Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘The boy wants to do his own thing?’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘This is a poem about how the soul of the boy is stronger than the soul of the teacher. The teacher’s soul is made up of dry facts and figures. The souls of the other kids can only mock.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘The kid’s a bright kid, isn’t he?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But bad in school. He’s bright like Holden Caulfield, right?’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  Mujahid had left America when he was twelve. Perhaps this had been a bit young for The Catcher in the Rye. I mentioned other works of art I thought he might know. Did he remember Elliott in E. T.? Did he ever see The Shining? I wanted him to notice that the boy in the poem was an archetype, and that our American culture was full of such creations. They were emblems of America itself: an illuminated child; yes, naïve – but a defier of the adult world, who sees his way through to independence. ‘You know who Huckleberry Finn is, right?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Well, not exactly. But I get the idea.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  He looked into his lap. He sniffled. ‘No.’ He made a weak smile. ‘I guess I don’t.’

  I spent an hour trying to help him understand. I couldn’t get the message through. In the end, I don’t think it was Mujahid’s fault. It wasn’t really mine.

  But there were problems. For one thing, during my explanation I kept referring to people and ideas generally known to American teenagers, like Holden Caulfield and a rebellious soul. I did this the way teachers do – in order to leverage a store of extant knowledge. There was some extant knowledge in Mujahid. There was Tony Hillerman, Tolkien and scraps of information from Wikipedia and the Google News page. There were certainly memories of Wisconsin. But this amounted to a trickle of memories. It wasn’t substantial enough to allow him to understand what the child in the poem might be thinking. The world of that boy was too far from Dammaj and too alien. In Dammaj, rebellious kids could not be admirable. Schoolmasters could not be pettifoggers. Going one’s own way could not be good.

  My tutorial suffered from another problem, which was that I was arguing on behalf of memorylessness. Mujahid could not, or would not accept the premise of such an argument. Memorylessness in Dammaj was distance from God, failure in the mosque, loss of face before the other students, and shame. To forget God or the Koran was to live in ignorance, like unbelievers. The whole purpose of life in Dammaj was to avoid that fate. To avoid that fate, one had to memorise.

  Perhaps our lesson’s biggest problem was that Mujahid had been fasting for more than a month, had grown sick, and had now embarked on a new regime of fasting for the Six Days of Shawwal. He had trouble concentrating. Though the temperatures were in the 30s, he shivered inside a plaid woollen Wisconsin deer-hunting shirt.

  As soon as the first note of the call to prayer crackled on the loudspeakers, we were jerked out of the French classroom. We were back in Islamic time. We hurried on to the mosque terrace. We knelt and thrust our hands into plates of sticky dates. They were delicious. We poured tea down our throats. As we washed ourselves at the ablution faucets, I think we were both relieved. We spoke tentatively about a second class but made no plans.

  Only one person, Qais, a French student I had met in Sana’a, made an effort to discover what I was really up to there. The last time we had spoken, I had made a poor impression. Back then, eight months earlier on the pavement in Sana’a, I had told him that I was an American, working at the local government newspaper. When he asked if I believed in God, I temporised. Later in the conversation, he told me he couldn’t play football with unbelievers like me because their presence weakened his faith. ‘If I am talking to you at all,’ he had told me, ‘it is for the purpose of bringing you to Islam, and for no other reason.’

  Now, standing on the stoop of a vegetable shack, he squinted into the sun. ‘What are you doing here, my friend the American?’ he said, speaking under his breath. ‘I assume you’ve stopped your journalism?’

  ‘Yeah, I never really was a journalist,’ I said.

  ‘But that newspaper in Sana’a?’

  ‘Yes, I did leave it behind.’

  ‘You sure?’ he said. ‘We’ll find out if not.’

  ‘Search all you like,’ I said. ‘I’m here, not there.’

  ‘You’re not going back there?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  ‘You sure?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘You are here to mind your own business?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘To keep to yourself and to study on your own account?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If this is true,’ he said, ‘you are welcome here.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ smiled Qais. ‘It’s much better for you that way. In any case, Allah – he knows everything. Time will tell.’ He winked.

  ‘Yes, time will tell,’ I agreed.

  45

  DURING THE FOLLOWING two weeks, I minded my own business. I never missed a prayer, never skipped a lecture, and sat in the shadows of the mosque a lot, memorising and writing in my journal. It was an innocuous routine that raised no eyebrows. Every day I talked to European talibs who’d been living this way for years. They didn’t know what month it was back home or did know but had had so little contact with home over the years that they didn’t much care. The weather was always pleasant in Dammaj. The altitude – about 1,000 metres – made the air temperate, with rain during the summer monsoon season and breezes in the winter. Because it was never too hot outside and never too cold, there really wasn’t much need to watch the months roll by on a calendar. I spoke to several students who were not sure if George Bush was still president of the United States.

  In Dammaj students who let the outside world slip away like this were admired. It was supposed to slip. Incoming students who let it go without a thought, with no homesickness, no complaints and no regrets, were said to be strong in their iman; they were mookhlis (sincere) and their aqeedah (creed) was correct.

  One morning, about two weeks into my stay in Dammaj, Jowad, that rare variety of student in Dammaj who insisted on clinging to the present, and I were chatting on the front steps of the internet cafe. I noticed him examining my headscarf, which was tied in a sloppy, indifferent way. His eyes smiled.

  ‘You remind me of my solicitor,’ he observed. ‘No, my mentor.’ Actually, he couldn’t remember who I reminded him of. In any case, I reminded him of some figure in the structure of secular authority in Islington to whom he had recently been referred by the English court system.

  As we sat a procession of talibs and teachers was filing into the Great Mosque. ‘Aren’t you a little young to have a solicitor?’ I asked after a while. ‘Are you some kind of a troublemaker or something?’

  He said that he was fourteen and that he wasn’t at all too young to have a solicitor or to make trouble. ‘I got in trouble with girls, mostly,’ he remarked in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, as if this was not a startling admission in Dammaj. ‘Italian girls, they’re my biggest fitna. They like romantic, and I used to be quite romantic.’ He sighed.

  In an earlier life, apparently, he had gone to nightclubs, had had girlfriends, and had drunk wine. When he was poor, he said, he robbed grocery stores and rode away from the police on his BMX bike. ‘Slowest bastards ever,’ he recalled, under his breath.

  As we chatted, two separate groups of English talibs stopped by the steps on which we were sitting to shake our hands and to invite us into the mosque. We salaamed them and told them we would be along in a moment.

  At one point, an American brother noticed us and shuffled over to recite a hadith, the burden of which was that the Prophet had said that Muslims who prayed on time would enter heaven. ‘We’re waiting for someone in the internet cafe,’ I said. ‘We’ll be along in a second.’

>   When the American had ambled away, Jowad stretched his arms to the sky and yawned. ‘I’ve had a difficult childhood for sure,’ he mused. He had been thrown out of schools, beaten by his stepfather, and arrested by the police. ‘There was some lonely, lonely times,’ he said. ‘But it’s what I always say. You can’t judge a child by his childhood.’

  Recently, he had read a biography of Clint Eastwood. Now, sitting in front of the internet cafe, the moral of that story came back to him. ‘Clint Eastwood, he had a terrible childhood and look at him now. He has his own gun named after him. Every year he gets in a beautiful movie.’

  ‘True, mashallah,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘mashallah.’

  Mujahid was now locking up the internet cafe. He salaamed us, then hurried across the village square.

  When he first arrived in Dammaj, Jowad had lived with Abbas al-Britani, the oldest and most respected of the British talibs. But after a month he tired of living in Abbas’s hut and moved, on his own, into the mosque. Now, four months into his new life, he slept on a mattress in the north-eastern corner of the prayer hall. He had no plans to go back to England. His parents had no plan to visit him here. Only Allah knew when he would leave or where he would go.

  ‘It’s just a boring life here,’ he mused, ‘but this is my life now. If it’s maktoub’ – written – ‘it’s the only thing that’s ever going to happen to you.’

  Jowad was clearly a bright kid who had devoted some thinking to the question of how much control individuals exercise over their destinies. Clint Eastwood, it seemed, had suggested to him that even those who begin life in difficult circumstances can exercise considerable control. It is never too late to turn things around, he felt, and even impossible destinies, like becoming a movie star, could and did happen.

  On the other hand, this particular fourteen-year-old happened to be living in an environment designed to bring about one destiny only. No one in Dammaj wanted reversals of fortune. The students and teachers had come to drift backwards, away from the world, into the mythological time of early Islam. Now Jowad’s parents were far away. They had cut him off from England and from his earlier life. Now he apparently had little to do. To me, he seemed to be drifting.

  As he talked about his new life in Dammaj, it occurred to me that the advice of a solicitor or mentor or some other benevolent figure in the local government of Islington could possibly have made a difference to Jowad. A person of this sort might at least have offered a different perspective on things. Jowad had evidently met with some such figure once. But those days were over. For better or for worse, he was now on his own.

  Jowad, of course, was not asking for advice. He wasn’t even hinting. On this occasion, I chatted with him for as long as was reasonable, and when the prayer could be postponed no longer, I prodded him off the steps. We walked together into the mosque. When we took our places in the prayer row, the hall was already on its knees. As we said, ‘God is great’ it was rolling forward through the first of the four noontime prostrations, and as we bowed it was already moving into the second. We had to hurry to catch up.

  For reasons I did not understand – extra fasting? fatigue from fasting? – classes over the following three days were cancelled. This left the students with time on their hands.

  Jowad and I spent the first morning of our vacation carrying out an errand his former guardian, Abbas, had asked him to perform. We were to retrieve a set of pots and pans that had been left in a hut far from the mosque, on the edge of a millet field. To get there, we had to wander through the back alleys to the south of the mosque, and then along a berm at the side of a leaky cesspool. Its contents were draining into the adjacent millet.

  The house itself, a single floor adobe hut with a tin roof and an interior courtyard, had a pretty setting on a bluff of red dirt, with a view across the valley, into a row of Yosemite-like cliffs.

  When Jowad and I visited, the owner of the house had been called back to London, and the other British Muslims, who used the house as a feasting spot, were memorising in the mosque or sleeping. Turning the lock in the front door, we stepped into a ghost house. Animals scurried away from a stack of dishes that had been left to moulder in the sink. A thin film of dust lay over the kitchen floor, the prayer rugs and the ablution basins in the bathroom. The community which feasted here was evidently a pious crowd but one given to drifting. The owner of the house had left the keys with Jowad and had invited him to stay there during his absence. There was however nothing in the deal for Jowad: no adults, no food, no company, nothing to play with and no reasonable way for him to pass the time. The whole purpose of sending a teenager to live in Dammaj, as I understood it, was to provide him with a community of ethically minded elders: the village would guide and ground the wayward kid. This was the theory. In practice of course the parents were busy performing their religious rites, or they were busy flying off to the UK, or they were busy being arrested by the Yemeni police. The wayward kid was certainly surrounded by ethically minded elder brothers. And yet he was very much on his own.

  The two of us tiptoed through the remains of the holiday feasting. We retrieved Abbas’s set of pots from the sink and hurried away.

  The pots belonged in a hut a kilometre or so away, across the millet fields. Abbas’s front door was a black curtain behind which a woman spoke to us in rudimentary, English-accented Arabic. We passed the pots one by one into a black-gloved hand that emerged from the curtain. We didn’t say hello and we didn’t say goodbye. It was an odd interaction, all in all, especially since it seemed pretty obvious that she was from the UK. I would have liked to have spoken with this woman more. Was she happy with her lot? Sad? Did she want to go home? It would have been unthinkable to ask her these questions of course. I had the opportunity to see her hand, and to listen to a fragment of conversation between her and Jowad. When she withdrew her hand, Jowad and I walked away in silence.

  At the time, Jowad’s default recreation was a multi-player internet game called PimpWar.com. Having finished with the morning chores, we were now free to pursue an afternoon of leisure. As soon as we arrived in the internet cafe, Jowad dialled up a website that depicted an American inner city in ruins. The law of this particular jungle stated that whichever pimp accumulated the most thugs, guns and whores won. ‘This game is NOT for whiners,’ said the website. ‘PimpWar players have 5000 ways to call you a bitch ass.’

  As Jowad toured the streets of his virtual ruin, he giggled. The website streamed a jazzy pimp music tune into the computer speakers which trickled out into the cafe, but not loudly enough for the other students to object.

  They were busy clattering on their keyboards. One of them was trying to communicate with his relatives in France via Skype. With only a dial-up connection shared by six other computers, the student’s conversation was going nowhere. ‘Salaam alaikum!’ he yelled into the computer. ‘Te’s là? T’es là?’

  Jowad and I spent an hour or so relaxing in the cafe in this way. Soon it was time to pray. Mujahid shooed us from the computers, locked the cafe and the three of us walked together into the mosque.

  46

  JOWAD WAS AN especially good companion during the sheikh’s speeches, which could be long disjointed affairs, more like a tour through the mind of a rural Arab chieftain than instruction in Islam. Usually the two of us sat against a side wall of the mosque and listened while the sheikh followed his stream of consciousness. Now and then, a funny or surprising or otherwise noteworthy idea would strike Jowad and he would turn to me to whisper his commentary.

  One evening, the sheikh’s speech took him on a detour through the sexual habits of Westerners. He said the normal things that are said when rural chieftains in Yemen address this issue: that AIDs is spreading through the West because the people know no sexual restraint, that apes and monkeys are more civilised than contemporary Christians and Jews, and that despite all the coupling that goes on in Europe, they are having fewer and fewer babies, while the Islamic world
is having more and more. ‘Is this not a sign from the hand of God?’ he said, grinning.

  Most of the students nodded sleepily. We had all heard versions of this speech before, and most people, I think, were inclined to assent. For Jowad, however, the ironies of the situation were too rich to ignore

  ‘Hell!’ he whispered. ‘There are kids right here in this mosque selling their booties. Why is he so worried about what people do back home?’ Older, wealthier students paid for sex and the younger boys – usually local kids – were happy to sell. There were covert couples, and assignations and break-ups. ‘It’s a regular soap opera in here,’ he said.

  ‘That can’t be true,’ I murmured. ‘Wouldn’t they at least leave the House of God to do all that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shrugging, ‘not really.’

  I did not witness this amatory aspect of prayer-hall life myself, but as Jowad whispered and the sheikh wagged his finger into his microphone, I did see a certain logic to the arrangement.

  One hundred young men, for whom masturbation was forbidden and contact with the opposite sex unthinkable, lying in the darkness together over a period of months probably would, I thought, from time to time fall into each other’s arms. A lot of those kids were lonely. Probably some wanted companionship. Probably some wanted cash.

  ‘Yup, they sell their booties at night and in the daytime, they read Koran. What’s that all about?’ Jowad asked, shaking his head and smiling.

  Other conversations I had with other talibs later on suggested to me that there was really only one inviolable taboo concerning sexual contact in Dammaj: girls mustn’t be involved. Everyone accepted this taboo and no talib I knew or heard of tried to break it.

  But homosexual relations – provided the partners turned up at prayer every morning, provided everyone shut up about what was going on – were tolerated. Silence, it seemed, kept the village on an even keel.

  On another occasion in the mosque, Jowad pointed to a short, chubby Yemeni sitting on the carpet a few rows away from us. ‘All the English brothers,’ he said, ‘first thing they want when they get here is a gun.’ It was against school rules to assemble an arsenal but there was no one to enforce such a rule and there was a regional arms market, just south of the Saudi border, 20 kilometres away. Since Jowad spoke excellent Yemeni Arabic and English and knew all the English and American brothers, he had helped the man on the carpet distribute his weapons. Jowad had been cut in on a percentage of the sales and for several weeks, until the Yemeni found another, older broker, had lived well.