Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  So in the morning, when I’d finished my prayers, I used to lie in my bed, daydreaming and wondering about my future. Of course one day the call I’d been waiting for came.

  It was Ramadan of 1427, year of the Hejira, or 2006 in the Gregorion calendar. A Nigerian brother, Abdul Gorfa, was knocking on my dorm room door. ‘Thabit,’ he whispered. ‘Driver here! Driver waiting. Hurry!’

  I sat up in my bed. A stream of multicoloured light was falling across my prayer rug, my sandals, and an English–Arabic Koran I had been given on the street.

  ‘Thabit? Sleeping? No, please. Rush!’

  When foreign religious students set out for Dammaj, they try to slip out of Sana’a in the early morning dusk, as the citizens of the nation sleep. If they don’t, the police force will awaken, man the checkpoints on the highways, and peer into the recesses of the vans and taxis. They might ask for ID cards and passports.

  The students, therefore, have to hurry.

  Being a reader of American newspapers, I was especially alert to a further danger. At this time, back in 1427, Rumsfeld and Cheney were still in charge of the government back home. Those two had been known to send Hellfire missiles on to people who drove along the roads we drove, worshipped in our mosques, and believed as we believed. Then there was the problem of the Shia, who were hostile to our kind of Islam; they were inclined to ambush people they didn’t like. Beyond this, there were restive tribes in the back country and, so the news media said, terrorists.

  Abdul Gorfa wanted to know if I had a white, Saudi-style robe he could borrow. The driver told him that his African dishdasha would raise the suspicions of people we might encounter on the highway.

  I ransacked my luggage. Yes, I had something suitable. Abdul Gorfa changed in front of the ablution sink in my room, then hurried away, down a flight of stairs, through the mosque and into the street. I folded my prayer rug into a square, and fetched my toothbrush. Five minutes later I was standing in front of a van in my robe and sandals.

  ‘Passport?’ the driver asked me.

  ‘Left it with a friend,’ I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Do I need it?’ I asked. He shrugged again.

  This would have been a good time for my nervousness to kick in. I have a tendency to worry at the outset of important voyages. On this morning, however, I wasn’t anxious or uptight in any way.

  It happened to be the morning after the Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Destiny, which is a pretty holy evening in Islam. It’s the anniversary of the first time the angel Gabriel brought certain special words down to Muhammad. It was the birthday of the Koran, in a manner of speaking, and I was feeling lucky.

  Actually, I was more than a bit surprised to be travelling into the back country at all. Though I was a fairly serious Muslim at this point, with a beard and a tiny abrasion on my forehead from the prostrations I had been doing on our mosque carpet, not every one of my fellow students had confidence in me. In fact, certain French brothers had doubted, even in front of our sheikh, the degree of my commitment. They thought I laughed in my heart at the Prophet, which I did not do, exactly, and that I underestimated the Book of Allah, which I also didn’t do.

  So, for eight months, they talked to this driver and that fixer and made sure that I stayed stuck in our mosque in the capital. Being stuck, I memorised Koran. I went to my classes. I learned about the problems the ummah faces in this day and age, and I discovered the excitement of praying with people who will solve those problems. Of course, I learned to respect my teachers. I hope they learned to respect me.

  As I was taking my seat in the van, the driver stood in the street, squinting at my pinkish American face. ‘Thabit,’ he muttered. ‘Is that your real name?’

  In Arabic, Thabit means ‘immovable’. For me, it stood for Yemeni qualities I admired – steadfastness, unshakeable faith, rectitude – and this is why I had chosen it. But Thabit was a country boy, salt-of-the-Arabian-earth sort of name. Sometimes, people smiled at me, an American from a city, when I introduced myself.

  ‘Thabit is my real name now,’ I said, and gave the driver a blank look.

  He wondered at this information for a moment but did not smile. He shrugged his shoulders, then looked away. In Yemen, no one questions anything. You can be whoever you’d like to be.

  It took the driver only seconds to strap the overflow luggage on to the roof. It took us a few more seconds to roll out of the alley behind the mosque. Soon, we were doing 80 miles an hour through the Ramadan dawn. Every time we came to a boulevard intersection, the driver accelerated. He was a holy man, with a long beard who said prayers as he came into the intersections. The traffic lights blinked. The Koran played on the van sound system. Sunlight streamed into his eyes.

  If there had been a pedestrian or bicyclist in one of those intersections we would have mowed him down like a melon. Pedestrians don’t have many rights in Yemen. Drivers will swerve for them but they won’t brake. Our guy didn’t brake and he didn’t swerve. He too was feeling lucky, it seemed. Or anyway, guided by Allah.

  We passed a few policemen right in the centre of the city, in front of a big international bank. They nodded. Were they winking? Maybe so.

  We flew by Yemeni hoboes slumbering in the central reservation. We careened past little flocks of goats.

  I scarcely knew my fellow passengers. The Nigerian brother, a family of Algerians from France, two American converts on my bench and in front, a young computer science student who’d come from Birmingham in England just two weeks earlier and could not speak more than three words of Arabic – that was pretty much it. The men wore checked headscarves, red for some people, white for others, robes, sandals, and in our breast pockets we carried a tiny book of occasional prayers called The Fortress of Islam. The woman in the van – from somewhere near Paris, like her husband – was dressed as all women in Yemen dress: black across the face, black across the head, black dress, black shoes, black gloves – black and black and black. Personally, I didn’t think she had a lot of choice when it came to colours. Maybe she would have disagreed. Her two daughters – silent, about the height of elves – also wore facial veils and black robes.

  Anyone who drives north out of Sana’a probably knows that the Yemeni government has forbidden outsiders from entering the Governorate of Sa’ada in the north. An enclave of Shia has been making trouble up there for several years now and the government likes to bomb them in peace, without outsiders poking their noses into the business.

  So on this morning our van was, technically speaking, taking us into illegal territory.

  We didn’t care much about the Yemeni government (we cared even less about the Shia) but still, whenever we came to a government checkpoint, all but the French family wrapped their faces in their scarves. ‘Sleebing, sleebing,’ the driver called out. He would slow. As he rolled up to the candy cane barrier with its little soldier hut and limp flag, the students would fold themselves on to the floor of the van. Limbs lay on top of limbs. Heads nestled between duffel bags: the smell of suitcases and floor sand. ‘Na’eem – sleebing, sleebing ,’ the driver would say again and we would press ourselves down deeper under the benches.

  In this way, anyone looking into the interior of our van in a casual, rubber-stamp sort of way would have seen: a chaste Muslim woman, face covered in Dacron, her offspring, similarly clad, and her long-bearded husband. A driver. On the rooftop: luggage. In other words: a family expedition into the countryside.

  It was true in a way. Once you submit to Islam, you belong to the ummah. Our little branch of the ummah was making an excursion into the countryside, though a particular, sacred one where the Prophet of God is thought to have walked. In the physical sense our destination was an academy on the Saudi border called the Dar al-Hadith, or the House of Prophetic Tradition. In a spiritual sense we were heading backwards, through the centuries, into the golden time of Islam.

  2

  ABOUT 50 KILOMETRES outside Sana’a, an overstaffed g
overnment checkpoint loomed ahead at a rise in the land. We had no choice but to give it the slip. We dropped off the lip of the tarmac, on to a sandy path. Soon we were lost in a little sea of vineyards. Then suddenly, two little boys stepped out of the vines. Their long shadows sloped across the pavement. The van slowed. ‘Which way back to the main road?’ asked the driver. Simultaneously, in slow motion, they lifted their left arms. Their stillness, their white gowns, the clusters of purple grapes in the fields behind them, and the way the sun backlit their hair made them seem like visitors from the Islamic afterlife.

  ‘Allah be with you,’ the kids said.

  ‘May he make you strong,’ said the driver.

  ‘All of us together,’ said the kids. They lowered their arms by imperceptible degrees, like boys in a trance. Then they turned their eyes on us, the passengers in the back of the van, and smiled shyly as if to say: we know where you’re going. May Allah open the way!

  In previous excursions around Yemen in my earlier, secular, touristic life, the drivers I’d been with had been working for money. They had been taxi drivers and tourist company jeep excursion drivers. I’d never submitted myself to a driver working on behalf of God. Things are different with the believers: easier, smoother, safer.

  3

  OUT HERE IN the vineyards, the weight of the fruit pulled the vines down on to the valley floor. Here and there, between plots of grapes stood patches of stunted corn that resembled parchment. On the fig trees, fruit hung. Millet, which looks like bulbs of cauliflower on a cornstalk, was ripe. I hadn’t realised that autumn came to Arabia. But it does come. The cities have been denuded of greenery. The trees have been replaced by hideous cement towers. If you only live in the city, you don’t see. If you only come to Yemen for a little while, say in the summer or winter, you also don’t see. In those seasons, the landscape, even outside the cities, is the surface of a science fiction planet: red, barren, unchanging, murdered by the sun. But in the autumn – this was news to me – there was fertility. There was fruit and there were harvests.

  Soon we were back out on the highway. Two crumbling twin towers of sandstone blocks rose up on the horizon, then loomed. I stared at them as they floated past the windows. They were conical piles of stone, derelict and staggering into one another, like minor ziggurats, too destitute to attract the interest of the outside world. They cast black shadows across the grapes. Then qat fields flew by the windows, and a parentless family of children rose up out of the sunlight. Each child held a translucent bag of qat gleanings into the air. ‘For sale!’ said the children’s eyes. Their mouths said nothing. ‘For shame!’ said the driver. We sailed by. The entire nation was addicted to qat, a leafy plant similar in effect to amphetamines. But the sheikhs of Islam had forbidden it.

  ‘What are these people doing to themselves?’ Abdul Gorfa wondered. ‘Why?’

  ‘For shame,’ the driver said again.

  We sped on, into the north. We slowed for further checkpoints but only as a formality and when the guards were sleeping, as they sometimes were, we really didn’t slow.

  To have slipped through the security cordon around Sana’a so easily was a surprise to me. The president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, doesn’t want rural extremists traipsing into the city to blow up embassies. Nor does he want foreign religious enthusiasts falling into the hands of zealots in the countryside. The checkpoints outside the capital are thus, in principle, well staffed. But the president doesn’t personally control the checkpoints. Really, he has no idea what’s happening on his roads. Or perhaps he does, and doesn’t care.

  Of course, it matters not a whit what the president of Yemen cares about. In Yemen, the Prophet is just a little bigger than the president. Soldiers on the highway almost always defer to people who love his messenger.

  Anyway, the soldiers know what’s going on. They know that a sheikh up in the Yemeni highlands has taken over a village, and that under his guidance the village is bringing the ways of the Prophet back to life: the ancient justice system, the scholarship, the love of recitation, the harmony between man and wife, the terror in front of God. It’s all coming back.

  When news like this appears on the internet, Western kids who feel strongly enough will eventually find their way into those highlands. I did.

  So one morning the travellers will be woken in their bedrooms. A tape of the Koran will be playing in a van outside. As they sail through the countryside, as the military men wave at them, they’re likely to feel the strength that comes to travellers on the Path of Allah. It’s a personal dignity, a sense of proximity to holy places, holy people, and it is a command of the landscape.

  But these young men – and the occasional women who come along with them – are now in a strange situation.

  Belief in Allah is under threat in Yemen. Islam is far from dead but it isn’t the force it once was in this pious country and every day Western commercial culture and Western science conquer it a little more.

  With the religion under threat, instability has spread across the land.

  In Yemen’s north, where Shia and Sunni have often been at one another’s throats, the society has descended into something close to permanent warfare. There are suicide bombers in the mosques, attacks on government buildings, and Shia takeovers of remote villages. Most of the Jews who once lived in the region have been displaced or murdered.

  Even if the young men in the van have brought maps with them, which none of them will have done, the maps are not likely to show what is happening here in the heart of Islam. Who is in danger? Who controls what? Why does a sheikh in a tiny village in the middle of the war zone welcome Western Muslims?

  The internet will have had nothing to say about these topics. When it comes to Dammaj, the Muslim chat rooms and the popular websites usually say that the purest of the pure still hold sway in Yemen’s north. ‘Voyage should be made and Knowledge should be sought in Dammaj,’ says Salafitalk.net. ‘It is a lighthouse from all the lighthouses in the world.’

  So as the van rolls northward, the young men are likely to feel that they are leaving the virtual reality of the web for a true, 3D, real-time Islamic utopia. Many of them will have been waiting for years for this crossing over to occur. It’s an exciting moment. Now it is at hand.

  4

  I WAS UNLIKE the typical religious pilgrim in that I had done some poking around on the net – particularly on LexisNexis, and in the archives of the New York Times. I had asked some questions in Sana’a. Some talibs in Dammaj keep blogs. I had reviewed these, had read up on local history in libraries in London, and connected some dots on my own. As a result, I understood the history of the Dar al-Hadith perhaps more completely than did my fellow passengers. This is what I understood: twenty-six years earlier, that is, in 1979, there had been no Dar al-Hadith at all but only a tiny village of Shia farmers: adobe huts, ziggurats in the fields, millet and grapes.

  Of course, 1979 was an interesting year in Islam, particularly in Arabia. The date corresponds to 1400h in the Islamic calendar. This year, which some Islamic prophecies once heralded as the date on which a redeemer would arrive on earth to vanquish the enemies of God, saw a popular revolution in Iran. It also saw a strange and frightening event in the holiest of Islamic places – the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. In November of that year, about 500 zealots, believing that they could hasten the Apocalypse, laid siege to this mosque. They were armed with AK-47S and hand grenades. They slaughtered an imam. They slaughtered the Saudi soldiers who were brought in to rout them. They slaughtered the pilgrims who’d come on the hajj. Most of the 500 died in the initial onslaught but a core group held out for two weeks.

  The attackers’ agenda was simple enough: seize the holy site. Restore the ancient pure untrammelled Islam to the Believers. Next: kill the Arab plutocracies, especially the one in Riyadh. Next: kill the Shia, especially those in Arabia. Not one unbeliever of any kind was to remain living on the sacred Arabian peninsula. With the holy site under control, the oil would follow. Wi
th the oil, the holy site, and the ummah at last guided by a pure Islam, the Koranic apocalypse would be at hand. And thus only a single task would remain: the slaughter of the kuffar, or unbelievers. This was the attackers’ agenda.

  My research had told me a bit about the founder of the Dar al-Hadith: he had been a professor in the hothouse where the siege idea was dreamed up, the Islamic University of Medina, but had avoided being gassed or beheaded as the other followers of this movement had been. He was only jailed. On his release, he promptly fled, in the company of a handful of the survivors, to his native village in the mountains of northern Yemen. Here, beyond the writ of any government or police force, in a halcyon valley, in the midst of the penniless Shia, he opened his academy.

  Until the year 2000, this mosque attracted little attention from the outside world. It did a quiet business ministering to 3,000 or so rather extreme, very pious, often (but not always) poor talibs from Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Occasionally the odd questing youth from the mountains of Morocco or Afghanistan found his way to the academy. It did, after all, teach exquisite Koranic pronunciation (tajwid), and an inimitable kind of Wahabi serenity that made graduates known in mosques around the Middle East – as students, as teachers, as fighters.

  Still, it was a highly obscure little academy. Its students learned to pray in the proper Salafi way, to memorise the sacred texts, to imitate the Prophet in all things, to turn their backs on representations of reality, and to regard the world of this life, the dunia, as a passing shadow. In short, the core of its curriculum was not really such a remarkable departure from standard Islam.

  If it weren’t for the intense godliness of the graduates, and the fact that they tended to find their way, in the 1980s, to Afghanistan, the place would almost certainly not have turned up on the radar screens of the Western intelligence agencies.