When the men had left, Fahd crept to his room, closed the door and wept until his soul grew still. He addressed his innermost self like an old man standing on the smouldering ruins of his house remembering happier days.
In the early morning, mother would wake me to go to school, while little Lulua was still sunk in sleep. I would sit drowsily in the living room as my father had his breakfast of a fried egg and a dish of Wadi al-Nahl honey. The voice of Fairuz, discovered by my father courtesy of Nabeel Hawamla, his Palestinian colleague at the newspaper distribution company, issuing from the kitchen:
I yearn, but for who, I don’t know;
At night it snatches me from amongst the revellers.
How Fairuz used to upset me when I was seven, my mother standing in front of the kitchen sink and opening the north-facing kitchen window, the March breeze buffeting her voice, low, effortless and sad:
The breeze blew upon us at the valley’s mouth
O breeze, blow, and take me to my country!
I used to believe that I would come home from school one day to find my mother gone, especially when her family had left for Amman after Saudi Arabia threw out the Jordanians, Palestinians and Yemenis. Jordan’s announcement that the war against Iraq was a war on the Arab nation was, we sensed, the reason my family were expelled, and I only saw them again a few years ago. My mother was miserable, silent and tearful, but she rinsed her sadness and loneliness in song and night time excursions with my father to cafés and restaurants. On Thursdays and Fridays they would take us with them, while the rest of the week they would go out by themselves after we were asleep.
Will Fairuz continue to pour out her voice over the walls of our house? Will the aroma of the Turkish coffee to which my father and mother were addicted still ascend? Will the smell of oil paints waft from my room while I paint a portrait of a three-year-old Lulua, her mouth smeared with ice cream? Will my sister ever play again on the little piano my father brought back from Dubai? Will the Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt posters stay on the walls of the salon and the sitting room? Will life carry on in the corridors of our top floor in Ulaya, that life my father made, or will my uncle occupy our house on the pretext of protecting the poor widow and her two little orphans? He will come, and death shall come with him. Fairuz will die; her voice will be choked off, and in her place, Sheikh al-Hazifi reciting surat al-kahf. The Turkish coffee will go, its aroma fading in the face of Arabic coffee and sugared dates. The little piano will be destroyed, its white and black keys flying to the vast rubbish skip at the end of Sayyidat al-Ru’osa Street. My little sister will die and in the portrait that I painted her playful eyes will be ruptured, but the ice cream shall remain about her mouth, a witness. The head of her cotton doll will be severed because it is haram and all the videos put to death; Falounu and Sally will go to meet their fate.
What was it that Uncle Ibrahim was after? When he came to broach the idea of my uncle marrying my mother, did he mean it? Was it to be an atonement for taking part in a demonstration outside Ibn Battal’s palace against the deputies and the pious, to show his relatives in Qaseem that it had been the error of a teenage boy?
At the end of that long day, night finally fell and Fahd went out, frustrated and sad. He drove towards Pizza Hut, passing the generator where the black cat hid. He had never liked cats. A shudder would run through his body whenever he caught sight of it hidden away, its eyes staring at him.
As soon as he was past the restaurant, Sulaimaniya supermarket and the petrol station, he stopped at Tareeqati Café and felt his way into the dimly lit interior. He ordered a bitter Turkish coffee and pondered his life, which since his tenth year had rushed by with frightening speed.
When he left the café he did not return home but aimlessly roamed the streets.
Back at the house, at the bottom of the four steps leading up to the front door, he passed the tub full of small roses that he had planted with his father the year before and he recalled his uncle commenting on the flowers: ‘You should grow something useful instead. Courgettes. Tomatoes.’
The man still thought he was in Muraidasiya; anything related to beauty meant nothing to those villagers. What’s the use of looking at something that you can’t eat? That was how they thought. Why remain a widow or divorcee, stuck at home without a man to put food on the table or share your bed?
When Fahd came inside, and while he was climbing the stairs with downcast eyes, he was surprised by his mother, who was sitting on the top step waiting for him. She looked at him. He told her nothing of what they had said. ‘They were just asking about the inheritance and dad’s car, whether we were going to sell it or not.’
She withdrew to her bedroom without saying a thing, but he sensed that she had detected his lie. Perhaps she had been eavesdropping from behind the wooden partition. She would do that a lot and often surprised her children by knowing what they were up to, astonishing them with her insight and teasing them by saying that a gazelle passed on everything they said and so they should never lie to her. It was certainly too embarrassing for his mother to tell him, ‘You’re a liar: they came to ask for my hand in marriage,’ and perhaps it was too embarrassing for him to tell her that as well. His mother was shy and unsure, and it was easy to convince and influence her.
‘But no,’ he muttered to himself as he went to his gloomy bedroom. ‘I will lie, Mother. And as for the gazelle, I killed it when my father died.’
Part 2
Sandals emerging from the darkness
–10 –
BURAIDA WAS UNFAMILIAR TO young Fahd, despite having lived in the city for months during the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and despite his father’s former life there. Shortly before his death, Suleiman had told Fahd tales from his youth.
Ali had insisted Suleiman study at the National School and Suleiman had kept resisting, but in the end he had consented because it was an opportunity to escape the village of Muraidasiya.
For a while he read Ibn Hajjar’s The Attainment of the Goal with Sheikh al-Duwaish. The sheikh, he told Fahd, had been an extraordinary man with an astonishing memory: he could listen to more than one student reciting the Qur’an at the same time, correcting their errors of pronunciation and intonation even though they were reading separate verses. Even Sheikh al-Albani, who occasionally returned to the text beside him to prompt him as he talked, sought help from al-Duwaish, consulting his computer-like memory. God have mercy on his soul! He died young, in the prime of life.
After sunset, Suleiman studied inheritance law with Sheikh al-Kaleeli, the imam of a mosque close by the home of his friend, al-Ulayti. The first time he went to see him, Suleiman sat flustered before the sheikh, who cast a keen and mistrustful eye over him, then said, ‘You studied at a government school?’
‘Yes.’
He gazed at Suleiman for a moment, closely examining his face as he prepared to hurl his first fatal arrow towards those boyish features. ‘Does the earth revolve?’
‘Yes, sheikh,’ Suleiman replied, confident and candid.
‘There is no power nor strength save in God!’ the sheikh said, then rose to his feet, pulled out a book and handed it to him.
‘Read this book, my boy, and then come back.’
Suleiman read the title: Heaven’s Potent Rage Against Followers of the New Age by Sheikh Hamoud al-Tuwaijri.
He read it in days and understood that it disputed heathen astronomers who believed in the spherical nature of the earth and its revolution and refuted their claims.
The sheikh didn’t dismiss Suleiman as he had expected, but showed him sympathy instead, feeling it his duty to take him by the hand and lead him from falsehood and bewilderment on to the path of righteousness and truth. The earth is flat, as the Lord tells us in His Book, and, contrary to the theories of heathens and atheists, does not revolve about itself or circle the sun. No: it is the sun that turns about the earth.
Suleiman loved these ideas, but quickly moved beyond them. He discovered that the Salafis of Bu
raida were in fact just doctrinally observant Hanbalis. He felt that he shouldn’t ally himself with any particular doctrinal school, and he found what he was looking for with the Divine Reward Salafist Brothers in Riyadh. He spent hard days of hunger and deprivation with them and suffered through Riyadh’s long winter nights, to the extent that when he accompanied the leader of the group to Buraida and visited his old school, he dropped in to see his family for a day in Quwai then slept for several nights in a classroom. He felt proud when he saw the looks of envy and jealousy from his peers in Buraida. He had begun to move with a commanding, disciplined air and could finally dream of restoring his ruined self-confidence.
The trip was the occasion of the final meeting between the Brothers in Buraida and the Salafist Group that would continue on the path to the Grand Mosque. There was affection and dialogue between the two parties before it turned into hostility and mutual loathing, the conversation gradually metamorphosing into a call to actively bring about a radical change, to do away with corruption, sin and doctrinal constraints. The inhabitants of Buraida followed the Hanbali rite, and the Hanbalis’ severest defeat had come when a group of them debated a Zaharite sheikh in Mecca, who brought them to a standstill with his proofs and logic. Suleiman had witnessed this event and it was then he realised that life and ideas might exist elsewhere, in places other than Buraida. Adventures, fraught with dangers, followed one after the other until he found himself behind bars in Mecca where, one day, he was joined in his cell by the young Mushabbab.
Mushabbab told his friend some of what had taken place the day of the Grand Mosque’s occupation. He didn’t see it as a takeover, but as the only proper way to acclaim the Mahdi, and the most appropriate place to do so.
Their arrival with their weapons had been a somewhat bizarre affair. It began just before dawn when their men carried in the bodies of four women inside coffins. In the Grand Mosque the body of a deceased woman wasn’t simply covered with an abaya (lest her body be visible to the worshippers) but was placed in a coffin with an arched wooden lid. The Prophet’s wife Aisha had been the first to buried in this domed coffin and now it was being used by the Brothers to smuggle guns.
The first dawn of the new century crawled slowly by, the group hefting the coffins with cool detachment while the weapons, hidden with their ammunition, almost seemed to come alive with longing for the bodies that surrounded them. By the Imam and the cloth coverings of the Kaaba the four coffins were laid in a row. Imam al-Subayil gave his usual calm and reassuring recitation, ushering in the dawn and stupefying the Meccan pigeons that strutted happily over the white marble.
No sooner had he performed the two dawn rakaas than ten men rose to their feet behind him, some wearing brown mashlahs beneath which they hid their pistols, and one took hold of the microphone that linked the prayers to a live radio broadcast. The Imam snatched it back to perform the prayer over the coffins, but the man drew his dagger and brandished it in the face of al-Subayil who cried, ‘Fear God!’ and backed away.
When the prayers were completed the Imam crept away to his room by Safa hill as the lids were lifted from the coffins and the Belgian-made automatic rifles distributed amongst the members of the group, some of whom spread out to the mosque’s gates, locking them one after another. By one small door a guard in civilian clothes objected: ‘Why are you locking the gates?’
‘None of your business!’ Muhsin shouted in his face.
They argued and Muhsin pulled out his revolver and took aim. The bullet flew out, a messenger of death intent on its victim, but not towards its intended target: cleaving the cold dawn air with a penetrating, vicious whine it struck the domed bronze head of a nail sunk in the metal plating that covered the wooden door. The wayward bullet gave a violent clang, ricocheting back towards the breast of the bearded young man and striking him dead: the battle’s first martyr. That is how they thought of their dead: martyrs.
The sound of the shot reached the ears of the worshippers and the other members of the group, and the first spark of the conflict flared.
Muhsin fell, twitching a little before his corpse lay still. The last gate hadn’t been closed and so those who could fled before the members of the group could shut it, while two lorries reversed towards the moat by the outer entrance to the underground cells. One carried weapons and ammunition, the other boxes packed with dates and sacks of cottage cheese.
The Grand Mosque was surrounded by cells, each one a small square room no more than nine metres square with a door consisting of a plate of reinforced steel a metre high, topped with iron bars as in a prison. Any passer-by could thus see into the cells, discouraging visitors to the mosque and worshippers from using them as places to rest or sleep. The young men of the group used these tiny cells to store guns and ammunition and their dates and cheese.
The preacher shouted to the mosque walls, and the hills of Mecca thundered and echoed back his words: ‘My Brothers in God, the Prophet, may the prayers and peace of God be upon him, said that in the last days God would send a man to set the umma back on the path to righteousness; He would send the Mahdi, Mohammed Bin Abdullah, to fill the earth with justice after it had been filled with injustice and tyranny.’
The leader of the group suddenly snatched the microphone off him and addressed his followers: ‘Seif! Seif! The north gate!’ before the preacher resumed his account of the Mahdi’s prophesied return at the start of a new century and exhorted the worshippers to acclaim him between the rukn and the maqam.
The leader took the microphone a second time: ‘Brothers! The government’s soldiers are yours for the taking!’
And so the two voices of the preacher and the leader mingled in a distant dawn, the flocks of pigeons fleeing, hearts quaking as the sniper climbed up towards the soaring minarets.
Eid was a skilful sniper. In the days that followed he relentlessly picked off any soldier who invaded the court of the mosque or descended from the sky beneath his parachute. Suleiman remembered their time together in Sajer, chambering a bullet and preparing to shoot a bird swimming through the sky. As it approached the tree to land on a branch, the bullet zipped, lodging in its little heart, and it tumbled to the ground a motionless corpse.
‘The true marksman,’ Eid would tell Suleiman, ‘is the man who can hit the target on the wing, the moving target, not the stationary one. There’s no glory in a sitting target: that’s for women!’
The same was true of life: the moving target is seductive, hard won. Any man can claim the prize that sits there, the whole world’s for the taking, but not everyone has what it takes to seize the fleeting chance, the fleeting moment, and turn it into opportunity.
In jail, Suleiman recalled a young man called Salah, one of a group of Egyptian pilgrims. The Egyptians spent days in anticipation of the confrontation, inspired and impatient and listening to tales of jihad in the way of God. These feelings were completely new to them, and when the actual moment came it affected them so forcefully that some snatched up guns and began chasing after the soldiers and guards and shooting them dead.
Amongst those roused to action was a youth by the name of Abdullah. He wasn’t granted the chance to enter the Grand Mosque, but he was member of the group and lived in the suburbs of Mecca. He took his vehicle and a machine gun and headed out to Sajer to inflame his comrades out there and lead them back to occupy the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, drawing the world’s attention to a second target and perhaps relieving the siege around his brothers in Mecca. Chased by the police and the army, who tried to make him surrender and hand over his weapon, he instead turned his car about and sent a shower of lead in their direction. They responded in kind. Their bullets broke the rear window of his truck and successive rounds slipped through, penetrating the flesh and sinews of his neck until his head lolled forward against the steering wheel, a fat fruit fit for picking.
The days passed slowly in the Grand Mosque and one by one they fell. Helicopters fired down from on high while teams of police and National
Guard troopers took aim from the Ashraf building. Towards the end, the leader was hiding behind the Ismail maqam, his back to the Kaaba and his light automatic rifle trained at the Ashraf building. He was screaming at his men, asking them to supply him with a Belgian-made gun so that his rounds might reach a more distant target. But after ten days under siege the place was closing in about them and the volume of fire was too great for them to handle.
In those final days the police attempted to bring tanks in through the gallery, so the members of the group drew off petrol from the lorries and began to pour it into the earthenware pitchers intended to hold the zamzam water, then sealing them with scraps of cloth and setting them alight, they hurled them towards the tanks’ tracks to explode like Molotov cocktails.
Incessant bombardment forced the group down from their elevated positions. The artillery was bombarding the high minarets where the snipers sheltered, the shelling so severe that the towers shook. The snipers began to descend to the rooftops. Most of the bodies there were headless. The bullets had ripped open skulls and blood mingled with brains on the sloping tiles. The survivors descended to the second floor and tried to flee or surrender, most of them ending up sneaking down to the storage rooms underground, where they were eventually choked with tear gas. Those who still could, emerged dishevelled, dusty and wild-eyed, their clothes in tatters. The papers were filled with their images, some sitting with thick grimy hair, others bowing their shaven heads. The mellifluous tones of radio announcer Hussein Najjar commented on their humiliation and defeat.
Suleiman never thought he would return to Buraida, especially with the wretched memory of his detention there, but return he did one dawn in January 1990 with his little family in tow, fleeing the indiscriminate Russian missiles that could flatten his house in a heartbeat and because, following his experience in jail, he had come to believe more than ever in his father’s judgment that he was ‘defective’. He asked his wife what would prevent the erratic and unseeing missiles from turning away from the airbase and the vast fortified palaces in Maadhar and landing on a rented top-floor flat in Ulaya, home to an exhausted father, a miserable mother whose happiness was already deserting her at a young age, and a pair of children like pet kittens who knew nothing of life other than the fantastical, dreamlike stories they watched on a small screen.
Where Pigeons Don't Fly Page 6