Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  I sighed.

  ‘You’re plotting something, yes?’ said Omar. ‘Spit it out. We think you’re writing something. Yes?’

  All right then. Yes,’ I said. ‘I am writing something. Plotting – not really. But writing, okay.’

  ‘Be serious, Thabit. Please,’ Said said.

  ‘I am serious,’ I said.

  ‘You’re writing a book?’ Omar asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A book.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Omar

  ‘You’re writing some sort of crap book?’ Said said. ‘Stagfir Allah.’ God forgive you.

  I knew I had lost the argument but I kept talking.

  I said that if a book told the story of how Muslims from the West live when they come to the Middle East, it had to be true. If it was true, it might be good or bad from a literary point of view but to say that it was forbidden didn’t make any sense.

  Are we ourselves impermissible?’ I asked. ‘What is the news with Western Muslims in Yemen now? Someone tries to answer that question and you say that’s wrong? Even to try?’

  The two of them stared at me. ‘Subhan allah,’ Omar muttered. Good heavens.

  ‘If this is true what you say,’ said Said under his breath, ‘then in the first place you are crazy to come to Yemen. In the second place, you do not have adequate learning. And do you have permission? From anyone? No. And in the third place, you have totally and completely missed the point.’

  ‘Of what?’ I said.

  ‘Of study. Of Islam. Of the unity of God.’

  We went round like this for several more minutes. Said and Omar felt I didn’t know enough about Islam to write a word, never mind a book. For if a Muslim speaks to the public, especially to an unbelieving public such as in France or America, he should be informed, have years of scientific training, mastery of the Arabic language, the Koran, and the support of the ulema, or learned men of Islam. At that point, he should speak about the revelations of the Prophet of Allah. Period.

  ‘I am trying to learn,’ I said. ‘Look.’ I pointed to my backpack in which a little store of pamphlets drifted about. There were notebooks in there, too, and grammar exercise books.

  Omar gaped. He shook his head. He was losing patience. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll make this very simple for you, okay? Listen closely, Thabit. Are you listening? If you have come here to denounce the religion of Islam …’

  ‘Which I have not done,’ I said.

  ‘Or if you are, in your heart, or in any way, an enemy of Islam.’

  I shook my head. ‘I am not,’ I said.

  ‘The Yemenis will kill you,’ he said.

  ‘They will cut your throat,’ Said added. ‘They will consider it an honour.’

  I stared at them. I stared at the old men in their circle – so calm, so focused on the Koran. ‘I suppose I’m okay then,’ I said. ‘Because none of these circumstances are true.’

  ‘I’m just telling you,’ repeated Omar, smiling.

  ‘I suppose I’m okay then,’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes, inshallah,’ Omar said.

  ‘Inshallah,’ I agreed.

  31

  WHEN I TOLD Muhammad, my grammar teacher, about Omar and Said’s warnings, he frowned, made an imperceptible flick in the air with his hand as if to say, ‘what is this?’ and advised me not to seek advice on Islam from Omar and Said. To Muhammad, those two were perhaps on the path of indolence or pizza or partial commitment to Islam followed by return to their comfortable lives in the West, as many students were. One thing they were not was pledged securely to the sabeel Allah, the Straight Path of God. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps because of their childhood in France, or perhaps because their Frenchness is mixed up with their Berber heritage,’ said Muhammad, they had different – he meant incorrect – views of Islam. ‘They were born Muslim, but what does this guarantee?’ he asked. ‘Anyway, you’re not the first Muslim about whom people in our mosque gossip and you won’t be the last. So concentrate on your work. Recite Koran. Remember Allah.’

  In the days after my conversation with Omar and Said, I learned new suras, or chapters of the Koran. I happened to memorise, at this time, the Chapter of the Earthquake or zilzal. All non-native speakers in our mosque were directed to this sura early on in their education because it was easy to memorise and also because it was a kind of creed:

  When the earth shall tremble with her quaking,

  and the earth shall cast forth her burdens,

  and man shall say, ‘What aileth her?’

  In that day shall mankind advance in ranks,

  that they may behold their works,

  and whoever shall have wrought good of the weight of a grain shall behold it;

  and whoever shall have wrought evil of the weight of a grain shall behold it.

  When I was memorising, I used to sit in the back of the mosque. I used to keep an eye on a blind teenage boy, about twelve, who spent his days sitting in the sunshine in a corner of the prayer hall. He didn’t use a walking stick to move around but clung to the sleeve of his little brother. He wore tattered robes and smiled at shadows. He napped during the mornings, then rose to pray, then returned to his spot in the sun. Sometimes the brother came to pick him up for lunch but often the brother didn’t come, and the blind boy sat all day, grinning and waiting.

  Sometimes as I was memorising, I watched a palsied four-year-old girl, the only female ever to appear in our mosque, twitching on her blanket. Her father would deposit her in a nook near the door, and would then go off to pray. The girl would lie by herself, twitching and waiting. Sometimes, in her spasms, she tried to sit up a bit and pray in synch with her dad. Usually the twitching was just too overwhelming. The faithful were supposed to give her coins. Some did. Most did not.

  In the weeks to come, when I knew the earthquake chapter better, I watched military men recite it and watched the words on the lips of the sheikh himself. By then it had occurred to me that there were probably just as many victimisers in our mosque as there were victims and that not everyone here was helpless and poor.

  The married men would have learned, through trial and error, how to curtail the ambitions of their wives and daughters, and how to keep them covered and quiet. The military men would have studied this practice as it relates to controlling the public sphere. Ostensibly, a Koranic verse about reversals, promising a cosmic turning of the tables, shouldn’t resonate with this audience.

  But it did. It was important to them, I guessed, because they knew they weren’t participating in a just system, because they were aware of the suffering they inflicted on other people, and wanted to atone for it before God. Atoning for it in front of the sufferers? No, this wasn’t on the agenda.

  Anyway, the entire cosmos was unjust. Why were four-year-old girls punished with palsy? Why were the most ardent, faithful believers the poorest? Why was work so scarce and pay so low?

  The more you focused on the Sura of the Earthquake, the more you thought that none of this mattered.

  For this sura promised that the palsied girl would finally be rewarded for her attempts to pray. She would be rewarded or punished according to the purity of her heart. As would everyone else. The Day of Judgment would be a violent, terrifying day because every sin ever committed would be alive and stalking the person who committed it. Humans would straggle forth from their graves, hopeful of heaven, terrified of hell. Most of all, though, it would be a just day – and that’s what the men in our mosque were waiting for: the time of reckoning, the hour of justice, the overturning of the current unhappy dispensation.

  Memorising Koran is not like learning one’s part in a play, for instance, or cramming for an exam. There’s no deadline, no hurry, and no test. Taking Koran into your head is more like learning to row a boat across a wide lake than like learning, say, your lines in Macbeth. The lake is the life of this world, and rowing well is meant to give you a straight, even course. A traveller who
moves across the lake stealthily, with purpose and rhythm, will not be seduced by the dark spots and will not lose his way.

  The Arabic verb for memorise, hafaza, really means to conserve or save. One conserves the Koran in one’s head. Of course memories tend to decay and so even a reciting genius must be in constant attendance on neglected memories. This shoring up is called murajah, or going back.

  Every time I went to the mosque to memorise, I went backward over old memories first, then forward into new ones. The people around me were often doing the same thing.

  Some people preferred to memorise with beads in their hands. Others held the book aloft; still others put the book in a stand, and others wrote the verses out by hand, which can improve your handwriting and is said to stabilise the memory.

  Thus the book was always close by, but so were the other bodies in the mosque, and their voices and their breathing. One looked into the book. One memorised. One looked away, at the bodies of those nearby. One returned to the book.

  In this way the meaning of the verses became tied up with the faces and bodies nearby – the twitching toddlers, the old shadows with their canes and misshapen backs. They had their place in the saved version of the text and helped to make its meaning clear.

  Later on, outside the mosque, when I repeated the chapters I had learned there, the faces I was looking at as I memorised came back to me. Nowadays every time the phrase ‘whoever does a mote’s weight of good will see it’ I think of the blind boy’s brother who held out his sleeve for his sibling, and guided him through his five ablutions, his prayers, and his midday meal. If I hear the phrase ‘when the victory of God comes to the people’ which comes from the Sura al-Nasr, another chapter I learned early on, I think of two incredibly patient Australian Pakistani friends who helped me learn it. They sat for hours on the opposite side of my Koran stand, prompting me when I forgot lines, and smiling when I did things right.

  32

  WHEN THE FUSS and bother over my intentions in the mosque subsided, I resumed my place at the evening homilies, in a shadowy rear section of the mosque, next to Omar and Said. Their concern about my bad faith faded away. They had their own problems. Gradually we resumed our excursions to the local chicken, rice and tea restaurants. They had to answer for gaps in the purity of their faith as well, and knowing this, and seeing that the Yemenis were not bothered by my presence, they agreed to leave me in peace.

  It was the middle of August. Ramadan was approaching. The suspense about when it would arrive – this evening? tomorrow evening? the next? – was a torture for the little boys in our neighbourhood. The ones who were on the cusp of adolescence were old enough to keep the fast absolutely, to sleep during the day as their fathers did, and to perform the pre-dawn prayers in public, along with all the powerful men in the neighbourhood. When Ramadan did come, these boys would go about the alleys in the holiday finery of a man – with shawls and daggers. The girls would stare at them from behind curtained windows.

  Yet when would it finally begin? In anticipation, boys would roam the streets in little packs, singing and collecting sticks for their welcoming bonfire. If they happened on a tourist or a lost Westerner of any kind they would shriek: There he is! Burn him! Is he a Muslim? He is not! Burn him, in the name of God! The children would thrust balls of hay at the ankles of their victim, and hurl their firecrackers into the air. The truth was that they had no intention of burning anyone. But on those tense evenings, when only the ulema knew exactly when Ramadan would arrive, the kids allowed themselves to go beyond the normal, into playacting, and then into menace. They liked threatening foreigners. Their fathers and elder brothers were too decorous, and too polite to offer to burn the tourists. But the little kids could get away with a lot, enjoyed being bold, and so took licence.

  In our mosque at this time, Sheikh Moamr made a special effort to keep to the most central themes of Islam: the oneness of God and the preservation of the iman, or faith. He spoke in a simplified, ultra-clear Arabic so that the Western students, many of whom were spending extra time in the mosque during this period, could understand every word.

  After the Maghrib, or sunset prayer, he would utter the normal words of welcome: ‘We are gathered in the name of God. We recognise him and believe in him. We believe in his Prophet, peace be upon him and his family, and we believe in the Last Day.’ Then he would turn to his audience and urge us into deeper belief. ‘Believe in God and remember God,’ he would say. ‘Conserve the Koran in your hearts and you will conserve your faith. Only say “there is no God but God.” The rest will come of its own accord.’

  Sheikh Moamr must have known that these simple exhortations went down well. When he made them to the Chechens, the Nigerians and the Brixtonian imports who sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of his armchair, they raised their chins at him, and held their heads in the motionless, silent way of children watching a movie. All you could hear was the rustle of their robes, their breathing, and maybe far away, from some out-of-synch minaret across the valley, the Shia call to prayer.

  * * *

  After this first part of his speech, the sheikh would usually move on to more abstruse, technical matters. He might discuss some remark or habit of the Prophet’s, or he might speak about the chain of narrators through which these habits and remarks were passed down to history. Certain remarks were passed down along this unimpeachable chain. Others were merely folk superstitions, fathered upon the Prophet by partisans and frauds.

  Sometimes he would talk about some issue of contemporary importance to Muslims, such as the way Christians came to Yemen in secret, with secret medicine aimed at suppressing the growth of the world’s Islamic population. Sometimes he would remind the worshippers and students in the mosque of the differences between the Islamic scripture and other sacred books. ‘The Christian Bible has been doctored by Jews,’ he would say, ‘and the Jews have hidden away their own Torah in favour of a fraudulent text. Why? Why? Because the real Torah contains signs of the arrival of Muhammad, the final Prophet. Do not read these books, because they are lies. They are forgeries and there is only one Book of Allah, and it is our noble Koran, blessings upon its creator.’

  Sometimes he discussed how exactly he knew about the population suppression programme, or the doctoring of the Bible. Certain scholars had confirmed it. He mentioned their names and the names of their disciples, or he mentioned the titles of their books.

  Now and then, when the sheikh was deep into this second, more academic part of his daily speech, which was sometimes almost a list of books, I would look over to my wifeless American friend, Muhammad from Maryland or to my homeless French pal, Said. Said would be out there in the blue, just gone, almost asleep, in another world. He was all cocooned up, safe from his antagonists, more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. Yup, it’s all lost on him, I would think, and the Arabic is too hard for him to understand. But sometimes I would look at him or at the row of French kids who were sitting next to him, and think: they’ve gone away intentionally, all of them. They can hear the sheikh better out there. ‘These doctrines have been well established by sheikhs Albani, Muqbel, and many others,’ the sheikh would say. ‘Read their books and conserve their books in your hearts.’ At moments like this, I would watch the fluttering eyelids of my fellow students and think: they may be away in spirit, okay, but out there they tune in on a finer frequency. Over time, the message will cut in deeper.

  Islamic faith wasn’t such an easy concept to master. Many young believers in our mosque thought they were strengthening it but they weren’t. Some of the devout Yemenis were, but then the next day they would skip their prayers and spend the money they had in their pockets, meant for wife and children, on qat. Evidently, the hours they spent in our mosque hadn’t done a thing for their iman. What were they doing wrong?

  One evening in August, the sheikh gave us a lecture which showed us how iman really worked.

  ‘To see what real iman looks like, there is a very simple thing to do,’ he to
ld us. If we took a bus to a certain mosque a few dozen kilometres to the south of Sana’a, we could see a local imam delivering an astonishing Friday speech. ‘Every Friday, the entire congregation there listens to the sermon in tears. Big heavy tears roll down the faces of the tribesmen and sheikhs who come to this mosque. They emerge with their beards soaking, their hands trembling. Why do they cry like this? Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Once not long ago,’ said Moamr, ‘a young cleric from the neighbourhood decided to tape this imam’s Friday sermons. He played the tape for himself at home, memorising everything. He returned to his own congregation the following week. When he delivered his sermon, he spoke every word the famous imam spoke, without changing a dot. He imitated the facial expressions and tone of voice.’ But his audience reacted as most Friday audiences across Yemen react: they shifted a bit in their robes, coughed, wiped their brows, and napped.

  ‘And so the following week, the young cleric returned to his mentor. “Why?” he said to the man of learning. “What happened? I spoke every letter you spoke. Where is the difference? What?”

  ‘“Ah,” replied the famous imam, “but when I speak on Fridays, I stay up the night before, reciting Koran to myself, making it pregnant within me, filling my heart with it, drinking in the sound, the feeling, and the sensations of the Koran. When the holy book is that much within you, every word you utter, even if it is about the weather, will be made of iman. Every silence, every breath, and every movement of your eyes. It won’t matter what words come from your mouth. The people in your congregation will sense the love of the word of God. They will feel iman. When there is that much faith in the air, a Muslim will weep”’

  After the sheikh had made this point, he sat for a few moments in silence. He took a heavy breath, smiled to himself and then said, “So this is why you must memorise Koran. Make it pregnant within you, in every thought, every deed and in every word that comes from your mouth. And go back over your memories, day in and day out. Because moorajah makes the iman strong. So you must read every day and memorise,” he said. ‘Hafizu! Please! Hafizu!’