Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  Unknown persons who succeeded in entering our mosque would be watched for suspicious behaviour. If they did something wrong, or even if they didn’t do anything wrong but merely looked wrong, they could be shot on sight.

  49

  AT THE HEIGHT of this tension, my old friend Qais invited me to dinner. By Dammaji standards, his house was a palace. We sat on the floor of his dining room beneath a big TV and a shelf of religious books as his wife, a Yemeni, prepared pizza in her kitchen. His daughter padded around on the carpet in a frilly pink dress. She was three years old and the owner of many fluffy stuffed animals. Beyond the mosquito screen of his front porch, a 1,000-acre vineyard rippled away to the base of distant cliffs. But for the call to prayer, we could have been in California or Provence.

  Few students in Dammaj lived in this luxury. Qais, however, was exceptional. He had exceptional talents. Four years earlier he had been one among hundreds of Western religious pioneers in Yemen. He had turned up with his suitcase and a certificate of conversion from an imam in France.

  Now, at twenty-six, he owned one of the three Dammaji internet shops, had married a daughter of the land, and was a confidant of the sheikh.

  If war with the Shia ever did break out, all the talibs knew that the thousand-strong community of Westerners in Dammaj would look to him for guidance. Should they fight? Lie low? Leave? The students in Dammaj counted on him to strike the right attitude – it would be defiant, passionate and measured. This was Qais.

  When I had dinner with him in October of 2006, he and his closest friend, Hamza, a Moroccan French student, originally from Lyon, did not show a hint of worry or interest in the doings of the Shia. The two of them lounged on the floor like happy pashas. ‘We will defend our religion,’ Qais said, smiling broadly, when I asked him what he would do in the event of a Shia attack. He was in the prime of his life then, with property, a business, and friends.

  ‘Are you sure you want to fight?’ I asked.

  ‘We have no choice,’ he replied, hardly paying attention. ‘Our religion demands it.’

  As we waited for our pizza, Qais and Hamza tried to discover if I really had come to Dammaj in order to spy. But they were curious and amused rather than aggressive. How exactly had I arrived in Dammaj? By taxi? By jeep? By CIA helicopter? I explained, fully.

  What about my conversion? asked Hamza. I spoke about my stalemate at the newspaper, and my interest in Islam. They had me recite a few verses from the Koran and a hadith or two. They chose easy passages that were so simple and so short it would have been impossible not to have memorised them.

  Soon we were on to other topics. Evidently, Qais and Hamza took me as an emissary from the world of universities, newspapers and contemporary knowledge. Once my bonafides as a Muslim had been established, they asked me to address questions to which their curiosity had turned over the years.

  Had there really been thirteen Jewish popes? Did I know that les frères maçons had founded America? What about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Did I know that the Jews planned out every war in the twentieth century one hundred years in advance? The book is a forgery, I said. They disagreed but did not insist.

  All such discussions eventually end up at 9/11. How could I be sure that Bush hadn’t done it himself? Hamza wanted to know. I spoke about the pilots, Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi and Hanjour, their education in Europe, Jarrah’s Turkish girlfriend, Atta’s work as an urban planner in Hamburg, and their trips back and forth between Germany and Afghanistan. The everyday details of motels in Florida and rental cars were new to Hamza and Qais.

  The two of them must have liked listening to me because soon we were talking about my future in the village. I should stay, Qais said. My things could be brought from Sana’a in the next van coming north. The sheikh didn’t like people hurrying away. Neither, for that matter, did the talibs.

  ‘Yes, but I just want to go,’ I told them. They did not insist.

  Towards the end of the evening, when Qais’s daughter had toddled off to the kitchen and we were drinking tea, we returned to the topic of war with the Shia.

  ‘Isn’t this is a 1,400-year-old squabble?’ I said. In my opinion it belonged only to this high-altitude steppe and these two tribes of feuding brothers. ‘You, however, do not,’ I said. ‘If you wanted to, you could learn about the topics that interest you at university in France. You could introduce your wives to Europe.’

  Qais smiled. He was long past wondering where his loyalties lay. He hardly bothered to respond in words but let me know how he was feeling by grinning to himself as I talked.

  ‘Allah,’ he said when I had finished, ‘has given me this house, this wife, and this child. Are you mad? I shouldn’t defend this?’

  Eventually the discussion tailed off into an academic dispute. I maintained that there were hadith prohibiting Muslims from killing other Muslims. He adduced hadith and Koranic passages to prove that the greatest thing an able-bodied Muslim could do was to defend the religion, the next greatest thing was the defence of the family, and the next greatest thing the defence of the self. In fighting the Shia, he was fulfilling all of these obligations at once.

  ‘You’re crazy’ I said.

  ‘You don’t understand Islam, my friend,’ he said.

  The argument of course was merely silly. Qais wanted to participate in a war. His wife supported him. His friends admired him for his boldness. He had passages from the Koran and the hadiths on his side. It wasn’t clear that the sheikh was going to allow foreigners to fight, but it wasn’t clear that the sheikh would or could stop them, either.

  Perhaps success had made Qais a bit bored with his life. Perhaps he felt he had accomplished as much as could be accomplished in this far-flung hamlet. Anyway, his fortunes among the talibs had been rising for some time. He would continue to rise, if Allah willed it, and no amount of friendly talk was going to dissuade him.

  Of course, a war with the Shia finally broke out. We knew that it would come some time. It had always come before. I was back in Sana’a by that point and heard about what happened to Qais from a Swedish convert who happened to have been in Dammaj as the war began.

  One evening in the winter, Qais volunteered to undertake a long-range reconnaissance patrol with an Algerian friend. He was killed in the dark, without so much as a warning word beforehand or time to say a prayer. His Algerian friend was shot in the leg and managed to escape. Qais took a bullet in the head. By the time I heard about his death, Qais was buried, the war was over, and the wife was preparing to marry one of Qais’s friends. To marry the wife of a martyr was an honour for the friend. The sheikh would look after her and her child for ever. It was the will of God, the Swede concluded, and Qais, God’s mercy upon him, was in paradise.

  50

  ON THE NIGHT before I left Dammaj, the sheikh’s evening lecture happened to discuss just retribution. The hadith he examined told of an incident early in the life of the first Islamic polity, when a handful of Muslims lived surrounded by the Jews of Medina: ‘A Jew crushed the head of a girl between two stones,’ said the sheikh into his microphone. He held a gold-embossed volume of hadiths in his lap but recited the text more than he actually read it.

  It was said to her. ‘Who has done this to you – such-and-such person? such-and-such person?’ When the name of the Jew was mentioned, she nodded with her head, agreeing. So the Jew was brought and he confessed. The Prophet ordered that his head be crushed with the stones.

  The purpose of the lecture, as I understood it, was not to fire up the audience with Jew-hatred but to describe the slow, Prophet-like use of retributive violence. It should never be angry. It should be proportionate to the crime. It should crush the enemy the way snakes are crushed.

  But perhaps there was another, subtler purpose behind the lecture. They were certainly out there, the sheikh was telling us. These were sick, demented people, inclined to crush little girls’ skulls. Perhaps the enemies were Jews; perhaps not. For our part, we were to stick to the Sunnah
, to the words of our Prophet. We were to wash and fast. We were to stand by one another.

  As the sheikh recited and the 3,000 talibs followed along in their gold-embossed volumes, anyone who was thinking about leaving this community of brothers would have felt like a criminal. A person like this would care only for himself. If he left, it was probably because he hoped to desert his brothers, and probably because he meant to make common cause with the demented, sick people of the world.

  The farmer who volunteered to drive me back to Sana’a told me to meet him in a lane, on the periphery of the village, just after the morning prayer.

  A streak of pale-blue light wavered over the peaks in the east as I emerged from the mosque. He and I and his wife piled into the pickup truck in silence.

  In the desert, beyond the last house of the village, the truck floated through thick powdery sand like a sleigh. We fishtailed round the turns and sank through to the desert floor wherever the sand was soft. When the blue streak in the sky opened up a crack, we watched as new light leaked out over the huts, the sand and the grapes.

  It was a beautiful, even a holy time to be awake. Under her breath, the driver’s wife recited the Sura of the Dawn over and over. It’s one of the short, poetical suras. Every convert learns it in his first weeks as a Muslim:

  I seek refuge in the Lord of the Dawn.

  From the mischief of created things;

  From the mischief of Darkness as it overspreads;

  From the mischief of those who practise secret arts.

  We drove for a long time on tracks in the desert. Once near a Shia village we ran out of petrol and had to ask the locals to supply us which they did, generously. We passed giant dunes rising like fins out of the desert and abandoned villages. We passed stone hovels from which men emerged who sprinted across the steppe like gazelles, flagged us down and climbed into the bed of the pickup. They wore ragged robes, and wild cavemen beards. I didn’t remember having passed this particular clan. Were we going further back into the past? So it seemed. It took us a solid hour of desert driving to regain the government tarmacked road.

  We drove further into the south. When we were stopped at a construction site in a small city on the plains, the driver lifted his finger. He pointed to a figure standing on a mound of construction debris, directing a digger.

  ‘See the Jew?’ said the driver. He pointed to a shrouded person looking up from the foot of the mound. ‘See his woman?’ he said.

  The town was called Amran, and was the last city in Arabia in which Jews live. About 400 of them out of a population that numbered as many as 60,000 in 1948, still cling to the land here. They chew qat, veil their women, and practise polygamy as Yemenis do. Israel is willing to take them but they believe that the Messiah will only come if they remain in Yemen.

  After so many months of discussing Jews in the mosques, I half expected that a real one might be equipped with a cape or shining eyes or some other sign of sinister powers.

  In fact, those who remain are digging in. This particular Jew was busy directing a digger which was making repairs to a drainage ditch at the side of his house. These people clearly love the land, manage to get along with some of their neighbours, and do not want to leave.

  To Yemenis who do not live in Amran, however, they are performers who stage their desperation in order to wheedle money out of the office of the president. Worse, they consort with foreign powers. My driver felt that the Jews of Yemen cooperated with Christians who came to Yemen equipped with special medicine designed to suppress the reproductive capacity of Muslim women. He believed that the same thing might be happening to Muslims in America. ‘Are there very many Jews there?’ he wondered quietly, as we stared at the Yemeni Jew and his wife.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. He pondered this information. A few minutes later, another question came to him: ‘America and Israel are very close?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He shook his head slowly. ‘They control you,’ he murmured. ‘The Jews are very powerful, and you do not know it.’

  ‘The Jews of Yemen – do they not impress you with their courage?’ I replied. ‘With the power of their faith?’

  ‘They are faithful,’ he replied, ‘but they are from among the enemies of God.’

  Arriving in Sana’a, we slipped into a different world. Lines of taxis beeped their horns at the stop lights and qat markets spilled into the highways. Unemployed men sat in battalions on the street corners, staring at the passing traffic. The Ali Abdullah Saleh presidential mosque, which was then only half complete, towered over the city with its four sky-piercing minarets, sixteen domes, aeroplane warning lights, and soaring crenellations.

  The driver deposited me at the entrance to the humbler Shariqain mosque. The beggar women in the hallway lifted their hands to me as I passed. Inside, three rows of talibs, or about twenty worshippers, were going through their afternoon prayers. What kind of mosque is this? I thought as I entered the hall. Where was the bustle, the crowd, and where were the 3,000 talibs with their dripping beards and their shining foreheads? Not a single shopkeeper nearby had shuttered a single stall. In Dammaj at this time, not so much as a child could be found stirring outside the mosque and a merchant who kept his stall open was subject to expulsion or worse.

  Sana’a clearly belonged to a separate world. A strange abdication of Islam was under way here. Women felt free to sit in public hallways. Shopkeepers didn’t pray. Even the talibs at the Shariqain mosque, of whom there were certainly more than twenty, felt free to skip the afternoon prayer.

  Really, of course, you can do what you like in Sana’a. No one wonders what you’re up to. You can be a reporter, scholar, drunk, student, athlete, woman-chaser or all of these things at once. Like many cities in the Islamic world, it is divided into zones. If you want to live in the anything-goes zone, off you’ll go. You’re free.

  It took me a little while to remember this fact but when I did remember it, I was relieved. I had not given up my apartment in the Old City, and intended to return there as soon as I could gather my things from my dorm room.

  Later in the day, praying in a line of new students, recently arrived from Nantes and destined for Dammaj, I wanted to yank on their robes. I wanted to herd them into a corner and shout at them: ‘For heaven’s sake! Here in Sana’a you have more freedom than you’ll find in any religious institution in the countryside. Are you sure you want to leave it?’

  These young men, however, were excited about Dammaj.

  Had my trip been safe? they wanted to know, and had it cost much?

  Life in Dammaj had been almost free. It could have been free but for the internet time I bought and the toothpaste.

  ‘Was there a war on?’ someone asked.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘Maybe soon.’

  The more I talked, the less they listened. They had obviously been planning this voyage for months, if not years. Now they were poised on the cusp of the golden time. They were in no mood to turn back.

  Three weeks later Jowad called me. Did I have a room to spare? he asked. Could he stay with me? He would be arriving in Sana’a that afternoon. Could I meet him?

  When I brought him home, he found an unused television set in a corner of my apartment and dragged it into the spare bedroom. He hooked it to a satellite dish on the roof, and scattered his clothing across the floor. Within a matter of hours, he had erected a teenage paradise of empty soda cans, half-eaten bags of potato crisps and cheap cologne. Here, he made it known, adults were not permitted. In the mornings, at eleven when I woke him up, the sound on the TV had been turned down but not entirely off. In the two weeks he stayed with me, I’m not sure he ever turned it off, or even, for that matter, switched it from MTV.

  As an elder brother I was much too indulgent. But I had never had a younger brother before and had a hard time saying no. I bought him a football jersey and shoes and cheap Chinese sunglasses. He wore a robe on his first day in the city but after that the robes and headscarves vanished. So
did the sandals. In the ensuing days, he wore jeans, a leather jacket, and the enormous basketball sneakers that had decorated his mattress-bedroom at the back of the Dammaji mosque. He spoke to taxi drivers and street pedlars in a thick London accent, like a tourist. If anyone mistook him for a Yemeni teenager, he quickly set the person straight: he was an English traveller, passing through. He didn’t think much of Yemen, he wanted the cab drivers to know. He had better places to be.

  One afternoon, I took him to play football at an international school, in Sana’a. The kit he wore on the field involved his leather jacket, the mirrored aviator glasses, his basketball shoes, and a generous spritzing of sampler perfume we had picked up from a street pedlar. It wasn’t an efficient football-playing outfit exactly but it did unfurl a new and unmistakable personal identity, plus cologne. The other players scarcely knew what to make of him. He was an efficient if rusty midfielder, however, who had picked up some useful tricks in London. Once the game got under way, his mixture of teenage fashion and football skill made him stand out as a distinguished addition to the hodgepodge of locals, expat kids and street kids with whom we played.

  After two weeks of TV paradise in the Old City, I brought him to the British embassy. They called his mother in London, who promptly made arrangements for his cousins in Sana’a to fetch him. The cousins sent him along to his grandmother in Addis Ababa.

  Hem, France, June 2007

  51

  ALL MORNING LONG, Said and I watched TV bulletins broadcast from someone else’s country, la République française. Nicolas Sarkozy was about to trounce Ségolène Royal in a landmark election, thus ushering in a government many Muslims in France feared. Said wasn’t interested. Anyway, politics were forbidden to him. Football highlights came on later and towards noon women appeared in a TV living room in sparkling dresses.