by Ali al-Muqri
She added that God had willed she marry an Algerian mujahid, a friend of her ex-husband. She saw this as a way of ensuring she’d always be close to her children.
Next to her, by the door, sat Abu Sadeeq’s latest wife, a Saudi. She looked around seventeen years old.
Andeera sat across from the two of them, with the grumpy looking Kurdish woman beside her. When I asked her where she was from – Syria, Iran, Iraq, or Turkey – she answered me angrily ‘From the Kurdish jinn.’
It had been a matter of pure chance. The soldiers had grabbed the three women at random, because they happened to be sitting next to the doors they opened. I was most concerned for the Egyptian woman because from the way she cried, I felt it had to be more than the rape. Looking back on it now, I realise that she was crying for the many rapes she had endured. This latest rape had broken something inside her. Instead of just adding to her store of silent pain, it had brought something to the surface.
The Moroccan woman beside me was silent. Before the rape she’d been reciting prayers in a low, melodious voice. Now the only sound she made was the odd painful sigh. Since the soldiers had brought her back, the Abu Sadeeq’s young Saudi wife had been angrily repeating the same words over and over again: ‘Infidels, infidels, enemies of God.’ After a while she went quiet and I glanced round to see if she was OK. Her posture was one of deep relaxation, but her tense smile told a different story. It was as though her body had fallen into a deep sleep, but her mind was still wide awake.
We stopped for a break – I think the little Syrian boy needed to pee. When we were getting back into the car I went out of my way to take the seat by the door. I let the other two women get back in first.
‘You envious or something?’ asked Umm al-Izz, the Egyptian, laughing. I forced a laugh to match hers but didn’t know what to say.
‘I can rest my head against the window and sleep here - you’re always awake anyway,’ I said to her.
‘No problem, whatever you like,’ she laughed again, then whispered, ‘How are these soldiers so strong? Do they eat Hadramaut honey or something?’ She seemed to have heard about Hadramaut honey’s properties as an aphrodisiac - the same honey I’d once hoped would work its magic on Abu Abdullah. Her words pained me; how pathetic, I couldn’t even get my share of rape. I asked God’s forgiveness for these thoughts but I couldn’t get them out of my head. I waited for the moment when a solider would open the car door and drag me somewhere out of sight. But what if he did it in front of everyone? It would be a scandal. No, not a scandal. Let him rape me in front of everyone. It wouldn’t matter. It would be rape, without my consent and I would not be to blame for it.
I fell asleep with these thoughts playing on my mind. When a soldier’s hand reached out and opened the door I felt like I was still dreaming. But when he asked me to get out with the others I thought I must be in a different kind of dream, a dream that was reality. At the time I understood the difference between the two dreams, but now I don’t remember, or at least I don’t understand anymore. The soldier, along with four others, searched every inch of the car. I waited for him to take me somewhere hidden from sight but he motioned for us to get back in. I was sure now that the dream had ended.
This second search somehow made the first more real, and back on the road our conversation turned to the rapes. As I listened to the women recount their experiences and discuss those of other women they knew, I became convinced that rape is a hateful thing. It is abuse, an act of violence committed for the pleasure of one party against another.
At that point, Andeera joined in. What she said completely shifted the tone of the conversation. In spite of her poor pronunciation and the way she mixed Arabic and English words, her meaning was clear: the body is like a constant chatter at which God and the devil take turns – and sometimes they both talk at the same time. God measures words with the conscious mind. His language is expressed in chaste and modest behviour; but the devil also enters the body, and talks through it in another way. This can be seen in the unabashed gaze or the hand that reaches for the erogenous zones, or even outbreaks of venereal disease. Two tongues speaking inside one body. Rape might satisfy the devil inside us, but it will crush a woman who devotes herself to God, cloud her judgement and make her ask too many questions. Those who talk about freedom have allowed the devil to chatter in their bodies. We must stand with God against the devil.
It seemed Andeera’s words had ended the conversion, since no one else spoke after that. In my mind I saw the image of the pure devout woman who dies a virgin, who guards her chastity and saves her vagina for her husband, virtuous and devoted. But unspoken questions soon bombarded me from all sides: In the end, as a virgin, will I be one of the women of Paradise who God will give as compensation to his God-fearing worshippers? Or will God create other such women? Don’t we, the obedient, worshipping women who guard our chastity, have any pleasure awaiting us in heaven like men do?
The Prophet of kindness showed the way
He led by example, guiding the people.
The driver said something to the little boy. He must have learned to speak that particular Afghani language during the time he’d spent in Afghanistan with his parents. He turned his head and said ‘The driver says we’re now in Iran.’
We were stopped at a border checkpoint where we were asked countless questions, and had to fill in a lot of forms. The boy and the driver had their work cut out. In the end, we had to wait almost four hours before we were finally allowed through.
After we crossed the border into Iran I lost track of events. Drifting in and out of sleep, our journey stopping and starting, I was completely disorientated. I no longer knew where Andeera was. When I came round I found myself inside a women’s prison, alone in the confines of a narrow cell.
A night didn’t pass without them taking me for questioning. I lost count of my interrogators. In total, I was there for twenty-seven days, nine of which I spent in solitary confinement. Once I was allowed to mix with the other inmates I got to know many of them, and began to feel less anxious. The most memorable was ‘the pleasure broker’ as she liked to be known. She was thrilled when I told her I was from Yemen, because it gave her a chance to use the Arabic she’d learned through her work. She told me that she used to arrange temporary weddings, according to the terms of Shia doctrine, with ‘a little independent judgement,’ as she put it.
‘I got so knowledgeable about sharia that I’d reached the level where I could make my own judgements,’ she added, laughing. The Iranian authorities hadn’t taken too kindly to this and accused her of sponsoring adultery.
There were other women there who I’ll never forget: Jehad, a drug addict; Catherine, an American Israeli journalist; Shireen, who the authorities accused of provocation against the Islamic regime of Iran. She had removed her headscarf during an opposition demonstration and made a statement to a British newspaper professing her love for a young man from Iran’s Jewish community. She admitted that, for her part, she would have no objection to marrying him.
Shireen told me: ‘My problem isn’t with the Iranian authorities, the worst they can do is kill us – and as you can see we’re like the living dead anyway. My problem is with the young Jew who, unlike me, didn’t dare admit that he wanted to marry me.’ Then she added: ‘He couldn’t – couldn’t even openly say he wanted to. At the beginning he wrote me a letter, telling me how much he loved me. Then he begged me to give it back, afraid someone else would read it, all the time saying he still loved me. But after a while he stopped telling me he loved me. It was like he was scared even of the walls, as though the walls had ears. He started looking at me in a certain way to tell me he loved me. But at the same time his eyes kept glancing at others – people crossing the street or sitting behind windows, or on the roofs of the cafes – scared that someone was watching us, or that someone might see us together.’
Every time I met her, Shireen retold her story, as though she wanted me to commit it to memory. She se
emed certain I would leave the prison, taking her story with me. She was more confident of my release than of her own: ‘Despite all the obstacles and the secrecy, I believed his love was real, and I felt the same. If I get out of this prison alive, the first thing I’ll do is visit his grave. He committed suicide when he heard I’d been arrested. Perhaps he was afraid they’d come for him, afraid I’d give his name away and they’d arrest him too. Even though, truth be told, he’d been under arrest his whole short life; fear had kept him imprisoned all along. He could never be free of it, even in death. He never gave a reason for his suicide, so he never escaped.’
On the first night, my interrogators’ questions focussed on why I had visited Afghanistan. They wanted the names of everyone I knew.
I soon got used to the interrogations, and learnt how to organise my thoughts so I could answer most of the questions – the same questions were posed in many different ways – without giving anything away. It seemed my interrogators were absolutely convinced I was one of Osama Bin Laden’s wives. Time and time again I denied any connection to Bin Laden, but they were unshakeable in their conviction. Finally, a man arrived who said the Iranian authorities had agreed to release me and he’d been sent by the Yemeni embassy to repatriate me to Sana’a.
I’ll stop here for a moment. I’d like to just listen to the song.
His message was a path to the light
His horses rode forth in the cause of right.
In the small bag Abu Abdullah had left in my care, I found exactly $34,620. Abu Abdullah had paid a year’s rent up front on our house, so the money was plenty for me to live on for the next five years, maybe more. But I wanted to live with my family – with my mother, my father and my sister.
It had been over a year since I’d last heard from Abu Abdullah when my brother ‘Abd al-Raqeeb returned from Chechnya. He brought with him a new wife, Valentina.
The home that ‘Abd al-Raqeeb returned to was not the one he’d left. Everything had changed. Now it was not only a lonely place, but the very embodiment of loneliness.
One morning, around six months before his return, Mother had left the house to visit her brother’s sick wife. Father left soon after her, but Lula said she wouldn’t be going into work that day – she was going to see a girlfriend and would be back soon. I was left alone in the house. I’d refused to go with Mother as I still didn’t really feel like talking to anyone. About an hour and a half later, Lula came home. I opened the door and she asked me to go and sit in Father’s room. ‘I’ve got a guest with me – I’ll sit with her in our room,’ she said, gesturing that I should go ahead of her.
From time to time, I could hear Lula’s laughter coming from the next room, but her guest didn’t make a sound.
I must have been dozing for a good while, when a knock on the door woke me. I got up to answer it. It was Father, home from work earlier than usual. He lay down on his bed, complaining of a sharp pain in his side. I knew this meant his kidney pains were back. He couldn’t have an operation on them because of his weak heart.
‘Lula’s back home early, then?’ he said when he heard her laughter.
‘She’s got a friend with her, someone from work I think.’
He twisted in discomfort, clutching his side. ‘Take me to the bathroom. Ahh . . .’ I placed his right arm over my shoulder and slid my left arm around his back to pull him up. I took his weight as he walked. As we made our way down the hallway he suddenly stopped in front of the door to our room, and said, ‘I heard a man’s voice.’
I hadn’t heard anything, so I said, ‘What man? There’s no one there. It’s just Lula and her friend.’ But he straightened up, brushed aside my hands and banged on the door with surprising strength. The locked door, unaccustomed to such attack, flew open.
A terrible sight greeted him. My father stared in complete shock. For my part, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing either. Had I known, I would never have answered the door to my father without warning Lula first. True, I never would have gone along with it if she’d told me who her guest really was, but she should have told me in any case. I’d just assumed her guest was a girl from work.
The sight of two naked bodies, in his home, in a state of intimate embrace, was too much for my father. Until he actually saw Lula’s face he couldn’t believe one of the bodies was his daughter’s. Lula, paralysed by shame, was unable to hide her nakedness.
He taught us how to gain glory
So that we took command of the land by force.
The young man, taking advantage of my father’s state of shock, bunched his clothes around his waist and fled from the room. I was astonished to see a woman’s abaya tucked under his arm. I recalled seeing the form of a woman in a black abaya standing beside Lula when I opened the door and realised that the young man must have entered the house in disguise.
Father looked utterly broken. He just stood there, incapable of punishing Lula, incapable of speaking. He got his voice back after I gave him a glass of water. ‘How could something like this happen in my own home? The home that I’ve worked all my life to strengthen with religious values and morals? How could my daughter, who I trusted, do such a thing? And you! You who have studied religion, and travelled to the ends of the earth to make jihad in the cause of God, you’re OK with this?’
‘No, Daddy, I’m not OK with this! I swear to you, in the name of God, the Almighty, I didn’t know. She told me she had a friend with her and I saw a figure in an abaya, so I left them to come in by themselves. I didn’t know it was a man under the abaya. On your life, Daddy! You mean everything to us!’
‘To top it off, she brings him in wearing a woman’s abaya! Something tells me this isn’t the first time she’s done this. You’re swearing on my life, on your love for me, but what’s life, what’s love? I never thought, never once imagined, that my dignity would come to mean so little that it could be thrown away like this.’
Lula had put her clothes back on. She approached Father, who was lying on the living room floor, and attempted to console him: ‘Daddy, you could never have expected it. You’ve known life’s hardships, but you’ve never known how to overcome them.’ As she came closer to him and he heard her words his anger flared up again. ‘You’ve got the nerve to say that, even now? What hardships? What solutions? You – you whore! My daughter, a whore? This can’t be happening.’
‘I’ve never done anything that hasn’t been for the sake of the family.’
‘What? What are you saying?’ Father was gasping now, struggling to speak. Lula went on: ‘That’s the truth, Daddy. Don’t you be angry with me! Why now? Why is it OK for you to judge me now? Why didn’t you judge and call me a whore when I was whoring myself to make money? You turned a blind eye because I was spending it on you. But now there’s no more money, you’ve finally chosen to open your eyes.’
When I motioned for her to shut up, she got even more furious. ‘Get lost, dimwit! You haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about!’ she snapped.
I shot my hand out to cover her mouth. Father wasn’t saying anything, just groaning in pain. Try as I might, I couldn’t silence her, so I screamed at her ‘Shut up! What’s wrong with you? Have you lost it completely?!’ Then Lula shoved my hand away – the sight of my father writhing in agony had finally hit home. ‘I love you, Daddy. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But what was I supposed to do? I wanted to do this one final thing. For me. But you had to come home early.’
Father was silent; he’d even stopped groaning. Was he in so much pain that he couldn’t speak, or was he just ignoring her? It was Lula who realised, after she’d frantically checked his vital signs, that the reason he hadn’t heard her was because he was dead.
Demands are not met by wishing
The world can only be won through struggle.
‘Abd al-Raqeeb asked how Father had died. ‘It was God’s will,’ Mother told him.
Lula and I hadn’t told Mother the details of what had happened, as we were scared she’d react in th
e same way as Father had.
Lula stopped going to work, and she no longer even left the house at all. She’d never been in such a bad way before, and only I knew the reason – although at first I wasn’t completely sure. I kept asking myself if Lula was suffering guilt over Father’s death? Or was it resentment? Resentment that all she’d done for us – or, as she put it, all ‘the sweat of her pussy’ she’d poured into making sure we never went hungry or lacked anything – had gone unappreciated?
After a week of Lula’s ramblings, I realised her suffering actually had nothing to do with regret or guilt. It was as if her image of Father hadn’t really changed at all, like nothing had even happened to him, or that what had happened had no significance. In a tone that was neither sorrowful nor bitter, and without a trace of irony, she would say that Father had known life’s hardships, but he’d never known how to overcome them.
‘True, he never just gave up, but then, neither did he do anything about his problems. What did him in was waiting for others to step up and solve them all for him. He was complacent, he never put himself out, never even thought how he might make things better. It made him passive. He did nothing, and he was nothing.’
Abu al-Zahra, I’ve overstepped my rank
In praising you, yet I seek the honour
Valentina seemed older than ‘Abd al-Raqeeb. She was more feminine than his ex-wife Nura, and everything about her was glamorous. With Valentina, ‘Abd al-Raqeeb was reborn a third time. As a young bachelor he’d been zealous to the point of extremism about his Marxist ideals and atheist opinions. Then after marrying Nura his jealously sent him to the other extreme, joining a jihadi group in a religious fervour and plotting to kill anyone he considered an infidel.
On the odd rare occasion ‘Abd al-Raqeeb used to say to me – and to me alone – ‘I have an important meeting with the group today.’ But his group was no longer what it had been. With Valentina’s arrival my brother burnt everything connected to the group: all of the books, pamphlets and cassettes that had filled his room. It was exactly like that other time when he was newly married and he burnt his Marxist books and his cassettes of socialist revolutionary songs.
