Undercover Muslim Read online

  One morning, as we were working through a grammar exercise, he noticed me drawing a self-portrait in my notebook. It wasn’t a great work of art but I was trying to make it prettier. I was almost finished when Bilal rose from his chair, strode across the classroom and snatched the notebook from beneath my pen.

  He returned to his chair, pulled out his own pen, and applied a spaghetti salad of heavy blue scribbles to my artwork. Then he ripped out the offending page and shredded it. Muhammad, our teacher, was busy trying to instruct us and didn’t appreciate the interruption. But Bilal didn’t care. When he was done obliviating my artwork, he turned to me and said, in English, ‘I did that for you, yeah. Only Allah, glory and praise upon him, has the power to create.’ People who tried to usurp this power, in his opinion, were magicians who conjured with spirits and would be condemned to hell on the Day of Judgment.

  He smiled tightly, then returned my exercise book to me. Towards the end of class, his mood lightened. ‘If you see an image on a bottle of dishwashing soap, or in a newspaper or what have you,’ he suggested, ‘just rip off the label before you bring it into your house. Understand?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said when he was finished with his speech. ‘I understand. No more images.’

  25

  THIS LESSON COULD hardly have been more explicit but that summer in Yemen representations of animate beings were everywhere. President Saleh, who was opening his re-election campaign, had had his face emblazoned across just about every possible surface in the city: it was plastered to billboards, bank facades and bus windows. It gazed down from the walls of restaurants and tea shops, and illuminated the front pages of the newspapers.

  One afternoon, when I was pedalling around town, I stopped to chat with a gaggle of child campaigners. Their clothing was covered with stickers depicting President Ali Abdullah Saleh. They had stationed themselves at an intersection and were passing out stickers and posters of President Saleh to drivers who were stalled in traffic.

  ‘Hey, foreigner! Do you love our president?’ one of them asked me.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Long live the president.’

  The kids high-fived me and marvelled at my bike. They asked to buy it, wondered how much it cost and when I told them it cost half a million Yemeni riyals or $1,000, they burst into laughter.

  As I was pedalling away, a tall, bold kid plastered a sticker of the president’s face across my backpack. ‘We love you!’ said the legend on the sticker.

  The next day, having forgotten about the kids and their stickers, I brought my backpack into the classroom with Bilal. The sticker had collected a coating of road grime by then but the president and the slogan were still visible. ‘Ali Abdullah Saleh: we love you!’

  Sitting down in my normal chair, I straightened my robe and adjusted my cap. I stacked my books on a corner of my desk.

  Bilal rose from his chair. He plucked the sticker from the backpack and raised it into the air, holding it away from his body as if it were a piece of toilet paper.

  ‘Look at what Thabit has gone and done now! Would you look at this then,’ he exclaimed. ‘Subhan allah! Would you look at this?’

  He went on for several minutes in this vein. He brandished the incriminating evidence and condemned politicians, image makers and Western programmes that polluted the land of the Prophet with democracy.

  Muhammad, our teacher, had had prior experience of Muslim enthusiasts from Europe. He had no training in teaching but he was an excellent classroom leader, who knew how to smooth ruffled feathers. He allowed Bilal to have his say and then held out his hand. ‘Give the sticker to me, please,’ he said in Arabic. Bilal deposited it on his desk.

  Without mentioning the words ‘politics’ or ‘magic’ or uttering any other condemnation, he folded the sticker in two, ripped it into bits, and, standing over a wastebin, let the shreds fall through the air. He returned to his desk and opened a Koran he kept in readiness on top of his grammar books. He chose a simple verse, one he knew that I knew, which happened to be about earthquakes, then nodded at me: ‘Recite, Thabit,’ he said.

  I think Bilal and I both got the message. His eloquence was in the way he detached the sticker from his hands, finger by finger, and in the way his eyes watched the shredded paper fall into the rubbish. That was quite enough. In that silence, he said that one didn’t make a show of despising the president. He said that Muslims, despite the current profusion of images in the streets, did not worship pictures, or tinpot dictators and did not allow themselves to be governed by them. They washed their hands of the entire business. In the face of such a thing as politics, a good Muslim would open the Koran, then read. In this way, over time, he would discover the strength that comes to those who walk on the Straight Path of God.

  26

  MUHAMMAD WAS AN excellent teacher but he was not a worldly man. He didn’t claim to be. He had grown up in Taiz, a small city to the south of Sana’a, and had moved to the capital to attend university. He mumbled in class and wasn’t a talented or a natural mentor. But everyone in our mosque respected him because he was a calm, thoughtful person who kept to himself, did not speak without thinking first, and then spoke only briefly and quietly.

  He hoped to take his sisters to Mecca in the autumn. If the trip came off, it would be his first trip outside Yemen.

  Sometimes, when the eight o’clock ilm class had run its course, and we were sitting downstairs in a cafe, Muhammad talked about his dream of marrying a Western woman. ‘If she is Muslim, where is the problem?’ he used to say. ‘There’s no problem. If I marry a Western woman, I could move to France or England and teach Islamic science, there, where it is most needed. No?’

  This kind of talk annoyed Bilal. Bilal felt that Muhammad had badly misunderstood what he was dreaming of when he dreamed of the West. More than once, he tried to teach our teacher a lesson: we in the West had badly screwed up our own countries, he said. Couldn’t Muhammad see that?

  One afternoon in late July, the three of us were sitting in the tea shop beneath our mosque. Monsoon thunderheads were coalescing in the sky to the south. We watched them expand into the highest part of the sky and felt the stiffening breeze blow through our robes. It was a good feeling and the tea was good.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Bilal addressing neither Muhammad nor me but speaking to both of us, ‘neither of you want to marry a woman from the West.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Maybe. Why not?’ wondered Muhammad.

  Bilal disagreed. He related a story that had been told to him by an old friend in Stoke-on-Trent. The friend had been having a drink one evening in a bar in a hotel there. He fell into conversation with a woman, one thing led to another, and within minutes, the woman had invited the man into her hotel bedroom.

  ‘Yes,’ said Muhammad. ‘Go on. I understand.’

  ‘No, she was wasn’t a prostitute, not at all,’ said Bilal. ‘Just a normal woman. When my friend, when he got up to her bedroom, yeah, he saw there was one guy stepping out the door, right? So he says “Hello, what’s this?” He steps into the room. And when he gets into the room, he sees there’s another fellow in the bathroom pulling up his jeans. “Hello, what’s this?” he thinks to himself. The men’s faces are all flushed, and they’re like smiling to themselves, like.’

  What had happened, Bilal explained, was that the woman had not been satiated by the sex she’d had with these two men. She had gone down to the bar to find a third partner for the evening. ‘Same room, same woman, same night, three men,’ said Bilal. He turned to face Muhammad. ‘Subhan allah, this is what it’s like. And you want to go there and live in that? With those animals?’

  Muhammad shrugged. ‘Not all of them that way,’ he said in English. ‘Impossible.’

  Bilal shook his head and grinned. ‘Yes, possible,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that so, Thabit? The girls have a few beers. Music. Then the girls get that special feeling going in them and then … you know how it is. This kind of thing happens all the time, doesn’t it?’

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sp; ‘When you put all the bars together and all the incidents and you think about it a little bit,’ I said. ‘Yeah, it probably does.’

  ‘Subhan allah,’ said Muhammad to himself. He shook his head. When Bilal had begun talking about Western women, Muhammad had listened hopefully, like a good student. Now a worried, disappointed, cold look came into his eyes.

  Bilal continued. He said that he had worked as a bouncer in a bar in Stoke, and had sometimes seen the same woman leave the bar five times with five different men – in one night. ‘I’ve seen it all,’ he said. ‘Woman with six guys on her. That happens, yeah?’

  Muhammad sank lower in his chair. He seemed to be focusing on a bird or cloud formation or aeroplane, far away, in the distance. ‘No. That can’t be,’ he protested. ‘I know that can’t be.’

  ‘Yeah, hell it can be,’ Bilal said. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes, haven’t I?’

  ‘If a woman do that, she dies,’ Muhammad murmured.

  Bilal and I shook our heads. ‘She may be tired,’ we said, ‘but she won’t drop dead.’

  ‘Yes, dead,’ said Muhammad. ‘Yes it is certain. Listen!’ He gestured at the clouds on the horizon. ‘Up there,’ he said, indicating with his hand the highest ridge off to the west of the city, which was just then being engulfed by a plume of desert steam. ‘Right up there,’ he said, ‘in that area, something happened recently. If you look closely, you can see a fortress on the ridge-line. Yes?’ In fact, all there was to see were waves of mist rolling in from the Red Sea. A block-like form on the ridge was disappearing under scraps of coalescing mist.

  ‘It happened near there,’ said Muhammad. ‘Behind.’ He thought about the issue for a moment more and then said, ‘Behind further. In the vicinity, in the valley beyond the mountains.’

  27

  ‘LAST YEAR,’ SAID Muhammad. ‘American soldier – training Yemeni soldiers. Up there in the mountains. See?’

  As part of the training, the American officer wanted the Yemeni soldiers under his command to have sex with a girl. These soldiers, being unmarried Muslims, were virgins. The American herded them into a troop carrier and drove them to a nearby village. A house was selected. ‘Any house,’ Muhammad said. ‘Just house. Small. Like this.’ He held his hand to the height of his waist.

  A door was knocked on, he said, and the door was opened. Behind it stood a girl in her black rayon robe and veil. This was her protection. ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ Muhammad said – ‘just tissue, a niqab.’

  As it happened, no male member of the family was at home that afternoon. The group of soldiers and their American lieutenant entered the house. They filed into the family’s only bedroom. ‘Off with the clothes,’ said the American. The soldiers raped the girl, one by one, over and over. As they were leaving, as the Yemeni soldiers were cleaning themselves up and putting their clothing back on and praying to God for forgiveness, the girl died.

  ‘Died?’ I asked. ‘How?’

  Muhammad opened his palm towards the storm clouds. He didn’t know. ‘From the hand of God,’ he guessed. ‘She just died. Dead. AIDS?’ He didn’t know. That evening, the family discovered the dead girl. They wept and cursed the Americans and called the village together. The father resolved to present himself to the officers at the nearby barracks. He would demand compensation. A village delegation was formed. ‘But when they got to the army camp, the officer, he say, “Go on. Away! You’re Yemeni villagers. Small men. We won’t pay anything.” Maybe the soldiers who committed the crime were put in the prison for some days,’ Muhammad continued. ‘Maybe two. Three possible. I don’t know.’ He couldn’t remember how many soldiers there were and how many days they were imprisoned. ‘Some few days. Then, go. Back to work. No punishment. Nothing. The American officer is still up in the fortress. He trains new soldiers now.’

  Even as Muhammad was telling it, I was pretty certain that I’d heard his story before. Sometimes, when a taxi driver told the story, the setting would be Egypt and the violated girl would not be a girl but someone’s wife or mum. Sometimes, in a chicken and rice restaurant, the aggressor would be an entire squadron of Americans and the victims would be entire villages in Iraq. Sometimes, the aggressor was a single American woman. The setting was a prison. Sometimes the rapists, as in Muhammad’s story, were just simple local soldiers, gone crazy with American advice. Always there was a confidence game, followed by an invasion, then sex, then death.

  In theory there were Muslim armies in the land of Islam. In theory the purpose of these armies was resistance to foreign invasion. But resist they did not. The native soldiers did what they were told. What did the Americans advise? They advised them to make war through sex. That was the American sickness, the way they conquered.

  And so somewhere up in the hills, somewhere close by, near a foreign military base, but where exactly no one knew, a girl whose essential innocence and connection to the land made an apt figure for the nation itself, lay dead. She had been dishonoured, murdered, as in a nightmare. She had been killed by the very people meant to defend her. Villagers had come to the scene of the crime, as they always do. They had raised their palms to the sky: Lord, who has done this? they had asked. And who will avenge us?

  An hour or so later, after Muhammad had gone home and I had gone off to the Old City to visit friends, the sky had turned into a blanket of lead. From the tower house in which I was sitting, which commanded a fantastic view, I could see the water falling in thick sheets across the mountains. When the rain hit the city, it came in gusts – wall after wall of heavy raindrops washing over the mosque domes and splashing against the apartment blocks. On the outskirts of the Old City, children stood on top of the bridges that arched over a spillway. That spillway was used as a road in the dry season. Now it was a river of detergent containers, cigarette packets, qat bags, bicycle inner tubes, election posters, branches, plastic teacups, sweet wrappers and clothing.

  The speed and the silence of the flood entranced the children. For fun, they hurled their bicycles into the water. Now and then a little minibus, piloted by some daring but unwise driver, tried to make its way into the river. The minibuses stalled, of course, and had to be pushed from the mud by squads of bystanders.

  The children of Sana’a loved these storms. Probably they needed them. The season’s rhythms of tension and release, tension and release were what the kids had instead of money and education.

  On those turbulent afternoons, the rains came like a great washing away. The whole city seemed to forget its frustration for a little while and to relax in the gust and the sheets of rain. After the downpours, the mosques were filled with drenched men warming themselves, whispering into their cupped hands and thanking Allah for the rain. Everyone wanted to register his gratitude. Everyone wanted to believe that Allah planned sparkling streams and fields of waving green for Sana’a.

  28

  AS JULY TURNED into August, the afternoon floods became more violent. Minibuses were carried away on tides of mud. Said, however, continued to be stuck. He had no passport, no money to buy a ticket out of the country, and nowhere to go. He slept on the prayer hall floor.

  While he waited for his deliverance, he was, not surprisingly, bored. He called home now and then. His brother insulted him. This made him, not surprisingly, frustrated. He visited Ahmed, the school secretary who smiled at him sweetly. ‘Ah yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘The passport? Tomorrow, by the will of God.’ There wasn’t much left for Said to do. He floated. His voyage of the spirit had stopped at the slough of despond.

  At least when he was eating, he could relax a little bit, be with friends and put his worries aside. So on most afternoons, at around one o’clock, while the Yemenis were buying their daily bags of qat, Said and I found ourselves searching the pavements near our mosque for a suitable restaurant. Is there anywhere, we wondered, that serves something besides chicken and rice? There wasn’t. Sometimes the restaurants served rice, and no chicken, followed by tea, or sometimes they served chicken and bread, follo
wed by tea. After a while, the sameness of the food and the sameness of the restaurants made us feel as though there wasn’t much left for us in the world except piles of overcooked rice. Each new pile brought on a new wave of despair.

  For a brief period, in August, before he left on his hajj, a fat Parisian brother, Omar, joined us for lunch. Omar came from a family of pizzeria owners in le 93, Seine-Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. He missed the food of home, as many foreign students in Yemen did, and missed the fun of sitting around a clean, quiet restaurant table with pizza, Coke, air conditioning and friends.

  In theory, when Omar, Said and I were together, we combined all the necessary ingredients to recreate a pleasant lunchtime experience: we had money, time and common interests.

  But the kind of food everyone liked, namely pizza, was far away, in a faux European neighbourhood on the other side of Sana’a. To consort with the kind of Yemeni who ate European food and hung around with faux Europeans bothered Omar and Said, and to travel into that neighbourhood of expensive cars, cellphone boutiques and imitation Starbuck coffee shops was, for them, to separate themselves from their routine of praying and recitation.

  So often, before lunch, our conversations unfolded like this:

  Said: That fast-food neighborhood of Pizza Quick is strictly for unbelievers. People wearing ties and so on. We should not go over there.

  Me: For heaven’s sakes! There isn’t an unbeliever within a million miles! This is Yemen!

  Omar: Said is right. I suppose we’ll have to eat the rice and chicken, Allah forgive us, that we always eat.