Rafiq enjoys a life of near perfect contentment. Long used to a comfortable existence in his small antique shop, he sells Persian rugs and an odd assortment of books to a curious mélange of customers on a small dead end street in Istanbul. Like many Muslims, Rafiq is troubled by the complexities of the political worlds that engulf his own and has sought refuge in the world of private Islamic practice and the company of books and a few good friends. Among these friends are a lonely old baker, an Iranian couple who run a local restaurant, and an American Sufi convert to Islam grappling with the conflicting social and religious demands of the order of dervishes he has become involved with. Rafiq then meets Michaela—an American Muslim academic—and her half Moroccan husband Samir. The couple are trying to raise a child and weather the disintegrating marriage of the Samir's parents and its devastating effects on their own family. Add to this mix what appears to be a fundamentalist extremist, who runs the neighborhood mosque and comes to him for help in the middle of the night, and Rafiq's life soon falls far short of perfect contentment.
Odd happenings begin to have a weird effect on Rafiq's world, and a mysterious presence begins to make itself known. A fabulous coin out of antiquity appears in Rafiq's shoe, things are moved about in the store where they don't belong, and there's the delightful tinkling of glass bells that fills the air whenever these curiosities occur. And the good natured owner of the restaurant boasting Persian home cooking wonders if Rafiq's store might be inhabited by jinn. But this is something Rafiq—a passionate student of both mysticism and rationalism just can't consider and he laughs off the possibility of the Jinn Theory in favor of searching for a more reasonable explanation. But then the old man appears in Rafiq's shop when the door was locked and there had been nobody there just moments before—an old man dressed in tribal Afghan robes and resembling, a little too perfectly down to the smallest detail, a beloved photo Rafiq remembered from National Geographic decades earlier.
Things ramp up when Ramsay Hamza, the proprietor of the old bakery across the street confides in Rafiq that his son Mahmoud, who has been living in the US for many years, wants to come for a visit with the grandchild he has never seen—if Ramsay Hamza will loan him the money for the trip. But this ruse quickly unravels and the baker's son is revealed to have been living a tangled web of stories in order to hide from his father the fact that he had sought a new life in the US because of his homosexuality. But the lies don't stop with this part of Mahmoud's lifestyle which includes drugs, crime, and violence.
Suhayl, a longhaired blond twenty-seven-year-old convert to Sufi Islam from California, is trying very hard to live the traditional religious ideals set forth by his shaykh. But Suhayl is suffering from severe migraine attacks that are worsening and all the shaykh wants him to do is pray. But there are the other troubling issues with this shaykh: He has brought a very young woman into the dervish lodge whom he says is his wife, but the girl clearly has no interest in Sufism or anything else besides playing lady of the house and ordering the shaykh's students around. Suhayl is torn between obedience, perhaps even blind obedience to his shaykh, and concern for his own health and what his conscience tells him is right, and wrong.
Suhayl joins Rafiq at Hamid's Persian restaurant for dinner and the two older men, both in their late fifties, are angered and worried by the tales of abuse that Suhayl and others have been reportedly suffering at the hands of their shaykh. They are most worried about the shaykh's refusal to allow Suhayl to see a doctor for his migraines and they reveal to him that Hamid himself has been with a shaykh for many years and never should there be the kind of recklessness and rejection of modern medicine and common sense that Suhayl has described. Rafiq must calm Hamid as his rage at the breach of trust that these false shaykhs hold over their helpless and sincere followers threatens to overwhelm their conversation.
While trying to sort out his concerns for his friends, Rafiq becomes entangled with Michaela—an American woman married to a Moroccan—and her crises with her husband's parents. Then Selim, the man Rafiq assumes is a fundamentalist and who runs the small neighborhood mosque, is banging on Rafiq's door in the middle of the night and begging for help when the young man Azami, his ward and a child he had rescued from a terrorist bombing in Syria when the boy was six years old, is missing and possibly arrested with would-be-terrorists of this generation.
Rafiq and Michaela discuss the crossroads that she, as an academic in Islamic studies, is facing. She laments angrily that she is called "an imperialist stooge" by Muslims to the right of her moderate and liberal Westernized views, and "a terrorist sympathizer" by fellow Americans because she is not afraid to address the role that colonialism, new and old, has played in world affairs. As a non hijab-wearing woman, and an American, she is often called not a real Muslim or a mere convert, but as a Muslim who deeply loves her faith, she is also accused of supporting antiquated cultural norms. Unwitting stooge, terrorist sympathizer; Michaela is none of these things.
And against all odds, it seems that the Iranian restaurateur was right: Rafiq's storeis inhabited by jinn, with one ancient nonhuman soul who is bound to the earth to guide and assist the most pained human souls in their transition to spiritual and worldly renewal.
Selim, the man who runs the mosque and who seeks Rafiq's help when there is no one else to turn to, is anything but a terrorist although he was bred and raised among the carnage of war and lived his early years as a militia fighter—Until the day he went into the destroyed ruins of a bombed building and brought out a small child. Clinging helplessly to Selim's body, Azami was only six years old and had just witnessed the brutal slaughter of his parents in an explosion that destroyed their apartment building. Selim is devastated by his encounter with the child and leaves the militia in search of his soul and a way to create a safe home for the child he has decided to raise, a child much like he had been when he first entered the fray of street violence in his war torn city. Selim recalls those early years with Azami and his own sudden and inexplicable desire to go on the Hajj where he had at first been disappointed that the experience was not what he had imagined. On the trip home he encounters a stranger, Tursun Nourazar, whom he had seen from a distance several times in the Holy City and begins a friendship that will change his and Azami's lives.
When Azami finally appears near dawn, after having spent the evening with Suhayl visiting his dervish lodge and then talking late into the night, Selim is enraged with worry that Azami is heading down the very same road he had taken as a youth which lead him into politics and violence. He backhands Azami, something he has never done before, and they are both horrified. Azami spends the rest of the night huddled in his bed with the door locked clutching a kitchen knife to his chest, not sure if it's for Selim, should he try to enter his room in anger, or for himself. He can't possibly suspect that Selim believes his own redemption is wrapped up in Azami making it, surviving youth and becoming a happy productive adult. For Azami, now eighteen, all he can think of is making his own decisions, deciding who he will spend time with and finding answers for the very same questions that drove Selim as a young man, and fighting the incapacitating anxiety attacks which strike him almost nightly.
Not long after the bizarre night in which Rafiq helps Selim try to track down Azami, and gets to hear Selim's whole life story breathlessly over the backseat of Ramsay Hamza's car, Rafiq is shocked to see his old friend Khosro appear on his doorstep— just arrived from Tehran. No accident of course, that same night the owner and patron of the mosque, Selim and Azami's teacher Tursun Nourazar, also appears at the mosque unannounced. In the following days he forces Azami and Selim to confront each other and share their worries and the changes going on in their lives as men for the first time. To accomplish this Tursun must shove them into the abyss of horrible memories that can no longer be ignored. Selim's early years of political and militant activism, something Azami has suspected and longed to hear about but which Selim has refused to share with him, come to light and the three men discuss the ideas of people like al-Afghani and Qutub and how those ideas have incited men to violence when desperation has driven them beyond hope in more rational means of political redress.
Khosro and Tursun have known each other since they were small boys in the seminary in Qom, Iran. Tursun had always been the ringleader and the boys were in constant trouble, causing their teachers and parents so much grief and embarrassment before the powerful clerics of Shi'ism who threaten to remove the boys permanently from school. Even after countless threats and warnings of the dangers at the haunted wells in the foothills outside the city, the two boys skip school again and ride out to explore the irresistible mysteries they believe must hide there. But tragedy strikes when Tursun's beloved horse Widad stumbles and breaks her leg and the boys end up falling into one of the abandoned wells when they go to get water to cool her heaving body. It is there in the wells that they meet the jinni, an austere but kindly being who breaks their arrogance and gives them another chance; a chance to save their standing at school and regain the trust and respect of their parents, a chance to grow into states of being they can not even imagine yet. This is an opportunity they embrace, each in his own way, and spend their lives engaged with. But this was just the beginning of a new life for Tursun and Khosro. It is this jinnii and these two boys, now old men in the middle sixties, who have come together at this nexus of crises that is tearing apart so many lives.
Michaela's mother-in-law Eileen arrives and proceeds to try to lure her twelve year old grandson Phillip back to the United States to live with her. The divorce from her husband Jamal has driven Eileen down a spiral of alcohol and pain medication abuse. She has also set out on a one woman crusade of hatred against everything Islamic: including her own son and his family. Samir, Michaela's husband, must learn how to distance himself from a controlling mother who has used her extended separation to manipulate him as she tries to drive a wedge between him and Michaela and turn their son against them. And Jamal, Samir's father must wake up and realize that his pampered upbringing and perhaps too easily won success has destroyed his family. And the affair he had, although brief and now ended, was the final breach of trust that ended his marriage and lost his son's respect.
Jamal is disgusted with himself for allowing his family to slip away amidst his selfish hedonistic dalliances. He is saddened as he remembers the adventurous young couple that he and Eileen had been at the beginning of their marriage on their travels throughout the Middle East, and is broken hearted to see the mess he has allowed their lives to become. Although Jamal has tried numerous times to see Eileen with the hope of convincing her to give their marriage another chance, she has always rejected any overtures with anger and silence, refusing even to speak to him, and he has all but given up. Jamal then runs into a respected colleague at a book convention who convinces him to give his marriage one more try. This colleague is the same Tursun Nourazar who had helped Jamal's son and his family get their apartment in the high rise right across from the mosque that Tursun owns among other global properties.
Ramsay Hamza receives news from his nephew Kareem who has tried to visit his cousin Mahmoud in the US. All of Mahmoud's stories about a career and a family were lies. Soon Mahmoud, Marty as he has been calling himself in the US, has disappeared and his father learns much later that he was murdered by a drug dealer.
Suhayl—having had a blowup with his shaykh and left his dervish order because of the wisdom he has heard from Hamid and Rafiq—is paralyzed by the fearful guilt that he just couldn't handle the rigors of spiritual life, and is torn by the growing certainty that Hamid and Rafiq were right in their harsh assessments of his shaykh. Suhayl stands on the edge of the a wharf entertaining the fantasy of allowing himself to slip into the waters to his death just when Azami, out running along the waterfront, discovers him and convinces him to come back to the mosque to talk with Tursun as dark storm clouds gather into the setting sun.
Throughout all of this Rafiq has been the anchor, the one person everyone has turned to for advice and just to release the mounting stress and frustrations. But the machinations of the jinni in the lives of all these people has not left Rafiq himself untouched as he comes to see that his perfectly ordered life was little more than a carefully manicured facade of refinement and spiritual contentment.
Nearing death, Eileen sees the jinni in a dream. Always a familiar figure, he came to her in her greatest moments of fear as a child, comforting her and guiding her through comforting dreams of safety and love. This time is no different, and while she tries to cling to him like a terrified child, he forces her to look at her family, those who love her and want desperately for her to get well. And this includes Jamal who she is afraid to trust, but who is there to make one last attempt to heal the breach between them.
As the sun sets and the storm thickens in the sky, the jinni appears in the garden of the mosque and seats himself beneath a tree to wait for his two old friends, savoring the delight of the scents of the flowers and the feel of earth upon his flesh. When they sense his presence they come to him and he tells them it is time to gather their friends in the mosque.
The storm descends upon the city causing widespread destruction and havoc while the inner storms of these and related peoples crest. Eileen, now drunk and passed out in a suicide attempt is rushed to the hospital by a tearful Jamal who has also just arrived in town with Tursun in renewed hope of repairing his family and admitting his mistakes to the woman he still considers his wife. But will Eileen survive the night when the storm knocks out the power in the hospital?
With the storm breaking wildly outside the mosque, Rafiq and Suhayl, Azami and Selim and Khosro and Tursun are inside, sensing that the heart of the storm is near. And soon the jinni arrives. He sits with each man, revealing the strife and trials they have been facing and giving them something they had all but lost: hope, and the understanding that the worst of life's trials may become doorways that each person must unlock alone and enter. Each is given a choice, the same choice that Tursun and Khosro were given in their boyhood at the bottom of the well: to go back into life wiser and more prepared to embrace their lives, or to enter a world of inner wisdom and service to the divine and humanity. And each will answer according to his nature.
But for Tursun and Khosro, old men at the end of their lives, that choice is something very different. Khosro feels he must continue his life as he always has, until that life is finished. Tursun however, forever the instigator, the risk taker, even as the ringleader back in Qom, chooses the unknown as he always has, and he touches the jinni's body.
The next morning the storms have passed, and the lives of all will begin anew, transformed in unexpected ways but all facing hard roads ahead of them, including those not present but in the wider circle touched by the jinni—Michaela and her family and Ramsay Hamza. Except for Tursun, who has completely disappeared along with the jinni and walked out of the visible world.
Some months later, Selim and Rafiq are walking down the street near the mosque late on a cold fall evening when they hear laughter and then see a young girl swinging in the park. A mischievous kid, she's a little too cheeky and won't tell them where her parents are and what she's doing out there in the dark. She then challenges them to see who can fly as high as she can on the swings. Selim is angered, but Rafiq gets a strange but pleasantly familiar sensation, and then there's that tinkling of glass bells he's always heard whenever the jinni was near. He tells Selim they'd better get on those swings and start flying.
And the jinni? He prepared these many lives to behold the threshold of mystery and opened the doors of profound personal transformation for them. His work is done, and he has finally earned that for which he had never dared to hope but which he has longed for throughout all the time of creation: The call of the One who created him.
