Undercover Muslim Read online

  Me: Brothers, we don’t have to. A pizza for three is $5. You want me to pay? I’ll pay for both of you. I have the money. It’s nothing. I don’t mind. You can pay me back when you are rewarded with prosperity, okay?

  Often, Omar and Said said that they could not allow me to pay, no matter how insignificant the sums involved were. They said it wasn’t entirely right according to Islam. Said reminded us that the Prophet had advised against incurring debts. As soon as the Prophet was cited, everyone acquiesced and we went off to a cement shack down the street from our mosque. It served boiled hens on top of piles of rice. We sat on the floor, next to teams of Yemeni diners who screamed at the waiters. The propane stove in the back of the room roared like a jet engine. We could hardly hear ourselves think. We squabbled with the Yemeni waiters over their prices, ate, felt sick and left, disappointed.

  Later, back in the mosque, Said would speak of what he hoped for from a meal: repose, clean place settings, calm and order, thoughtfully prepared food. He hoped, he said, for actual conversation with his fellow human beings. He felt that by dining as the Yemenis dined, in a rush, with people screaming and the noise of the propane stove and the chicken feathers everywhere, we violated the Prophet’s instructions. As Muslims, we were supposed to eat in a clean, dignified manner.

  One afternoon towards the middle of August, after we had washed, prayed, and listened to Sheikh Moamr’s noontime homily, Omar and Said suggested that we make an exception to our routine by taking our lunch in the upscale neighbourhood. ‘It will be good for us,’ Omar said. ‘We would have a change of scene. We’ll see something new for a change.’ As soon as the idea was proposed, I seconded it, and within the minute we had boarded a passing bus.

  Soon we were sailing past the glum cafes of our neighbourhood and our mosque was receding in the distance.

  We got off the bus two blocks away from Pizza Quick. In this area, the storefronts had been done up in bulging backlit plastic facades. The display windows were draped with neon signs in English. Spicey checken, they said and tastie! and Fastfood!

  We walked in front of an international bank. We passed a billboard depicting the president casting his eyes towards a distant horizon.

  Ten minutes later we were standing directly in front of the wide, glassy but very locked doors of Pizza Quick. Omar pushed the door handle. It was definitely locked.

  ‘Subhan allah,’ mumbled Omar.

  ‘Closed?’ asked Said. ‘Ya salaam! Have we got here too early? Is this a joke?’

  We stared at the locked doors for several long seconds.

  ‘Shall we try some of the fried chicken restaurants nearby? It won’t be exactly what we wanted,’ said Omar. ‘But certainly better than what we’re used to.’

  It was true that this neighbourhood was filled with jowly men in yellow ties and business suits who imitated the West. But on this afternoon we had come down here for an air-conditioned all-male dining room, for the familiar taste of fast food, for proper service, and a reliably halal lunch. We weren’t so unlike the businessmen ourselves.

  Two minutes after discovering the locked door of Pizza Quick, we stood on the front steps of Spicey Buffalo Chicken. Four waiters in crisp pin-striped uniforms smiled at us. ‘The blessings of Allah,’ Omar called out. Said adjusted his prayer cap. Omar called out, ‘Your chicken, my brothers! Is the chicken from the Yemeni countryside? Or from outside of Yemen?’ Beladi ow kharaji?

  The waiters conversed among themselves.

  ‘Beladi ow kharaji?’ Omar repeated.

  ‘It is from outside of Yemen,’ one of the waiters admitted. ‘It has been frozen and imported but it remains delicious!’

  ‘Thank you, my brothers!’ Omar replied.

  ‘Of course it’s halal,’ Said whispered. ‘Why are you making a scene?’

  ‘Are you paying?’ Omar replied. Are you even paying for your bus fare? Maybe you should keep quiet.’

  The three of us put our heads down. We walked further into the fast-food neighbourhood.

  At the next restaurant, Omar wished the head waiter the blessings of Allah, then smiled, then asked again: ‘Do you have the chicken of the countryside?’

  ‘I am sorry, my brothers,’ said the waiter, ‘it is from outside the Yemen.’

  We walked to the next restaurant and the next. At every place the answer was the same: the chicken had been frozen. It had been imported from an unknown country. It was certainly halal. But how, Omar asked, could this be proved?

  At the fifth restaurant, we stood at the threshold of the dining room, frowning and wondering what to do.

  ‘It’s just very sad,’ Omar said.

  ‘Allahu akbar!’ I exclaimed. I gestured at the cavernous dining hall. It was filled with boisterous Yemeni men. Their plates were covered in chicken bones. ‘My brothers,’ I said to Omar and Said. ‘Isn’t this proof enough? What more do you want? This is how Muslims eat.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Omar. ‘Restaurants around here import the cheapest chicken. There may be a halal label attached but that means nothing. You want to be the victim of a fraud? Some chicken processor, probably in France, will make out like a king. Your food won’t be halal. You’ll pay a lot. That’s what you want? No, I hope not. A Muslim should be vigilant.’

  We walked further into the fast-food neighbourhood. When we were interviewing our final set of waiters, I knew we were no longer actually looking for lunch. Now we were proving to one another, and to anyone else who happened to see, that we were stranded in a country whose pizza restaurants closed at lunchtime, whose chicken restaurants could not do a simple thing like serving halal chicken, and whose most important food district left pious Muslims wandering through the streets like lost souls, begging for, and not finding, halal, Islam-appropriate food. Of course, we were also proving that we understood the laws of Islam and respected them. Whereas the benighted Yemenis …

  Eventually we did find a small, ill-lit place serving frozen, reheated pizzas. When our lunch finally arrived at our table, it turned out to be a tray of weak dough on which curds of plastic floated in a sweet sauce.

  We stared at one another. No one wanted to say anything. We ate in silence. A team of Yemeni waiters with ties and shaved chins stared at us.

  Towards the end of lunch Said said, ‘Maybe you can find better Islamic practices in Saudi Arabia? Or, who knows, maybe in Afghanistan somewhere? In Waziristan?’

  ‘You don’t even have enough money for a taxi back to our mosque,’ said Omar. ‘Perhaps you could shut up?’

  Not at this point, nor at any other point during lunch, did any of us say what was what was most obvious: that we had come halfway across the world for an authentic experience in Islam only to find ourselves eating fake pizzas as Yemenis in make-believe European waiter costumes gazed in fascination. At least a voyage through the back lanes of Roubaix would have culminated in a hot, well-made pizza. At least there would be halal signs in the windows of the restaurants and waiters who were proud to be Muslims, wore beards, and did not slaver over people speaking French who happened to have a few riyals in their pockets.

  29

  WHEN LUNCH WAS finished, we had nowhere to go, and no plans. We ambled into a tea shop around the corner from Pizza Quick. When the tea arrived, Omar relaxed into his chair, smiled to himself, and began to speak about the ideal form of Islamic government.

  All the necessary rules for governing society were written in the Koran, he said, pronouncing the words loudly and carefully, as if he meant his voice to carry from table to table. Therefore there didn’t need to be a government at all where true Muslims were. In a proper Islamic society there would be no president and no parliament but, instead, scholars. ‘What is needed in Yemen – in every Islamic country – is respect for the Koran, period,’ he said, in French. ‘How can you say there is respect for the Koran here, when the leaders of the country dress like bankers in Paris and you cannot find a halal chicken anywhere?’

  A portrait of the Yemeni presiden
t glared at us from the wall above the front door of the cafe. The president sat atop a horse. Omar gestured at him with his elbow. He lowered his voice.

  ‘If there were respect for the Koran, there would be no need for an idiot knight like that,’ said Omar. Un chevalier con. ‘The Koran would govern.’

  Omar shot the breeze in this way for a little while. The Koran was the word of God. Muslims did not enter into political affairs. The very idea of politics was a departure from, or as he said, an ‘innovation’ on systems spelled out in the sacred writings.

  The speech would have been utterly banal in our mosque, or any of the places we were used to having lunch, but here we were surrounded by people who did enter into politics – at least inasmuch as they supported the President. Omar knew perfectly that they were regime apparatchiks – their ties, suit coats and moustaches gave them away. And so he expostulated: the falling-off that had occurred since the time of the Prophet; the ever present, ever enduring Straight Path; the corruption of Islam that the modern world had wrought.

  As Omar spoke, I happened to notice that one of the tea drinkers, an ugly man with a sour expression in his eyes and a long, tangled beard, was staring at him. He stared at Said, then turned to me. He opened his cellphone and tapped some numbers into it. Then he chatted with his friends a bit. Finally, he smiled at Omar, rose, stepped towards us and salaamed. We shook his hand.

  He grinned. ‘My friends!’ he said in English. ‘May I sit with you?’

  ‘Please,’ we said. ‘You are our guest.’

  He smiled again. ‘You think we not understand,’ he said after a moment, still speaking in English. His eyes sparkled. ‘Some do! Yes, they do understand. You never know!’

  ‘What?’ said Omar in Arabic.

  ‘From which city in France you are from?’ said the man with the tangled beard.

  We are visiting Yemen,’ replied Omar in Arabic. ‘Is it your business where we’re from?’

  ‘The police,’ said our new friend, still grinning. ‘They listen here. Always listening. You have spoken about our religion. Do you know what you’re talking about? You have talked about our president. Why? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?’ He stared into our faces.

  ‘No,’ we said, quietly.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the man persisted.

  ‘Just visiting,’ Said said.

  ‘You have said we do not understand the Koran. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Omar, still speaking in Arabic. The tea drinkers in the cafe were now leaning forward on the edge of their chairs, poised, thoughtful, motionless.

  ‘We have seen you walking in the street, visiting the restaurants,’ said the bearded man. ‘What are you looking for? What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Omar.

  The man opened a packet of cigarettes, and began to smoke. He smiled to himself and muttered something in Arabic to the people with whom he had been sharing his tea a few moments earlier.

  Then he turned back to us. ‘Be careful,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t know where you are.’

  He smiled at me. ‘This young man here conducts himself properly,’ he said, pointing to me. ‘He does not make problems. He keeps to himself. He shuts up. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘But you, I think,’ he said, turning back to Omar, ‘I think you like to make problems. Yes? Am I right? Yes?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Omar.

  ‘Well, be careful,’ said the bearded man. ‘You have been warned.’ He snuffed out his cigarette. He offered to pay for our tea. We declined. He rose, smiled at the three of us one final time, and reached into the pocket of his trousers. He deposited a coin on a counter near where the cafe owner sat, salaamed, and walked into the sunshine.

  A few seconds later, the old man who owned this tea shop tapped his coin on the formica counter. Omar, Said and I looked up. ‘Hess,’ said the old man.

  ‘What?’ we said.

  ‘Hess, hess,’ he said.

  Omar and Said looked at me.

  ‘Hess,’ said the owner again and nodded vaguely at the poster of the president atop his horse. ‘Hess!’

  At the time I thought ‘hess, hess!’ might mean ‘Behave yourself, young man,’ or maybe, ‘Asshole! You have embarrassed me in front of my customers!’ Much later, when I had a deeper knowledge of Arabic, I learned that the command ‘Hess!’ comes from the verb hasa, to feel or sense, and in this context means: ‘Sense your surroundings!’ Or maybe: ‘Feel where you are!’ Or maybe, more simply, ‘Wake up!’

  Out on the pavement, sunlight stabbed us in the eyes. A sound truck playing presidential election music was assaulting pedestrians.

  We stumbled around for a moment, disorientated by the racket and the light. We asked a passer-by for the nearest mosque and followed him through an alley, past a nondescript ministry, and into a garage-like hall made of cinder blocks. It was evidently the mosque of a local military detachment. Soon we were standing shoulder to shoulder with a legion of mustachioed men in army fatigues and black socks. ‘I seek refuge from the Shaytan, and the djinn,’ the hall whispered. ‘From the Outcast and his evil.’

  30

  THOUGH OUR EXCURSION to the fast-food district ended calmly, it must have alarmed Omar and Said. Within a day, they had quite changed their behaviour towards me. They were cold and correct. They avoided me outside the mosque. Maybe I had been too flip about our search for halal food? Maybe they thought the bearded man in the tea shop who scolded them was an undercover policeman. Did they imagine that he and I were working together? I don’t know. Anyway, Said and Omar stopped talking to me.

  When we shook hands in the ablution room or after prayers, they said nothing. When I sat down with them in the mosque one afternoon, they smiled to each other, waited a polite interval, then rose and left the mosque. Once, finding Said in a tea shop by himself, I asked him if he wanted to examine a pamphlet I had picked up recently: How to Respond to the Nullifiers of Islam.

  ‘Ah, l’americain,’ he sighed, not bothering to hide his boredom. Where have you been?’

  ‘About,’ I said. ‘In the mosque.’

  He sipped his tea.

  ‘You’ve been seen in Hadda,’ he said after a moment, referring to the faux-European neighbourhood. ‘Some brothers from the mosque here have said so. Riding your bike around. Wearing Western clothes.’

  It was true. I had been buying sneakers. I had been on my way to play tennis with a European friend.

  ‘Sneakers and tennis?’ he asked, shaking his head. ‘I suppose that’s what you want?’ I left the tea shop by myself with my pamphlet.

  Early the following morning, at the quietest time of day in the mosque, when the bodies of a dozen or so students were slumbering in the sunlight, and only a single circle of Yemeni grandfathers was rehearsing Koran beneath a column, Omar and Said sat down in front of me. I was involved in a grammar exercise. Omar wrapped his hand around the back of my neck. ‘There he is, Brother Thabit!’ he said. ‘Studying still? Our American friend, always in the midst of studying.’

  He smiled but the smile was forced.

  ‘Wa alaikum a salaam,’ I said.

  ‘We’d like to talk to you for a moment, Thabit,’ said Omar.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. For several long seconds, Omar and Said sat there on the carpet in front of me, smiling and examining my schoolbooks, my notebooks, my Koran and my backpack.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Should we have tea? Stay here?’

  ‘May I see what you are scribbling in your notebook?’ wondered Omar.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I showed him a page of verb declensions.

  ‘Is that all you have in your notebook?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of pages of scribbling, too.’

  ‘May I ask why you spend so much time scribbling in a notebook?’

  ‘Because I am trying to understand Arabic grammar,’ I replied. ‘I am also trying t
o understand the religion of Islam. I am also trying to do my homework.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s quite normal,’ Omar said. ‘The funny thing is that Said and I have been noticing lately. You seem very interested in what kind of pizza we eat. And where we’re from in France and who our families are and that sort of thing. But not so much in the unity of God.’

  I took a deep breath. I knew where this was going.

  ‘I am interested in the pizza you eat,’ I said. ‘I am interested in where you’re from and what your lives are like in France.’

  I could see Said’s face falling. He shook his head slowly. He turned to Omar and said, ‘Let me talk to him.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Listen, Thabit,’ he said. ‘Arrête tes conneries.’ Stop kidding around. ‘You’re very far from the point, the goal of Islam, if what you’re interested in is why we’ve come here from France and what kind of pizza we like. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Why is that wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ Omar interrupted, smiling. ‘The good news is that we don’t think that you’re working for the CIA any more. Or the Mossad or the French police. The bad news is that we’ve been watching you. In fact everyone has remarked about you and everyone is wondering what you’re really up to.’

  ‘Everyone?’ I asked. ‘Who’s everyone?’

  They shrugged their shoulders.

  I glanced at the circle of elderly gentlemen who were sitting beneath a column. They held Korans in their laps. Their beards were illuminated by the sun. But for the office decor, they could have been figures in a painter’s fantasy of Eastern sagacity and self-contentment.

  No, it wasn’t them.

  Yes,’ Omar continued, ‘the questions you ask, the way you scribble in your notebooks, even though your Arabic grammar is not improving, is getting worse if anything, your general façon de faire, your attitude, even the way you dress. It has helped us understand. You’re certainly up to something.’