The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: We got him.”

  In December 2003 the Americans found Saddam in a hole. Wild-haired, grimy, bearded, defeated, his sons killed, his country occupied. Iraqis watched an American army doctor probe his mouth, look inside his ears and check his hair as if for fleas. These were the only images released. They provoked a strange mixture of fascination and umbrage. In some way Saddam’s humiliation seemed to resonate in many Iraqi hearts. I heard, even from the mouths of his tortured victims, “This is not the way to treat him, after all, he was our president.”

  Gunfire erupted, inevitably, ratttatattatata all over the city; mixed outrage and celebration. The Sachets were all very happy and their house hummed with satisfaction. Um Omar smiled broadly and told me that Ali, always the impetuous one, had wanted to get the gun and fire it in the air but she and his sisters had restrained him.

  “No no! Don’t fire your gun or the Americans will arrest you!”

  Ali pretended to look sheepish, but we all laughed about it. I teased them that gunfire expressed all Iraqi emotion: celebration for weddings and beating the Kuwaitis in soccer, frustration in traffic jams, anger, warning, joy for the birth of a son…

  They politely pretended to laugh with me as Ahmed came into the room and touched his hand to his breast in greeting. It was Ramadan and they were fasting. Ahmed looked a little drawn from his religious exertion. Yes, it was a matter of celebration that Saddam had been captured, but he could not thank the Americans for it. The occupation was a national humiliation.

  “When I see an American I want to kill them myself,” said Um Omar, without losing the kindliness in her voice.

  “Perhaps if we kill them they will go away,” Shadwan hoped.

  For Ahmed the Iraqi police were the same as the Americans. The police were collaborators with the occupiers and betrayed the names of the mujahideen.

  “They deserve to die more than the Americans,” said Ahmed; treachery was worse than occupation. “They are helping the oppressor.”

  Ahmed was studying at a religious college and he rose every morning for dawn prayer and to read the Koran. He told me he could not choose a favorite surah because all its verses were perfect. The Koran was all knowledge, law and prophecy, the sum of history and future, God’s incarnate word, entire and complete. Ahmed’s big brown eyes shone with its beauty. He memorized a little more of the great book every day. At night he dreamed of his father, and in his dreams his father was wearing his uniform and exhorting him, paternal and firm, to learn the Koran as he himself had always wanted to, because in the Koran there was peace. “The point is to show the Koran is right,” Ahmed told me. “It is ahead of us. Everything is already written in the Koran, and then we discover it.”

  AHMED HAD NOT been a good student when he was a boy, mathematics was complicated for him. He remembered his father testing him from his Arabic textbook and becoming furious with his wrong answer. Ahmed, in retelling, shuddered at his father’s authority. Another time, Ahmed told his father he was going to do something “tomorrow.” Kamel Sachet told him no, he should always say inshallah, God willing, when he spoke about the future. This stricture seemed to Ahmed as integral as the authority that had delivered it.

  “When he told you to do something, there was no now or later, you did it immediately. It was like a military order. If you hadn’t done anything wrong, it was fine, but if you had done something wrong—well, I didn’t want to sit next to him if I had done something wrong.”

  When he was ten or eleven Ahmed went to summer school at the mosque and began learning the Koran. For Ahmed the mosque was a clean slate. He found he was good at learning the surahs and he noticed that when he talked about the mosque his father paid him more attention; from time to time, when he correctly recited a surah, there came down a nod of approval. He asked his father if he could be sent to religious school for secondary education and his father agreed.

  As Ahmed grew up his ambition was to become an imam, to advise people about Islam and to answer their questions.

  No, Ahmed shook his head, he was not interested in traveling.

  “Perhaps to Mecca?”

  Ahmed nodded solemnly.

  “Inshallah.”

  During Ramadan Ahmed was at home more often and several times when I came he sat with me and we discussed differences in belief. East and West, believer and infidel. Ahmed smiled. “Everyone has their different opinion and we respect it. But one of us is wrong!” Ahmed liked to talk to me about his faith and the example of Mohammed. I had a thousand questions about heaven and pork and women and jihad; Ahmed always had an answer. Islam was as clear to him as a crystal pool in paradise.

  A day or two after Saddam was captured, after a few pro Saddam demonstrations in Adhamiya had been broken up by the Americans, I asked him:

  “What did they teach you in religious school?”

  “They taught us that we should say salaam, peace, to everyone, no matter who they were. They taught us that we should forgive someone who had harmed you.”

  “But this is difficult.”

  “Yes, even in the Koran it is written that not everyone can have this kind of patience.”

  “Do you hate Saddam?”

  “Yes, I still hate him.”

  “Should you hate him? Or should you forgive him?”

  “Forgiveness means that if he fell into my arms I would not kill him. I don’t care what happens to him now.”

  “What about the Americans?”

  “Ah, with the Americans, it’s different.” Ahmed said that those who came as fighters should be fought.

  “But it means only more death, as if death could wipe out anger or right a wrong—”

  “Do you mean revenge?” Ahmed asked me.

  “Yes, perhaps, revenge.”

  “It goes back to our roots, to the Arabs before Islam. If you kill my brother I will have to kill you. My conscience would not let me live while you lived. Mohammed put rules around these traditions. In Islam if you kill my brother I cannot kill you. The government should kill you and take my revenge for me. There are three choices: I can either go to the government and tell them you have killed my brother, or I can agree to accept blood money from you, or I can forgive you.”

  “Which option does Mohammed most strongly recommend?”

  “If it is an accident the best thing to do is to forgive; but if a murder happens in a criminal way, you cannot forgive those murderers who kill others. In fact you will prevent more deaths by killing them.”

  “So what is an accidental death, when is it alright to kill? Why is it acceptable to blow up the Red Cross?”

  “Jihad, you know, is only permitted against other fighters. But these bombs—it depends who’s inside the building.”

  “It’s often a mixture: Iraqis and foreigners.”

  “Well, if there is an American VIP in a hotel and he is staying the night there, maybe there are other innocent people in the hotel, but in this case it is OK to kill innocent people so that you don’t lose the opportunity to kill the American. Perhaps you kill twenty innocent people, but if the American VIP was not killed he would kill a thousand innocent people.”

  “Is this written in the Koran?”

  “In the Koran it doesn’t say you can kill innocent people to achieve your goal. But each Islamic leader has his own group and his own view; he takes it from the Koran. Maybe it is right and maybe it is wrong.”

  “But the Koran is very definite about war and how to manage war. How can different interpretations be allowed?”

  Ahmed had certainty. His eyes shone with the clarity of his mission and his smooth brown brow never knitted at my recalcitrance. His fingers were elegant and slender and he would gently press their tips together to define a certain emphasis or to gesticulate frustration. Every question had an answer, the answer was revealed through God and Ahmed kept his patience while explaining such obvious truth to me.

  “The Koran is detailed about jihad. These differences in app
lication are not very large. In the end it is only about how they achieve their goals and the Koran leaves some things to individual assessment.”

  “But surely killing innocent people has definite parameters? Israelis on buses are not fighters.”

  “Israel is different. The Israelis came and lived in our land, there are no innocent Israelis when a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus.”

  “But suicide is haram!”

  “Suicide is a sin, yes. But jihad is a special case. A suicide bomber is exploding himself but he is benefiting his religion.”

  “Do you think he is benefiting his religion in the eyes of the rest of the world?”

  “Let them have their opinions! He is going to heaven as the highest rank of martyr.”

  “So what did you think about September 11th?”

  Ahmed blinked. “The attacks on New York?”

  “Yes. When the two great buildings were destroyed.”

  “Yes, it was jihad.” Ahmed smiled. “I was very happy.”

  “But why jihad against America?”

  “As long as it is attacking any Muslim country there can be jihad against America.”

  “But what Muslim country was it attacking in 2001?”

  “Many different countries.” Ahmed insisted. “But especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they slaughtered most of them.”

  I patiently explained that America had not slaughtered Bosnian Muslims and had in fact defended Kosovar Muslims against the Serbs. Again, I asked Ahmed directly: so where was America attacking Muslims in 2001?

  Ahmed bent his answer in a different direction. “It fights Islam in an indirect way. I don’t know exactly. But America puts pressure on Muslims. It’s a lot of countries. Specifically I don’t know.”

  “So were there innocents killed in New York?”

  “If it is true that al-Qaeda did this then it is a very big hit to the American economy.”

  “Ahmed,” I told him, bit of Western superior fact between my teeth, “it didn’t make any real difference to the American economy!”

  Ahmed’s logic twisted again.

  “They say al-Qaeda hit it but I personally think it was the Americans themselves. Those two planes made a huge media propaganda against terrorists. After that, they could attack any Muslim country under the cover of freeing a terrorist nation. Afghanistan. Iraq.”

  AT THE END of 2002 I was working in Tehran, living in the heart of Bush’s axis of evil and watching, with my semi-legal satellite receiver (and an amused smile at the surreality of juxtaposition), Fox News ratchet the rhetoric for war in Iraq. I went to the poorer districts in southern Tehran and talked to Iraqi exiles—almost all Shia—who had fled Saddam’s terror and I went across the border to Iraqi Kurdistan and listened to the stories of the Anfal, chemical attacks, razed villages and mass graves. Every Iraqi story was a tortured horror. Old men lifted up their dishdashas to show me the circular scars of manacles around their ankles; toothless women described watching their sons being dragged away by soldiers, their houses burned; the Kurds told me that the gas smelled like apples and garlic, that it burned their lungs and that they had held their children in their arms as they died.

  I was naïve then. Saddam was a bad ruler who repressed and killed his own people and, if force were needed to get rid of him, I thought, like Ahmed’s innocent bystanders, this was probably a price worth paying. I believed in the principles and assumptions that I had grown up with, half American, half Brit, a mix of decency, might, right and democracy. In Iraqi Kurdistan, in March 2003, waiting for war, I watched Tony Blair argue, impassioned and with full moral fervor, the case for invasion in front of parliament. I watched Colin Powell detail intelligence on weapons of mass destruction at the UN. I believed in my governments, not literally, but I believed they were the good guys.

  When the war came I went to the Kurdish North, where there was not so much mayhem: mostly we watched the Americans bomb the Iraqi front lines while we waited for Baghdad to fall. When the statue of Saddam was pulled down it was the signal for Mosul and Kirkuk to follow suit. We drove across the internal border into the husk of post-Saddam, along with thousands of Kurds over-excited to be reunited with relatives, pillaging weapons stocks and trashing whatever Baathie symbols, police stations, offices they could find.

  I remember two or three days later the looting had died down and I went to the big Saddam hospital (quickly renamed Azadi, which means freedom in Kurdish) and found a young man lying in a hospital bed. He had the misfortune of a February birth date and on his eighteenth birthday, five weeks before the American invasion, he had been given a uniform, but no weapon, and drafted to stand in a trench. One day a B52 dropped a bomb which cut off his right leg and his right arm. He was fit and handsome, he tried to smile, he said his stumps ached, but he had some medicine and he could listen to the tape machine his parents had brought him from home to distract him from his sleeplessness. Of all the ragged bits of violence I had seen, thin dead bodies, the wounded baby, death rattles in a blood-spattered emergency room, this image bothered me the most. I don’t know why. He had been a soldier, a legitimate target, but now he was just a maimed boy, body and prospects ruined. It seemed a terrible price. His mother worried for him: How would he have a job? Who would marry him now? I held her hand and told her it would be alright, that help was coming, that in a few months there would be Western aid workers and health programs all over Iraq, that there were new technologies and special prosthetic limbs made out of titanium that worked with electrical impulses and were miraculous and bionic, “as good as new,” that her son had a future. I think at the time I believed what I was saying.

  The war did not end oppression in Iraq but continued and worsened it, killing and suffering; each year dragged a greater weight of misery behind it. The mistakes and miscommunication of the occupiers and the exile parties who set up shop in Baghdad were legion; their ignorance and ignominy were raked into a heap in the GreenZone and covered with a bit of tarpaulin. When I went back to London or New York, I could barely stomach the TV pundits-politicians-party chit-chat, which ran together as a mash of opinionated blandishment and lies. A year and a half into the disaster, George W. Bush was re-elected.

  Ahmed’s conspiracy theory was wrong, but maybe no more trite than its opposite: that democracy could be imposed by force. It was only the inverse of an opposite set of beliefs, scorn and reaction, like two presidents calling each other “evil.” All of us grow up in a community, a society, a country that feels, to us, safe and familiar; outside, across the sea, somewhere else, reside the dragons of the other. Ahmed had absorbed the mores and opinions of his community: family was honor, Islam was right, the larger world was a conspiracy that kept Muslims and Arabs down. He was subject to self-serving information and the odd sticky gobs of propaganda like the rest of us. He might have been cynical or depressed except that he was young and angry and he had, in this condition, as my father used to call it when he was talking about the youthful idealism of the internationalists in the Spanish civil war (Orwell, Koestler, Robert Jordan and other heroes), “caught an ism.” Ahmed had latched on to an ideology—salafism, jihadism, nationalism—that, like all ideologies, offered him clear concrete answers in an unjust and confusing world. It was a one sided view, bent through a prism; facts refracted accordingly. I would argue with Ahmed and call him to order with countered, reasonable explanations, but anything contrary bounced harmlessly off his shiny-armored certainty.

  ONE DAY AHMED showed me a video made by one of the resistance groups, Ansar al-Sunna.

  The opening scenes were of the brutality of the occupation. American soldiers kicking in gates on hard-knock night raids, a group of Iraqi prisoners, wrists bound, heads cowed, loaded in the back of a truck, American soldiers dragging a man, barefoot and shirtless, along the street, American soldiers firing their guns into a civilian crowd. An over-dubbed voice, screeching and hoarse, asked, “How can you be quiet when such things are happening!”

  Cut to a
sermon of clerical intonation: “God loves those who fight for the sake of religion. Be patient, have faith and do not participate with the enemy. Jihad in Iraq has become the duty of every Muslim and those who are fighting are the true Muslim people. Everyone in every neighborhood should be called for jihad…to protect our nation. These enemies have come here to stop the religion of God. We must eject the occupiers. The Americans have come here with their interests and they are being backed up by the Jews…You must fight against all those sinners from north to south and rise up with one hand and fight in an organized way according to our religion.”

  Then there were scenes of mujahideen resistance. Pickup trucks at night, faces swathed in kuffiyehs, traditional headscarves, carrying homemade rockets. Shaky footage of Humvees exploding from remote-controlled bombs hidden along the road. Close-ups of the passports and documents of assassinated collaborators.

  In the final sequence a group of mujahideen were positioning a mortar at night. The scene was lit with a handheld torch, a wobbling circle of green white in the dark.

  Ahmed added his own commentary: “They hit the hotels with these.”

  “Thanks Ahmed, I live in a hotel.”

  For ten minutes or more the camera recorded luminous hands splicing wires, arranging mortar tubes in an atmosphere of concentrated urgency. One of the mujahideen began to try to light one of the rockets with a match, but the match flared and went out in the wind. He lit another, which flared and extinguished, and another, which burned and died, and another. Five or six failed matches. They were repositioning the mortar tube, whispering, “Move it, move it, just a little, just a little.” Then finally the fire caught the match and the hand lit the fuse and the rocket whooshed into the night like a firework and hit nothing.