by Theo Padnos
The local kids quickly picked up on this truth about me. They cheated me at the corner store. Sometimes I made a fuss. Sometimes, I didn’t. Often, they hung on my sleeves the moment I set foot in the little alleyway in front of my house.
When they were too insistent, when they were hanging on my arms or reaching their hands into my pockets, or standing on the pavement before me, shrieking into my face, I seized them by the front of their robes. ‘Shut up!’ I told them. ‘If you want to talk to me, talk quietly,’ I told them, yelling. This frightened them. But there were times when so many kids were clustering around me, and so many shrieking faces were yelling at me, that I wanted to do more than frighten them. I pushed the most aggressive kids to the ground, and when they fell, I held their throats to the pavement and ground their tiny wrists into the cobbles.
Before my first such episode, I had been under the impression that I was turning myself into an altruistic, feed-the-poor, Bob Geldof person. But one afternoon, after I had had a proper battle with a pesty kid I had to wonder: where did this violent streak come from? Is this really within me? I didn’t give it too much thought, though, because I was glad of it. I needed it in those swarms of pushing and tugging children.
16
THE WEBSITE FOR the Mahad Medina, a religious school in Sana’a, said that new students had to be ‘Salafi Muslims in good standing with strict observation’ but I just walked in off the street. An American friend I met in a fast-food restaurant accompanied me. Together we climbed to the fourth floor of an apartment building in a newer, disregarded section of Sana’a. I stood in front of a door and knocked.
When it opened, my friend, Muhammad from Maryland, introduced me as Thabit. ‘He’s looking for knowledge,’ Muhammad said. ‘I thought you could help him.’
A heavyset American who introduced himself as Omar shook my hand. He pointed to a spare foam-rubbermattress in a corner. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. When I sat, he introduced the other students in the room: a British Pakistani named Abdul Majid, and Ibrahim, a Bosnian, who had recently been a computer-science student in Denmark.
Introducing myself, I said, ‘I’m interested in what you guys are doing here. I’ve been in Yemen for a year now. I have a pretty strong feeling that I’m missing something.’
The students wanted to know if I believed in God at all. I temporised. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sort of interested in what you guys believe about God.’
* * *
Omar yawned. I asked him why he had left Philadelphia. ‘America is jess a big ol’ Seven-Eleven,’ he said. ‘Jess people buying up stuff they don’t need, you know. Shampoos and shoes, drugs and sweets. Here in Yemen we got Science,’ he said. ‘Here we don’t buy nothing.’ He was twenty-eight years old and had been living in Yemen for six months. Abdul Majid was twenty-three. He had come to Yemen so that he could teach his Pakistani parents, his English sisters and his Canadian wife what Islam really was. Ibrahim had come because Islam in Bosnia had been massacred by the Serbs. ‘No Islam in Bosnia, no. Some Muslims live there, yes,’ he said, ‘but they are afraid.’
On this, my first afternoon in the Mahad Medina dormitory, we perused some of the easiest, most self-explanatory chapters of the Koran. The passage we talked about more than any other had to do with wasted lives, and the dumb, profitless passage of time.
‘By [the passage of] time, mankind is in loss,’ said the Sura al-Asr, the Chapter of Time. ‘It is in loss except for those who truly believe and worship Allah alone, and do righteous deeds, performing that which is obligatory upon them and avoiding that which they are forbidden.’
Ibrahim had memorised these words in their mellifluous Arabic. He was the most learned of the students and therefore the leader of the discussion. His part as leader was to mumble the passage to himself on his mattress. When he was finished, Omar, a giant, oval man with an enormous oval face, turned to me. ‘Your lord, he created you,’ he said. ‘He created Ibrahim. He created you all for a purpose. If you don’t find out what it is, you just wasting your life. You might as well be dead.’
Such was the verdict of the students and I could see it immediately in the saddened faces of Abdul Majid and Ibrahim. The conversation continued for a few more minutes but it didn’t need to because I had understood the point well enough. Without Islam, the passage of time was merely stupid. Without knowledge of what was obligatory and what forbidden to men, life was an aimless and profoundly selfish thing. It might drag on at great length – or it might not. In either case, without God it had no meaning. Ibrahim made this point sternly and slowly in rumbling, Slavic-inflected English. ‘If knowledge is available, we as Muslims – we believe it is death if you do not seek it. Even life is death.’
Just before he rose to do his ablutions, he reached into a plastic bag by his pillow. He withdrew several pamphlets, examined them, and then passed me one: The Way of the Salaf.
Then, without ceremony or smiles, he asked me to leave. Prayer time had come. At that hour, I had no business in this room, in the dorm, or in the neighbourhood at all, really. Ibrahim showed me the door.
17
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Muslim to feel that a simpler, truer way of life endures in the East.
When Gertrude Bell first arrived in Syria, in 1909, she wrote home from Damascus: ‘Existence suddenly seems to be a very simple matter, and one wonders why we plan and scheme … when all we need to do is to live and to make sure of a succeeding generation.’
I had similar feelings when I first arrived in Sana’a, but not knowing what to do, I busied myself in a life of planning and scheming.
My discussion with Ibrahim, Omar and Abdul Majid suggested to me that these were three kids who knew enough not to do what I had done. Now they would focus on the important things: God, Knowledge, Koran.
‘I’m here to learn my religion,’ Abdul Majid, the Mancunian, told me when I asked him why he had come to Yemen.
But what did he mean to do once he had learned his religion?
He shrugged. ‘You never finish,’ he said. ‘But when I advance, maybe in five years, maybe in ten – whenever my knowledge is strong – I could teach. Only Allah knows.’
‘Teach who?’ I asked.
His mother and father. Beyond that, he didn’t know. Anyway, he wasn’t worried. Things would take care of themselves. In the meantime, he would study.
Later on that evening, at home, in my apartment in the Old City, I leafed through The Way. It was unexceptional. All Islamic pamphlets in Yemen recommended following the ways of the Prophet, as this one did. All of them were written in badly translated English-Arabic, with spelling mistakes, and quotations from the Koran. ‘Stick to the Sunnah,’ the quotations in The Way said, and ‘Muhammad is not the father of any amongst your men but [the] Messenger of Allah and the seal of the Prophets.’
On Wikipedia, I looked around for context about The Way. I discovered that the term salaf referred to the community of disciples and warriors who surrounded the Prophet at the dawn of Islam (salaf = ancestor). I also discovered that Salafism and Wahabism were essentially the same. Muslims preferred the former term to the latter.
The Salafis abjured politics, idealised family order, and loved the Prophet above all things. Salafism honoured scholarship and scholars. Millions of Saudis and millions of Yemenis were leading pious, ordered lives by revering these precepts.
Despite these virtues, sects within this strain of Islam were causing trouble. Its military wing had swept Osama bin Laden from his family of plutocrats, and had brought him to a life of caves and jihad. For fifty years, I read, the angry side of Salafi Islam had been guiding the most important names in jihadism: Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Palestinian theorist, Abdullah Azzam. It had inspired the London bombers, and was calming the suicide soldiers of Baghdad as they strapped themselves into their bombs.
The kids in the dorm, however, didn’t belong to anything angry. If anything, they were escaping earlier, angrier lives. In Yemen they wer
e perhaps getting themselves in slightly over their heads. And so? That didn’t bother me, nor apparently did it bother them. This is what we were there for: immersion, deeper Islam, a radical change in our lives.
Since I had no job then and not much to do, I sat every night in the place of seeing, or mafraj, in my apartment in the Old City.
Every evening at around 6.30, a muezzin whose voiced cracked and sometimes cut out altogether clicked on his microphone. He coughed and sputtered for a moment. Then all was quiet. Then he took a deep breath and called out to the heavens: ‘God is great, God is great.’ Before he could get through the second akbar, he was joined by another bellowing voice and then instants later by another and another until the whole valley rang with echoing, overlapping cries: every voice said that God was great. Every voice said that he witnessed there was no God but God. Except Allahhhh, except Allahhhhh, except Allahhhh.
For me, this time of day was always a little nerve-racking. But the storm of cries over the city also reassured me. It made the single human voice, particularly the one inside one’s head, sound petty and unimportant. Meanwhile, the universal, stereophonic sound, bouncing from one side of the valley to the other, constricted space. It made the towering escarpments that surrounded the city seem to loom and drape, as if they had picked up and advanced a little bit during the day while the citizens napped and chewed their qat. These could be ecstatic moments for the tourist because the late afternoon sun turned the cliffs the colour of whiskey and the muezzins’ voices really did bang and ricochet between the brick tower houses. But it wasn’t a great time to be an unbelieving resident. The streets emptied. The darkness fell at that middle of the world latitude like a cellar door collapsing. One minute it was dusk and the sky was a storm of cries. The next minute a wall of black air had fallen over the minarets, the moon sat on top of the tallest spire, and the mountain ridges, overlapping and chaotic during the day, melted into a single dark velvet curtain surrounding the city.
A week later I was standing in the courtyard parking lot of the Mahad Medina, fixing my bike to a mulberry tree. Ahmed, a director of the school was waddling towards me in his robe and sandals. He had a jolly smile in his eyes, and in his hands were the keys to the new Land Cruiser from which he had just emerged.
If I was to enrol in the school, I would need the permission of this eminent personage first.
I used to have the same conversation with Yemenis when I was interested in them being interested in me. It was a sort of comic routine – silly, but foolproof. It was odd how universally consistent the Yemeni reaction was, and how automatic the dialogue. The script worked because I loved what Yemenis loved: their sense of virtue, their drugs, and their dream of Yemen as a confederation of God-seeking mountain brothers, all loving, warm and prepared at a moment’s notice to clash their sabres together in acknowledgement of God’s supreme power. This, they believed, was their quirky place in the Arab world.
Often on the street, especially when I was riding my bike, passers-by would stop to stare at me. The starers were always men and were never shy. I would sometimes pull my bike over and introduce myself.
‘My name is Thabit al-Mattari,’ I would say, ‘and I come from Beni Mattar.’
The starers would raise their eyebrows.
‘What is your name?’ they would say. ‘Where did you say you were from?’
‘Behind that mountain there,’ I would say, and nod to the hills. ‘I am from the land of the Beni Mattar.’ The land of the sons of the rain. This was a village on the road to the Red Sea, famous in Yemen for its weapons trafficking and its opposition to the federal government. If other people on the street happened to hear the name of the village in my mouth, they would stop. They would rest their hands on the pommels of their waist daggers or lean on the shoulders of their neighbours.
‘Beni Mattar?’ someone would wonder. ‘Really?’ Amana?
‘Yes, Beni Mattar,’ I’d say.
This puzzled Yemenis. It especially puzzled the country folk from Beni Mattar who were everywhere in Sana’a. Someone in the group would reflect for a moment and then conclude, wisely: ‘No, can’t be.’
Heads would turn. I would stare into the crowd. I got some pretty blank, mystified looks. ‘No, where are you from? Which country?’ someone would correct. ‘Which nation?’ he would say. Ayi bilad? I would stare.
‘Beni Mattar!’ I would reply, pointing to the farthest and highest mountain summits. ‘Behind that mountain, there!’ I would say, feigning annoyance and indignation. ‘What do you mean, No? Where are you from, my brother?’ A few smiles would ripple through the group, and more people would stop to listen. My words were just vaguely plausible not because I could pass, in a physical sense, for a local but because I had learned Arabic almost entirely from the street. My Arabic then was straight imitation of Yemeni vowel sounds and rehearsed phrases. But I had no self-consciousness in the language. I plunged forward. ‘I’m the mountain son of a mountain man, the tribal son of a tribesman (qabili ibn qabili)! I’m made in Beni Mattar. I live for the rich coffee of Beni Mattar and the green qat that grows on the hillsides. I chew only this qat! Everything else is for the dogs of the street – for the sons of the dogs of the street!’
Then I would stop. Actually, the qat from Beni Mattar was a cheap, low-grade affair. No one ever got excited over it. But excitement over Mattari qat was funny. More people would gather. Now there would be a dozen turbaned gentlemen staring at me in blank incomprehension. ‘He tells you he’s from Beni Mattar,’ someone would murmur.
At this point, I used to find a person in the crowd whose eyes were boring into me. ‘We’ve had quite a bit of rain up there,’ I would say. People would blink. Others would scan the street nearby for policemen. In the silence of their unease, I would try to look a little sorry for myself. At last, I would say: ‘Well, if you want to know the truth, I’m not a hundred per cent from Beni Mattar. My mother …’ and then I’d look down at the ground. ‘I mean my mother, may Allah protect her and guide her – she’s not from there at all.’
Ah … a clarifying light would break across a dozen heads wrapped in turbans. Faransah? someone would suggest. Almania? Amrika?
‘No, my brothers,’ I’d say. ‘My mum, she’s from …’ and I’d name the other village hidden away in backwardness and religious foment next door to Beni Mattar.
That was it. That’s all it took. Yemenis have the most wonderful faculty for delight and wonder and laughter. They would bend over in hysterics. ‘Ya Mattari!’ they would exclaim. ‘Welcome!’ ‘Who’s your sheikh?’ ‘Where in Beni Mattar?’ ‘You are the son of which house?’ I had answers for all these questions. They were all ridiculous. For instance, my sheikh was a bona fide sheikh, Ali Muhammad al-Mattari, but he’d been dead for ten years. I said that my house was in ‘the valley’, underneath the waterfall.
Irony isn’t known in Yemen. It is too traditional and too sincere a society for irony to flourish and when Yemenis meet a little bit of it, they are often transported by delight. It can seem to them like an odd, delicious drug, dropping from the moon.
‘Welcome! Welcome, ya Mattari!’ the people around me would declare as I blathered about the rain and the waterfalls of Beni Mattar. Whenever there was a lull in the dialogue, someone would fill the quiet with the beautiful Arabic expression, mashaallah: Such is the will of God!
Outside in the courtyard, I undertook a version of this dialogue with Ahmed, the man with the Land Cruiser and the cheerful smile. I knew he didn’t approve of qat – Salafists believe it will send you to hell – but I carried through with a muted, humbler qat paean anyway. As he listened, he smiled. When I got to the part about my mum, he opened his mouth. A full-throated fundamentalist laugh poured out. He called to some other Arabs milling before the door of the mosque. They had similarly round bellies and beards and came tottering over in their sandals. Ahmed nodded to me. ‘This is Thabit al-Mattari,’ he said gravely. ‘He’s from Beni Mattar but his mother’s from al-Heima.’
The other teachers and officials at the centre were educated, canny people and knew this was a joke right away. ‘Inner or Outer Heima?’ said one, smiling.
‘Inner,’ I said, ‘of course. Much the better one.’
He smiled. ‘May Allah receive you and welcome you,’ said Ahmed’s friends.
‘He chews only Mattari qat and only on Fridays,’ said Ahmed. The friends shifted in their sandals. They smiled shyly as if they knew they were in the presence of a joke but didn’t want to laugh.
‘Qat is haram, or forbidden, said Ahmed, but he didn’t mean it, and as the words were leaving his lips a naughty look appeared on his face. ‘Allah welcomes you. You like qat from your countryside?’ That sounded suspiciously like an invitation to an afternoon qat-chewing session to me, but I said nothing. A lot of invitations came whizzing through the air in this country and extinguished themselves in the ether. They meant nothing.
‘He’s going to be taking classes with us,’ said Ahmed to the other teachers.
‘You are welcome,’ they said.
‘We are going to pray the Maghrib prayer now. Come with us to pray the Maghrib,’ said Ahmed, looking at me.
This seemed too sudden to me.
‘Come with us to pray the Maghrib.’
‘I don’t know how.’
‘Come,’ said Ahmed and he took me by the hand. Off we went to a sink. Ahmed asked me to say that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his Prophet. I said these words in Arabic then performed the ablutions and when I was done with these, without shoes, without congratulations or ceremony or additional holy words of any kind, I walked upstairs, into the mosque, and joined a prayer row. I touched my feet to the feet of the men next to me. I raised my hands to my ears, then bowed from the waist, then stretched myself across the sandy carpet.
