Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  Said slept in a corner of the prayer hall, and didn’t have a private place to dress. But every morning around ten, he crept to a closet in the basement of the mosque in which he kept his suitcase, discarded his pyjamas, clad himself in a beautiful shining, silky robe, either of black or of powder blue, and then emerged, his beard fluffed out, his hair combed, in a little cloud of perfume. He admitted openly that he was a clothes-horse. This was not at all common in our mosque, ‘Je suis un dandy, moi,’ he liked to say, ‘tu vois? Il faut savoir s’habiller correctement.’ He felt that les Salafistes were the aristocrats of Islam and should also claim their heritage in their choice of clothing.

  On Fridays, he wore a proper Yemeni dagger and scabbard. If he was to attend a local wedding, or had been invited by friends to a private house, he would wear a smooth white cape made from Algerian lambswool over his robe and daub his eyes with kohl. Sometimes the French brothers wondered what on earth he was on about with his capes and his eye make-up. He would point to his robe, or to his waist dagger, and say, ‘Ça? ça? Ça, mon ami, c’est la classe!’ He knew that his lambswool cape didn’t suit the Yemeni climate. He didn’t care.

  As a part-time auto body specialist in a suburb outside Roubaix, Said had sometimes worn his robes and capes to prayers in the local mosque. But the place, as I later discovered, wasn’t much of a mosque. It was a retrofitted grocery store, whose coolers and shelves had been replaced by wall to wall carpeting. Most of the people who prayed there were Algerian grandfathers who’d spent their lives working in the textile mills of northern France. They wore jackets and slacks to prayer.

  There was more to Islam, Said had felt, than praying with those fossils, in that mosque. When he was in his early twenties he visited other, more genuine, stricter mosques in the city of Roubaix which were frequented by young French Algerians who wore long beards and tracksuits. For a year, Said made friends among these Muslims. But the prayers at their mosques were often conducted in French, and afterwards the brothers in the tracksuits tended to lecture him, also in French, about what was forbidden in Islam and what was permissible.

  When he turned twenty-three, he knew his faith in God was deepening and he knew that he would not spend his future wandering around a housing development outside Roubaix, while French-Algerian secondary school dropouts, who could barely speak Arabic, pontificated about the life of the scholar. ‘I came to Yemen to put my faith in evidence,’ he told me. When he left Roubaix, he said, his ignorance about Islam had been formidable: he had memorised only tiny bits of the Koran, and those bits were in French. About Yemen, everything he knew was contained in the hadith about jurisprudence (fiqh) and faith (al iman) being ‘Yemeni’.

  In Roubaix, Said had memorised this hadith. ‘But how to trust yourself to God and to live like a Muslim – that I didn’t know. I just believed in Allah,’ he told me. ‘So I wanted to prove my faith.’ (Je voulais mettre ma foi en evidence.) ‘Voilà tout.’

  21

  OUR FRIENDSHIP BEGAN one cool, blustery morning in April. During the previous night, as he slept in his pyjamas in the mosque, a mosque bandit had made off with his robe. It had been made of a fine, expensive Egyptian cotton and was his favourite one. In the morning, he awoke, reached his fingers across the carpet near his head, and knew, even before he opened his eyes, that it was gone.

  He went to complain to the school secretary, Ahmed, in his pyjamas. I bumped into him here, in Ahmed’s office.

  On that morning, as it happened, Ahmed wasn’t interested in listening to Said’s complaints. He was busy. Maybe he felt that Said ought to have taken better care of his robe. Maybe he felt that one lost robe wasn’t such a big deal no matter what kind of cotton it was made of. Things do disappear in mosques, especially shoes, as every Muslim knows.

  ‘Inshallah, it will be returned to you soon,’ Ahmed was saying when I walked into the room.

  Said couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Inshallah?’ he said. ‘Inshallah? In the heart of a sacred space, in the house of God, while a brother sleeps, his own clothing, his best clothing, is taken from him? What is that? What on earth is that? C’est un pays de clochards, mon ami! And you say “inshallah”?’

  Said’s Arabic was a mixture of Berber, French and Algerian Arabic. Ahmed smiled at me as Said ranted – a patient, tolerant, brotherly smile, as if Algerian gibberish were a kind of music that he enjoyed listening to in the mornings.

  ‘I can help translate,’ I suggested to no one in particular.

  ‘Ah, the American,’ Said said when he saw me standing at the office door.

  ‘Can you believe this? Can you believe what has happened to me?’

  I asked him what a new Egyptian cotton robe might cost. I said that I knew brothers in the mosque who would be willing to chip in to buy him a new robe. I myself would be willing.

  ‘What I really need now is breakfast,’ he said.

  ‘No problem,’ I said.

  He flashed me a dubious look. ‘Do you have enough?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘I’d like to buy some olives and cheese at the supermarket. Is that okay?’ Breakfast for two in our neighbourhood at a restaurant would have cost pennies – but Said didn’t want to spend more cash than necessary, even if it wasn’t his own, since the Prophet had counselled frugality in all things. So we went to the supermarket, bought provisions, and consumed them in a nearby tea shop.

  As it turned out, we did not discuss the lost robe. We ate our olives and feta, drank our tea, then ignored the robe altogether. Instead, we discussed my own inability to perform a proper Islamic prayer. ‘I’ve seen you many, many times, my brother the American,’ he said. ‘Do you know you hesitate as you pray? You don’t know what to do with your hands. I’ve remarked on that, if you want me to be completely honest with you.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. I fingered the olives. Okay, I admitted. I had not had a proper lesson but had picked up the prayer by imitating the people next to me.

  ‘Yes, you’re lost,’ he said. ‘And what do you do if you miss a prayer and have to pray by yourself?’

  Twenty minutes later, we were standing at the edge of a large piece of office carpeting in the basement of our mosque. Our Mecca-facing wall was the closet door behind which Said’s suitcase lived. In an adjoining bathroom, old men with long white beards and canes were lost in their morning ablutions.

  I slipped off my sandals. I stepped out on to the carpet. I turned to face the closet door. ‘I’m waiting,’ Said said. ‘Any time now. Pray.’

  At the time, I was under the impression that during prayers one communes a little bit with Allah, or the heavens or the angels, or in any case Mecca, and that this communion should somehow transport the worshipper. Accordingly, as I prayed I sometimes bobbed my head. Sometimes as I stood there waiting, I swayed imperceptibly.

  On this morning, I listened to the old men washing their beards. They muttered and moaned to no one in particular. Then I did my normal thing: I raised my hands to my ears, lowered them to my chest, and recited the opening chapter of the Koran. Perhaps I did sway a bit as I recited. I might have bobbed once or twice. Anyway, Said interrupted.

  ‘My friend the American,’ he said, ‘stop that. Stop it, now.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘No, do it again,’ he said. ‘I want to see that again.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What? I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘Do you think you’re a jazz singer?’ he said. ‘Do you think this is a gospel chorus? There’s no bobbing your head in Islam. There’s no swaying. My friend the American, it’s not a dance. You’re not communing with the spirits, may Allah forgive you. You’re not telephoning a friend in another galaxy. What on earth is going through your head?’

  ‘I’m trying to pray,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to have a spiritual experience.’

  ‘Who told you to dance as you pray?’ he said. ‘Who?’ He said that if I persisted in this error, the prayer would stop being valid.r />
  ‘This is not improvisational aerobics, you know. If that’s what you want, you’ve come to the wrong place. Go elsewhere for that. Do you understand, my friend the American? A Muslim learns how the Prophet prayed and prays like that. Okay?’

  He was right. The Sufi, a mystical, occasionally heretical branch of Islam, have their own way of going about things, as do the Shia, but in the world’s most populous, common, international variety of Islam – namely Sunni Islam, which was the variety prevalent in Yemen, to which 99 per cent of the believers in our mosque subscribed – you were not supposed to express your feelings at prayer. You were meant to abstract yourself from your feelings while you stood before God.

  Said made me stand aside while he demonstrated.

  ‘Make sure that all your fingers on the carpet are pointing towards Mecca. The five toes of your right foot should point to Mecca at all times, even when you are kneeling in prostration. Touch your forehead to the carpet, not your lips and not your nose.’

  I practised. The old men gazed. If Said had not lost the pocket booklet of invocations and instructions for prayer which in French is called Le Citadel de Yislam, I could also have learned, at this time, how to say the Arabic prayer liturgy.

  Because we had no such booklet we had to rely on Said’s memory of the French prayer. As I bowed I said, ‘Gloire à mon Seigneur, le Très Grand.’ As I stood, I said, ‘Allah ecoute Men celui qui Le lue.’

  When I bowed a second time I said, ‘Gloire a mon Seigneur.’

  ‘Remember this well,’ Said said in French. The old men watching chattered among themselves. Perhaps they had not heard people praying in French in their mosque before. Perhaps they were just interested. Anyway, five Yemeni grandfathers and Said Chikouche from Hem outside Roubaix were the witnesses to my first correct Islamic prayer.

  22

  PRAYER IS THE second pillar of Islam, after monotheism. It is indispensable to Muslims, as central to the life of the believer as food, friends and family.

  Five times a day, the Muslim effaces the selfness of the self. He is meant to synchronise the movements of his body to the movements of the five or five hundred or five thousand people standing in rows in his mosque. In this way, the believer unites himself with the global body of believers – the ummah. He is larger than himself, and his personal idiosyncrasies will only throw the movement off course. Because in Yemen the entire city is praying at roughly the same time, he is participating in a reunion of the community acted out across the neighbourhoods, through the tower houses, and into the canyons beyond.

  In fact it’s an international movement. When the prayer is finished in western China lines will be bowing in Bishkek, then more lines will be bowing in Yemen, and after that in Libya and Morocco. It is a wave that follows the sun across the surface of the globe in five daily pulses that keep on pulsing, every moment of every day.

  The Salafi are the most stoic and serene of the Islamic denominations. To them, an Islamic prayer is not all that different, in a physical sense, from Zen meditation. Your body is calm, and your breathing is even. You try to be present rather than absent. You still your brain. You do not agitate it. You keep your eyes open.

  The liturgy acknowledges that God is the ruler of the heavens and the king of all the worlds. He has no partner. Muhammad is his messenger. ‘Lead us on the straight path,’ you say, and then you touch your forehead to the carpet. ‘God is great,’ you say. Hundreds of voices mutter along with you – allahu akbar, allahu akbar. As you lift your foreheads from the carpet hundreds of sighs rise through the air.

  Praying works best if you have a bit of limberness to you. The falling to the floor is easier, and the rising from it more graceful. When you’ve finished the prostration, you kneel on the floor with your shins and feet tucked beneath you. Your right foot is supposed to be curled up under your haunches, its arch stretched, its toes pointing towards Mecca.

  For a few days after my lesson with Said, I was more deliberate in every prayer gesture and more self-conscious. Then, knowing that this was a hindrance, I tried to forget my self-consciousness. I tried to watch the locals and when I watched them I imagined that every one of them was as I wanted them to be: a warm, woolly-bearded, sweet-tempered welcomer of Western converts to the Land of the Prophet.

  One month after my first prayer lesson with Said, I happened to come early to my morning Arabic class. Instead of waiting at the classroom door, as I often did, I went down to the mosque. I stood in a patch of sunlight at the edge of our former Arab business suite carpet. A circle of young men – British talibs who had marked me out as an intruder, and therefore kept their distance – were staring at me. I performed the waist bow, the prostration, the kneeling, the second prostration and then rose. I am swimming, I told myself. My hands knew where to go. Stretch, pause, contract. Repeat. No bobbing. Never close your eyes. Concentration.

  After I’d finished my two supererogatory prostrations, when I was sitting cross-legged beneath a column, reading Koran to myself as everyone does when they’re waiting in a mosque, Said sneaked up behind me. He patted me on the head.

  ‘Your prayers are becoming more correct, mon ami,’ he said. ‘With less hesitation and less nervousness. Congratulations.’ He smiled.

  It was the first time someone had congratulated me for performing an Islamic deed. Since the compliment came from Said, who did not suffer fools gladly, it meant something special to me.

  ‘Keep practising,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry if people are watching.’

  Bilal, the friend from Bradford, noticed I was improving. He pulled me aside one morning in May to say, ‘You’re not trimming your beard any more. It looks good. And your prayers are improving. Congratulations.’ Later on that month, in the middle of class, when we were reading through a textbook called The Comportment of a Muslim, the teacher asked me to stand up. I stood up. He smiled. ‘Thabit, you’re a Muslim now,’ he said. ‘Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘You’re meant to dress like a Muslim, then. Jeans such as the ones you’re wearing – where do they come from? Muslims dress as we dress here in Yemen.’ He glanced at Bilal who was wearing a splendid ocean blue robe and matching cap. Muhammad himself was wearing a snowy white robe, a black and white checked headscarf, and a sturdy waist dagger. ‘If you are a Muslim, you might as well start dressing like one.’

  At the time, I was the only student in the Mahad Medina who didn’t wear a robe. I also disdained turbans and skullcaps. The garb had seemed too strange to me at first and felt like a betrayal of my identity. But after that class my insistence on jeans and football jerseys struck me as mere self-involvement. This Western dress was a mark of pride. In what, though? Nothing. Why not just let it go?

  I bought myself expensive robes and expensive smooth silken shawls to wrap around my head. At prayer on Friday of the following week, people I had barely spoken with to date, including the British Muslims, shook my hand. ‘Na-eeman, na-eeman,’ they said, which literally means ‘grace, grace,’ but is used in everyday speech to congratulate someone who has done something small but good for himself, like cutting his hair or cleaning his body.

  23

  BECAUSE HE HAD arrived in Yemen with only 300 euros, and had spent these in his first months, Said couldn’t afford the Mahad Medina classes I was taking. He couldn’t afford to buy his own food. He had to depend on the kindness of strangers. In Yemen, where one must be kind to strangers, provided they are Muslims, it’s almost possible to live this way. When one is hungry, one stands at the entrance to a restaurant or one hovers near a table on the street. Eventually the diners look up. Eventually they wave the hungry person to their table and make him sit down and urge him to eat bits of bread or leftover scraps of stew. Said managed to get along in this way. Still, I could see in his eyes when he told me about this variety of begging that he found it humiliating.

  After he lost his robe, he redoubled his efforts to find some member of his family in France willing to pay for
his ticket home. His father had not wanted him to go to Yemen in the first place, and now that Said was living in Yemen, the father no longer wanted to talk to the son. When he was feeling panicked, he called up his older brother who worked for the public transit authority in Lille. Those conversations could last for as much as a quarter of an hour, but they almost always ended with Said emerging from the phone booth, grinning tightly and saying little. ‘Inshallah, maybe,’ he would sigh, ‘maybe some little money in a little while.’ On other days the conversation would be shorter, the smile at the end tighter, and when we were standing in the sun outside the phone shop, Said would sigh and say, ‘He insulted me. I had to hang up on him.’

  In the meantime, as he waited for money to come in from someone in France, he moped around the mosque. There really wasn’t much for him to do.

  He couldn’t find a job or didn’t want one, or both. One of the few things he could do, besides praying and eating, was to dress up in his robe and waist dagger, and visit the local tea shops. On more than one occasion, for fun, Said and I dressed in our proper clothing and rode the bus across town to the Old City. It was another world over there and it held out the possibility of interesting encounters – for instance with Parisian tourists or executives from the French oil company Total or embassy officials, hunting for trinkets. If we had bumped into one of those tourist types during our excursions, we might have laughed to ourselves at how out of place the tourist was, and how worried. Perhaps Said would have let him know somehow that he was now in territory that belonged to Muslims rather than French people. The normal roles would be reversed at that point. Said would be in charge. The French would have to defer to his customs, and show him their respect.