A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  Yousry would have laughed me out of his office if I had had the power to look about a decade into the future. In 2017 the new US President Donald Trump would name a fanatical bigot called David Friedman his ambassador to Israel.

  When they blithely promised they would move the US embassy to Jerusalem a chill went down my spine. Did this man and his gang have absolutely no idea of the worldwide repercussions of this incendiary move? And these repercussions would not be felt only by 1.7 billion Muslims. There is a reason that Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank and Gaza remain the world’s most-contested real estate. The city of Jerusalem as the possible capital of Israel is just one issue that lies at the heart of the world’s most unsolvable problem. Al-Quds, as Jerusalem is known in Arabic, home to the world’s third-holiest mosque for Muslims worldwide, is the most visible symbol of Islamic oppression and all the power of empire that the Muslims lost. Many Muslims are taught this.

  But at the time, Yousry and I just shared our common woe about how funding was scarce, and then I told him about my still-unfinished film.

  “Islam and homosexuality? A film? It’s just going to be a black screen!”

  I met many old friends at my favorite Café Riche on Talaat Harb Street in downtown Cairo. We exchanged stories about future dangers we shared prescience on. “If Mubarak falls, everything falls!” said an older writer friend prophetically. Neither he nor I could ever have predicted that this very café would become a triage center for revolutionaries in a little over five years. I made sure I bought Garth a big box of pastries from the bakery of Cairo’s storied Café Groppi downtown. The famous statue of Talaat Harb, a renowned Egyptian economist of the 1900s, marks Groppi’s location and the modern name of this square. But it is still known as Soliman Pasha Square to what I called “the triple Cs”—Cairo’s crazy cabbies. Until the early 1950s, the area was named after Soliman Pasha (born Joseph Anthelme Sève and the top army commander during Muhammad Ali’s reign). It was renamed Talaat Harb Square by Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was eager to erase all evidence of the monarchy he’d toppled. Tahrir Square lay a few minutes away. This entire area had not been a stranger to revolutions, including the one that was coming.

  One night, Garth took me to a casual bar that most Mideast correspondents gathered at to exchange gossip, careful never to reveal their own scoops. So off we went past the Odeon cinema to the Odeon Palace Bar atop the “Odeon Hotel” on Abdel Hamid Street. I didn’t know if it was still a safe meeting-place for gays. Garth said it was the “favorite stop” for the many hacks who made up Cairo’s (not official) Foreign Correspondents Association. This was the kind of place only Cairenes knew about. It was a no-frills, expansive space for a restaurant that also included a shabby rooftop “garden” bar. But it all had the aura of history. No one seemed to know for sure if this building was a “real” hotel.

  Boozy journos are purveyors of the best kind of gossip. “This town is a ticking time bomb,” I said, as I had on every single visit to Cairo in the past. The journos agreed. This was a police state, after all. Mubarak, a dictator fashioned after many in the region, had stayed in power for over two decades, walking a tightrope between the “secular” Cairo elite, many of whom owed much of their offshore wealth to his brutal regime, and an impoverished, still-silent majority, for whom Islam was their only weapon. It was within the latter where the Brotherhood had spent decades quietly building its political machine. The Ikhwan (brothers) took care of the desperate whom everyone else had forgotten. Mubarak, much like his dictatorial predecessors Nasser and Anwar Sadat, had perfected the art of suppressing the most organized political force in the Arab Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood. Much of the leadership of the Brothers, all devout Muslims who had the silent support of the Egyptian masses, had been incarcerated in Mubarak’s torture chambers for decades.

  The conversation veered into a discussion about recent stories of a man who trained as a medical doctor but was anything but, who was moved from a Sanaa prison in Yemen to Mubarak’s notorious Tora prison in Cairo after 9/11 to serve a life sentence. This notorious man used the moniker Dr. Fadl, which stuck. His real name was Sayyed Imam al-Sharif.

  There were about eight of us. After swearing us to secrecy about his name and affiliation, Azhar, a Gulfie journo at our table, passed around a bunch of densely written photocopied pages. He claimed this was Earth-shattering content. Azhar had somehow managed to get regular access to the incarcerated doctor, whom he said he had known since the mid-nineties. We were getting, said Azhar, a scoop. In truth, most of what he told us did not unfold publicly till 2007–08. Azhar said this doctor was in essence the “father of al-Qaeda.” He said these pages would form an important and decisive book, and “the sheikh” (Fadl) was thinking of calling it Rationalizing Jihad in the Modern World.

  “You have to pay attention to this man,” said Azhar. “Like his title?”

  There was some discomfort at our jolly table. Surely no one wanted to say the name of this “book.” I didn’t tell Azhar that I had known of Fadl for a while. Anyone who studies Islamic extremism and terrorism as I had for years knows Fadl. They also would know names like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. Books like Fadl’s Essential Guide to Preparation (seminal for violent jihadis) laid the theological foundations of al-Qaeda. This upcoming Rationalizing Jihad in the Modern World would take a historic, unexpected turn: It would be an about-face on the use of violence.

  Books like these are not like regular books from publishing houses. They used to travel in hundreds of thousands of bound photo-copies around the globe to recruit future violent jihadis—an underground railroad of Islamic terror. Now we have the web, as do al-Qaeda and ISIS. Like Osama’s mag, Inspire, ISIS has two of its own. None need newsstands. Fadl’s new book was first published in the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper in six parts in winter 2007. Fadl’s captors (the feared Mukhabarat) also made sure a six-part interview of Fadl’s 180 from being the “father of jihad” to peacenik was arranged for the pro-Saudi Al-Hayat newspaper, which is the Middle East’s New York Times. But always looking over its shoulder, it is a mere shadow of its American behemoth, which Trump and his cronies would venomously attack as “false press” in the not-so-distant future.

  I wondered how this man’s name was totally unfamiliar in the Western press. His incarceration and the preparation book got a lot of Arab press. The US National Security Agency does a great disservice in not diligently following every single word published in Arabic or Urdu papers and online forums. Fadl is a living Islamist ideologue who provided fodder to extremist Islam and its ideology of violent jihad. In fact this man is the true “father” of modern violent jihad. This incarcerated Fadl, Azhar reminded us, laid the Quranic basis for al-Qaeda in his 1988 opus, The Essential Guide to Preparation, which claimed violent jihad was the natural state for all Muslims, who should always be in conflict with nonbelievers. That book is still a bible of violent jihad. It came into existence after Fadl and Osama bin Laden had considerable hang-out time in Peshawar. All this “literary” output? Right under the noses of the Pakistani government, which definitely knew where both men were.

  On this night atop the Odeon, I wondered, if a mere Gulfie hack like Azhar knew about this Dr. Fadl and his new criminal literary output in 2005, then why did it take the world and especially the US to discover him in a New Yorker article dated June 2, 2008? The ideological father of al-Qaeda had been (comfortably) writing away in the prison of a dictator who was a US ally for years.

  According to Azhar, while writing in prison Fadl had undergone a 180-degree turn in his ideology and some pages of that were in our hands. Because he met Fadl frequently, Azhar described a cell filled with earlier books of Islamic thought and the Sahih’s (Sunni canon) and more: Clearly Fadl was following due academic rigor, because he knew his content would be attacked by the likes of his former students Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, and it was Zawahiri who famously produced a 200-page response mocking Fadl. In the not-so-distant future, his new book
we were passing around would be widely available because it was regime-approved. Cairo rumors had started—it was available to be bought from Egypt’s Ministry of Interior for 150,000 Egyptian pounds.

  “I usually carry them in my backpack,” Azhar said, taking more copies out. “Too unsafe otherwise.” Azhar read a part where Fadl confessed he had been wrong all along. He was using the same Quran he had used to sanction bloody jihad to say that “there is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property.” The book said that terrorism of all kinds was not in compliance with sharia.

  To Zawahiri and Osama’s chagrin, Fadl denounced al-Qaeda in this Rationalizing Jihad book. In a direct nod to 9/11, he said that “the blowing up of hotels, buildings, and public transportation” was not permitted. He laid out strict conditions for the “rare” occasions a jihad would be called for. Most important, he alluded to the “Greater Jihad”—the kind I had always known about and longed for. It was a struggle of the spirit. Fadl now claimed there was no Islamic sanction for killing in the name of Allah, even if the victims were non-Muslim. He repudiated even takfiri doctrine—the idea of one Muslim declaring another to be an apostate. Osama was born into a Wahhabi ideology. It’s a ridiculous view because it makes more than a billion Muslims infidels. Historically, takfir and violence often went together. Fadl took Quranic aim at the 9/11 hijackers, saying they “betrayed the enemy,” because the visas the “enemy” had given them was a contract of protection. He reserved a great deal of rage for al-Qaeda, whose very foundations were built on his words, saying, “The followers of bin Laden entered the United States with his knowledge, and on his orders, double-crossed its population, killing and destroying. The Prophet—God’s prayer and peace be upon him—said, ‘On the Day of Judgment, every double-crosser will have a banner proportionate to his treachery.’” He raged that the Bush administration’s decision to bomb Afghanistan was what al-Qaeda deserved. He didn’t stop there: “People hate America, and the Islamist movements feel their hatred and their impotence. Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?”

  “Fadl is a big deal, isn’t he?” I asked the assembled journalists, all of us shocked.

  “Yes, he is. Here in the Arab world,” replied one. “I wish America would pick up on it, but they don’t even care.” By 2007 many Arabs were reading and talking about what was an earthquake. Did US intel even know that Fadl was the theological founder of al-Qaeda, not to mention kind of hiding in plain sight in the most prominent prison of the country that was a long-term Arab ally?

  Did the Americans realize that this father of modern jihad was now a peacenik and available to talk? Was the Bush White House listening? More important, had anyone in the CIA ever read The Essential Guide to Preparation—and, yes, between its lines as well?

  Rationalizing Jihad in the Modern World desperately needs accurate translation. It answers thousands of questions, all from the inventor of violent jihad. It helps us understand parts of ISIS. It took the New Yorker story of June 2, 2008, written by Lawrence Wright, to finally acknowledge this man.

  I was reminded that sinister police states like Egypt acted as gatekeepers to the dark world of terror by imprisoning men like Fadl. Like him, some seemed to do a 180.

  This was clearly a gang of night owls. It was 1 a.m. and they got even more fun and loquacious. Edward, from a big British newspaper, began to talk about Egypt’s popular fatwa-on-demand television shows. He told us how on one such show, a Dr. Izzat Atiya of Al-Azhar University pronounced an otherworldly fatwa in response to a woman who wanted to know if she could reveal her hair to male colleagues at work. Atiya used perverted Islamic logic to say that if she breastfed the colleagues five times, she could reveal her hair! This would make the men related to the woman and thus preclude any sexual contact. There was enormous outrage. The grand mufti of Al-Azhar denounced it as un-Islamic. Mubarak’s minister of religious affairs at the time, Mahmoud Zaqzuq, decreed that future fatwas needed to be compatible with “logic and human nature.” Atiya did a swift turn around and said he had misinterpreted a hadith. This was the kind of stuff that these foreign correspondents reported about in Mubarak’s Egypt. It was either hilarity or revulsion. Revolution, often the subject of boozy discussions, was not part of their journalistic oeuvre. Mubarak’s stranglehold on society seemed impenetrable. His Mukhabarat did the dirty work of making people disappear overnight.

  With dread, I returned to lonely and soulless Johannesburg. Zahir’s housekeeper Thambi let me in to the mansion, conveniently located in the majority white and thus rich Sandhurst neighborhood, which Zahir could only afford because of his rich doctor husband. It came with a swimming pool and Thambi. Black women in post-apartheid Africa had no option but servitude to the white or sometimes colored rich. In subsequent trips, South Africa struck me as one of the most inequitable and oppressively racist places on the planet. While the government was quick to remove the signs, apartheid had mostly not gone away. How on earth was this considered an equal nation? Clearly its much-touted constitution did not affect decades of hate.

  Thambi, who used a kanga (a cotton sling favored by African women) to hold her newborn as she cooked, cleaned, and shopped, was just one visible symptom. A Baby Björn was beneath her status in this still unequal country. Thambi and I didn’t share a language and I didn’t drive, so there was nowhere to go. I read the books of Islamic thought and theology I had bought in Cairo.

  I prepared a long document, telling Zahir how he could be at the center of this evolving LGBTQ universe around the western world, hoping that it would appeal to any narcissism he had. I centered my argument on the principle of the greater jihad, reminding him I was going to call it A Jihad for Love. He returned from Mecca, read my work, and was impressed with the effort, research, and thought I had put into the proposal. He agreed to be in the film.

  Neither the imam nor I knew at the time that the film would bring him worldwide fame and enable funding for his future pastoral career, as all manner of foundations flocked to him. I regret presenting the ijtihad (independent reasoning) Zahir favored as solution for the Islam-homosexuality conundrum at the end of that film. It was false logic. Audiences love happy endings. I gave them one.

  I am sure Zahir didn’t know that al-Qaeda, Dar Al Saud (“The House of Saud”), all Wahhabi and Deobandi logic, and perhaps even Daesh loved the concept of ijtihad. I would never share a table with them.

  I wondered if I needed to film talking heads to understand the historic and theological disarray created by Islam and its ever-changing and also bygone relationship to homosexuality. In the early years of the eighth-century Abbasid Empire, in a region that would include present-day Baghdad, the Arab poet Abu Nuwas, a favorite of the caliphs, flourished. Nuwas wrote a kind of verse that would not easily be accepted in a moralistic society like America. A scholar called J. W. Wright had published some of it in translation in a book called Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. In the often-florid Arabic of his time, Nuwas wrote verses that would shock even the organizers of my (first-ever) 1998 San Francisco Gay Pride. It was claimed Nuwas even wrote verse that would be considered pornographic in puritanical America:

  Oh Sulayman, sing to me and give me a cup of wine . . .

  And if the wine comes round, seize it and give it to me!

  Give me a cup of distraction from the Muezzin’s call

  Give me wine to drink publicly

  And bugger and fuck me now!

  Nuwas’s risqué verse got the better of him eventually. He died in prison. During a particularly prolific period of writing, he went on to take Ayahs 17 and 22 from Surah 56 of the Quran and transform them into a homoerotic fantasy. Ayah 17 said, “Round about them will (serve) youths of perpetual (fre
shness).” These youths were clearly male. Ayah 22 said, “And (there will be) Companions with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes.” Nuwas was being homoerotic before the concept even existed in the English-speaking world. Poetry lay at the heart of Islam. What was the Quran if not a deeply spiritual, enormous, and eloquent poem? The tribal Arabs in Muhammad’s time had always turned toward poetry in difficult times, both sanctioned and from the lips of wandering minstrels, and no subject was off-limits for them. Today, all good Muslims, including unfortunately the ones who blow themselves up to get a direct ticket to heaven, would dismiss Nuwas’s poetry as fiction. While the seventy virgins “bearing wine” were often mentioned, the fact that amongst them in this paradise there would also be a sizeable number of youthful boys was conveniently forgotten. Clearly Nuwas was far ahead of his times. His rejig of Quran 17:22 was genius.

  I started filming with Ziyad, whose first encounter with me was in Le Depot, the Paris sex club. Ziyad was brutally and repeatedly raped during his incarceration. Condoms were never used. He managed to escape prison and flee Egypt. He was granted asylum in France when I first met him. Unfortunately, the French system granted him nothing beyond that. He was treated with contempt, living a penniless life on the streets of Paris while trying desperately to learn the language of his new country. At the time, it was inconceivable that he would be allowed to return to Egypt—the freedom of an EU passport was far away. The young man was clearly suffering from PTSD. And unfortunately that was not the only illness the regime of his homeland given him. Ziyad tested positive for HIV soon after he arrived in France. It was no doubt a result of repeated anal rape by prison staff in Tora prison. In the film, we transcribed every word he said. He repeated the same story, almost word for word, for an excellent report Human Rights Watch did on the subject, so I was sure of his veracity: