by Theo Padnos
According to this second understanding of Dammaj, bin Laden had precisely these goals in mind as he planned his new, twenty-first-century jihad. He didn’t need many soldier scholars, but he did need them to be calm, and so confident in their faith that they could, for instance, take over aeroplanes in mid-flight, slitting the throats of the stewardesses, while not forgetting to utter the correct invocations for entering into battle. In this way, the aeroplanes would be guided by God, rather than by half-baked, multi-ethnic, non-Arabic-speaking, adolescent adventurers.
In Dammaj, I found that almost every student knew this theory, or some version of it, and hated it. The students disliked the thought that to the outside world their years of praying and memorising amounted to so much preparation for murder.
But they didn’t repudiate the theory totally. Many students told me that in the late nineties bin Laden had indeed made a visit to Dammaj and that he had come then with a single goal in mind: to recruit for a new campaign, which would be based in Florida.
I heard one version of the story from a Canadian student, Shakr al-Canadi who told it to me in order to emphasise his ending: Muqbel had turned bin Laden away. There were no jihad preparations under way in Dammaj and there never had been, he insisted. ‘Muqbel,’ said Shakr, ‘told bin Laden, “your jihad is wrong, you will have no students from Dammaj, and you cannot establish a training camp at all. Go!”’
When I arrived in Dammaj I found it hard to believe that the school was producing anything specific at all, and harder to believe that it was now or ever had been guided by a single purpose. The current sheikh of Dammaj, Yahya al-Hajoori, screams a lot in his lectures. Up close, he comes across as frazzled and outraged, like someone who’s been shouting at his unruly children for hours, knows he’ll be shouting again soon, and cannot bear the disorder of it all. He recalls an absent-minded professor more than a military genius.
As for his school, it didn’t seem modelled on a military plan or even on a university but rather on the principle of constructive chaos, as many institutions in Yemen are.
Classes were taught by students or former students, most of whom had no university degrees, no training as teachers, and were not paid. The classes met on the mosque floor or under acacia trees on the edge of the desert or in private houses. There were no rosters, no grades and no exams. When a student felt that he had mastered a particular topic, he moved on to another study group sitting in a different corner of the mosque, or he established his own group to teach the topic he had just finished studying. The mosque loudspeaker announced the schedule of classes in the morning, and there was a bulletin board in the mosque terrace covered in handwritten notices which functioned as a kind of course syllabus. By reading the syllabus, one could see that courses were offered in all the Islamic disciplines: fiqh (jurisprudence), tajweed (koranic reading), tafsir (exegesis), sharia, and hadith, as well as Arabic grammar. But the syllabus often left out crucial information: were there synopses of the courses? How many weeks did they last? At what times of the day did they meet and were they meeting now, at the end of Ramadan, or had they been cancelled for the following month as well? Sometimes the teachers were away on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Sometimes they were in residence in the village but sick, and available for private instruction at their bedsides.
There might have been a single intelligence guiding the working of the Dar al-Hadith, it seemed to me, but if so it was more like the collective intelligence that guides smart mobs and Wikipedia. It brought students from across the world to Dammaj, though the place was unadvertised and dangerous to get to. It cultivated the grapes, fed the students, accomplished the five daily prayers and divided the community day by day into cell-like classes.
One thing it was not doing while I was in Dammaj was training for jihad in the West. There were rumours that Sheikh Hajoori had permitted the Somalian students to leave for jihad in Somalia, and other rumours that certain Iraqis had been given leave to fight in their homeland. These rumours spoke of people leaving for jihad in ones and twos. My feeling was that if there was an organised programme for sending fighters to the front, it was a well-hidden one. In three and half weeks of eating and sleeping in and around the Dammaji mosque, I never saw it. Instead I saw students building more mud huts and more cement shacks. They studied and memorised. The wider trend in Dammaj was not to take off for the territory ahead. Instead, it was to find a Yemeni wife, or to import a wife from Europe, and then to settle in.
43
THE SETTLERS WERE certainly busy. They rose at 4.30 in the morning to the sound of the sheikh’s voice inviting them to prayer. During Ramadan, the students ate breakfast by candlelight, before the prayer, in the privacy of their huts. Those who slept in the mosque had their breakfast on the prayer-hall floor. They were usually in a hurry because dawn was coming, and the communal prostration was at hand.
Shortly after I arrived in Dammaj, a former bike mechanic from Kensington invited me to stay with him in a hut that had been built in the talus fields, high off the valley floor. In the mornings, we hurried through our ablutions together, sharing the cold water. Then we ate a plate of oranges and stumbled out into the darkness.
Lines of flashlights and illuminated cellphones were trickling through the boulders. No one spoke, but the village dogs were barking, candles in some of the houses had been lit, and the smell of wood fires rose from their kitchens.
Those October mornings were clear, and filled with stars. They were also freezing. We trundled into a satellite mosque a kilometre or so distant from the main prayer hall, which had no electricity and no heating. We lined up in the candlelight. Everyone shivered but the Europeans shivered less because they wore North Face parkas, cold-weather cycling jackets, and fancy fleece sweaters over their robes. The Yemenis stood in the prayer rows in their woollen dinner jackets and turbans. On those mornings, the congregation looked like an expedition into the Himalayas: we, the Westerners, were dressed to the nines, the locals were dressed in charity shop dinner jackets and everyone was huddling together for warmth.
After the dawn prayer, most of the students went back to bed. A handful of the most pious ones went off to the Great Mosque, where there was electric light, and warmth from the bodies who slept there. Already, at a few minutes past five, the most pious of the students were inside, forming their study circles.
Later, around 6.30 a.m., the village square came to life. About a dozen merchants, some from Somalia, some from Sana’a and some from England, came to unlock their cement shacks. An Iraqi entrepreneur sold sports jackets and used robes from a clothing rack at the foot of the mosque staircase The grocers sold fig bars, cola, vanilla wafers, tins of tuna fish, and hot sauce. Farmers sold spinach, coriander, onions, parsley and tomatoes. In addition, there was an internet cafe, a barber, a clothing store, a hut for eggs, a hut for school supplies, and a man with a cart full of uncooked potatoes. This was downtown Dammaj.
The central event in every twenty-four hours in Dammaj was the evening hadith recitation. In these moments the entire community spoke from the same page at the same time, in response to the sheikh’s explicit commands. At no other time were we as close to the sheikh, or for that matter as close to the Prophet of God.
Often the hadiths we recited detailed the domestic economy of Muhammad’s household: in these hadiths he spoke about his bedtime rituals, his favourite foods (cucumbers, dates, pumpkins), his ambivalence about garlic (not to be eaten when eminent guests were expected) and his feelings about sex and marriage. His wives and friends spoke.
Typically, an evening of hadith recitation in Dammaj unfolded like this: about 3,000 students sat on the prayer-hall floor. The sheikh entered, usually from the rear of the mosque. A hush fell over the hall. He processed through the columns inside an envelope of bodyguards. When he arrived at his armchair, he adjusted his microphone, then seated himself. ‘Where were we?’ he would mumble. At what point did we stop last?’ Then he would open a volume of hadith he had brought with him, then co
ugh, then gesture with his right hand at the western wing of the prayer hall. ‘All those in that section, recite,’ he would say. Five hundred young men in the west would rise. They would recite from memory and the recitation would come out as an extended drone. This would last about three minutes, or as long as it took to recite two pages of text.
When the students in the west had completed their recitation, the sheikh would wave his hand at the students in the east. ‘Students there, rise,’ he would say. ‘Recite.’ On some evenings he divided the congregation into new ad hoc denominations: ‘rise all those from France,’ he would say, or ‘all those from Hodeidah!’ or, ‘all those whose names begin with the letter A!’ Always there was the slow lifting of the sheikh’s right hand followed by the slow rising of the students from the prayer-hall floor. Always the students droned. The militiamen sat at the feet of the sheikh, and looked south into the student body. The students looked north, past the militiamen and the sheikh, into the qibla or Mecca-facing wall.
These recitation sessions lasted about forty-five minutes. When the sheikh spoke, his commands were lifted from the roof of the mosque by loudspeaker; they rose into the cliffs and bounced across the vineyards into the mud huts of the village. Here the wives and daughters of the students were, in theory, reciting in their turn.
These recitations occur every night of the year, regardless of holidays. Attendance is mandatory.
After ten days in Dammaj, I had my own theory about why the sheikh required every male student to attend every night.
Yes, the sayings of the Prophet were spreading through the minds of the students. They were certainly mastering their hadith, and certainly doing their best to bring the time of the Prophet alive. Meanwhile, the sheikh was mastering the students. Who inched closer to the master of ceremonies? Who inched away? Every evening, just after the Maghrib prayer, the sheikh waved his right hand at the students and watched them. Over time, some retreated into the columns at the back of the mosque. But those who liked the exercise gathered in concentric circles at the feet of the sheikh’s chair. They spoke loudly and raised their chins at him as they recited. They had memorised well and wanted the sheikh to know.
No one was coerced. Everyone volunteered. It was an entirely voluntary, self-selecting system of submission. Anyone who didn’t like the staring of the militiamen or the scrutiny of the sheikh or the pressure to memorise was free to abstain.
But they were not exactly free to go. Some students were too young to leave on their own, or too poor, or didn’t know what they would do when they left, or didn’t like the idea of turning their back on their friends. Some were simply too passive to get their act together, and a few were all of these things at once. For this group, it was much easier to fall in line, and to allow the prostrations and the memorisation to work whatever effect nature and God wished them to work.
44
MY FIRST FRIEND in Dammaj was a clerk at the internet cafe, an eighteen-year-old from Gays Mills, Wisconsin called Mujahid. In an earlier life, he had been a farm boy on the prairie and his mum and dad had been Lutherans, like all their Wisconsin neighbours.
Mujahid and I struck up a conversation one morning when the electricity in the cafe had failed.
Did he miss the prairie at all? I wondered. Did he still have feelings for Gays Mills? He cast an amused eye at the dead computers in the cafe, then grinned. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘What is there to miss?’ He thought for a moment longer, then said, ‘I miss hunting in the winters with my father. I miss the snow.’ He hoped his father would send him the first two volumes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Mujahid (formerly Tim) had come to Dammaj six years earlier in the company of his mother, two siblings and a stepfather. At that time, his mother was a new convert recently divorced from his Lutheran father. It had taken him a while to adjust but now, six years later, Mujahid felt that the adjustments were bringing rewards.
In his six years in Yemen, he had memorised the Koran, hundreds of hadith, and had acquired a remarkable, idiomatic command of Yemeni Arabic. He had studied so much in fact that he had almost got bored with his subject.
One morning as we chatted in the internet cafe, he asked me if I would be willing to give him French lessons. ‘Of course,’ I said. We agreed to meet that evening in the mosque, before the prayers. In the meantime, I would find a suitable lesson somewhere on the internet and download it.
Later in the day, as I searched through French poetry websites, Mujahid sat at his clerk’s desk, reciting Koran. His voice filled the cafe. At first, not seeing where the voice came from, I thought I was listening to a tape or a live TV feed from one of the Saudi stations. His voice had that much confidence, and he had the fluidity of a native speaker.
‘Mashallah,’ I said to him when he came to a pause in the text. I wondered how long it had taken him to get to this level – six years, he said – and why exactly he was reciting.
This was murajah, he said, or review. He did it for two or three hours every day, because he enjoyed it and because it allowed him to pass the time in a profitable way.
In fact, murajah does have a specific purpose. People who have memorised the entire Koran as Mujahid had are like the owners of a vast, ancient property that has been built out of friable bricks, on unstable ground.
Every hour, forgetfulness attacks a distant crenellation. Murajah is the activity which sweeps across the grounds, patrols the parapets and mans the turrets in defence. It enters rooms, uses the disused furniture, walks the floorboards and then throws open the windows. Everything should be in its place, precisely where Allah put it.
Without murajah the furniture can rearrange itself. Rooms can swap places with other rooms, dismantling the larger order of things. Over time wings and towers can fall away into the abyss. A derelict property like this, as imams often remind students, is one in which alien presences – words, ideas, false memories – take up residence. If the memoriser isn’t vigilant, he’ll assume that the words he recites at prayer are the correct, orthodox ones when in fact they are just a disorderly melange of personal memories and guessed-at phrases.
* * *
When he was finished with his murajah I asked Mujahid what he liked to read. He said he enjoyed Tony Hillerman novels (about detectives on a Navajo Indian reservation), though he had long since finished all the books he had on hand. Now he spent his free time tracking down facts about Tolkien on the internet and reading the Google News page.
We couldn’t do our French lesson that evening because Mujahid’s mother called him to her hut, and the following evening he was sick. Our first lesson occurred a week later, in a shady, quiet section at the back of the mosque.
The poem I picked out for him was an eighteen-line vignette called ‘Le Cancre’, or ‘The Dunce’, by Jacques Prévert. It tells the story of a boy who is called on to recite his lessons in a French classroom. Some rebellious element in his soul, we learn, a fifth column of the heart, refuses to cooperate with the teacher. He stands but he will not speak. His classmates snigger. Meanwhile, his misbehaving brain attacks the entire programme of schoolboy information which the boy has committed to memory. His mind erases everything:
Les chiffres et les mots
Les dates et les noms
Les phrases et les pièges
The words and figures
Names and dates
Sentences and snares
Mujahid and I translated the poem together. When it was clear to both of us what was described in the poem, I asked Mujahid to reflect on why the boy forgets. ‘What do you think is really going on?’ I said. ‘Is it a good thing to forget or a bad thing?’
He stared at me. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I mean, here’s the schoolmaster with his history lesson. But I don’t think much of it. Do you?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you think of the schoolmaster?’ I asked.
‘I dun
no.’
‘Do you like him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Look, Mujahid,’ I said. ‘This attack of memorylessness, in the context of this poem, it’s a good thing. Right?’ He stared at me. ‘It’s a good thing,’ I repeated. ‘Why?’
Mujahid shook his head. His lips moved but no sound came out. His eyes scanned the mosque which was now filling with people preparing for the sunset prayer. ‘Subhan allah,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
In the poem’s final lines, the child strides up to the blackboard to mark out his schoolboy declaration of independence:
Et malgré les menaces du maître
Sous les huées des enfants prodiges
Avec les craies de toutes les couleurs
Sur le tableau noir du malheur
Il dessine le visage du bonheur.
[And despite the teacher’s threats
And and the leers of the infant prodigies
With chalk of every colour
On the blackboard of misfortune
He draws the face of happiness.]
‘You see?’ I said to Mujahid, when we had finished examining these lines. ‘This is a poem about the triumph of the human spirit. There is something irrepressible in the kid. It will have its day. In this case, having his day means tout effacer – forgetting everything. It means saying, “Teacher, classmates: I will be me.”’
Mujahid smiled faintly. His face searched the forest of mosque columns. He’d been fasting that day, though by this time the mandatory fasts of Ramadan had passed.