A Nice Jewish Wedding

Sultan Khan still felt like a foreigner in his own clothes. Robes and jewels and a turban, after all! But one of his first acts after his election had been to burn all his suits from London and Mumbai. It had taken a long time and a lot of gasoline, for as any carpet merchant will tell you if you have the time to spare, and even more enthusiastically if you don't, one characteristic of good wool is that it resists the flame.

But the suits had finally ignited, and the televised bonfire had signaled to four billion subjects that it was all right to dress like Turks and Arabs and Greeks again. Parliament had even legalized the fez.

He chose a comfortable robe because, glancing at his itinerary, he saw he had a long day ahead: a speech full of brotherly glad tidings but studiously devoid of substance to the Macedonian provincial parliament; an audience with the mayor of Sarajevo; a ribbon-cutting - by Allah, he was going to have a stern chat with the vizier! - at a supermarket in �r�mqi. Should a man with half the world's nuclear weapons under his command really have to travel a thousand miles in an afternoon to bless okras and Laughing Cow cheeses?

If quaffing chinottos with liberated Uighurs was the price of leadership, however, Sultan Khan accepted it. Straightening his turban and glancing back at his wife, slumbering anew, Khan thanked God, as he did at least five times daily and usually more, for the fairytale ending He had provided, not just for him and Zeynep, but the world. Yes, it was sad that his reign had been ushered in by tragedy: the simultaneous blasts in New York and Tel Aviv, and the release of sarin in West Jerusalem, on Nov. 11, 2011, had killed millions quickly and tens of millions slowly, and thrown the world into chaos for a time. After the Hashemites had taken Palestine and the Sauds most of the rest of the Middle East, the United States and the European Union had merely pissed themselves out of fear.

Who would restore stability to an angry, hungry planet? Lesotho?

After four decades of petty, pointless little wars and plagues, a legislator in Ankara, a small, stooped man old enough to remember not better days but the memories of better days, had delivered the answer. He had stood up and uttered the words that became the rallying cry of the renewed Turkish empire: "Let's start again."

The nation had felt reborn. Tanks had rolled, ships sailed, and within weeks, the lands of the East, weary with the impossibilities of self rule, had given themselves up, some resentfully, some dolorously, some cheerfully. From Belgrade to Lahore, from Astana to Dacca, Turkey ruled. Even the Hashemites and the Sauds, those women, had signed mutual defense agreements, in effect turning their lands over to the Empire.

So Turkey ruled many, but who could rule Turkey? The matter had been debated for months in Ankara and again it was our little legislator who had provided the answer.

"Friends, this is crazy," he had said when he had finally gotten the floor. "It will take us longer to write a Constitution than it took to assemble the greatest empire the world has ever known. You know as well as I do what is needed. Were the statue outside this building to come to life and the father of our democracy, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself, to rejoin us here in this great hall, and if he brought George Washington and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin with him, they would agree with me. In this unprecedented hour of need, what we truly need is a king."

The people would vote, knowing that they were choosing not just a man but his line for as long as it could sustain itself - millennia if that was God's will. At his club in London, Khan's friends had joked that he should put his name forward.

"Don't be absurd. If Parliament went Islamic, I'd have to give up Glenlivet," he'd said.

But on a visit home to Izmir, the powerful banker had been struck with the same sense of humility, of duty, of patriotism, as had gripped the rest of the country. He ran and, to his disbelief, won. He donated his fortune to the Red Crescent Society as a way of atoning for violating the Muslim prohibition on usury (minus a few billion he sent to the Banco Ticinese di Ascona as a sort of gratuity to himself).