Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  But the agencies did know about it, and therefore, when the USS Cole blew up in Aden harbour in south Yemen in the autumn of 2000, life in Dammaj changed. The intelligence agencies, eyeing the recent explosions in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and noting that Yemenis had been involved in both of them, began to focus on the sheikh of Dammaj. They knew that one of his most ambitious, best-loved early students had been a well-heeled Saudi talib, since vanished into Afghanistan, called Osama bin Laden.

  So the Yemeni government came. They shut down the school for two weeks. When the government came, reporters came. One of the reporters was the New York Times correspondent, John Burns, whose article about Dammaj was entitled, ‘One Sheikh’s Mission: To Teach Students to Hate the West’. When he visited in November 2000, he did an interview or two outside the mosque. The village guards came immediately, and pointed their guns. He left right away.

  And that, pretty much, was that. The school resumed its classes. The government, which is never welcome in these parts, went away. The reporters went away. Whatever window the outside world had on goings on in Dammaj closed.

  Then came September 11. Slowly but surely, it changed everything. It brought heavy surveillance in the European and American mosques. To Muslim youths in Europe, it brought condescension in the press, bullying from the police, and annoying stares from fellow passengers on subways and aeroplanes. Then came wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then came an awakening of identity politics among young European Muslims. ‘Where is Islam resurgent?’ asked the young men in the exurban mosques of Europe. ‘Where is it powerful and pure and ancient?’ The answer filtered back to them: ‘In the mountains of Yemen.’

  Soon social networking sites were flourishing on the internet. Then cellphone service came to Dammaj. The Western students started coming. At first they trickled in. They kept trickling. They built huts from mud bricks next to the mosque. They called their friends back home and wrote text messages. They opened up an internet cafe. Sheikh Muqbel, who had always been well known in the Arab world, was, by 2002, becoming famous in Walthamstow, Roubaix, Grozny, and the jails of South Philly. More students came – also from Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and in 2005 the mosque was rebuilt to twice its original size.

  When Burns was in Dammaj in 2000, he wrote of a population of several dozen Westerners – strays, misfits, one-offs. I knew the population had expanded since then but by how much and who exactly was living in the village and under what conditions I didn’t know. I was looking forward to finding out.

  5

  ON MY FIRST night in Dammaj, I ate in the moonlight, on the mosque terrace, in a circle of impoverished brothers. Most of them had come over on rafts from Somalia. They were too poor to buy their own food. The mosque fed them.

  Only a single Yemeni ate with us that night. He was incredibly gracious to me. He saw me ambling across the mosque terrace, saw me eyeing the circles of men sitting cross-legged in robes, and watched me wonder which cluster I might join.

  ‘Hiya la man jah!’ he called, which is an old-fashioned, Arabic way of welcoming a traveller. It has died out now in other, more contemporary nations. It means: Greetings to the one who has come. Alive! ‘Eat with us please,’ said the Yemeni. He smiled. He opened the palm of his right hand on a spot of empty terrace next to his knee. ‘How was the voyage? How is your health? What is your news?’

  ‘Praise Allah,’ I said.

  He asked after the health of my family, and how the world of this life was sitting with me.

  ‘The world of this life is good with me,’ I said. ‘Praise God.’

  He offered me bread from a stack of steaming flatbreads that the Somalis had been too polite to touch. As we chewed on the bread, he smiled at me.

  * * *

  When we had had our fill of rice and bread, he introduced himself properly. His name was Abdul Wahab. His parents had died five years earlier, when he was fourteen. Back then he had lived in a teeming Yemeni city out in the east, called Mukalla. Every day he worried that without parents, and without money, his two younger sisters would turn into degenerates. He worried that the degeneracy of the city would affect his own mind.

  ‘Mukalla?’ I said. ‘Not a believing place? I thought it was one of the most pious of the pious cities in Yemen.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not really. Anyway, God protected my family by bringing us here, praise him.’ He turned his palms to the moon.

  ‘The will of God,’ I murmured.

  For a few seconds our circle of diners sat in silence, smiling to ourselves, and marvelling at the workings of providence: it had rescued Abdul Wahab. It had rescued the Somalians. It had brought me, an American ex-poetry teacher, ex-bike mechanic to the House of Prophetic Tradition.

  In the silence, I watched the East Africans staring at their dates, then pressing the tips of their fingers over the sticky clusters, then raising their fingers to their mouths. They sucked on the pits carefully as if they were filled with nutrients that had to be pulled out with the tongue and the teeth. Their enormous eyes sparkled in the moonlight.

  After a while, Abdul Wahab, the Yemeni, nudged me in the ribs, and murmuring softly, told me that he knew why I had come to Dammaj. He grinned.

  I grinned back at him. ‘You do?’ I said.

  Yes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Allah – he has brought you here.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe there are people who know very little about Islam in your country.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Their ignorance is very great. Even the Muslims there. Especially the Muslims there. Perhaps they themselves know very little. Perhaps in some cases they know only a single prayer. And that they are Muslims. Is that right?’

  I thought about this suggestion for a moment. ‘In some cases, yes,’ I said, ‘certainly.’

  ‘You already speak Arabic well, praise God.’

  ‘Praise God,’ I said.

  ‘So you will learn more here and spread knowledge of Islam when you return, in your own country and wherever you go. Around the world. Allah has brought you here and this is the reason.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Learn well so that you can teach well,’ he said. ‘Memorise Koran. Seek advice from the sheikh. When you return, you will help them understand. Islam is a complete and true religion and Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the final prophet.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Allah bless you,’ he said.

  Allah bless you,’ murmured the Somalians.

  Soon it was time to pray the evening prayer, the isha. Abdul Wahab kissed me on my cheek as he stood up. ‘Concentrate, study, memorise,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn very quickly. This is the best place in the world to gain knowledge and science.’ Al ilm wa’l hikma.

  ‘That’s why I’ve come,’ I said.

  ‘And write as you memorise because writing stabilises the memory’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  After the prayer I sat under a column in the mosque and scribbled the conversation I had just had with Abdul Wahab into a notebook.

  Some of the brothers in the mosque cast funny looks at me as I wrote. I was a new brother. Maybe this was normal. A village guard ambled by with his machine gun. He didn’t say anything. He gave a half-smile. I half smiled back. If he had lingered, I would have folded up my notebook and taken out a Koran or something. I might have risen and thrown down a prostration or two. When you don’t know what else to do, and the communal prayer has yet to come, it’s usually not a bad idea to put down a private, solo prostration. You can pretty much never go wrong doing that.

  If the guard had squinted at me, or wondered at all, I probably would have smiled right back at him and ambled away to an open stretch of carpet, suitable for prostrations and for contemplating Mecca.

  That would have been my habit – a learned reflex. But there were times when I didn’t follow my learned reflexes. There were times when I did wha
t I felt like doing, habits be damned. On this occasion, I had had an interesting day. It had been filled with interesting events, highways, and interesting new people. I felt like writing it all down, everything that had happened to me, including the toothless checkpoints, the van driver’s prayers, and the God-saturated dialogues.

  So instead of wandering away to an open spot on the carpet, I remained in the shadows of the mosque, scribbling and stabilising my memory.

  6

  I CHOSE AN auspicious place for a spiritual adventure. Even though Nintendo and satellite TV are making headway in Yemen, the country remains, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, an excellent place to discover what life feels like under the rule of a conservative, unreconstructed version of Islam.

  Its mountains have kept it apart from the world, as has the poverty of the people, as have the country’s imams and presidents, who’ve tended to govern the country, as the Yemenis say, with the windows shuttered. Apart from a small community of Jews, most of whom fled in a 1949 airlift called Operation Magic Carpet, Yemen has never had a significant non-Muslim minority. In this respect it is unlike the broad sweep of other Middle Eastern countries: Iran, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

  Women still move about Sana’a as little towers of black rayon. They are not addressed in public, except when absolutely necessary, and are not expected to speak. They never enter restaurants, do not sit next to men on public buses, and hurry home before dark. ‘Human wolves,’ say the religious authorities from their minarets, will prey on them if they don’t.

  Perhaps because he doesn’t care, or perhaps because everyone is entitled to something in Yemen, the president has given control of the education ministry to the Islamist party. The results are not entirely unpredictable: most young people who would like to be educated in technical matters leave the country. At home, a class of young people have been brought up to understand the worst about non-Muslims. When young cab drivers find themselves in a confrontation with Westerners, they scoff, ‘Nazarene!’ or sometimes simply, ‘Jew!’ (or, more recently, for any foreigner, ‘American!’).

  During Ramadan, the society comes close to shutting down entirely, since most people try to sleep through the daytime fast. At night, there is feasting, then prayers, then qat chewing. In the early morning, an army detachment fires a cannon from a precipice above Sana’a to wake the populace for the pre-dawn meal. ‘Come to the prayer!’ say the minarets which are scattered across the valley floor like poppy stalks. ‘Prayer is better than sleep! Prayer is better than sleep!’ cries the morning muezzin, at 4.30 a.m. No other Islamic country turns up the minaret volume quite this loud. ‘God is great! God is great!’ cry the many dozens of muezzins. ‘Come to the prayer, come to the flourishing, prayer is better than sleep!’

  If you’re not awake by then, you might well be awakened by the sound of car horns in the street and door knockers, clanging away in the alley beneath your bedroom. At last, you’ll get up. During Ramadan, an hour or so before dawn, the city streets bustle. The restaurants overflow. But you don’t need to go to a restaurant because people will be happy to feed you at the mosque.

  Predictable as this routine is, Yemen is in the process of a slow-motion disintegration. Desertification in the countryside, floods of migrants pouring into the cities, rising food prices, indices for life expectancy and maternal mortality far below the already lagging standards of the region, and teeming, understaffed maternity hospitals: this is Yemen today. Women have an average of six babies. When you enter the private houses, especially in the Old City, where people are poor, you can almost smell the approaching collapse: it is sewage overflow, qat on the breath of the men who’ve given up on work, warm, humid baby clothing, and big stews, boiling away in hidden kitchens.

  The burgeoning population is draining away Yemen’s fresh water. This is especially problematic in the capital, at 8,000 feet, which has to draw its water from a series of high altitude aquifers. They’re drying up. Some enterprising property owners in Sana’a now sink their wells 900 metres below the surface. In theory, you’re not allowed to drill without a government permit, but for every law in Yemen there is a sum that can be proffered to make it go away. If the bribes don’t work, there is always the umbilical network of family connections, and if that fails, which it rarely does, there is always the Kalashnikov.

  People avoid the courts because the judicial system is a joke. In theory some combination of Egyptian, Yemeni and sharia law apply but in reality, whenever an important case is pending, the president weighs in or the person with the most money weighs in, and the matter is disposed of. Usually people know what the judge will say long before he says it.

  The government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh asserts a kind of authority but it is an intermittent one, more like trying to keep a violent dream under control than like governing power as we know it in the West. Anyway, the status quo – chaos burbling but not overflowing – seems okay with him. Meanwhile, the rebellious Shia continue to cause problems in the north, along the Saudi border. Al-Qaeda-style groups flourish in the countryside and fractious tribes, anxious for respect, kidnap tourists, blow up oil pipelines and periodically ambush units of the Yemeni army.

  Some day, most observers agree, the fractiousness of the tribes and the religious groups will combine with the environmental problems, and this aggregate power will then confront the president’s army. It’s not hard to guess what will happen next. The army will fade away, more or less as Saddam’s army did.

  The poor will huddle in the mosques. Those without a tribe or a powerful family will pay for protection. There might be an ominous silence for a little while as the citizens of the nation load their guns. There are said to be some sixty million Kalashnikovs in Yemen, which translates to about three for every man, woman and child. During this silence the surrounding countries will probably fret. Then a new episode of Arab bloodletting, of IEDs, mutilated children, and blood-spattered hospital corridors will splash across the pages of the world’s newspapers.

  None of this does anything to diminish the excitement of a young man in search of spiritual experience. If anything, the instability heightens the excitement.

  With its bribable officials and innumerable religious academies, Yemen is a friendly, pliant destination. Everyone will tell you that the national drug, qat, can make you hallucinate. People you meet on the street want to give you handfuls of it. At the same time, they want to instruct you in Islam.

  So you take an apartment in the Old City. Within a few days, there will be such kisses on the cheek from your language teachers, and such delight in the eyes of the young men when you emit your first sentences in Arabic. You will smile back at your new friends. The tottering old men on the street, with their canes and their Kashmiri shawls, will stop in their tracks to stare. ‘May Allah open the Way for you,’ they will say, assuming that you’ve come, like most of the other Westerners in the neighbourhood, for spiritual comfort.

  In fact, spiritual comfort is the one thing they do extraordinarily well. Five times a day you are reminded that the world is a Wilderness and that through it runs a broad, Straight Path, the sirat al-mustaqim. Five times a day you are reminded that the rest is a cursed emptiness. By and by, this prayer becomes familiar. By and by, the local dialect of Arabic becomes intelligible, and with it, a string of lovely phrases: Morning of the Light! Morning of the Good, peace be upon you! Lead us on the Straight Path, Merciful Allah, King of all the Worlds. At this point, the dilapidated state of the government here, or any government for that matter, hardly seems a shame. It seems a propitious thing, in fact; an opportunity.

  Then one day, perhaps, you will find yourself sitting in the top room in one of the gorgeous tower houses of Sana’a. In the mafraj, or place of seeing, you are way up in the air – far above the city, far beyond the reach of women, who are in any case not permitted in such rooms. Your friends will be offering you sprigs of qat, which has a bitter, tart flavour, not unlike maple leaves. It rot
s your teeth but it does stimulate unusual thought.

  The longer you sit among these new friends, the more likely it is that you will feel you have come to a place where your life can change at last. You will survey the mountainscape outside and contemplate the men around you: they live by a code of justice that hasn’t varied much in 1,400 years. They are kind but severe. On occasions like this, it can feel as though the entire early part of your life, in which you laboured to bring things and girls into your orbit, has amounted to precious little. Where are the girls and the things now? The answer: far away and indifferent. If the frivolity of this programme of acquisition and loss never struck you before, it might well strike you now.

  In such rooms, at such times, it would be altogether reasonable if a smart young man from the West, attached to no special life plan or place, should happen to fall under the spell of an immensely powerful vision. Naturally, that vision would be built on the idea of the journey, which is an overarching notion in this part of the world, among this formerly nomadic people. Haraqa fiha baraqa, says the Prophet: ‘in onward movement there are blessings’.

  In Islam in general, the voyage is not just a metaphor by which to understand our fits and starts as we pass through the terrestrial world, though it is that. It is also a physical obligation, a wajib, incumbent on each worshipper, meant to spread the religion, to teach the seeker, and to bring him closer to God.

  The young man in the qat-chewing suite reflects. What form will the voyage take? It could be a scholarly voyage, through Arabian history, through the Koran, the hadith (the Traditions of the Prophet) and the sira (the biographies of the Prophet). It could also be a physical journey, to various schools, perhaps in Yemen, perhaps elsewhere.

  In Yemen, a Western Muslim is a figure to be admired: he tends to have a better education than the locals, can sail through the airports of the world, can speak the European languages, and tends to have more personal money at his disposal. In Yemen, these qualities are not the lucky accidents we take them for in the West but are thought to be signs of leadership. They hint at a figure with a special destiny.