Undercover Muslim Read online

  Sadly, such encounters never happened. They were unthinkable in our neighbourhood since there were no tourists anywhere nearby and, by bad luck, they didn’t happen on our excursions to the Old City.

  Instead, when we went into the Yemeni streets, we tended to bump into Yemenis. The truth is that no matter how regal and Islamic their costumes are, two foreigners in Yemeni robes speaking French in the Sana’a street will not look like proud, indomitable Muslims who have embarked, at considerable expense and personal risk, on the Straight Path. They’ll just look strange to the locals. When Said and I ambled down the pavement in front of our mosque the Yemeni men we encountered stared at us with expressions of blank incomprehension.

  If we were in a cafe or on a bus, a public-minded person sitting nearby would sometimes raise his voice. ‘Brothers, where are you from?’ he would ask. The other Yemenis would lean in and stare. Said considered himself a citizen of the ummah, period. More detailed discussions about national origin would have required him to explain about his Algerian-immigrant parents, his rejection of France, his embrace of Salafism, his hopes of finding a true Islamic home in Yemen, and on and on. It was none of anyone’s business. Furthermore, he worried that the police might take an interest in his interest in Salafism.

  So, in public, he usually scowled and said little. Curious Yemenis, however, would always persist.

  Eventually, some cheerful, well-meaning Yemeni would bring a new question to the floor. It was always the same one: ‘Are you Muslims?’

  This ignorance rankled. Were the Yemenis really this innocent? Apparently so. Of course we were Muslims. There were times when I wanted to seize these bumpkins by the throat. ‘Look, brother,’ I would have said. ‘When someone dresses like this, with the beard, the sandals, the waist dagger, the robe and the prayer beads, and when this person is in Yemen, it’s probably a safe bet that, yes, he’s a Muslim. Although he’s speaking French. Although his features are not Yemeni but North African.’ I was tempted but never did it.

  Still, we were both annoyed that we had to spell things out for the slow-witted people of Yemen. Could they not read the most basic social cues? Could they not perform the most rudimentary of social obligations, namely welcoming their fellow Muslims to Yemen? Apparently not. Apparently the average bus passenger in Yemen felt that when people spoke French, had foreign facial features, and wore Yemeni robes, they might well be space aliens, dressed in dishdashas.

  We were trying but we weren’t exactly relaxing into the warm embrace of a Yemeni society.

  * * *

  Most French students arriving in Yemen head off to one of the various countryside Koran schools sooner rather than later. Their lives then have order and promise.

  But Said had already spent two months in Dammaj. He felt that the place was too isolated, the valley in which the school sat too narrow and dark, and the students too desperate for money to be decent to one another. The Algerians who lived there, he said, were not above stealing money from your pockets as you slept in the mosque. They were jackals, he said, and the French brothers were not much friendlier. ‘They will calumniate against you,’ he declared, ‘and stab you in the back.’ So he returned to Sana’a where he found himself, after five months away, in a less purposeful, less certain state of mind than he had been when he lived in France.

  To keep himself busy, he went to the school secretary’s office every morning to enquire about his passport. He had given the passport to the school in the hope of gaining a residency permit; it had then vanished. But not entirely. As far as we could discern, it was behaving rather like a carrier pigeon. Ahmed, the secretary, had released it but he was confident that it would return some day. At first, we understood that it was resting over at the Immigration and Passport Authority, maybe taking on a new message of some kind and preparing for the return flight. It would come home in due course.

  Then later on, towards the end of June, a Yemeni in our mosque whose good relations with the visa office had got him a job as a conduit between our school and the visa centre, told Said that he had sighted it in a nest of papers in the office of Sheikh Moamr. He said that he was quite sure he’d never taken Said’s passport to the Immigration and Passport Authority, or anywhere else.

  By the second week of July, news of the passport petered out. Maybe it had been left on a lonely ledge? Carried away by an eagle? ‘It’s in the hand of God,’ said Ahmed. ‘It will come back, by his will.’ For a while, the conduit person seemed to say that he had seen it at the foreign ministry, but when we pressed him one afternoon, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re Said from France?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I thought you were Abbas from London. I guess I didn’t see your passport after all.’

  ‘It’s being prepared and is on its way,’ said Ahmed. ‘Soon, inshallah, it will be ready for you.’

  It failed to turn up.

  Meanwhile, Said’s brother in Lille was losing patience. When Said first arrived in Yemen, he had been curious and had seemed to offer his help. But over time, the brother’s mood changed and now, when Said called, he almost always got an earful.

  The brother happened to be a percipient observer of Said’s character. Even though they were delivered from halfway across the world, his observations cut to the quick. ‘You’re not becoming a student of knowledge at all,’ he told Said once. ‘You’re just a beggar. Go ahead, then. Beg from the passers-by.’

  On some days, Said took the setbacks in his stride. ‘They are tests from Allah and Allah never sent anyone a test that was too strong for him,’ he would say. ‘C’est une épreuve d’allah, c’est sûr.’ He would suggest we visit our customary tea shop, on the avenue in front of the mosque, and when we got there, he would lean back in his chair and stare into the passing traffic and smile. ‘Do you know that outside of Sana’a,’ he would say, ‘the Sunnah allows you, and it is customary to do this if you are on a pilgrimage, to eat from the fields of the farmers and to sleep in their shelters when you are tired? Of course, you cannot walk away with armloads of vegetables. You cannot stay in a farmer’s house for a year, but it is the custom in the countryside to give food and shelter to pilgrims. I used to eat lettuces and carrots from the fields outside Roubaix. In France, you can be put in jail for this of course which is one of the reasons I had to leave. In Yemen, it is in the traditions of the Prophet. You are honoured, and especially so as a pilgrim.’

  ‘Are you suggesting we walk to Mecca?’ I would ask.

  ‘No,’ he would say. ‘But we could. We could also take a bus. It costs 16 euros for a one-way ticket.’

  When Said talked like this, it seemed clear to me that he liked Yemen, despite its difficulties, and that his faith was deepening from day to day. He would go to Mecca. He would commit himself, once and for all, to a life in the Arab world.

  But there were other, equally eventless days, when the discouraging phone calls from France, his lack of friends in the mosque, and the unscrupulous school officials seemed to be souring him on the religious life.

  On those days, he seemed resolved to confront reality, openly and without illusions. When the topic of our future movements came up, he would stare into his tea, then turn his eyes on the broken-down taxis and cow-carrying pickups passing in front of our mosque. He would look at the grease-stained turbans of drivers. The drivers would look at us with their wide, hungry eyes as if they had never once laid eyes on a foreigner.

  ‘For the love of God,’ Said would say. ‘Would you look at these broken-down people? Des vagabonds! Des clochards!’ Before the end of our discussion, inevitably, one of the trucks would break down, or a minibus would break down, or a taxi, or several of these in combination, and then the bus passengers would get out into the street and other drivers would stop to stare, and tribesmen would mill around, pushing at the dead vehicles, or just watching them. Every driver with a working horn would lean on it. Gazing into the chaos, Said would clap his palm to his forehead. ‘In the name of God the merciful!’ he would shriek. ‘How on earth
did I get here? How can I get out?’

  Then he would turn to me. ‘You dream of becoming like them?’ he would say. ‘Is that why you converted to Islam? No, my friend, we are not living in the seventh century any more. Why are you so interested in studying Islamic science, anyway? It’s enough to get an honest job in an Islamic country, to pray and to fast. It’s enough to work. Man must work! This is a commandment. Must you memorise the Koran? Do you need to know every ruling from every mufti in every century since the arrival of the Prophet? Don’t be ridiculous, my American friend.’

  * * *

  On those mornings, his fantasies settled on workaday neighbourhoods – outlying districts in Cairo or Amman or a mountain town in the Algerian Kabylie, where his parents had been raised. Yes, he admitted, the true Islam had not reached such places and the people there, especially in Algeria, often practised a bastardised, peasant’s version of Islam. ‘But so what? When we travel, we will bring Islamic science with us,’ he would say. ‘We will give them da’wa’ – preaching – ‘and show by example. It’s not necessary to turn yourself into an Islamic monk with zero riyals in his pocket and a robe just to prove you’re a Muslim. Where in the Koran does it say you must do that?’

  The solution to Said’s dilemma appeared to him one afternoon in the third week of July. We had had a difficult but not untypical day: an argument in the heat of the midday sun with a cab driver, followed by a failed attempt to recover the passport at the Passport Authority. On the way back to the mosque, we had witnessed a brutal incident in which a man in a Mercedes knocked a street sweeper to the ground with his car.

  After the asr, or mid-afternoon, prayers, we stood in the aisle of a Western-style supermarket near our mosque as Yemeni housewives in robes and veils prodded us with their shopping carts. They wanted us out of their way and were not shy about pushing. In supermarkets, Yemeni women can be aggressive, like fiercely determined babushkas with impaired peripheral vision.

  ‘This is not Islam,’ said Said casually as we watched the women retrieving boxes of chocolate-covered maraschino cherries from a shelf high above their heads. He waved his arms at the black forms in front of us and shook his head. We watched the scene for several minutes as the shortcomings of Islam as it exists in Sana’a today flooded into his mind: the madness for Western products, the cupidity of the merchants, the beggars in the mosque hallways, the universal addiction to drugs and cigarettes, the pollution of the air, and the unaccountability of rich people – here was one long j’accuse that had been building in Said’s head for some time. Muslims were meant to be sincere, mild, seekers of knowledge, he said. In fact Islam in Sana’a was broken. ‘It’s an insane asylum,’ he said, ‘in which the patients have thrown off their restraints and ransacked the shelves and are now crawling over one another for drugs and food and water. It’s unliveable,’ he concluded. Invivable.

  He turned to me. ‘You think you will learn about Islam here, in this mess? If you want to learn,’ he said, ‘you have no choice but to go to Dammaj. In fact, I order you to go. Do you agree?’

  I agreed.

  He stepped closer to me. ‘Are you sure you are not an agent for the Mossad?’ I assured him I was no one’s agent.

  He stared at me for a few moments to make sure I was on the level, and I stared back. ‘I’m ready when you are,’ I said.

  We made our plan there in the supermarket as the Yemeni babushkas clambered after their chocolates. ‘At last you will breathe the pure air of Islam,’ Said said. He didn’t know why we had waited this long. I felt I was waiting this long because the Dar al-Hadith was a serious academy, requiring deep knowledge of the Koran and the hadith. But I was also interested in exploring, and if this was where the currents were inclined to take me, I was inclined to go.

  A van, he said, left our mosque once a week for this village in the north. Said would make my arrival in the village easy by introducing me to the sheikh of Dammaj and to the French residents. In exchange for these introductions, Said suggested, I would pay for his trip. After a month, if he wanted to go on to Mecca, I would pay for that trip, too. The total would amount to about $200. Are you agreed?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Certainly.’

  We met the smuggler the next evening. He promised to remove our luggage from the mosque dorm the following morning at dawn. We would take our places in a second car, a van, which would be waiting outside the mosque. The smuggler needed $160 to drive us into the north. He looked me over. ‘For him,’ he remarked to Said, ‘since I don’t know him, I’ll need the permission of the imam of the mosque, or a teacher. I can’t take anyone off the street to Dammaj.’

  I called a mosque teacher. ‘Thabit’s iman is strong and getting stronger,’ said the teacher when he turned up, a few minutes later. The smuggler was satisfied. I thanked the teacher and thanked the smuggler. We agreed to meet at dawn the following morning, after the prayers.

  I spent a sleepless night. There was still awkwardness in my prayers. There were thousands of ayats, or verses, in the Koran I knew nothing about. What if the brothers in Dammaj decided I was an imposter? What if, finding myself in over my head, I couldn’t leave? Am I being set up? I wondered. I tossed and turned.

  Le passeur, as Said called him, didn’t turn up for the dawn prayer. He didn’t turn up for the noon prayer either and in the afternoon during our customary tea-drinking hour at our tea shop, Said happened to recall that the evening before, he had had a conversation with some of the French brothers in the mosque. They were friends of a Parisian student, Qais. ‘Know him?’ Said asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It seems he and his friends blocked you. They didn’t want you to travel. They don’t trust you. Or maybe they just don’t know you. They say you should study the ilm – Islamic science – ‘in Sana’a for a while and that time will tell what kind of a Muslim you really are.’

  24

  MY COURSE IN ilm began right away. We met at eight o’clock every morning in a classroom next to Sheikh Moamr’s office. It was taught by Muhammad al-Taizi, a recent graduate of the Islamic Science department at Sana’a University. There was only one other student, Bilal, the car mechanic from Bradford.

  Almost everything I learned about Islam that summer came from the conversation the three of us – Bilal, Muhammad and I – had in the mornings, as a kindergarten class chanted Koran in the mosque below us and the other students of science dozed in their dorm rooms.

  Islam had come to Bilal eleven years earlier. He told us that he had led a disorderly life back then, involving dance clubs, beer and women.

  At first, after his discovery of Islam, his non-Muslim wife had tolerated his new name, his friends, and his new habit of praying five times a day. But she refused to convert.

  He left her eventually and she sued for divorce.

  The judge in the case, a woman, struck Bilal as a classic Muslim hater. She gave custody of his daughter to the ex-wife. In late 2005, as Bilal was selling his auto repair shop and planning to leave for Yemen, he offered the daughter an opportunity to convert. She could come with him and live in Yemen. But she was only eleven years old at the time and still under the sway of her mother. She refused.

  Now in Yemen, Bilal was one of the rare students in Sana’a capable of saying that the Islamic life he had dreamed of in England was happening to him, now. He had a new Muslim wife (also from Bradford), new children, stepchildren, and of course a new house. He went out of his way to be a positive, fatherly presence in the mosque. A crew of American teenagers whose parents had full-time jobs as English teachers needed supervision during the days. Instead of supervising them, Bilal befriended them, studied with them, and allowed them to fill in gaps in his knowledge of Arabic. Often, Bilal could be found in the afternoons in the mosque, surrounded by a circle of diligent, studying teenagers.

  That summer Bilal was also trying to help another young man in need called Azi, who had arrived recently from Niagara Falls. Azi barely spoke Arabic and ha
d gone to Catholic schools as a kid. Both of his parents were Yemeni immigrants to Canada, he was curious about Islam, and he was hoping that Islam would straighten out what had evidently been a troubled adolescence.

  In Canada, Azi’s speciality had been robbing banks. When I chatted with him, he liked to recall the exciting days when he had managed to sneak into banks, rob the tellers quietly, and get clean away. Once, he said, he had managed to net more than $40,000. He had bought himself a fast Honda and had gone on vacations with his girlfriend. Now, however, the money was gone, and the federal authorities on the Ontario-New York border were making inquiries among his friends back home.

  This was another reason for his new life in Yemen. He didn’t want to be napping some day in his bedroom only to have the door broken down by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  Azi admitted openly that he wasn’t much of a walker on the Straight Path. He advocated masturbation; he openly sought Somalian girlfriends. Most of the anglophone brothers in our mosque kept away from him and the Yemenis whom he resembled physically regarded him as anathema.

  Only Bilal made an effort to bring him into the fold.

  The two of them used to sit together for hours in the cafes along the avenue in front of our mosque. What they talked about I don’t know but I would often see them sitting together, poring over a text and sipping tea quietly. When I chatted with Azi in private, he would say of Bilal, ‘Yeah, he’s a good guy. He’s definitely helping me. He gives me advice and stuff. He wants to help me. I can’t even help myself so I don’t know how he can help me.’

  Bilal was trying. When he wanted to be tough, however, he could be very tough. Sometimes, in talking about the upside-down world of England, its female divorce judges, and the way women ran the society back home, he sounded like a man whose house had been invaded by evil spirits. They had penetrated to a deep, intimate place within him. He was angry about this violation and had come to Yemen to free himself from their power.