Imam’s authority across distance.

That distinction between speaker and voice gives the scene its force. The Imam’s message emerges through Bilal rather than directly from the Imam, yet listeners receive it as the Imam’s own declaration. The broadcast therefore depends on both the political leader who supplies its doctrine and the singer whose voice can make that doctrine sound commanding. The Imam’s authority is not presented as independent of mediation: it travels through a human performer and a radio link.

The program Bilal transmits calls for revolt not only against a ruler but against History itself. It rejects progress, science, and rights as part of an order opposed to the Imam’s conception of divine timelessness, and it contrasts the Imam’s desired stillness with Empress Ayesha’s flowing wines. Bilal concludes the nightly proceedings with a religious affirmation. Afterward, the Imam summons Gibreel, linking the broadcast’s human, technological channel to the novel’s visionary and angelic register.

Voice, Power, and Disagreement

The Imam describes Bilal’s voice as an instrument from the West turned against the forces that sustain Empress Ayesha’s rule. Bilal initially objects to this characterization. He argues that he, too, belongs to an oppressed people, and that his American background should not make him a representative of imperial power. The disagreement is not about whether his voice can command an audience; both men recognize its force. It concerns what that force means and what its history has made of its owner.

The Imam answers with a distinction between being oppressed and being untouched by power. In his account, people raised within the house of power absorb its habits—its posture, tone, and ways of relating to others—even when they themselves suffer oppression. He treats that inheritance as an infection that can cross the boundary between powerful and powerless. The exchange complicates Bilal’s position in the movement: his voice is indispensable to the Imam, but the Imam also interprets the very qualities that make it effective as evidence of a power-shaped past.

The novel does not reduce this conflict to a simple verdict on Bilal. His objection preserves the difference between the experience of an oppressed person and the institutions of imperial power; the Imam’s answer insists that power can leave traces beyond formal membership in those institutions. Bilal’s place in the movement thus involves both service and disagreement. He lends his voice to the Imam’s authority without thereby becoming identical to the Imam’s account of what his voice represents.

The Mahmood Story and Exile

Bilal also appears as the teller, or source, of a fable about surveillance and fear in London. In a nightclub where the Imam’s lieutenants listen to people associated with opposing factions, Bilal meets Mahmood, a young man from Desh. Mahmood is frightened because he has moved in with Renata, whose former lover is a powerful former head of SAVAK. Letters arrive that demonstrate the sender knows where Mahmood lives and even anticipates the telephone number eventually assigned to the apartment. Mahmood responds by begging Renata to leave for her own safety.

When the Imam hears the story, he treats it as a warning about vigilance and about the dangers that can persist in a city of refuge. London may welcome exiles, but the people who arrive there do not thereby escape every connection to the forces they have fled. Bilal’s encounter with Mahmood places him within the Imam’s network of listening and information-gathering, not only its broadcasts. The anecdote also shows that his role as a favored singer and transmitter exists alongside the practical business of exile: gathering accounts of danger and carrying them into the Imam’s circle.

Narrative Role

Bilal’s career makes voice a material and political force. The same capacity that once gave him a place in popular music now enables the Imam to speak to an imagined audience across national borders. Yet the broadcast does not erase the singer’s identity or resolve the disagreement over the meanings carried by his voice. Bilal remains both the skilled performer chosen for his command of listeners and a man who contests the Imam’s interpretation of his relation to power.

Through him, the novel presents political authority as something that must be performed, transmitted, and heard. The Imam supplies the message and the revolutionary framework; Bilal gives that message its audible reach. Their collaboration is powerful precisely because it is not frictionless: the Imam needs the singer’s voice, while the singer resists being defined entirely by the history and authority the Imam hears within it.