Saleh was known to the congregation at his small mosque in the East Riyadh neighbourhood of Quds as Abu Ayoub, after the Prophet’s most militant companion. He was fat but light on his feet with a beautifully combed beard and a thaub that was always spotlessly clean, while his shimagh sent out the scent of incense and agarwood oil wherever he went; you only had to embrace him for the smell to linger on you for days.
When he entered the mosque he would bring a censer with him and hand it to the man at end of the row of worshippers, or humbly carry it past them himself, though at the same time he was skilled at sniffing out any new congregant, greeting them attentively and tenderly and welcoming them to the mosque. Sometimes, when the prayers were done he would turn his plump frame towards the line of worshippers behind him and peer at them, muttering invocations and fingering his prayer beads as he searched for a new victim. As soon as he spotted a newcomer he would send him his charming smile or a nod of the head in greeting, leaving the worshipper doubting himself and wondering, ‘Does he know me, or is it just that I look regal and majestic?’ at which instant he was snared.
The worshippers came to his little mosque from most of the neighbouring districts of East Riyadh, from Riyan, Roda and Khaleej, and the building’s parking spots and the surrounding streets were filled with their cars. They claimed he had a wonderful voice, that his recitation brought on humility and tears, and in Ramadan they came like raindrops because he could wrap up the night prayers in fifteen minutes: anyone praying behind him who didn’t know him would lose track at the end of the Qur’an recitation as he ran on in a single breath into the exaltation of the rakaa: …forGodistheonewhoseesandhearsallthingsGodisGreat!
He attacked the prayers like a startled crow hurriedly pecking at the earth before flapping back into the sky.
Many of those who called him Abu Ayoub had no idea that his eldest son was called Yasser and not one knew the secret of his extensive contacts and influence, nor how he had convinced the country’s leading sheikhs and muftis to come and pray behind him, nor how he was able to announce that one of them would be giving an address at his humble mosque. This won him considerable renown; men such as these were the unsullied of the earth, their honesty and purity doubted by no one. So not one of the congregation could find it in themselves to take Abu Ayoub to task if he missed the odd prayer or made use of the mosque for his agarwood oil and incense business.
He put a door in the room that led to the mosque’s courtyard and after prayers he would open it to welcome his guests. Brushing the back of a worshipper’s hand and suffusing his ghatra with the fragrance from the sweet white smoke, he would make him a gift of one of the minute vials that held less than three grams of oil, while the Bangladeshi mosque guard served coffee and preserved dates.
Abu Ayoub and the Bangladeshi guard had perfected the art of stalking worshippers and running them to ground. After the free gifts Abu Ayoub would leave it until another day to show his wares to the victim, who would be forced to buy more oil or quarter of a kilo or more of fragrant agarwood sticks, either because he liked them or out of a sense of embarrassment and good manners. Guests were impressed by the fact that Abu Ayoub had taught the Bangladeshi to wear a pressed white thaub and new red ghatra and to comb his sparse beard exactly like a Saudi; he even spoke their dialect. ‘Greetings, by God! Wonderful to see you. A cup of coffee in God’s name. Taste these dates, God grant you Paradise.’
Abu Ayoub, who invited the great sheikhs to his mosque, had so spun and extended his web of contacts within the Call and Guidance Centre that he had secured a fully subsidised annual trip to India and Eastern Europe. His ostensible purpose for travel was to call non-Muslims to Islam, but it was there that he obtained large quantities of agarwood oil jars and boxes full of huge, high quality incense sticks to sell in the mosque. His motto: ‘Go on pilgrimage and sell prayer beads while you’re at it.’
He would be gone a whole month and sometimes longer if there was a wife to marry. ‘Marry women of your choice, two or three or four.’ He would mutter in front of others (and argue to himself) that he married women from East Asia, Eastern Europe and the impoverished villages of India for two reasons: to safeguard himself against the more heinous sins such as adultery and to educate the unenlightened bride in matters of the Faith—how to wash before prayer, pray and fast and the other tenets of Islam—so that she might teach other women, not to mention the man who would marry her next. His evangelising mission complete, he would return to his mosque in Quds having divorced the Indian, the Ukrainian or the Filipino.
He was careful to marry young girls because they were quicker to learn than older women, but he never claimed, as others might, that they were more passionate or that they restored his lost youth. He would instruct them how to lie back and open their thighs and repeat with him the prayer of copulation. ‘In the name of God. God keep us from Satan and keep Satan from what you have provided to us,’ he would say, as he knelt to enter them.
He would teach them the correct way to wash themselves, taking great pleasure in coaching them on how to clean the vagina then, unable to control himself, would leap on them again. Such moments presented him with no great difficulties. ‘There is no shame in the Faith,’ he would say, pointing out the sentence in the translated text then leading them to the bathroom to become conversant with the method of achieving true cleanliness in Islam, his hands playing ceaselessly with their chests’ ripe fruits like an Indian gardener assessing the yield on the mango tree.
Abu Ayoub had no qualms about taking two new wives at once. All the better to teach them simultaneously and thus transmit his knowledge to the greatest possible number of future husbands, and so that the men in these foreign countries might understand that Islam permits multiple wives, he would point out the relevant Qur’anic verse in translation. How skilfully he convinced these new converts to Islam! He would distribute blessings on these benighted individuals then return to his house in Quds to boast to his first wife, Umm Yasser, that more than 120 of these foreigners, men and women, had joined Islam at his urging.
And so it was that in a few short years he became the owner of seventeen agarwood outlets in Riyadh. His Abu Ayoub Agarwood and Eastern Perfumes chain enjoyed an irresistible appeal and credibility amongst the public. The Bangladeshi guard no longer manned the shop on his own, but was assisted by a large number of Indonesian employees with long, light beards whose individual hairs hung down separately, and gleaming white ghatras on their heads, the sort whose toothsticks only left their mouths when they slept.
–13 –
OCCASIONALLY, SOMEONE WOULD ASK why Abu Ayoub was so keen on marrying his brother’s widow. Was it out of spite? Was it because all his deceased brother had salvaged from the wreck of this world was a beautiful wife whom he loved, leaving Abu Ayoub dreaming of adding her to his possessions, like the hundredth camel in the story of the two brothers, one of whom owned ninety-nine of the beasts but could not rest until he had taken possession of his brother’s only camel to make a round one hundred?
One summer evening Fahd and Lulua clapped for joy and shouted when Abu Essam and his wife knocked on their door, bringing with them gifts from Amman and spreading laughter through the sad house. But the laughter died away when the two young ones discovered that their grandparents had come to tell them that one day they would grow up, marry and have homes and children of their own to distract them from their mother, that this was life, and it was their mother’s right to look to her own interests. So it was that Abu Ayoub slipped in, a wolf dressed as a pussycat, who later tried to win Fahd over by buying him a new car.
Just a month later and Abu Ayoub was ready to usher angels into the home that his brother—God rest his soul—had made a dwelling place for devils and infidel demons. By degrees, life started to change: the still-grieving Soha began setting the dial on her kitchen radio to play the Holy Qur’an all day long, and then the cassettes of Fairuz, Umm Kulthoum, Khaled Abdel Rahman and Ahlam vanished to be replaced
by taped sermons. In one a sheikh screeched away as he recounted the terrors of the Day of Resurrection and the sins committed by the heedless, such as giving an ear to slander, gossip and song, coveting that which God had declared forbidden, adultery, sodomy, prostitution and filth. He spoke of the righteous path: hotter than burning coals, more slender than a hair, sharper than a knife-edge, more elusive than a fox, with Paradise at one end and hellfire beneath it and no way forward but along its back. Another sheikh spoke of death, when they place you in the grave and the two angels, Munkir and Nakeer, come to judge you; then he wept and wept and with him wept Soha and little Lulua.
A few months later and the uncle started urging Fahd to enrol at the College of Sharia Law, promising that he would come top of his class and get a job as a judge or court clerk. Despite the overpowering influence of his uncle, Fahd never even considered it. His loathing of the man had grown after he took down his father’s portrait from the living room wall. Fahd took the picture to his bedroom where he was now confined, when in his father’s time the whole house had been his. He hung the picture facing his bed, but his uncle surprised him in the room one day and screamed, ‘You’re in need of some re-education. Pictures are not to be glorified, don’t you understand?’
His uncle took the picture down and flung it to the ground. ‘I don’t want to see any pictures in this house after today. Pictures are forbidden. You just don’t get it. Angels won’t enter a house where there are pictures. God protect me from you!’
He went out and Fahd froze, the fingers clutching his ruler and open biology textbook suddenly numb. He got to his feet, the needle stitching its thread through his chest. He lifted up his father’s smiling portrait, the one taken at Studio Zamani in Thalatheen Street with its painted backdrop of books on a shelf. Sobbing, he kissed it and then hid it behind his clothes in the wardrobe. When he went to bed at night he would lock his door, take it out and sit talking to his father, reproaching him:
‘Why did you betray me, Father? You had no right to run off and leave me to face life on my own. You had no right letting this person meddle with my life. Have you noticed that the only thing left of you in your own house is inside my wardrobe? All of this because of your brother, with his belly, his beard and his stink like the smell of the dead. Sometimes I think that he really is dead. He smells like a corpse as he climbs the stairs to the house. I don’t know, I just smell dead men climbing the stairs. I even feel that you’re alive, sometimes, that behind my clothes you’re more alive than him.’
Nor did Abu Ayoub find it easy to accept Saeed, the family friend, coming into the house. This young man, raised by Suleiman as a favour to his fellow inmate Mushabbab, who had spent happy days as one of the family and often travelled with them to Sharqiya and Ta’if, was now banned from their home.
‘I’m not worried about your boy other than from that Southerner,’ Abu Ayoub shouted to the back of Soha’s head one day as she stood silently before the stove making his bitter coffee. ‘His father was a terrorist, one of Juhayman’s group, and his family are a bunch of degenerate Zero-Sevens. Come into this house? Not a chance. I’ve bumped into him in the majlis a few times wearing a T-shirt and underwear and nothing else.’
One evening, when the uncle was with his first wife, Umm Yasser, Saeed called Fahd up to invite him out to Yamama College.
‘We’ll catch a play and get a break from studying.’
Fahd agreed and told him that he would wait at Tareeqati Café, to avoid the possibility of his uncle surprising him outside the door as he got into Saeed’s car. He had no desire to bring the man’s rage and ranting down on his mother. When it was time for the sunset prayer he put his shimagh over his shoulder, told her he was going out and hurried off.
Saeed was sitting in his car outside the café. Before getting in Fahd motioned with his hand to say that he would fetch some coffee. Saeed nodded. When Fahd pushed the glass door he found that it was locked. He peered inside where the dim lights glowed but saw no one. He rapped his knuckle against the glass. Saeed got his attention with a soft honk of the horn and held his hand in front of his mouth like a megaphone, indicating that it was a prayer time. Inside the café a little sign dangled down above the door: Closed for Prayer.
Fahd got in and Saeed told him that he had been to the college the evening before and there were cafés and restaurants by the main entrance. They set off towards Qaseem Road and as they approached Quwa al-Amn Bridge, Saeed moved to the right lane and turned left, heading back to Riyadh on the service road. At the corner of the college’s outer wall he turned right and they passed through the northern gate, finding a parking space some distance from the main building. It was still early but they walked until they had almost crossed the courtyard in front of the entrance.
‘Some coffee or tea?’ Saeed asked.
‘Ummm … There’s a poetry evening that should be wrapping up now. Let’s go and watch some.’
‘Fahd, I don’t feel like modern poetry, and anyway I don’t understand any of it.’
‘Fine, we’ll just take a look. It’s still half an hour till the play. Enough time to get a tea or coffee. What do you say?’
‘OK.’
They entered the half-full auditorium, found a place in the centre and quietly sat down. In front of them were four bearded young men. One had long hair that flopped down over his shoulders despite being covered by a shimagh, while in the front row the other three sat wearing brown mashlahs.
‘I want to try and understand this,’ whispered Saeed.
‘Concentrate and you will.’
The words were not difficult, emerging slowly, precisely and rhythmically from the mouth of a poet in his sixties who waved his right hand as he looked out at the audience through his spectacles, his intonation staccato as he pressed on the words to mould and shape them. After him there was a younger poet who recalled his time in prison and coming home a stranger, the kisses of his friends and girlfriends …
‘Girlfriends? What? The kisses of his girlfriends! In front of these people, in a city like Riyadh?’ It was the bearded man in the brown mashlah, rolling his eyes so the whites showed as he tried to interrupt the poet. ‘This is not permitted. This is promoting disgusting behaviour!’
But the audience were applauding the poet enthusiastically and the extremist began muttering, ‘God suffices me and is my best provider. God suffices me and is my best provider,’ as one of the others, a sparsely bearded teenager, shouted, ‘Peace be upon you!’ into a mobile phone in an attempt to create a distraction.
Fahd gave Saeed a kick and gestured towards them: ‘They’re going to wreck the show. Trust me.’
Saeed drew closer and whispered with bitter sarcasm, ‘I’d be worried if they hadn’t already wrecked the country a long time ago.’
The men in the dark brown mashlahs, some of them with their shimaghs pulled back to leave their skull-caps half exposed, were being joined at regular intervals by groups of teenagers with shaven temples, who took their heads and kissed them to break people’s concentration on the poets and draw attention to themselves.
As soon as the reading came to an end they tried to mount the stage and hand out advice to what they saw as the sinning, misguided poets and guide them to the path of righteousness. But the security guards in their sky blue uniforms smoothly blocked their way, asking them to remain calm while the poets were led off backstage, and so the event ended peacefully.
Fahd left the auditorium followed by Saeed and got a plain, black coffee, while Saeed had tea. They found an empty table and sat down, parking their paper cups. The smell of fried chips filled the air. By the entrance the young extremists huddled around the men in mashlahs.
‘Don’t they look like football players gathered around the coach at half-time?’ Saeed said.
‘Well they’re certainly playing with the country. I get the feeling we’ll have problems tonight.’
Squeezing a Lipton teabag around his spoon, Saeed said casually, ‘No. They’re
all talk. Trust me.’
‘You’re wrong, Saeed. That’s what you think.’
‘After all the terrorism they’ve lost their hold over people.’
A cold northerly breeze had made the coffee cool quickly, though Fahd drank black Americanos no matter how cold. He took a short sip: ‘Believe me, they’re not done yet. They’re like locusts. We’ve got them at school, my friend: they lure the students into the Islamic Awareness Society or the Islamic Club.’
Crushing the paper cup powerfully with his hand, Saeed whispered, ‘OK, then, do you know what those two groups are?’
‘They’re terrorists.’
Saeed laughed and winked. ‘Don’t turn into a takfeeri and declare them all infidels! Islamic Awareness is the Muslim Brotherhood and the Club is the Surour Group.’
‘Surour my arse. Listen Saeed, that lot are the furthest thing from happy and carefree. They’re always scowling. It’s like the whole world is wrong and they’re the only ones who are right.’
‘No. Listen here Fahd: it’s nothing to do with surour, the word for happiness. I’ve read a lot about them online. They’re called Surourists after Mohammed Surour Zein al-Abedeen from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. He fled Syria and came to Saudi Arabia and preached among you lot in Buraida until he got together a group of young acolytes. They became teachers and sheikhs and that’s how a number of tributary organisations branched off, known as the secondary Surourist parties. They’ve split from the Muslim Brotherhood; there’s disagreement between the two, I mean.’
‘I don’t think these types have real disagreements; they’re all cut from the same cloth.’
‘On the contrary. They get into serious quarrels and they fight dirty. Take the Islamic Awareness Society and the Islamic Club at school: if you look closer you’ll find there’s a hidden conflict between the two, and sometimes it comes out into the open. The students think that every teacher is trying to increase the number of students in his club, but in reality he’s recruiting for the parties that lie behind them.’
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