Finally, he said, “Your mother will become one of the .”
I frowned and looked down at the wood patterns in the table. This answer did not settle well with me. My brother Ibrahim had once told me angrily that in the Koran, Muhammad referred to women as the “ground that we walk on.” We could not think of our mother that way.
I could feel everyone staring at me, waiting. Finally, I looked up at Father. “If Mother works hard in this life and dies as al-shaheed, why doesn’t she get seventy-two virgin men?”
My uncles’ mouths popped open. Then they looked at each other, threw their heads back, and roared with laughter. My father’s face flushed red, and a vein on his neck began to pulse. Then, quick as a cobra, his hand closed the distance to my face. Whack!
“Insolent boy! Never talk about your mother that way!”
My father glared at my uncles, but the joker Khalid did not care what my father thought, and he snorted out loud. Mother did not say a word.
My question ended madrassa that day. But a week later, I was out on the roof chasing lizards through the liquid sun when my father emerged through the door from the living room and walked to the wall overlooking our street. I went over and stood beside him. Below, a vegetable merchant slowly wheeled his cart past a knot of giggling girls. Marie, the Christian girl from next door, was down there.
My father pulled a lighter from the pocket of his white shirt and lit a Kent. Leaning his elbows on the wall, he turned his head toward me. “Do you remember what you asked me about your mother?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Your mother will become the head of the , the head of the seventy-two,” he said. “She will be in charge of them all.”
Father never told me where he got that. Maybe he went to the mosque and asked the imam. If he did, I learned later, the imam most certainly told him, “The woman gets nothing.”
But Father could not come and tell me that.
5
People traveled to Beirut from all over the world, and the richest ones rented chalets—colorful tents on the seashore. Yellow stripes, blue stripes, white, red, like candy dotting the sand. Americans called them cabanas. The rich people jetted across the cobalt water on their big boats with wooden skis, nearly naked in their western swimsuits. It was the fancy life.
“These people bring evil with them,” Mother told me. “When the flesh is exposed, the devil gets loose.”
I nodded solemnly, but was secretly fascinated.
During the summer, Saturday was my favorite day. The whole family would get up at the crack of the sun and walk the short distance to the shore. I remember those walks, my heart beating, excited to visit the sea again. From my dreaming window, the Mediterranean had always called to me, inviting me to explore its endless blue depths. To come and dabble at its cool, clear edge was to me like ruffling stars at the fringe of another universe.
At that hour, the infidels would not yet have defiled the water, Mother and Father told us, having stayed up too late the night before indulging in their debaucheries.
I walked along the shore with my brothers and sisters, collecting seashells and watching tiny crabs scurry across the wet sand. Rising over the mountains behind us, the sun turned the sea foam pink as it tickled our ankles. My aunt and sisters waded into the water wearing bathing suits underneath long shirts and snug pants down to their ankles. They did not remove these outer garments even when they swam. Afterward, they were careful to wrap up tightly and quickly, not wanting anyone who might be out early to see their hair or skin.
On these days, my father tried to teach me to be a man. He would grab me and throw me into the water with just one instruction: “Swim back if you want to live!”
6
In madrassa, when we learned about Sura 99, “The Earthquake,” my father sat with us again.
“At the day of judgment, Allah will bring all your good works and your bad works together and put them on a scale,” he said, looking pointedly at me and each of my brothers as we sat on the kitchen floor. “If your good works outweigh your bad works, you will go to heaven more quickly. If your bad works outweigh your good works, you will go to hell.”
My own works flipped through my mind like snapshots: fighting with my brothers and sisters…helping myself to guavas and plums from my grandfather’s garden…the “medical games” I secretly played with Marie next door.
I am in bad trouble….
I glanced across the table at my younger brother Omer and saw no concern. Nothing fazed him; he was always happy as a little rabbit. But Ibrahim would not look at me. I could see he was as tormented as I, stuck somewhere in his thoughts like a mouse in a trap.
Father had talked to us several times about the flames of hell and the tormenting giants who would use meat hooks to rip you apart. We had already learned that, according to the Koran, every Muslim, except for al-shaheed, has to pass through hell. There, Allah purifies you through burning. After a long time, if you were not an altogether bad Muslim, Allah would excuse you and admit you to a dry place between heaven and hell. Finally, if you pleaded many times, Allah would let you into jannah. You would be among the lowliest and receive only a few virgins and a little bit of food. But Mother assured us that even this was much better than earth.
After madrassa was over, I scurried to the bathroom and climbed up into my secret place, the attic where we stored rice and grain and kept blankets in the summer. My heart was melting completely because I knew I had no hope. I was not even good enough to make it to the dry place.
My breath came short and quick as I thought about the demons with the meat hooks. Leaning back against a sugar sack, I thought, My deeds will have to make a place for me.
I remembered the teaching about al-shaheed, the martyrs for Allah. My mother had taught us that one Muslim man has the strength of ten infidels, just like Prince Ali Baba in The Arabian Nights. As the comforting smell of wheat and rice seeped through the cloth bags all around me, I looked up at the rafters and meditated on legendary Islamic warriors. One would charge at hundreds, knowing he was going to his death. The idea, I had learned, was to take as many infidels with you as you could. I imagined myself as the great Muslim general, Khalid ibn Walid, or as Omer ibn al-Khatb, the second caliph. Father had told us that wherever Omer walked, Satan ran away.
I could be a great warrior like that.
I knew I did not want to grow up to be an evil man, not like that bandit who had dishonored his mother. And I remembered what Father had told us: “The first drop of infidel’s blood you shed, you can provide atonement for seventy of your loved ones.”
No matter how bad and evil I am now, I thought, one day I can save myself and my family. One afternoon during madrassa, my mother taught us something amazing. She was reading from her treasured Koran. Omer was only about four at the time. Mother sat on the floor at the end of the kitchen table, and he stood at her side, tracing the words with his tiny finger. She was reading the Sura 9:5, which teaches that infidels do not deserve to live.
“Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them,” Mother read. She then looked up to expound.
“My sons, if you kill a Jew, on the day of judgment your right hand will light up before the throne of Allah, and all his heavenly host will celebrate.”
When she said this, I flashed back to an incident a couple of years before. At a young age, a sign had emerged that I was destined for trouble: when I colored with my crayons or ate my food, I naturally used my left hand. To my mother and father, this was intolerable.
In Islam, the importance of the right hand, and the “right” in general, cannot be overstated. Infidels are “the people of the Left.” Muslims are “the people of the Right.” We sit at Allah’s right hand, the side of goodness and righteousness. The good Muslim, when he greets a friend or makes a vow or opens the Koran, or even when he eats, does so with his right hand. When he dresses for work in the morning, he first puts on his right sleeve, his right pant leg, his right shoe. When
he washes at the mosque, he washes his right hand first.
His left hand is reserved for unholy business, such as going to the bathroom or having sex with his wife.
Left-handed people are shunned. So, when I began using my left hand, my mother took to stinging it with one of her welt-raising switches.
I was not yet three years old on the day I was sitting on the nuniah, the training toilet, when my father got home. That was the hour when my mother delivered her daily damage report: which son had done this or that, which one had gotten into the most trouble. That particular day, as she finished running down the household news, my mother and father came and stood at the doorway to the water closet where I sat.
“…and I caught Kamal using his left hand,” Mama concluded her report.
“Burn it,” my father said without hesitation.
“What?” mother said.
“Burn his hand.”
Burn my hand! With fire?
“No, no, no!” I cried from the nuniah, my pants bunched around my ankles. My mother disappeared from the doorway and returned with a small box of kitchen matches. Crowding past my father into the tiny room, she came and squatted on the floor before me. She grabbed my left hand and put it under her left arm.
“No, Mama! No!” I cried.
Mama twisted around so that I faced her back, my arm clamped in the vise between her left arm and side.
A strike. A sizzle. A whiff of sulfur.
“No! Please!” I screamed, now choking with fear.
I pushed at her and kicked with my feet. I kicked the nuniah and it tipped over; a pool of urine spread around my feet. The heat of flame licked near my hand, and I fought wildly.
“Mama, don’t hurt me!”
Suddenly, she let go. Turning to face me, she blew out the match. A curl of bitter smoke snaked up my nostrils.
From the doorway came my father’s voice: “You are a Muslim child, and you will use your right hand.” Then he turned and walked away.
I cried all night long and would not allow any of my brothers and sisters to talk to me. That my mother who loved me would burn me was scarier than anything else. I decided that no place was safe.
I had not thought of that day for a long time until Mama told us about our right hand lighting up before Allah. Now I was thankful she had corrected me, that I might instinctively use my right hand to kill an infidel and not displease Allah by using my left.
“Why do we do this?” I asked.
Killing infidels is one of the ways Allah would open heaven for us, she told us. The more infidels we killed, the better our chances to move quickly from punishment to paradise.
“It is your duty,” she said. “It is the duty of the faithful to punish and harass the Jews and Christians, who are thieves and traitors to Islam. They are cursed as monkeys and pigs, and their spirits are unclean. It is in the Book.”
Aspen, Colorado
2007
In July 2007, Walid Shoebat and I met in Aspen to address a meeting of the Jewish-Christian Relations (JCR) on the subject of anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism. Speaking to this audience was an extraordinary experience for me, meeting eye to eye with the very people I had been brought up to think of as my blood enemies. After leaving Islam, I had embraced the teaching that people “of every nation” were the same in God’s eyes. By the time I met with Walid for the JCR conference, I had believed that for more than twenty years. The opportunity to (perhaps, in some small way) redeem some of the evil I had committed against this people was of great meaning to me.
Our stay in Aspen was brief, and the glorious summer made me wish we could stay longer. Around us, the Rocky Mountains, blue-green with spruce and pine and still capped with snow even in July, jumped out in sharp relief from the crisp Colorado sky. The morning of our departure, my wife, Victoria, and I sat by our hotel swimming pool chatting over coffee with Walid.
Walid is not Walid’s real name. Born in Bethlehem of Judea, Walid’s grandfather was the Muslim mukhtar, or chieftain, of a village in Israel called Beit Sahour-Bethlehem. While living in Jericho, Walid lived through and witnessed Israel’s Six-Day War. Like me, he joined the PLO at a young age and was later imprisoned in the Russian Compound, Jerusalem’s central prison, for committing violent acts against Israel. After his release, he resumed his acts of terror against the Jews, eventually continuing them in the United States, though in the form of fomenting propaganda against Israel while working as a counselor for the Arab Student Organization at Loop College in Chicago.
Though schooled in violence, Walid was also an intensely scholarly man whose jihad was informed by hundreds of hours of Islamic study. Ultimately, it was his intellectual bent that led him to abandon holy war. Islamist men are taught that they can marry Christian or American women in order to convert them, or to gain innocent-looking entry into a certain society. In 1993, in a challenge to convert his Christian wife to Islam, Walid studied the Hebrew Scriptures. Within six months, he decided that everything he had been taught about the Jews was a lie. Convinced he had fought his whole life on the side of evil, he became an advocate for his former enemy, speaking to tens of thousands at churches, synagogues, and civic groups, and to government leaders and media about the cause of Israel.
For that, he was marked by the jihadists for death—and by many in the American media as a bigot and a charlatan. As we sat by the hotel pool, steam rising from its surface and from our coffee cups, he told me that soon I would be marked as well.
“I have a real concern with your security,” he told my wife and me. “You both need to understand that as Kamal becomes better known, you will need to eat, sleep, and breathe security.”
Victoria looked at me, concern straining her eyes.
Walid had been speaking out against radical Islam for five or six years by then, but I had only recently joined the fight. I could tell he thought me an innocent who was far too willing to think the best of the other guy in the room, unworried about embracing, shaking hands, and sharing personal stories.
He had learned the hard way to be more careful. “I was targeted several times,” he told us gravely. “They tried to find me and my family. We had to keep moving from place to place, hiding. To find a safe place, I eventually had to move out of the country.”
Walid’s grim manner sent fear spearing through my heart. He reminded us of what had happened to Zakariah Anani, the third member of our trio, who had received multiple death threats. In Canada, jihadists burned up his car and burned down his house.
“Every one of us in the Shoebat family is continually conscious of our environment, our surroundings,” Walid said. “We wonder, are we being followed? Are we being watched? It is always at the forefront of our minds.”
I looked at my wife and could see reality beginning to sink in on her face. Walid was telling us that if we continued on this path, our lives would never be the same.
“Move often,” he urged. “Get an 800 number. Make sure that your real name never appears on any documents.”
He told us to hire a registered agent to handle all our business transactions and never to reveal where we live.
“Above all,” he said, “trust no one.”
Beirut, Lebanon
1964
1
In madrassa, Mother loved to talk about how her ancestor warriors, Arabs and Turks, had used their thick and heavy swords to lop off the heads of Jews. They were men of great courage, she said. Muslim warriors were clever and strong, first piercing the enemy’s armor with their swords, then severing the infidels’ arms from their bodies.
“Now the Jews and Christians could not raise their swords against the Muslim fighters,” Mother told us. “And that’s when the Muslims chopped off the infidels’ heads.”
That day, during our coloring time, I pictured myself on a white horse slicing through enemy armies with my mighty Muslim sword. As a child of six, when your mother loves you so much and is nourishing you, you believe her with every part of your bein
g. Among my brothers and sisters, I was the one who believed the most. I was the one with the big faith. I used to lie on my back on our concrete roof, drinking in the passing clouds. In them, I saw Allah’s creations. Some were glorious and mighty like a snowy mountain or an eagle. Some were funny, like cartoon trees and toucans and fat elephants, as if in scrawling his art in the heavens, Allah was trying on purpose to make me laugh.
Allah must be great, I thought. He must be big. He must be awesome!
With the world he created as my witness, there was no question about my mother’s honesty. To me, she spoke the mother’s milk of truth.
That night, I had a dream so powerful that I never forgot it. I saw myself sitting on a haughty white horse, wielding a saif, a heavy double-edged sword, in each hand. The Day of Islam had come about, the day when Muslim warriors would cleanse the earth of every infidel and establish the true religion, the day that every infidel would convert or die, the day that Umma would be complete.
In my dream, I rode bareback without armor, no shoes on my feet and wearing only the white sherwal, bloused pants tight below the knees and above the waist, like the Ottomans. In the eye of my dream, I knew this was a battle of no return. I might die, I knew, but I would take with me as many infidels as I could. Sleek, muscular, and majestic, my horse stamped and snorted amid an army of fierce Muslim fighters, all of us ready to charge under the scarlet flags of Islam. Rank after rank in military formation, we faced off against an army of our enemies arrayed against us across a vast, foggy battlefield.
One warrior cried out, then many: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” One nation, one voice!
The infidels charged. Unafraid, I kicked my stallion’s flanks and galloped forward, racing the wind. Setting my horse’s reins free, I plunged into the enemy formation, drew my swords from their scabbards and swung them left and right in deadly arcs. Every sweep of my blades sent a man’s head tumbling off his shoulders and onto the ground. At this sight, the Islamic dream warriors cheered for me, chanting, “Wa Islama! Wa Islama!” Power to Islam!
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 3