Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  Now when I think back on that moment, those pomegranates which were so close to us, so cheap, so natural, and which had been nourishing Yemenis since the time of the Prophet but which we were never to eat, seem to me a symbol of the sweetness of Islam. There it was, staring us in the face. All we had to do was reach out. It would have cost us nothing. Said certainly needed the nourishment and perhaps I did too. It was not to be.

  When the first soldier took hold of him, he snatched at Said’s arm with such violence that Said fell halfway to the pavement. His piece of fruit bounced in the gutter. The pomegranate man pounced on it.

  Another soldier seized Said by the neck. Said’s hands grasped at the air. The muzzle of one of the soldiers’ guns kept poking into Said’s ribs. He squirmed.

  This is surely dangerous, I thought.

  Then more policemen, in civilian clothing, were clutching Said’s hands, two to each arm, and a higher ranking policeman with a pistol and a radio but no machine gun was holding the crumpled poster of the president’s face. He thrust it into Said’s beard. ‘Did you do this?’ he yelled. ‘You did do this. Why? Why?’

  A plainclothes policeman took me by the arm. ‘What country are you from?’ he asked. ‘What’s your name? What’s in your pockets? Why did you do this?’

  Now a swarm of curious citizens descended on us. They fastened their hungry eyes on us. ‘What? What happened?’ they called out. ‘Subhan allah! Who are they?’

  Some of the gawkers were filling station employees, and some were passers-by. Soon more policemen were surrounding us, then random taxi drivers, then the man who had been lounging against a post, and finally the man whose posters had been shredded – all of them pushed and elbowed for a better view. ‘What did the foreigners do?’ they shouted. ‘Tore the image of the president? What have they done, in the name of God?’

  Two policemen dragged Said towards a nearby military jeep. ‘He’s a French citizen,’ I heard myself say to no one in particular. ‘Tell them you’re French,’ I murmured. ‘Tell them.’ He wasn’t listening.

  He couldn’t move his feet. The police stuffed him into the passenger seat. The door was locked. A soldier was posted by the passenger door.

  With Said safely locked away, the policemen gathered around me. ‘What are you doing here? Who is he?’ they asked. The fellow in the tracksuit was now reaching into his tracksuit jacket for a two-way radio. The lamp-post leaners and loafers were also squawking into hand-held radios. I could see now that they were wearing pistols beneath their jackets. They were everywhere, scattered across the filling station plaza, watching from inside unmarked cars, marching with the marchers. If we had searched the city for days we wouldn’t have found a more carefully policed patch of cement.

  ‘Tore up the picture of the president!’ a civilian in the crowd shouted. ‘Foreigners!’

  ‘Doesn’t like the president!’ people said. ‘Why?’

  34

  UNTIL OUR ARREST Said and I had understood that Yemen, despite its rubbish-strewn streets and its impolite, staring crowds, was somehow a better place to be a Muslim than, say, France. This was especially true of Said. He often said that France had banished all true Islamic science and that the French state controlled every mosque. But in the moments following our arrest, as the jeep sped away from the scene of the crime, and when we were interrogated in a police station, we were both of us jolted into a mood of vulnerability, and shock. We were in the perfect mood for new perceptions. They came on suddenly, as soon as we were arrested, and they kept on coming.

  In the police station, from the comfort of our interrogation room we watched a Yemeni prisoner being dragged across a slab of courtyard pavement. Blood had been splattered across his T-shirt. His head bobbed on his shoulders. He looked a lot like he was asleep except that his eyes were open and one of his feet was paddling at the pavement.

  All afternoon, as the interrogation progressed, as we got hungrier and hungrier, new, important truths about life in an Arab democracy forced themselves on us. I could see Said shaking his head in silence and muttering to himself and to me and drawing the conclusions I had drawn some time earlier: there are elections but there are no civil rights. The government can persecute whoever it likes. It answers to no one. When you get in trouble, you are on your own.

  Since Said had committed the crime, the officers who interrogated him were angry with him, most of all. At first I thought their indignation might be an act or a pretence or a sort of fright show. But in fact they were indignant. As Said explained about the Salafi prohibition against photographs and politics, their faces flushed. ‘Have you come to our country to tell us how to believe?’ said the lead interrogation officer. Maybe Said wanted regime change in Yemen? Said said he didn’t. He said this over and over, in Berber, in French and in shreds of Yemeni Arabic. It was fine, said the officers, that he didn’t like photographs. It was fine that he didn’t like politics. Then why had he come to the rally? What was he doing at the filling station? What was he doing trying to teach his American friend about Islam? Shouldn’t he let someone who really knew, like a Yemeni scholar, teach? And really what was he anyway? Was he a terrorist?

  ‘I am not a terrorist,’ Said mumbled.

  ‘The sentence for tearing a picture of the president in Yemen is three years in jail,’ said the interrogator, who was dressed in a dark suit and an expensive tie. ‘Three years in jail. That will give you enough time to learn what is really prohibited and what is allowed in Islam.’

  ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done,’ Said said. ‘I respect your president.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ said the interrogator. ‘You should have thought about being sorry before you tore the picture.’

  Said’s hands shook. His face was white. He stumbled over his words. He looked to me for the translations. He had introduced himself as a student of Islam but he could barely speak the language of the Koran, had no money, no job, no home in Yemen, and no ticket back to France. ‘What kind of a Muslim conducts himself like this?’ the interrogator asked.

  The officers stared at him as if they were looking at a mental deficient. ‘Why did you come to Yemen in the first place?’ they asked. ‘Is France not a nice country? Did France throw you out? You were a terrorist there?’

  ‘I am a Muslim,’ Said said.

  ‘No you’re not,’ said the man in the dark suit. ‘You’re a terrorist.’

  Maybe the object of the interrogation was humiliation. If so, the officers succeeded. After an hour or so, Said was barely speaking. To everything he said, the officers offered a mocking response or found in his words some evidence of ignorance or bad faith or both. In the end, they escorted him to a cell in the basement.

  I was brought to a second interrogation room, where a pair of lower ranking officers asked me exactly the same questions I had already answered but in a friendlier tone of voice.

  An hour or so into the second interrogation, I happened to mention that every now and then, I allowed myself to chew qat.

  An expression of involuntary happiness and pride spread across the face of the ranking officer, a lieutenant.

  ‘Really? What kind? Hamdani? Mattari?’

  We talked about qat chewing until the topic was exhausted. Soon there wasn’t much left for us to discuss except the hacky sack they had found in my backpack. A cheerful junior officer who sat by the side of the lieutenant wanted to know about the details of the sport of hacky sack. Who played? How? Why? I demonstrated. We tried to play together. They thought a bigger ball would have worked better.

  At around eight in the evening, an assistant brought me tea and cookies. An hour after that, when even the secretary outside the office door had been let go, when I was ready to fall asleep because I was so hungry, we came to the heart of this second, friendlier interrogation. ‘Please tell me the truth about this,’ the lieutenant said. ‘I suspect I know anyway. But tell the truth.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘You have girlfriend?’
r />   I wished I did. I didn’t. ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said the lieutenant. He winked. ‘Not sometimes? Never? No foreign girls?’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘I do have a girlfriend.’

  ‘Good!’ said the lieutenant. ‘How many?’

  There was only one, I said modestly. Um … she was German, I said. Twenty-four. But soon, I had several girlfriends. They were all non-Muslims, which, in this context, meant ‘promiscuous’ and lived by themselves in apartments in the Old City.

  Ah,’ said the officers, smiling. ‘Ah … But this is a shame, for you, a Muslim. Yes?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. A fitna. But I am only human.’

  For several minutes, we sat in the interrogation room in silence, thinking about the idea of German girlfriends.

  Then the lieutenant asked in a small voice, ‘Can you find me one? just one? An American, please?’

  ‘Okay, one,’ I said. ‘Inshallah.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘But think about it.’

  He stretched his arms into the air, checked his cellphone, and nodded at his friend, who stood up. The two of them winked at me as if we shared a brotherly secret. In this mood of fraternal admiration, and longing for a girlfriend, they escorted me to my cell.

  35

  BEFORE THEY EVER went to jail, the American teenagers I used to teach in Vermont had imagined prison as a place of secrets, brotherhood and heightened spirituality. But in real life, as it turned out, jail wasn’t nearly as interesting. It was simply a matter of angry men being locked in a cage, day in and day out, with tasteless food.

  In Yemen, however, jail really was as the American teenagers imagined it would be. The underground wisdom, the brotherhood, the moral force in opposition to the world as it is – it was all alive and well in our communal cell block.

  Actually, life in jail in Yemen had much in common with life in our mosque. The prisoners washed together, brushed their teeth together, prayed together and ate together. Thus, from day to day, the esprit de corps that always develops among young men living together in difficult circumstances built on itself. In jail, we sang together as well – an additional pleasure that never would have been permitted in our mosque.

  As we sang, Adnan, a crazy, occasionally joyous, occasionally weepy prisoner danced. The prisoners cheered him. They laughed as he twisted his body in the sunlight and when he let himself get carried away, the prisoners sang louder so that he would lose himself in his gyrations. He giggled to himself as he danced. It was an Arabian, Janis Joplin, ain’t-got-nothing-to-lose sort of dance which somehow, I think, matched the mood of his audience.

  As in the mosque, each person knew how much Koran each other person could recite, how well he pronounced Koranic Arabic, how much of a reprobate he was with regard to prayer, and how circumstances, many of which were beyond his control, had led him to this point. These people were hardly the winners of the societies from which they came. I liked them more for their lack of success. The best reciters were rich in Koranic memory. They didn’t want to be rich in any other way.

  Of course, as in the mosque, there were problems in our jail life.

  At the mosque, we were often told that the iman is like a bowl of milk. A believer preserved its whiteness by not thinking of sex or temptations of any kind. If a believer touched a woman, even by shaking her hand, this could bring on thoughts of sex, which would then pollute the milk.

  In jail we cultivated this atmosphere of chastity. Everyone monitored everyone else. But these were young men in their twenties. They masturbated every night and sometimes during the day. I don’t know what else they did with each other but, as in the mosque, you heard rumours. One evening, a lonely prisoner who used to be a barber said to me, ‘I’m not gay. This is forbidden in Islam. But I do screw (aniq) gay people.’

  None of this was permitted in Islam. Improper things did happen, though, and the gap between the law and everyday practice made everyone feel ashamed. The shameful acts made people secretive and the secrecy generated distrust. It didn’t take long for our Islamic utopia to degenerate into mutual recrimination.

  The bigger problem was that the young men were furious with the outside world, which had imprisoned them for arbitrary reasons. Islam doesn’t offer an escape route to the frustrated, and the locked-down. ‘Fast,’ it says, ‘and pray.’ But we already were fasting and already were praying. What next?

  * * *

  When Ramadan came, a few days into my imprisonment, rancorous words were forbidden along with eating and dissent of any kind. Everyone stayed up in the night to pray the taroweah, a standing prayer that began at midnight and lasted sometimes until three or four in the morning. Everyone said then that the iman in the cell was very strong. But at that point it was impossible to breathe inside the jail. Everything was forbidden – eating and drinking during daylight hours, not praying, dirty words, dancing, not reading Koran, not loving your brothers. And yet the brothers stole your food as you slept and, when they thought you weren’t listening, they wondered out loud if you were possibly an enemy of Islam.

  In this environment, it was inevitable that talk inside the cell would circle back to the Jews. There were only 400 or so of them in all of Yemen. They were the weakest and poorest citizens but somehow they exercised magical powers over the imagination of my fellow inmates.

  One prisoner, a short man in a tattered robe, told me that when he had been in Iraq, he had observed the Americans up close, had cousins in Guantanamo, and was now in possession of special information about the Jews in America.

  ‘Did you go to Iraq to fight the Americans?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course, my friend,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So you have secret information? I’ve heard it before.’

  ‘But I do have secret information,’ he said. ‘You want to know the truth?’

  The prisoners sitting in our circle nodded in the darkness.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Were not the Towers full of Jews on that day? They were! Not Americans, Jews. The poison in America, it was in the Towers, wasn’t it? Are you not better off now?’ The other inmates smiled. ‘The Towers were the head of a reptile,’ the Iraq veteran said. ‘We cut off the head of the reptile first. Above all, and before anything else, we wanted to hit the Towers. You see?’ Then, as the neck bled, the tentacles were to be attacked. He smiled. What were the tentacles? The White House and the Pentagon. ‘So you see?’ he said. ‘You have allowed the Jews to come in among you, and you have taken money from them. You should have killed them off, my brother, long ago. But you didn’t. Even now they’re not dead.’

  Said was locked in a cell across the corridor from mine. The prisoners there gave him bread and bits of rice and he spent the first few days napping and eating. On day three, however, as the sun was setting, he lived through a moment of panic. I was singing in the back of my cell. I could barely hear him calling for me. A criminal next to me had to poke me in the ribs.

  I stood up to see Said clutching the bars fiercely. His eyes were burning. ‘Call the French embassy when you get out,’ he whispered, loudly. ‘Call them as soon as you possibly can. Call the newspapers. Do whatever you have to do. You’re a journalist!’

  ‘I’ll get you out of this, brother,’ I told him. ‘Just relax for a few more days.’

  ‘Never mind whose fault it was,’ he whispered. ‘Just call the embassy. Tell them what has happened. Tell the brothers in the mosque. They have connections. Anything. Anything, okay?’

  I was released within the week. I took a taxi to the mosque. I arrived long after the call for the afternoon prayer had come and gone. I climbed the stairs and slipped into the rearmost prayer row. Even before I had finished the final prostration, I could feel Omar, Ahmed, Bilal, Azi the bank robber, and their friends, and friends of their friends drifting over, then surrounding me, and watching me. I sat on my knees, looking into a circle of faces.

  ‘Br
other Thabit,’ said Omar when I had finished. ‘Come! Sit with us. Speak!’

  I could tell by the tone of his voice and by the expressions of the onlookers that people knew where I had been, and approved. I had done something positive at last. The people were respectful at first, and then questions came in a flood.

  How long were you in jail? Were you surprised when you were arrested? How is Said? What was the name of the jail? Were you locked up with Abdul Rahman, the American? Or Malik, the Frenchman? Did you meet two Algerians who live in a hole?

  I had never before been the object of such solicitous attention in the mosque. No one had ever wanted to know my opinion about anything.

  I related my story.

  Ahmed from Lyon had spent six months in the political security prison. He was anxious to know what had become of his fellow prisoners. In his jail, some of the prisoners lived beneath the floors of the cells, in two-person dungeons. Had I met these brothers? Were they okay? Did they still have rats in their dungeons? Had I had rats?

  I had to explain. Said and I were never in this prison. Yes, we did have rats. No, we did not meet any underground Algerians.

  For me, as it turned out, prison was a stroke of good fortune. It won me respect and the confidence of the believers. To be arrested for being a Muslim, to be jailed, to endure it all quietly, and then to return to the mosque – this was the real testament of faith in our mosque. I had crossed a threshold.

  Later on that evening, in Ahmed’s living room, surrounded by his French friends and a scattering of Yemenis, I broke the Ramadan fast.

  ‘Eat, please! More,’ said Ahmed. After we had prayed and had eaten our fill, Ahmed told me: ‘We weren’t sure about you at first, we’ll be honest with you. We didn’t know who you were or why you had come. So we just watched and said nothing.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.