Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  * * *

  Among the believers, Islam remains an evangelising religion. Fourteen hundred years after its birth in the deserts to the north of Sana’a, it is still an expansionist, practical, muscular, intensely social force that eyes foreigners as so many twigs clinging to the bank of a river. They must be swept away into the swift mainstream of Islamic worship. You can become any kind of Muslim you want to be later on – stern, learned, evangelising, humble – but the sweeping itself is always simple. Say: ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet’; say ‘Muhammad is the Prophet of God’, and you will have satisfied every immediate requirement.

  After the prayers, I was directed to a circle of Americans sitting beneath a column. They were all in their thirties, all wearing glasses and all black men from the east coast. Their teacher wore a turban and a dress shirt with an Oxford collar. He was in his mid-twenties. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said to me and gestured for me to sit.

  The Americans pulled lined notebooks, coloured pencils and Arabic alphabet primers from their briefcases. This was the kindergarten circle, it seemed. The teacher was not interested. He was tired. He hardly talked to his students but lectured them in a language they could not understand.

  To me, he seemed to incarnate all the worst Yemeni qualities: shiftless, proud, racist, dismissive. He put us through ten minutes’ worth of spelling exercises, then sent us on our way.

  Outside, puffy clouds floated above the tabletop mountains on the western edge of town. Since it was a calm, pretty afternoon, I thought I’d roll through the streets a bit on my bike. I’ll visit my old friends at the newspaper, I said to myself, and tell them what I’ve done.

  As I pedalled up to the front of the gate, I could see that the official, government-run part of Yemen was boldly marching into trouble, as usual. It did have a planning ministry but one thing it hated to plan for was the disintegration of Somalia, just to the south, across the Bab el-Mandeb Straits. On this afternoon, about 200 Somalian refugees had gathered for a protest in front of the UNHCR, whose offices happened to be just across the street from the Observer.

  Many of them were outraged: after ten years as refugees in Yemen, they were still homeless, still penniless and no one, apparently, was making efforts to resettle them. So they had come to the UNHCR to complain.

  The real problem, as a lawyer who worked for the UNHCR explained to me, was that while Yemen, unlike other countries in the region, permitted automatic entry to Somali refugees, it did nothing for them once they arrived. Once the Somali men hit the shores of the Arabian peninsula, they scurried off to Qatar and Dubai and Jeddah in search of cash for their families. The women had to fend for themselves. In the absence of their men, the Somali women in Yemen were in deep trouble. Their belongings were plundered; they were beaten and often raped. Sometimes, said the lawyer, who interviewed the people in gravest need, the police took them to jail, then raped them.

  So the Somali women had gathered in their colourful veils and abayas to demand sanctuary from the sanctuary Yemen was supposed to have been. Moments before I arrived, some fifty of their men – the sick, the elderly, those who refused to leave their wives – were carted away in a Yemeni army truck. To frighten away the women, who were apparently clutching at their departing husbands and brothers, soldiers fired a dozen AK-47 rounds into the air. This brought a crowd of Yemenis on to the street and sent a ripple of terror through the demonstrators. As I pulled up on my bike, a dozen women, seeing the colour of my skin, and taking me for a UNHCR official, leapt up from behind the blue plastic tarps where they had been sleeping and cooking in recent days. They scurried forward – a great flourishing of olive green abayas and flowing black skirts. With their arms in the air, their eyes outraged, and their wrists turning helplessly at the sky, they called out: Help us! Help Us! Then one of them yelled out in Yemeni Arabic : ‘We want death!’ Then many of them were shrieking: ‘Give us death! Give us death! Nishti al maut!’

  So it had been with the riots earlier in the summer: puffy clouds, soaring blue sky and that Sana’a sensation of things slipping into chaos, of locals asking soldiers to shoot them, of the whole city, even the women, especially the women, electrified by the prospect of death. The fundamentalists in town knew how to exploit these sensations of course but it could hardly be said that they had invented them.

  18

  THE MOST FAMOUS Islamic university in Sana’a, the one known for its red-bearded, fiery-eyed cleric and leader, Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, sat on a north-facing hillside about 10 kilometres outside the city. The students here were the sons of Yemen’s clerical class, along with a few sons of lawyers and judges. Their education was free, or mostly free. Its purpose was to supply the nation with the next generation of imams.

  These students called themselves tulab al ilm, or students of knowledge. The ilm in this phrase referred to the various academic disciplines within Islam: fiqh (jurisprudence), hadith (prophetic tradition), sharia (law) and tarikh(Islamic history).

  The Islamic Studies department at Sana’a University, in the middle of the city, enrolled an additional hundred or so tulab al ilm. The course here lasted four years, was open to women and was given on a cosmopolitan campus, where there were no fiery clerics, no mandatory prayers, and no suspicions of extremism.

  Then there was our school, the Mahad Medina. We hardly were a school at all – just a few classrooms on the fourth floor of an apartment building in a disregarded neighbourhood to the north of the real university.

  Our students had happened on the idea of a new life in Yemen while they were surfing the posts on Islamic bulletin boards, or they had heard about the Mahad Medina from friends in their local mosques back home, or they had travelled to Syria or Egypt and had decided to go one step further. They were usually in their teens and twenties, and poor. They scrimped on everything, including the Io-riyal bean and bread breakfasts which we ate in tea shops on the street below the dorm.

  Classes in our school cost $80 a month. You could enrol at any time of the year except Ramadan, when classes were cancelled. In theory, Muslims of all stripes and colours from across the globe might have managed this. In practice, they tended to be the underfunded, jobless, occasionally frustrated, but accepting and hopeful children of the Western public education system. They were black men from Virginia, French Algerians from Lyon, British Pakistanis from Birmingham, Moroccan Dutch from Amsterdam, Yemeni Americans from New York, and, now and then, university-educated, pale-skinned converts from good schools and pretty suburbs in the West.

  After my conversion, I rented a room on the fourth floor corridor, above the imam’s apartment. It also cost $80 a month. It was equipped with a small bathroom, a foam rubber mattress, and a window that faced south-east, into a light shaft. Ibrahim and Omar lived across the hall from me. My friend Muhammad from Maryland lived two doors down and a physical fitness instructor from North Carolina named Broadway Bilal lived in a room to my left.

  In theory, all the dorm room residents had come to Yemen to study Islamic science, but time and chance had distracted some of the students from their goals. Muhammad, who was dyslexic, had given up on his classes. He now taught English. Broadway Bilal had come to Yemen to study at the Dar al-Hadith, in the northern village of Dammaj, but had caught typhus, and had had to come back to Sana’a for medical treatment. Now he worked in a gym and did not take classes. One of the dorm rooms on our hallway seemed to operate like a youth hostel for travelling Nigerians. Young men in caps and gowns would come, smile at everyone on the hallway, stay a few days, then disappear.

  The students here led city lives and had private, mysterious schedules. I had expected unity of purpose, and a militant schedule of prayer and study. In fact, students drifted through the dormitory as if they were passing through a bus station in a town they wanted to visit but did not want to inhabit. They came with plastic suitcases, and sleeping bags. They looked for work, but when they didn’t find it, or when they discovered that work in Yemen paid litt
le, they moved on. The ones who stayed, like Broadway Bilal and Muhammad from Maryland, were hoping not to stay for long.

  From the pavement, our apartment building looked like most other piles of cement in Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. Our facade of air conditioners, business signs and dangling TV cables was marked with dark water stains as high as the building. A complicated filigree of piping and electrical wiring had been affixed to the rear facade.

  In addition to the classrooms, the fourth floor housed the office of the school secretary, and about twelve dorm rooms. A lawyer’s office occupied the third floor, along with an apartment for our imam and his family. The second floor had once upon a time been an office suite but it had been re-purposed in the eighties to serve the neighbourhood and the students of the Mahad Medina, who numbered, in total, about a hundred, as a mosque. A mattress store, a rice and beans restaurant, and a religious bookstore occupied the ground floor.

  If a visitor were to stand in front of the mattress store and look up, he would see a small sign in Arabic indicating ‘The Shariqain Mosque’. It pointed into a corridor beside the mattress store. At the end of the corridor was a flight of stairs. Here in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs women beggars sat in black robes with their little girls. They cradled their kids and held out their hands to the passing students of knowledge. Sometimes they held out a photograph which showed a frightening skin condition with which they or their children were afflicted.

  * * *

  The official part of the curriculum at the Mahad Medina offered students basic training in how to read and write in Arabic. Arabic was not only the language of the Koran but also the language of heaven.

  These classes were given by the imam of the mosque, Sheikh Moamr, every morning on the fourth floor.

  The rest of the Mahad Medina curriculum, which was the interesting part and the reason most of the students were there in the first place, was given downstairs in the mosque. Here, one could take part in ad hoc classes, offered by Yemeni university students or local men of learning or, sometimes, by the sheikh himself. These were roughly similar to book clubs: people sat on the floor and discussed fiqh or sharia or hadiths and practised their tajwid (pronunciation). This educational programme was supplemented every day at noon by a speech the sheikh would make from a chair at the front of the mosque. It was usually a homily about an incident in the life of the Prophet or a saying attributed to him. On Fridays he gave a longer speech, which usually lasted about forty minutes and tended to touch on events in the modern world.

  It took a few months for the Westerners in our school to acquaint themselves with the vocabulary in which the speeches and classes were given. But this vocabulary was a relatively simple thing, describing a relatively simple world, and if one had a basic competence in Arabic, as several of the incoming students had, it didn’t take longer than a few months to follow the drift of the speeches.

  Ikhlas was sincerity; iman was faith, al tawheed was the unity of God, shirk was polytheism, the dunia was the world of this life and the achira was the world to come. If you could follow these words as they changed into adjectives, verbs and plural nouns according to their grammatical function, you were well on your way.

  When the sheikh talked about people in the modern world, he classified them according to a series of oppositions which we also learned quickly: the moomineen were the people who believed in God; the kuffar denied God. Good students were energetic: mooshtahideen. Bad students were kaslaneen: lazy. Good women were mootadeyniat: religious. Bad women were jaheeliat: ignorant. Young women who were suitable as brides were moobtessimat: smiling. The unsuitable ones were wakia: insolent. Good ones were shy (moostahai) rather than proud (mootakebira) and walked with their eyes on the ground rather than in other people’s faces.

  As soon as you understood that the daily prostrations were divided into two kinds, those which the Prophet required of all Muslims (alfard) and those which he did not require but recommended (as sunnah), you knew what a complete religious day felt like and what an incomplete one felt like.

  If the Prophet did it and if he recommended it, that should be enough, the sheikh said. Why debate it? In our mosque, the same logic applied to the beard, which it was permissible to trim but not recommended to trim, the facial veil for women which was not required but recommended, and the robe (for both sexes) which was desirable but not mandatory.

  Spending time with unbelievers was not recommended. You could do it, and in working environments you sometimes had to do it, but too much time among them led to imitation (teldee) of Western customs. As students of knowledge, we were trying to imitate the customs of the Prophet (teldee an nebi), as described in the hadith, or Traditions of the Prophet – and no other.

  Anyone who understood this and was willing to study a bit to pick up the relevant vocabulary could make progress quickly in our mosque. The sheikh’s speeches were never all that complicated anyway and on Fridays, when there could be as many as a hundred Western students in the Shariqain Mosque, he spoke especially simply.

  On those days, the mosque in our apartment building filled with believers: about seven hundred or so waiters, lawyers, mattress store salesmen, university students, schoolboys and shop assistants.

  They started turning up in the second floor prayer hall around eleven in the morning. By a quarter to twelve the prayer hall was full. The twenty or so dormitory residents had washed themselves and come down by that time, and the remaining seventy-odd Westerners filled out the hall.

  To judge by his face, Sheikh Moamr lived in the sunny prime of life; he was in his mid-forties, with broad shoulders and youthful, beaming eyes. On all days of the week except Fridays, he frolicked with his toddlers on the floor of the mosque, smiled at the students of knowledge and bounded up and down the steps of the apartment house. But on Friday, in the role of pastor, he behaved like a much older man. He wore an expensive Kashmiri shawl as the old gentlemen of Sana’a did and carried a walking stick. He coughed into the microphone and smiled weakly.

  The content of the speeches really wasn’t so different from the mosque speeches that were broadcast over every minaret sound system in Sana’a. He spoke about Islamic hypocrites and sincere believers; he spoke of those who revered the traditions of the Prophet and those who betrayed them; there were those who insisted on living large in the world of this life and there were wiser Muslims who knew that the Straight Path of Allah would lead to eternal life.

  If America was in the news, and it often was in the news, the sheikh spoke about cold-blooded technological prowess and heartlessness. If Israel was in the news, he spoke about Zionists and war crimes.

  ‘Remember the Prophet, in everything you do,’ he would say, ‘and remember his family and his companions. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said “stick to my Sunnah and to the traditions of the rightly guided caliphs who come after me.’”

  When he was angry, he banged his cane on the plywood platform and spoke of bombings and invasions: ‘the Jews are committing these crimes! The Jews! The Jews the Jews!’ It was a common refrain in Sana’a. If he wanted to insult Western politicians he would call them ‘the sons of pigs and monkeys!’ And then lift the index finger of his right hand. ‘Do not imitate the unbelievers. Do not be near them in restaurants. Do not allow your family to be near them. Does a Muslim go to a restaurant in which there are alcohol and prostitutes? Muslims do but in this way they cease being Muslims. So do not go to such restaurants. Would you allow your daughters to pass their time in such places? Stick to the Sunnah,’ he would say, sometimes yelling, sometimes only whispering. ‘This Path and no other is the Path the Prophet has laid out for you, O Slaves of God. If you are Muslims, this is the Path you will follow from this moment, now, until the Day of Judgment.’

  At the climax of these Friday lectures, there was often a minute or so of full-throated shouting. But this was an oratorical style more than actual outrage. Like the real thunderstorms that sometimes rumbled through Sana’a in the afternoons
, the shouting made the windowpanes in the mosque rattle and the believers huddle together more closely in the prayer hall. But no matter how much fuss and bother the sheikh stirred up, the speeches always finished on time. The clouds of outrage dissipated. Long before sunset, all was finished.

  19

  ONCE UPON A time, there had been cubicles in our prayer hall, and telephones and computers. Suited Arabs had walked across our carpet in dress shoes. But that had been back in the 1970s, in a more hopeful, outward-looking era in Yemen – a time of emerging nationhood and commerce.

  The carpets remained, but the telephones, office dividers, secretaries and suits had gone away. Now the theme of the decor was emptiness.

  There were bookshelves to hold sandals, butterfly-shaped Koran stands, and a single chair, at the front of the mosque, in which the imam sat as he delivered his sermons. The windows were small, transom windows, about the size of shoeboxes, that had been slotted in high on the walls, just beneath the fibreglass ceiling. Sometimes, on hot days, a mosque assistant or student would set up an orange water cooler such as are used on football fields, in the middle of the hall. Worshippers drank from a tin cup attached to the cooler by a tin chain.

  There wasn’t much more to the place than this. The word for mosque in Arabic, masjid, literally means ‘place of prostration’. The literal meaning of the word Islam is ‘submission’. Our mosque was a place for uniting the act and its meaning: here you performed prostrations in order to enact submission before God. There were no fancy carpets, no marble, no gold fixtures in the bathrooms, no fountains of any kind, no domes, no gardens, no pulpits and special niches in the Mecca-facing wall. There was just a gritty carpet, and a microphone stand. There were copies of the Koran in sagging bookshelves. The rest was up to us.