Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  So what should this young man do?

  If he likes, he can devote his otherwise blank future to the sirat-al-mustaqim, that ever-present Straight Path, and to serving the intrepid millions who adhere to it. Nothing specific will be asked of him, just spiritual struggle, on his own behalf and perhaps later, if things go well, on behalf of the people. They do need it, as every nightly newscast – from Iraq, from Palestine, from Yemen itself – shows. If he does commit, he will have a mission – a beloved one in this part of the world. Every child in the street, every veiled woman lurking in a doorway, every wise man in a qat-chewing hall will admire and celebrate him for it. Why should he not?

  7

  BEFORE I LEFT for Yemen, I had a job teaching poetry in a prison in Vermont. During my last years there, in 2002 and 2003, Bush and Cheney were rolling out their adventure-in-Iraq programme. Most of the prisoners in jail, and all of those who came to my classes, knew it was a reckless, stupid idea. Nevertheless we were jealous of the people who were in a position to set out into the wide world and probably would have traded places with them if we could have. Instead of setting out, we daydreamed about travel, and of new lives as explorers of faraway, crazy countries.

  One day, one of my students brought a news article to class that described the Afghan life of the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. Before he turned to jihad, Lindh had apparently scoured the internet for information about Islam. ‘I have never seen happiness myself,’ he wrote to a chat room friend, allegedly an authority on Islam. ‘Perhaps you can enlighten me … Where can I go to sneak a peek at it?’ When the CIA arrived in Mazar-i-Sharif, they found him inside a cave with his Taliban regiment.

  This story fascinated my students, as it did me. A few days later, I found a video of Lindh on the internet which showed him being removed from his cave. I brought this to class, and watched it with the students. That autumn, this was the only certain, unimpeachable method I discovered to calm my students down.

  The tape showed a California kid at the culmination of a long journey. His eyes had sunk into the depths of his head. His chest and shoulders had been racked by starvation. He spoke in a poetical Arabic accent, though of course he had grown up in Marin County and had come to Islam three years earlier through the Alex Haley book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  In the video, he looks like he might be about to die. A week earlier, he and his Taliban brothers had bungled their attempt to surrender to the American army. In panic, they took refuge in the basement of a fortress at Mazar-i-Sharif. In order to dislodge them, American planes bombed the fortress. When the bombs failed to kill Lindh’s Taliban regiment, soldiers on the ground poured diesel fuel into the fort and set the fuel on fire. A few days after that, they dropped grenades down the air shafts and several days after that, having determined that some of the holdouts had yet to die, the Americans decided that the best thing for it was to drown whoever remained. In came the water. ‘We were crying out to Allah,’ said an American-Saudi survivor who was interviewed later. ‘Men who were wounded, men who were sick, men who were dying: the Koran tells you how to pray in all situations. People there who couldn’t move and couldn’t turn to face Mecca still prayed. They prayed in one position until they died.’

  Now, in the video, Lindh is in the custody of the US Special Forces. Could you explain, wonders the CNN cameraman, how you found your way to Afghanistan? ‘I started reading the literature of the scholars of the Taliban,’ says Lindh. ‘My heart became attached to them.’ He was sorry about the bungled surrender. He was tired, he said, and had been travelling for nearly two years. Most recently, he and his Taliban brothers had marched a hundred miles across the high altitude steppes in order to surrender to the American army.

  Every time I replayed that video, and I replayed it a lot, the students in the class sat quietly, as if entranced. The kid had clearly been lost in Arabia – but he had also found himself in some important way.

  Anyway, the Marin County chat room surfer had died. In his place there was Suleyman, a soldier scholar with a love of Taliban religious writing, a new native language, namely Arabic, and new friends.

  At the end of the video, the cameraman asks Lindh-Suleyman if, in retrospect, he thinks the jihad has been worth it. Suleyman pauses. He wants to give an honest response and searches his mind for the right English word. ‘Definitely’ he says, thoughtfully. His head rolls on the gurney. ‘Definitely.’

  By this point in my life behind bars, I was beginning to wonder what exactly the purpose of a poetry teacher in prison should be. In theory, studying poetry and short stories can help prepare young people for life. But many of my students were going to be spending the next twenty years locked up in maximum security. They were frightened and needy but they didn’t exactly need preparation for life. They needed preparation for life in prison. It is similar but not quite the same thing.

  I did want to help my students. They liked me and took my advice seriously. But they had needed my advice when they were alone and driving their cars 90 miles an hour down the icy back roads of Vermont, with guns in their cars and plans to kill someone.

  So that autumn, a new career idea came to me. Instead of bidding young men goodbye as they disappeared into the correctional system, I would find young men out in the world, now, on the road. They would be Muslim searchers like John Walker Lindh, and their roads would be the high altitude footpaths of the Islamic world. I would meet them before they had committed any crimes, when they were just mulling things over in their minds. How best to live? Should I kill? Why? Whom? I would listen to their discussions, take notes and if they asked for my advice, I would give it.

  Even at this time, before I left for Yemen, I was aware that Americans wandering around in the Arab world often wandered into trouble. Later on, when I got to Sana’a, I bought home-made DVDs in the marketplace of the old city which depicted the kind of trouble to which adventurous travellers are sometimes subject in Yemen. This is what the DVDs showed: a group of tourists is driving down a desert road in a Toyota Land Cruiser. A second Land Cruiser signals for them to pull over. The tourists emerge. The men with the machine guns utter a word of prayer. Then the tourists kneel in the roadside sand. Then the Protectors of the Faith, or the Soldiers of Yemen Brigades or whatever they happen to be calling themselves of late, empty their magazines into the tourists.

  In the videos I watched, the tourists were killed near Marib, a site tourists like because it is the location of the biblical capital, Sabea. Local Islamists dislike it for this reason. Or maybe they don’t. Who knows? In general, in Yemen, when tourists die no one explains anything. At the same time, most people there understand that militants kill tourists, especially when they go to Marib or Shibam, or any other spot far away in the desert, because they – the outsiders – have ventured too far, into territory they do not fathom, which happens to be under the sway of a steadfast, ultra-serious kind of belief.

  As the Iraq war moved towards a disaster in the making at the beginning of 2004,I taught my poetry classes in jail. The students were fascinated by the violence on TV and laughed and chatted about this in class, just as they laughed and chatted about the violent things they had done.

  They asked me to bring in YouTube clips of the war, which, obliging teacher that I was, I did. At home, I entered ‘war Iraq death video headshot’ into Google, then saved the videos, then brought them into class. The students were pleased. Together we watched videos which depicted US soldiers standing in the turrets of their tanks, then dying as snipers shot them in the neck. A particular sub-genre within this category of YouTube video attracted my attention: the insurgent-filmed IED video. Generally what happens is this: a Hummer is lumbering down a Baghdad highway. Religious chanting rolls in the background. In the next instant, it is aloft and disintegrating. The bits and soldiers tumble through the sky. Here is an excellent way to offer yourself the sensation of Westerners adrift in the land of Islam, of the wrong road taken, of the irretrievable error, and
of the ground that seems, to a foreigner, stable, negotiable. But it is not. The locals are watching. They’ve prepared the way. They’ve even prepared the video camera. Careful.

  As I watched these videos in jail, I thought to myself, I can do better than this. I would study Arabic. Instead of wandering around amidst religious feelings I couldn’t understand, I would try to understand them. Naturally this would involve a deep study of the religion, the history and the culture.

  I might be disoriented for a little while, I told myself, but eventually, like Lindh, I would find my way.

  It was certainly a naïve idea, and as it turned out, I was a naïve traveller for many years but it did have an outstanding virtue: it was safe. To travel about Yemen in Islamic dress, as I have done, in the company of one’s brothers and teachers, is to feel a pleasant invulnerability and a belonging that no Western tourist and certainly no Western soldier can feel. As a proper Muslim in Yemen, you can drive back and forth through Marib all day long if you like. Your skin can be pink and your beard blond. When you stop your van, you’ll emerge to shake a lot of hands. You’ll smile into the watering eyes of old gentlemen, who will wish the mercy of Allah on you, and will praise him for having given you Islam, and praise him again for having given you the wisdom to leave the land of unbelief.

  As it turned out, no one – not my mum, or my girlfriend at the time or anyone else I spoke with – was enthusiastic about my adventure. I hung around in Vermont for another two years. Then George W. Bush was re-elected. I couldn’t take more prison and I couldn’t bear even a few more minutes of George Bush, not even on the radio.

  I went back to the internet to read about the specifics of John Walker Lindh’s voyage. I discovered that he had begun his excursion into Islam in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. The school had a telephone number and a website.

  When I got to Yemen, it took me about two weeks to discover that language academies in the Middle East teach an entirely notional language, which they call ‘Arabic’ but which no one, not a soul, not a single Yemeni or Palestinian or Iraqi or anyone else in the street, actually speaks. This version of the Arabic language, sometimes called classical Arabic and sometimes called by its Arabic name, fossha, is a Platonic ideal: it’s what the Arabs would speak if they were all one, all educated, despised short cuts, loved complicated grammar and never felt the need to adapt a tongue to a specific geography and time.

  As I was studying this formal language, I went looking for the kids on the road in need of help. I looked at the entrances to the local mosques and in the corridors of the language academy where I was studying. I asked my tutor if he had known John Walker Lindh. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A sweet boy.’

  ‘Where did he go?’ I asked. The teacher, Adel, didn’t know. He suggested I ask around at the other institutes in Sana’a which catered to Westerners studying Arabic. There were three such academies at the time. I soon discovered that every institute claimed John Walker Lindh as a graduate. None of the teachers knew how he had passed from Yemen to jihad in Afghanistan.

  I asked Adel: ‘Do you know other Western Muslims in Sana’a, and if so where are they?’

  ‘Um, in their mosques?’ he answered. Mosques were of course off limits to unbelievers. Tourists and students like me were allowed to use the urinals in the basements of Yemen’s mosques. Setting foot inside the actual sacred space as an unbeliever was by consensus, and by law, forbidden.

  Which left my ‘discover young believers at risk’ plan in the lurch.

  In truth, it had been in the lurch from the very beginning. From the moment the airport taxi driver dropped me at my school, I could feel my plans being broken apart by an unyielding force, namely reality. The laughing, barefoot, homeless kids in the alleys wanted to play football with me. A grandfather who sat on a bench near my school wept when I gave him coins. My teachers at the school hinted to me that I might buy them qat, and when I did, we sat in the late afternoons in a room high above the Old City discussing how they could emigrate to America. They wished for new, better-paying jobs. Could I help them with their resumes? I could. With visas? I could not.

  Neither in that school, nor in any of the marketplaces or rice and bean restaurants I frequented did I find the young men I had imagined I might find. Instead I found dutiful, pious Yemeni men who prayed a lot. ‘We’re poor,’ said the young men, and: ‘Islam is a religion of peace. Terrorism, no! My friend, no!’ My new friends, the teachers, said, ‘We have democracy in Yemen but no opportunity.’ The teenagers in my neighbourhood spent their days and nights sitting on the steps of the mosque in front of my house. They seemed like unlikely terrorism candidates to me. ‘Can we ride your bicycle?’ they used to ask me. ‘Can we buy it?’

  One month to the day after I arrived in Yemen, I sat in a top floor tower-house chewing room by myself, as a hundred minarets issued the evening call to prayer. I could see with my own eyes that I had arrived in a gorgeous, other-worldly, heartbreaking, deeply pious, almost medieval country. It was medieval but for the cellphones and the traffic from hell. Why inflict one’s fantasies on such a place? I thought. Isn’t the country interesting enough? It seemed to me that Muslims in the Middle East had been putting up with their share of Quiet Americans, of cowboy fantasists, over the past six years. My language teachers suggested to me that this country needed, above all, rural health care and a more equitable system of distributing the oil and gas revenue.

  I couldn’t help with this.

  I was at a loose end.

  When a fellow student mentioned he was interested in working at a local newspaper, I went along with him to his interview. We were both hired on the spot. Within minutes, we were put to work.

  8

  I STARTED AS a copy-editor and moved up in a few weeks to serve as sort of all-purpose assistant to the newspaper’s publisher, Faris Sanabani. The publisher was himself an all-purpose assistant to the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

  Faris’s job, among other things, was to receive journalists from the West. So in the evenings, when the newspaper work was done, he and I used to take the correspondents from Die Zeit and the Washington Post to his favourite restaurant. We would fill them in on the problems facing the administration of President Saleh: fundamentalists in the opposition parties, restive tribes in the hinterlands, terrorists, and a weak sense of democratic norms in certain cities, particularly in the south, where the communists ruled until 1990. All of this, we would say, is compounded by other well documented problems: the surging population, the national addiction to qat, the drying up of the aquifers, and the absence of any real natural resources besides oil and gas.

  The journalists would listen politely. ‘We’re doing what we can,’ Faris would say. ‘We’re among the poorest countries on the face of the earth. Better to change slowly than to knock the entire house down.’ We would eat our fish. There were usually sceptics among the journalists and some probably doubted the degree of Saleh’s commitment to solving certain problems but when we read their articles on the internet we could see that they had accepted the general picture: Yemen was a struggling democracy. The reformers were in charge. We were moving in the right direction.

  After dinner, the journalists would return to their hotels. Faris and I would return to the office to chat, chew qat and to assist in putting the newspaper together.

  This is where the real fun was to be had. The Yemen Observer came together like this: every Wednesday night, at around sunset, in a neighbourhood less crowded than the Old City, less raffish and filthy, but still raffish and filthy in its own way, four or five local reporters and a Canadian editor began to filter into an office suite on the first floor of a rented villa. The Canadian guy, Gabriel, checked his email. The locals exchanged gossip, argued, smoked cigarettes, cursed each other, then retreated to the courtyard to pray.

  At ten, other less resolute journalists arrived. More arguments erupted, and a news story or two, lifted from one of the Arabic papers in town or the state news agency, was
typed, in broken English, into a computer. At midnight, graphic designers arrived and at nearly one in the morning the staff spilled out into the courtyard again. A table laden with blackened fish and gummy, steaming hot Yemeni flatbread stood waiting.

  Now the fun began. The staff set on the fish like wolves. The journalists had to be aggressive while dining. Everyone wanted his fair share and Yemeni fish came out of the oven like incinerated toast. There wasn’t much flesh left over after the cooking. If you didn’t hurry, you could fill your mouth only with bits of seared bone and woody, dried out flesh.

  When the journalists were finished eating, they threw the heads of the fish out into the darkness for the cats. Sometimes a journalist accidentally or on purpose threw a bone at someone else, and then a round of filthy cursing and laughter began. Then came the qat.

  Out in the privacy of the guardhouse or sometimes in the open, in front of the computers, the journalists began feeding their cheeks. At first, nothing much happened. Then beads of sweat appeared on their brows. Then the veins in their eyes filled with blood, and as this was happening, their breathing quickened. ‘Can you see New York?’ they said, laughing. ‘Wow! Take some!’ One of them would pluck the most succulent, tiniest leaves from the qat branches and arrange them in his fingertips in the shape of a rose. Then he would present the rose to his poorer friends, who couldn’t afford daily qat or to a foreigner looking on in bemusement. If the foreigner refused he would drop the bouquet into his own mouth as if it were a fancy sort of chocolate made in the shape of a flower.