Undercover Muslim Read online

  ‘We said to ourselves that time would tell what kind of a Muslim you really are – whether a fake one, an enemy of Islam, a tourist among different religions or what.’

  He suggested that I might want to continue my education away from the city, in a school in the mountains.

  ‘It could be better for you there,’ said a second Frenchman whose name I didn’t know. ‘There are more teachers there, there is more learning and the villagers, down to the smallest toothbrush seller and Iraqi beggar, are from the People of the Salaf.’

  ‘We can help you in Dammaj even if we’re not there,’ Ahmed offered. ‘We’ll call the French brothers before you arrive. We’ll tell them to look out for you. We’ll tell them to help you find a place to live and they will introduce you to the sheikh.’

  Before I left, I wanted to get Said out of jail. After a week in the police basement cell into which he and I had at first been locked, the authorities transferred him to an immigration prison on the south-eastern outskirts of Sana’a. I started to visit him there, usually at sunset, so that we could break our fasts together, chat, and discuss how to get him out of jail.

  He wasn’t interested, I quickly discovered, in lawyers, money, and embassy people. Instead, he wanted to talk about the great men of Islam.

  ‘They were all of them tested for their faith,’ he told me during one visit. ‘Younis was imprisoned in the belly of a whale. Yusuf was imprisoned by his brothers.’ A sheikh whose name he couldn’t remember was asked to renounce Islam, refused, and so was tortured in jail. But the torture only strengthened him in his faith.

  ‘I’m not being tortured,’ he said, ‘I’m not being asked to renounce anything.’ He felt his imprisonment might have saved him from a greater danger – perhaps the anger of the crowds or a stray bullet from a soldier’s gun.

  One evening, to make the breaking of the fast happier, I brought him a bag of Snickers bars. The gift awakened his love of chocolate but it also awakened his instinct for zakat, or charity. At first he buried the bag under a pillow at the back of his cell and then seconds later, as the other prisoners watched in surprise, he retrieved the bag, and gave every prisoner a Snickers bar. There were about ten people in his cell. When he had fed all of them, he peered into the plastic bag, felt for the remaining bars, and smiled. He handed the bag back to me. ‘Give it to the Somalians across the corridor,’ he said. ‘Il faut tout donner, mon ami l’américain. Give it all away, everything.’

  On another evening Said and I stood at his cell door gossiping about the guards who ran his prison. They were lounging in a guard-room next door to his own, watching a broken television and calling their wives on their cellphones. ‘They’re not like us, Thabit,’ Said cautioned. ‘They do not pray, and do not really believe.’

  When he was arrested, he said, he had been afraid of the guards. ‘I was afraid of the policemen, all officials, and of the entire Yemeni government apparatus. That was a mistake. One mustn’t be afraid of any human. One must be afraid of Allah, that’s all. Only fear God.’

  He said that if he had been afraid of Allah sufficiently in the first place, he never would have ripped up the posters of the president.

  ‘Because I acted according to an impulse action, which did not come from Islam but from myself. A Muslim only acts on what is within Islam, according to what is written in the hadith.’

  The evening athan was about to sound then and the brothers in his cell were sitting in a circle around a plate of dates, waiting for the call. When it came they passed dates to me through the bars of their cell, and pressed cups of tea into my hand.

  In the Old City at that hour, a wave of fast-breaking generosity was breaking over the streets. Restaurant waiters were feeding homeless men on the sidewalks. Bus passengers were passing dates to strangers. In banks, dental offices, post offices, and on mosque floors, men were squatting in circles and sharing their food.

  Said lingered at the cell door. When the other prisoners had eaten, he fetched dates and tea for me.

  ‘Eat, my brother, the American,’ he said. ‘Eating is a good, a sacred thing in a time like this’.

  Over the next fifteen days, I made a point of making friends with the guards. Before I passed by Said’s cell, I would stop to chat and offer cigarettes and qat. ‘When can he be freed?’ I would ask. ‘What will it take?’ The guards would breathe deeply and smile pained, unhappy smiles. Only God knew, they would say.

  Sometimes, the head guard would reply, ‘Difficult, Brother Thabit. Very difficult.’ But one evening, as Ramadan was drawing to a close, the head guard did not sigh. ‘Buy your friend a plane ticket,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to make sure he has a driver to take him to the airport. The driver will be a soldier from this prison and will have to be paid. If you can pay for a ticket and a police escort tonight, he can leave tonight. Allah be with him.’

  Said’s idea of a desirable airplane destination was not my idea. I suggested Paris. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. He said that he had never had such belief in God as now. He had never felt so full of faith, and so close to the heroes of Islam. He knew that feeling would ebb away in his French suburb. He refused to return home.

  A one-way ticket to Algiers cost $350. Back at the mosque, I took up a collection, as Said had asked me to do. The brothers stiffened. Neither the French brothers nor anyone else was interested in contributing to his freedom. ‘Maybe after Ramadan,’ one brother said. ‘We are buying gifts for our families now,’ said another brother. Many brothers said that Said was impulsive, had brought shame on to our mosque, and was therefore not a good Muslim, and maybe not really a Muslim at all.

  ‘He meant to stay out of politics,’ I said. That was the whole point. He had been trying to teach me.

  My argument went nowhere.

  In the end, I split the cost of a ticket with Said’s brother in Lille.

  On the night of Said’s flight, I fetched his belongings from his suitcase closet in the mosque. I fetched his passport from a French friend who had somehow retrieved it from the school secretary. At the jail, I gave the suitcase to a guard and gave Said his ticket and $50 in cash for when he landed in Algeria.

  ‘Allah be with you, brother,’ he said, pushing dates into my hand. He was looking forward to Algeria because people spoke French there and because the food was better. From Algeria, he meant to find his way to a proper seminary in Saudi Arabia.

  An hour later, the guards removed Said from his prison cell. He rode away in an unmarked car.

  I heard later that when he got to Algeria, the police there couldn’t figure out what he had been doing in Yemen and why he had been so abruptly kicked out. Not knowing what to do with him, they put him in jail.

  After that last visit with Said, I rode back to the city on a municipal bus. My fellow passengers had just watched the results of the presidential election being certified on national TV. Saleh had trounced his opponent. Now it was official. The passengers were heading downtown, into the streets of the capital, to celebrate.

  Even in the outskirts of the city, the celebration was under way. Enthusiasts fired their Kalashnikovs into the air, lighting up the sky with tracer bullets.

  The kid who was collecting fares on the bus smiled broadly at everyone. As the bus picked up speed, he climbed to a platform next to the driver’s seat, then addressed us, his passengers. ‘Tonight the bus fare will be on the house!’ he called out – which in Yemen is a way of saying, ‘You still have to pay, of course, but we’d like to make it free.’

  He strolled down the aisle and stopped at my seat. He smiled at me. ‘You’re a foreigner,’ he observed, taking in my light eyes and facial features. ‘Are you a Muslim?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  He smiled to himself, then shook his head in surprise. ‘A foreigner?’ he wondered again.

  Yes, a foreigner, I confirmed. ‘Nevertheless a Muslim.’

  ‘Not a Jew?’ he said, his eyes smiling. ‘Not a Christian?’

  ‘Not at all,�
�� I said. ‘And you? Not a Christian? Not a Jew?’

  The boy laughed. The bus passengers nearby laughed. ‘I have a joke for you,’ he said, winking at me. He strolled to the front of the bus again.

  ‘In the name of God,’ he called out to all fifteen passengers. He giggled for a moment and blinked at us. ‘What are the five pillars of the Jewish religion? Does anyone know?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said an old man sitting next to me.

  ‘They don’t have five pillars,’ whispered another passenger.

  ‘What are the five pillars of the Jews?’ the boy insisted.

  ‘The pillars of the Jew are five,’ he called out, laughing. ‘One: cheating! Two: alcohol! Three: adultery! Four: hypocrisy!’

  The bus passengers giggled. ‘I can’t remember the fifth!’ the boy said. ‘What is the fifth?’

  The passengers offered suggestions. ‘Drinking!’ said a grandfather whose turban was decorated with sprigs of basil.

  ‘Stealing!’ said someone else.

  ‘Murder! Killing children!’ said a tribesman to my right.

  No one knew the right answer. The passengers chattered among themselves. The tracer bullets arced past the windows of the bus.

  My seat neighbour turned his face to me. He touched his turban helplessly with his fingertips. ‘Is this true?’ he wondered. ‘Is this true? The pillars of the Jew are like this?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t believe them.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is true.’

  As I got off the bus, this old man turned to me with a kindly smile. He shook my hand. ‘Welcome to Yemen!’ he said. ‘Welcome!’ He stared at me as the bus pulled away. When he was almost out of earshot, he called into the night, ‘Allah be with you, brother! Let him open the way forward for you!’

  Walking back to the mosque, I thought about the strange election season I had just witnessed. Democracy, such as it was in Yemen, had made everyone happy. It had reinforced the status quo ante. Like so much else in Yemen, it had invited, when all was said and done, thoughts of the treachery of the Jews. But it had also made the Muslims closer to one another somehow. I knew that when I travelled into the north, as long as I travelled as a Muslim, I would be protected and kept from danger.

  Ramadan, the Shariqain Mosque, Sana’a, 1427h

  36

  ON THE NIGHT of Destiny, the father of the twitching girl brought a child I presumed to be his daughter into the mosque. The child was dead. Later on, I found out that the corpse was that of a different daughter, of the same family. At the time, I assumed it was the handicapped child to whom we, the Western students, had sometimes offered pennies. The father had wrapped the body of this unfortunate, second daughter in synthetic, pile blankets. He laid the corpse down in front of the qibla, the wall facing Mecca.

  Three hundred worshippers from around the world stood before her. We spoke private prayers into our cupped hands. We muttered in English, Arabic, Berber, Chechen, Chinese, Urdu and French.

  As soon as the prayer was finished, the father scooped up the dead child. He whisked it away with the swiftness of a thief, then skipped down the stairs and into the night.

  The Night of Destiny came, as Ramadan did, in secrecy. Only the ulema, the learned men of Islam – committees in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Dammaj – could speak with certainty about its arrival. And these scholars only spoke on the morning after, when occlusions in the sun’s rays told them that the Night of Destiny had come and gone. Yet it was an important night. Prayer on this night was thought to be more effective than a thousand days’ worth of prayer. On no other night, says Islamic tradition, do the angels of God hover so close to the surface of the earth. ‘Ask God for what you most want tonight,’ my French friend, Ahmed, told me. ‘Ask him again and again and ask when your head is on the ground. When you are prostrating yourself, for you are never closer to God than at that point.’

  The mosque was so full on that evening that it was difficult to find an empty patch of carpet. If the Night didn’t arrive then, it would come the next night, and if not the next, it would certainly come on the following evening. No one wanted to miss it. The American and European teenagers had come to wait in the mosque until it was announced, officially in the newspapers, that it had come. They brought their camping gear: sleeping bags, pillows, pile blankets, flashlights, cereal, two-litre bottles of Coke, Game Boys, cellphones, iPods, grammar books, and hooded sweatshirts for ablutions and prayers in the pre-dawn chill.

  Early in the evening, Ahmed removed an ID photo from his wallet that had been taken two years earlier. It depicted a beardless face, and knowing eyes. ‘I was an alcoholic then,’ he said. ‘I worked in a hotel in London. I drank pints in the pubs. I didn’t even know what the Night of Destiny was. You see? We’ve all been in that place of disbelief. We’ve all been kuffar. You’re not so different, you know.’

  During these final Ramadan days, Ahmed had embarked on a programme of voluntary withdrawal from the world, which in Arabic is called itikaaf, or sequestraton. His wife brought tea and meals to the mosque. He left it only to go to the bathroom. When he wasn’t praying or sleeping, he was drinking tea and chatting with friends. One evening, Ahmed and I shared his tea with a new fellow, a Nigerian, just in from Lagos.

  ‘I will not stay in Sana’a,’ he said. ‘No.’

  ‘Really, where to?’ I asked.

  ‘To the north, Dammaj,’ he murmured.

  He gave me the number of the driver. I called the driver.

  ‘Peace upon you, uncle,’ I said. ‘I am Thabit from Beni Mattar.’ I told him that I chewed only Mattari qat and only on Fridays. The driver giggled.

  ‘Mashallah,’ he said.

  ‘I love the Yemeni people,’ I said.

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. Ahlayn, ahlayn.

  Abdul Gorfa introduced me to the other people who were going to travel to Dammaj on the following morning: two American brothers, a weightlifter from Birmingham, and a French teenager. ‘My wife and daughters will be coming with me,’ said the teenager in fledgling Arabic

  At the dawn prayer, the people smuggler did not appear. ‘Go back to bed,’ the Nigerian told me. Five minutes later Abdul Gorfa was knocking on my door. ‘Hurry, Thabit!’ he said. ‘The driver!’ I stuffed a copy of The Fortress of Islam in the breast pocket of my robe. I grabbed my prayer rug and my Koran.

  In the hallway, outside my dorm room, Abdul Gorfa was in a panic. The driver had told him that his colourful African robes were likely to raise eyebrows on the road to Dammaj. The French teenager had said that only housewives in Dammaj wore floral patterns or multicoloured robes at all. Now Abdul Gorfa was knocking on doors, trying to scare up a proper white Saudi-style dishdasha. I found one in my luggage and watched while Abdul Gorfa divested himself of his native costume.

  We all knew we were heading into a world of Saudi standardisation and orthodoxy and that this was why we would have to dress in white from now on. Abdul Gorfa had come halfway around the world for this, but he seemed for a few moments to doubt his decision. Nigerian Islam, with its regal, multi-hued robes, and dances, and rules honoured in the breach, was finished for him. Did he really want to let it all go? He stared at his new white robe in the mirror in my bathroom. His face fell. Of course, at this stage it was too late for second thoughts

  He slipped down the stairs of the dorm, and walked through the mosque on his own.

  Soon we were racing through the Sana’a streets at dawn. The rising sun was pouring into the driver’s eyes. He flew through the intersections as if all the other cars in the world had vanished, and we alone remained to barrel down the boulevards. A clutch of policemen in front of a bank gazed at us in silence. We passed homeless men collapsed on the front steps of corner mosques. Every store was shuttered. The traffic lights blinked.

  Within minutes we were passing a cavernous empty football stadium and then we came to a giant open-air marketplace on the northern edge of town which was deserted. The Ministries of Defence, Elec
tricity, and the Interior had been abandoned. Only a handful of slumbering policemen sat on chairs in front of the ministry gates.

  Early on a Ramadan morning, Sana’a is like this. It is especially devastated towards the end of Ramadan, when everyone is exhausted, and people are trying to sleep the last few hours of fasting away. On mornings like this, only the essence of the city remains: a merciless sunlight on the boulevards, tiny clutches of policemen, goats in the alleyways, and posters of the president looking down over the banks and the mosques. I didn’t realise this until I was sneaking away from the city myself but the essence is also clusters of devout young men sneaking away into the countryside as the policemen sleep.

  At around ten in the morning, I woke to find the van drifting through a landscape of black volcanoes. Candyfloss clouds floated over the summits. The Koran was playing on the van stereo. Certain lines leapt out: ‘and we have brought this down to you the Muslims, you the Muslims. So that you may worship it.’

  Later in the day, the driver dropped off the lip of the tarmac. We followed a jeep track in the desert to a village about five kilometres from the road, and here we slipped through a gate into a labyrinth of white walls and shuttered windows.

  The van rocked to a stop in front of a one-room mosque. Three old men in robes and caps sat on the carpet inside. They smiled at us but did not rise. Outside, sheep nibbled in a courtyard. When we had finished praying, one of the old men told us that the government soldiers had passed through the village a week earlier but had not been seen since.

  ‘Praise God,’ said the driver.

  ‘Yes, praise God,’ the villagers agreed.

  On stepping out of the mosque, we saw that two new drivers had materialised along with two olive green army jeeps. We retrieved our baggage from the van. The jeeps set out into the trackless desert. On the horizon, a line of low-lying tabletop mountains glinted in the sunshine.

  Around four in the afternoon, I woke up to find our jeep creeping along a knife-blade ridge. We were high in the air, and a cloud of steam was washing over the ridge. Rivulets of moisture trickled down the windows. We couldn’t see a thing. Then quite suddenly the cloud dissipated. We peered down, over the knife-blade ridge into a perfectly square, immaculate white city: whitewashed houses, white mosque dome, white cemetery.