Undercover Muslim Read online

  From a single gateway at the foot of the city, jeep tracks spiralled into the surrounding steppe.

  Abdul Gorfa pressed his nose against the window of the jeep. ‘What do the sheep eat here?’ he wondered. ‘No green, is there?’ No one said anything. ‘We are having an adventure,’ he concluded absently.

  ‘Yes,’ I said at last.

  ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this,’ he murmured. ‘Very dry and white. Red dirt. What do the people eat in this country?’

  ‘There’s more green in Nigeria, isn’t there?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But mashallah, there is no knowledge in Nigeria.’

  For the next two hours, we passed village after village like this: desiccated, silent and white. Old stone watchtowers, once used to guard the crops, had been left to rot in the sun. Sometimes toothless old men sat beneath acacia trees, watching us and keeping perfectly still. Goat carcasses lay half buried in the sand at their feet.

  In fact most of the smaller towns in northern Yemen have this ghost town appearance. Much of the region was abandoned in the 1970s, when oil money began to spread across the countryside. The old economy of sheep, beans and potatoes died because it was easier and cheaper to buy mass-produced, imported goods. Young people who had been scraping a living from plots of lumpy topsoil learned to live from low-skilled jobs in Saudi Arabia and low-wage jobs in southern Yemen.

  With no agriculture to stop it, the desert swept through these villages like a slow-motion flood. It poured down the main streets, and filtered into the dooryard gardens. Nowadays, sand waves lap at the ground floor windows of the houses. The people who remain in these former villages tend to be elderly, rough-hewn survivor types. They harvest their firewood by hacking at the limbs of acacia trees and drink a muddy, brackish water which they pull from wells with buckets attached to strings. To drive through these villages is to feel that the environmental catastrophe everyone else is waiting for has already come to this part of the world and left it. The survivors are evidently unperturbed; the women cluster at the wells in their black cloaks. The men doze in the shade of acacia trees. Their sheep, goats and camels are now mostly carcasses. Bones and hooves lie in piles beyond the wells and now and then a camel skull pokes out of a drift beside the jeep track.

  After two hours of trekking through the mountains, we rejoined a government tarmacked road. Soon we joined a line of cars waiting at the checkpoint on the outskirts of the city of Sa’ada. Because Sa’ada is the headquarters of the Shia insurgency in Yemen and because it is also a smuggling hub in which Saudi entrepreneurs load up on guns, qat and Djibouti alcohol, this checkpoint was meant to look forbidding. Behind the barrier, barbed wire had been strung across the road, guns poked from behind sandbagged machine-gun emplacements, and pickup trucks, mounted with light anti-aircraft guns, sat in the sunshine, pointing their guns at the oncoming traffic.

  Our driver had stashed Yemeni-camouflage gear beneath the seats. Abdul Gorfa, an American named Malik and I slipped into dinner jackets. The driver tucked his Kalashnikov under his seat. It felt a little like we were preparing ourselves for a wedding, and a little like we were on the verge of a commando assault on the government sentries.

  ‘Sleeb,’ urged the driver, ‘sleebing now.’ We fell on to the floor of the jeep. We buried our heads among the duffel bags. Lying on the floor of the van, we waited for the dialogue we had heard a half-dozen times that day.

  Driver: Officer! Evening of the light to you.

  Officer: Evening of the rose. How is the world of this life with you?

  Driver: We praise God. Peace unto you.

  Officer: And unto you. Off you go!

  Soon we were winding our way up a back road. Twenty minutes later, the jeeps had stopped on a windswept promontory. All ten of us stepped out into the red dirt. ‘This is the Dar al Hadith,’ said the driver, sweeping his hand over the valley at our feet. ‘Welcome. The Shia live there and there –’ he said, angling his beard towards the southern end of the fields beneath us: ‘and they live beyond the mountains there and there, but beneath us, here, in these vineyards, this is our place of study. Welcome.’

  37

  FROM UP HERE, about 500 feet in the air, we could take in the sweep of the landscape: beneath us lay a steep-walled valley whose floor was covered in vineyards, and rows of corn. It was about five miles long and one mile wide. At the northern end of the valley, near where we stood, a village of mud houses and corrugated tin roofs was spreading into the fields. Further away, towards the southern end of the valley, a scattering of cobblestone watchtowers and smaller, more decrepit huts huddled under a band of cliffs.

  The northern end of the valley was by far the more prosperous, fertile spot: a winding river bed, now dry, was lined with deep green orchards and plots of grapes. The houses had backyard gardens in which fruit trees and corn stalks shimmered in the last of the evening light.

  At the middle of this settlement, a cement warehouse, not unlike a suburban mall, rose from the sand. Its most prominent feature was the garden of satellite dishes, speakers and antennae on its roof, which made it look as though it was listening to the surrounding cliffs and the sky.

  This building, said our driver, was Sheikh Muqbel’s marqiz, or centre; here we would study, pray and eat.

  For several minutes the ten of us stood in the wind, gazing out over the white box and the surrounding valley. After four hours of desiccated villages and brown landscape, the agriculture at our feet had a mirage-like quality. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust.

  I happened to be standing next to the Americans and the French father. I watched them snapping pictures with their cellphone cameras and listened to them exchanging expressions of awe: ‘subhan allah,’ they murmured, and ‘ya, salaam!’ and ‘mashallah’!

  My travelling companions may have been right – the will of God may have been at work – but in a more immediate sense what we were looking at was the will of the Saudis. This was how the Saudis proselytised: to the centre of a valley that had belonged to the Shia for a thousand years or longer, the Saudis brought construction equipment, cinder blocks and white paint. They brought loudspeakers and satellite dishes. They also brought well-digging equipment which is often illegal in Yemen but evidently has a salutary effect on the landscape.

  The result of this influx was a seventh-century scene of agriculture and cobblestone towers into which a fortress had been dropped. The fortress was occupied by a corps of Sunni whose mission it was to pacify, then convert the natives.

  Evidently, the Saudi-sponsored mosque had not entirely succeeded. From above, the lines of the current entrenchment could be discerned in the landscape itself: the Saudi-backed Sunni had the white cement, the satellite dishes, the well-digging equipment and the proliferating huts.

  The indigenous Shia held the mud houses at the furthest end of the valley, their own vineyards, and the surrounding valleys. The watchtowers that rose near their end of the valley were tall and formidable; in a time of need, they could probably have functioned as snipers’ nests. From a strictly military point of view, however, it would have been better to hold the Salafi mosque, which was reinforced by heavy concrete walls and probably could have doubled as a bunker.

  The Shia were further disadvantaged by the fact that they were losing the battle of the demographics. In Yemen, they were a minority of a million, among twenty million Sunnis. In the Muslim world at large, they were about 175 million among 1.5 billion Sunnis.

  Now, every day, a trickle of foreigners from this larger Sunni world was filtering into the Saudi-sponsored colony. Even from high above the village of Dammaj, on a sandstone bluff, it was easy to see how this immigration was likely to upset the already fragile local ecology.

  38

  ABOUT TEN DAYS after my arrival in Dammaj, I was hanging around on a bench in the village square. I was thumbing through a Koran and watching the tall cedars overhead bend in the breeze.

  The noontime prayers were about t
o begin. A parade of religious students from across the world drifted into the Great Mosque. Every now and then, some former resident of Anaheim, California or Aubervilliers or Dortmund would address me in formal, classical Arabic: ‘Salaam alaikum, brother of mine,’ the person would say. ‘See you inside? Is everything fine?’

  ‘Of course, brother,’ I would say. ‘Inshallah, I’ll be inside in a moment.’

  This was a typical late morning in Dammaj. The village guards hung about the entrance to the mosque, clutching their machine guns. The merchants locked their shops in preparation for the noontime prayer. The students trekked through the dust in their robes and slippers. An Iraqi who sold sports jackets from a clothes rack at the foot of the mosque stairs pulled a plastic tarp over his rack. He pushed it into a corner, climbed the mosque stairs, and slipped off his shoes.

  Just then, a teenager in a white robe and white silken scarf emerged from the village internet cafe. He loitered in front of the cafe, kicking at piles of sand with his sandals and frowning. Then he sat on the stoop of the cafe and unwound his headscarf. His schoolbooks fell into the sand. He made no effort to retrieve them. Instead he folded his headscarf into a perfect triangle, then folded it again into a band, then carefully spiralled the band around his forehead. Having accomplished this upgrade in his dress, he did not blend himself into the procession that was moving into the mosque. Instead he loitered.

  I ambled over to the steps of the internet cafe, and sat down. ‘Where are you from, my brother?’ I asked him in Arabic.

  ‘You know, brother. Around,’ he replied in English.

  In the conversation that followed, I discovered that this young man had been having some behaviour problems at home in Islington, that these involved court orders, counsellors and a succession of schools, and that his parents, who were at their wits’ end, had sent him to Yemen. They hoped that a few years in a Koran school would straighten out his life.

  At fourteen the young man, Jowad, was now the youngest English student of knowledge in Dammaj.

  ‘It’s certainly a test from God,’ he said, ‘but me, I can get used to anything. Anyway, if something’s been written for you, it’s the only thing that’s going to happen to you.’

  The procession of students had dwindled to a trickle. The square in front of us was nearly empty. Only a pair of guards on the mosque steps was watching us.

  ‘We had better pray,’ I said.

  In this mood of resignation, we strolled into the mosque. We joined the last of the rows, in the back of the hall. The front of the room was already on its knees. We looked out over a little sea of humped backs, towards Mecca. It was only a few hundred miles away, and it seemed much closer. ‘Lead us on the Straight Path,’ we mumbled, ‘the path of those thou hast blessed, not those with whom thou art angry or those thou hast cursed.’

  39

  IN THE DAYS that followed, Jowad introduced me to his favourite internet game, PimpWar.com. We chatted more about London and he told me more about his life of juvenile crime.

  I understood the details of Jowad’s story only from his side, and he was not beyond bending the truth a bit for the sake of a good yarn, so perhaps the particulars were off, but this is what I gathered. He had misbehaved and had got into trouble at school and with the police. There had been conferences with the police and with the school authorities. And then, one day, he and his stepfather had decided on an approach that would circumvent the English educational system altogether.

  Now on the ground in Yemen, Jowad had pennies to live on. He wanted to buy shoes, sweets and internet time. He wanted to call his mum in Islington. But the merchants of Dammaj had already extended him all the credit they were likely to extend, and the phones did not work unless you paid in advance. Jowad, however, was taking things in his stride. He had a phlegmatic side to his personality that allowed him to relax where other kids might have panicked.

  ‘It’s just a boring life here,’ he liked to say, ‘the most boringest in the world.’

  * * *

  One Friday, we spent an afternoon wandering through the vineyards around the mosque in Dammaj, discussing his options. He hoped to go to Aden because there was a mall there. But he knew no one. He hoped to go to Sana’a to live on his own and to teach English, as some of the English brothers in Dammaj did.

  ‘But you’re only fourteen,’ I said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  At one point in our discussion, he paused at a bend in the path and looked out, over a field of grapevines. ‘What I really ought to do,’ he said quietly, ‘is to hang around here for a while and finish memorising the Koran.’

  We kept on walking. He had already been in Dammaj for four months and in that time had memorised only the easiest, shortest suras.

  Later on, as the sun was going down, we sat around on the bench in front of the internet cafe, waiting his for his mum to call. But she didn’t call. He had been expecting to hear from her for four days, and she had neither emailed nor left messages with the cafe clerk. ‘I just wish she would be honest with me,’ he muttered to no one in particular as we dug our toes into the sand. ‘Ever since I hit puberty she hasn’t wanted me in the house.’

  The longer we sat on the bench, the more the reality of the situation crept up on us. Jowad really had caused everyone trouble in London. He was now banished to Dammaj. Because Dammaj was surrounded by a thousand miles of Arabian desert, and Jowad had no money, and no way to get out, that banishment was likely to continue – perhaps for several years. Meanwhile, the stepfather was in the house of his childhood, living with his mum.

  ‘The last time I talked to her,’ he said, sighing, ‘she said she would send me some football boots. She didn’t send nothing.’

  The sun was sinking quickly behind a band of cliffs that towered over the mosque. We watched more brothers treading into the prayer hall. For a long time neither of us said a word. ‘I don’t mind living on my own,’ murmured a small voice next to me. ‘I’ve done it in the past. I can get used to anything.’

  40

  FROM WHERE I was sitting, I could see the opening of a winding, sandy pathway. The path led away from the mosque to a bluff that gave a view over a lake of millet and grapes. Only two hurried talibs were visible on that path – and they were rushing towards the mosque. Behind them was emptiness. Privacy. To me, the path beckoned.

  I had in mind a speech I might give to Jowad. I meant to wind the clock back about twenty-six years to when there was no Saudi-sponsored mosque rising over these vineyards, and no Koran students shuffling through the sand. I was going to tell him about the siege of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca in 1979, how the Islamic apocalypse was supposed to take place that year, and how, when it didn’t take place, Sheikh Muqbel had established his academy here in Dammaj. In the succeeding years, it had become known to the Western intelligence agencies for its skilful, highly dedicated graduates.

  ‘Look, Jowad,’ I was going to say, when I had finished the lecture. ‘I know that in this mosque you have many good British brothers looking after you. I know that your mum and dad think this place has the power to straighten out your life. I know that we focus here exclusively on the ways of the Prophet, peace be upon him.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I might have said, ‘the people who are in charge of our village have the will to do something frightening at home. You might know this?’

  I could then have said, ‘Jowad, brother, I just don’t think it’s right that a kid like you, a seventh-grade dropout, should be left to finish out his education here.’ He would have stared at me. I could have added, in his silence, ‘So let’s find a way to get you out.’

  Personally, I liked my speech okay. But on that Friday afternoon, as I contemplated my speech to Jowad, I was worried for myself. It wasn’t proper for a newcomer like me to take so much interest in someone already under the care of the sheikh, nor was it proper for me to be chatting while everyone else was praying. Also: I didn’t think I could really accomplish anything anyway. Instead of a
cting, I started thinking. That was the end of it.

  ‘You wanna walk around a bit?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he said. ‘Where to?’

  In Dammaj, there really is nowhere to go. You can’t walk far because no matter where you go, you’re liable to run into Shia. It’s quite dangerous to walk through their part of the valley.

  There were still a few stragglers rushing into the vastness of the Great Mosque. We trickled in among them. Inside, in the back of the mosque, we stood next to each other – hands across our chests, little toes touching – in line, with 400 other heavily committed Muslims. Jowad and I cinched our shoulders together tightly, as one always does, so that no Shaytan or whisperer might, at this vulnerable moment, insinuate himself in among us. It was the Maghrib prayer. We made the Maghrib number of prostrations – three, always three – in front of our sheikh.

  The current sheikh, Yahya al-Hajoori keeps a militia in order to defend the village from the Shia and whatever other enemies – American spies, devils – might be lurking in the hills. His militiamen, who are called haras, or guards, study, pray and eat with the students and so the mosque is, in a way, their headquarters, too.

  When the guards want to memorise Koran, they sit cross-legged in front of their Koran stands with their guns in their laps, or they discard them on the carpet nearby, where they collect in little piles. When they want to pray, they lay their Kalashnikovs on the carpet between their legs. It makes for a strange sight: the barrels of the guns pointing towards Mecca, the heads bowing and bobbing over them. And then the guards rise, sling their weapons over their shoulders and walk away, more or less as if they’ve been practising at a firing range.