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  As Ramadan approached, the sheikh also took time to talk about what life was like where faith was diminishing, where Islam was on the retreat.

  ‘In Tunisia,’ the sheikh told us one evening, ‘Islam used to be strong. It used to be a major Islamic capital. But I have a friend who recently returned from there. He told me that Muslims are living through a time of extraordinary hardness. It is all but illegal to wear the hijab, the veil has been forbidden, and the very activity of prayer,’ he said, ‘makes a citizen suspect.’

  There was silence in the mosque when he said this and a slow shaking of heads. ‘So you see,’ said Moamr, ‘we have problems in Islam. Big problems.’ In Tunis nowadays, he said, there were hardly any prayers offered to Allah, period. The mosques had been closed. People had to pray secretly, in their houses. Now, in public, in the streets, there was adultery everywhere and alcohol.

  Moamr then folded his hands in his lap. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘because of the closing down of the mosques there and the abandonment of the Prophet, homosexuality has spread. It has now become a major problem in all of Tunisia. Of course God, in his throne in heaven, is watching. He is taking the measure of the situation and punishing as appropriate. You think he isn’t?’ He raised his right index finger into the air and let it hang there for a few dramatic seconds. ‘Thirty years ago or so, in 1981 or ’82 – about this time, approximately – a meteorite crashed into a village outside the capital. It was a village of homosexuals. It was destroyed like broken pottery. You see? The people do not know it but Allah is watching and will punish.’

  Maybe in some other time or place, some of the students – the ones who’d studied at British universities, for instance, or the ones who had family in Tunis – would have thought: Can this be true? Really? Or is this myth? The young men in the audience were not suckers. They were owners of Palm Pilots and laptops. In a university lecture hall, in the lecture of some much-admired professor, they might well have dialled into Wikipedia on the campus wifi system to verify the claim. On a technical level, they were certainly capable of verifying claims.

  Naturally, they did not proceed this way in Yemen. In the first place, the sheikh was not insisting on the details of his facts. Secondly, everyone understood that a different kind of truth was at hand. The students knew from their own experience that out on the perimeter of the Islamic world, far from here, but maybe not so far after all, Islam was falling into a void. Shame itself had died. Moamr added new details. Homosexuals, he said, were taking over entire villages. The surrounding country of Tunisia had all but apostatised. But God was watching. As sin compounded sin, with every passing second, God watched and prepared his punishment. The locals never bothered to examine the sky. They forgot God. They went about their business. The result was that they did not see the meteorite as it sped on its way. They were surprised when it destroyed an entire village. Moamr, however, was not. ‘Allah is now killing Muslims,’ he said. ‘Problems. Big problems.’

  Most of the Westerners in our mosque probably did not need these lectures. They recognised deep iman when they saw it. Iman was the self-discipline, seriousness and silence of those Western men who had married Yemeni women. It was the Somalians who huddled in corners in our mosque, praying and keeping to themselves. Actually, most people in our mosque knew that the two individuals with the deepest, most solemn iman in our mosque were the blind boy who tugged on his little brother’s sleeves all day and the convulsing, four-year-old girl.

  When you had faith like that, you did not wonder what contributions to your life Wikipedia, iPods and the rest of the world’s gadgetry might make.

  You were a child of God. You prayed. You would be rewarded for your faith when the time came.

  One evening, shortly before Ramadan, the sheikh gave us a primer on the signs that would accompany the arrival of the Islamic Redeemer, or Mahdi.

  ‘He will not necessarily come during Ramadan,’ said the sheikh. ‘But when he does come, we will know. Muslims should memorise the signs: the rising of the sun in the west, yes, and plagues across the globe, yes, these will be signs. And also a war in Iraq. There will be fitnas, or internal divisions, for Muslims, and temptations and jealousies. But there will not necessarily be two eclipses in the month of Ramadan. And the Redeemer himself will not necessarily appear in Damascus, but may even appear in Yemen, even among the Jews of Yemen. We do not know.’ When the Redeemer finally establishes his rule on earth, he said, the ummah will at last feel like a family. There will no longer be divisions between the nations and the sects will unite as one.

  If this speech was calculated to ease the Ramadan tension that had been building in the mosque, I think it worked well.

  After the speech, in the stairwell among the beggars and the discarded sandals, the students shook hands with each other. They smiled warmly and gave alms to the beggars. Even Said gave up a few coins. Walking down the steps and out into the evening light, several of the students draped their arms over one another’s shoulders.

  These were reassuring moments. The Redeemer will come, the sheikh had said, and he will make things better. Scan the skies, he said, and know the signs – ‘conserve the signs in your heart’.

  33

  THE DAY OF the Great Presidential Rally, which was held to mark the end of the first great presidential re-election campaign, dawned bright and hot. It was 26 August 2006. The rally was no regular ‘get out the vote’ affair but rather a national welcoming party for the arrival, at long last, of democracy in Arabia. The first real, truly certifiable presidential election in the history of the region was at hand. The president was throwing a party.

  The European Union election monitors came. The international press came. The Yemen Observer was filled with photo spreads and banner headlines – Faris’s way of expressing delight. In the pictures, the president appeared in his sunglasses, in front of crowds, in expensive suits and ties, smiling. The other Yemeni newspapers, pro- and anti-government, were also excited. So were both Yemeni TV stations. All media in Yemen were singing the same song: democracy had dawned in southern Arabia.

  The sameness in the media was because the news in Yemen was fixed. The journalists knew that the president wished to see a celebration of democracy in the media. They knew that foreigners were watching. They knew what the foreigners wanted to hear. So they celebrated. Al-Wasat and al-Hurria (‘the Middle’ and ‘Freedom’, respectively), newspapers of the so-called opposition, muted their celebrations because their purpose in the Yemeni media firmament was to show that there really was an opposition. Like all newspapers in Yemen, they got their funding from the office of the president. So they were defiant, but mildly. ‘We urge citizens to vote according to their conscience!’ they said. And: ‘Historic days for Yemen.’ The rest of the press, especially the all-important satellite TV channel, Yemen TV, urged citizens to show up at the Great Presidential Rally, the first such in the history of Arabia. The President of the Republic, His Excellency Ali Abdullah Saleh, was planning to address the crowd.

  At one similar rally, earlier in the campaign, twenty-eight supporters of the president had been trampled to death in Ibb, a fertile, rainy city of terraced gardens to the south of Sana’a. When the rally was finished the police heaved the bodies of the victims into the back of nearby pickup trucks. On TV, the dead looked like stacks of Yemeni tuna, pulled from the ocean and laid out in pickup beds for easy transportation.

  But this was in the past. The victims had been mourned and buried. Now the citizens of Sana’a wanted to celebrate, and to exhibit their love of the president to the media of the world.

  Even on the night before the rally you could feel a weird kind of euphoria descending on the streets. It was written across the faces of the country folk who had come to Sana’a to celebrate and buzzed over crowds of children as they waited to buy candyfloss on the street or fought over bags of chocolates tossed to them by big-hearted merchants.

  On the avenue in front of our mosque, buses from the countryside had i
nstalled themselves in parking spaces long before midnight. The passengers bought big bouquets of candy-floss for their kids, spoke in thick hayseed accents and stood on the street corners, staring.

  The Yemeni public loved its Big Man, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He was the king of southern Arabia, the hero of the unification of North and South Yemen, the scourge of the southern communists, and the defier of George H. W. Bush during the first Gulf War. He was the builder of roads and institutions. He brought satellite TV, cheap food and foreign dignitaries. On this occasion, he brought the attention of the world to Yemen.

  Most at the rally and probably all the citizens of Sana’a knew his democracy didn’t exist. But so what? The Yemeni public could be euphoric about the man himself. His democracy was just a system after all. No one loved a system. People loved the man.

  After the dawn athan, or call to prayer, had come and gone, at around six in the morning, the traffic on the street in front of our mosque consisted entirely of buses and taxis arriving from the countryside. By eight o’clock, pedestrians were filling the nearby streets. Columns of marchers converged at the intersections. The minor streets were like streams emptying into tributaries, and the tributaries poured into plazas and boulevards of holidaymakers.

  Here the buses, marchers, horses, sound trucks, police cars, pickup trucks, farm trucks, jeeps and battered taxis collected but did not move. Police tried to urge the traffic forward but many watching the parade were happy where they were. Apparently, they didn’t want to march. They just wanted to mill around, singing and chatting.

  By the time I came down the prayer hall to wake Said at nine, the avenue beneath the mosque was filling the prayer hall with an unearthly racket. Music poured from loudspeakers attached to the roofs of minibuses and the police were using the public address systems on their patrol cars to shout at the marchers.

  ‘Haraq! Haraq!’ they yelled. Move! Move!

  I was amazed to find that Said was still asleep. ‘Wake up, my friend,’ I said to him. He turned his face to the wall. ‘God knows how I am sleeping through this racket but I am,’ he said. ‘So leave me alone.’

  I shook Said’s leg again. I promised him a breakfast of fresh orange juice and Yemeni beans.

  ‘As a Muslim I am not allowed to enter into politics,’ he said. ‘You’re not either. Apparently you don’t care.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘There is no danger to your faith here. It’s not a democracy! There is no democracy in Yemen. There is a fake democracy and now there will be a stage show. Why not watch it, Said? Get up. Now.’

  He rubbed his eyes. He sat up and then stood up. ‘I will come for breakfast,’ he said. ‘But only for breakfast.’

  In the ablution room he put on a robe and a waist dagger. He combed his hair. He fluffed out his beard. When he returned to the prayer hall, he strode across the carpet, looking regal and healthy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights. ‘Ça c’est la classe,’ he said of his robe, but he deadpanned the line, as if his heart wasn’t in it. ‘A re-election rally for a tinpot dictator is not a place for a Muslim,’ he said. ‘I am going for breakfast, then I am coming home.’

  Outside the mosque, in the blinding sunshine, we gazed up the avenue. Crowds streamed towards the parade ground. Minibuses covered in pink plastic flowers nosed through the pedestrians. I looked for an open tea shop. Seeing that there were none, I looked into the crowds for a tea cart, or a wandering kebab man, or even a child selling chips.

  We started walking. We crossed a commercial thoroughfare, Zubeiri Street. After a half-hour of ambling, we were in the middle of the fast-food district. Now we were properly hungry, both of us, but every restaurant was locked up as if in expectation of a riot. We searched the side streets for signs of beans, or beet soup carts, or falafel, or bananas – or anything comestible at all. There was nothing.

  The normal city buses had stopped running. All public vehicles had been commandeered to serve as shuttles, ferrying people to the old Sana’a airport, where the rally was to be held.

  A couple of Sudanese diplomats who had stopped to buy cigarettes offered to give us a lift. ‘A Frenchman and an American?’ the driver asked. ‘Here? Today?’

  ‘They are spies,’ muttered the fellow in the passenger seat. ‘Are you spies?’ the driver asked, turning to us with a smile.

  He dropped us off a few metres from the Greenland restaurant. Above us, a squadron of helicopters flitted in front of the sun. ‘Good heavens,’ Said murmured.

  ‘We’ll walk just to the edge of the airport tarmac,’ I said. ‘Come on, brother. We’ll just see the rally from a distance. We’ll have a peek, then the restaurants will have opened, and then we’ll go eat.’

  The crowd grew zanier as we approached the Old Airport. The nation of Yemen would not be denied its euphoric moment of democracy. Several democrats walked by us with photographs of Ali Abdullah Saleh pasted on to their foreheads. One inventive Yemeni had strapped a piano synthesiser to his waist, and had somehow affixed a pair of stereo speakers to the crown of his turban. With his right hand, he banged on the piano keys and with his left he shook a tambourine. Tribesmen beat their drums. Taxi drivers hammered on their horns.

  I nudged Said in the ribs. ‘We’ll take a short cut down this side street,’ I said. ‘We’ll hop a fence and from there we’ll have a better view.’

  Now above us, on the roofs of a tall bank and the tallest apartment buildings we could see the police snipers, strolling, eyeing the crowd, cradling their rifles. We drifted down the side street. Just as we were about to turn into an alley that would have brought us to a secret hole in an iron fence, an eighteen-wheel troop carrier stuffed with blank-faced soldiers rumbled past. The soldiers sat on their benches in grim resignation, wearing helmets. Soon another such carrier passed, and then smaller police vehicles followed in its wake.

  ‘Allahu akbar,’ Said said as the fleet passed us. When the last vehicle bounced by, he stopped walking. He stared, as if he’d seen a truckload of spirits. ‘I’m leaving,’ he said, ‘I’m going home. Now. Goodbye.’ Ahead of us, in a cloud of dust, about a hundred metres away, the troops were pouring out of their trucks. Even from a distance, this outpouring made an impressive sound – a long, loud waterfall of boots and shouts and then a widening pool of helmets filling the space between the apartment buildings.

  Said fled down an alley. It led backward, into the fast-food district. ‘All right! Forget it!’ I called out. ‘Forget everything. We’ll have breakfast. We’ll go home.’

  Jogging in my sandals, I caught up to him after a minute or so. ‘I am not allowed to be here,’ he muttered. ‘My religion absolutely forbids this. You do what you want. This sort of thing is for your sort of people. Go.’

  Unlike so many Muslims, Said had chosen sides. When it came to democracy, he was no fence-sitting, accommodationist type. He knew where he belonged. If he had kept his own counsel, he would have been fine. Instead he listened to me and, like all well-intentioned Westerners, I was a fence-sitter.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Relax. We’ll eat. Off we go. Food, okay?’

  For a few minutes, we followed a succession of alleys. We were quite lost and then we were less lost and soon we found ourselves again on a main boulevard. We marched against the streaming crowd. At last we came to a filling station. Here the crowds of observers on the pavements had thinned. Only a sprinkling of loiterers leaned against empty cars; a lonely fellow in a tracksuit lounged against a lamp post. Out in the centre of the boulevard, a trickle of celebrants hurried towards the airport tarmac.

  Generally, police protect filling stations. Filling stations might be interesting to terrorists, so the thinking goes, because Islamists like to show their control over oil and especially appreciate the satisfying black ball of smoke an attack would cause. So when there are throngs in the streets, the police in many instances go to the filling stations. This bit of wisdom was something we might have known. We did not.

  As we were passing in front of the pump
s, I stopped a marcher who carried a sheaf of glossy posters of the president. President Saleh was sitting at a desk, grinning officially into a camera. With you! said the legend in thick red letters.

  ‘Let me have one of these, my brother,’ I said to the marcher. ‘Allah bless you and keep you.’

  ‘Gladly!’ He handed me two. ‘A foreigner loves the president, too?’

  ‘Of course!’ I said.

  Turning to Said, I murmured to him, ‘For the toilet wall.’ He scowled. His pace quickened. As he walked, he slipped the posters from my fingers. ‘Arrête tes conneries, Thabit,’ he said. ‘Leave these. Haram.’ He took the images in both hands, ripped them once, then twice, then three times, then crumpled the bits into a ball, then deposited the ball in the filling station rubbish bin. ‘No pictures, my friend,’ he said. ‘No politics. This is shirk. Do not enter into this shirk if you wish to remain a Muslim. T’as compris? T’as compris? Now let’s have something to eat. I’m famished.’

  From out of nowhere a wheelbarrow heaped with pomegranates like giant rubies appeared before us.

  ‘Uncle!’ I said to the seller. ‘How much for two?’

  He named a sum so insignificant – a palmful of Yemeni pennies – it wasn’t really money.

  ‘Too expensive,’ Said muttered in French. ‘C’est un bandit. It should be half that.’ But already the roundness and the juiciness of the pomegranates and the thin rind that could be peeled away with the teeth were casting their spell over him. He reached forward casually, as if he were picking from his own wheelbarrow.

  ‘Please, you are my guest!’ said the pomegranate man. He beamed at Said. He was a proud, happy fruit seller without teeth. ‘Chooth, brotherth,’ he said. ‘Ahlayn!’ Welcome!