Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  From an architectural point of view, the Great Mosque in Dammaj is a nonentity. It has been designed on the parking garage model, with sturdy, efficient cheapness as the guiding principle.

  There are no mirrors, gateways, vaulted ceilings, patios, domes, inscriptions on the walls, pools or marble sitting rooms, and of course there is no minaret. There are heavy, square columns, and there are bookshelves. The footprint of the building covers about two acres or about enough space to accommodate 5,000 worshippers.

  In theory, this radical simplicity repudiates the ‘innovations’ or false traditions which, from century to century, have accrued to the edifice of Islam.

  The first mosque in the first city of Islam, namely Medina, is thought to have had no minarets or domes, nor any walls at all, but only a thatched roof to protect the faithful from the sun. So, in theory, the mosque in Dammaj brings worshippers back to the carpet-on-the-desert-floor plainness of this time.

  This is the theory. But everyone in Dammaj knows that the greatest falsifiers of Islam came recently. Everyone knows that a certain family of petrocrat neighbours to the north is now pouring layers of gold and marble over the holy sites of Islam. Their mosques are simply piles of chandeliers, carpets, crenellations, friezes, mirrors, domes and minarets lit up like Christmas trees.

  In Dammaj, to criticise these people too much is a game that comes dangerously close to biting the hand that feeds you, and so one tends to see the criticism more than one hears it. It is in the strenuous simplicity of Muqbel’s mosque, and in the way the students walk to class in bare feet. It is in the way they eat rice and beans five days a week and fast the other two, in the barrenness of their huts, and in the mahar, or bride price they pay for their wives, which is often little more than a Koran.

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  THE DAR AL-HADITH HAS no website and produces no promotional literature; nor are there recruiters or guides who will meet students at the airport to bring them into the mountains. Nevertheless, the village square there has an international Islamic elan, like an airport in the Gulf during the hajj. If you look through the crowd carefully, you’ll eventually find people who come from your part of the world.

  At first, however, it takes a moment to get one’s bearings. The people with the russet beards and light eyes could be from Chechnya, Dagestan, Sarajevo, Albania or anywhere else where light-skinned Muslims predominate, or they could be converts. It’s hard to know in what language to speak to them, and harder still to know who is approachable and who not. Generally speaking, if you speak to everyone in classical Arabic and ask no questions beyond ‘how is your health and the health of your family’, you can make no mistakes. You might not learn very much, but at least no one will take you for a spy.

  Perhaps the best description of what the Dar al-Hadith actually does for the communities that send these young men can be found in an essay posted at Salafitalk.net. When Sheikh Muqbel began to build his mosque in Dammaj, says the author, a Canadian convert and long-time village resident named Abdullah MacPhee, Islam in Yemen was in a state of disarray. It was he said, ‘plagued by tashayyu [Shiism] in the north, tasawwuf [Sufism] in the south and hizbiyyah [sectarianism]’ in general.

  Then, says MacPhee, destiny, in the person of Sheikh Muqbel, asserted itself. ‘The Sheikh set up an institute of knowledge that by Allaah’s will has changed the face of Yemen.’

  The Institute started as a small masjid [mosque] made out of mud, then as the students numbers grew a bigger masjid was built adjacent to the Sheikh’s house then later a bigger masjid was built which is today the library then an even bigger masjid was built and now that masjid has just been expanded. The latest masjid is very big and is active day and night with classes and students memorizing Our’aan …

  Now at this bustling centre, says the essay, students new and old are served two (simple but free) meals a day: ‘usually beans and bread in the morning and evening and rice for lunch.’

  Single students, MacPhee says, usually live in rooms made of mud bricks, many of which have bathrooms attached. As for families, ‘a small family can easily get by on a $100 a month’, provided the head of household is not profligate. ‘A student of knowledge should spend his money wisely so he can focus more on studying,’ he cautions.

  The curriculum itself is described simply because it is simple: ‘classes are opened in all sciences and go all year round only stopping for Ramadaan when most people focus on reviewing Qur’aan …’

  MacPhee wants the newcomers to like the place and at the end of the essay makes a special plea for tolerance:

  Many westerners when they first arrive complain of the trash scattered around and the smell of a sewage system that has been blocked up and things like this … I advise the brothers and sisters that they read the history of our Prophet, may the peace and praise of Allaah be upon him, and the history of our Salaf As-Saalih [righteous ancestors]. We are all on a journey to our Lord … Our Prophet, may the peace and praise of Allaah be upon him has said: Be in this life as if you are a stranger or a traveler.

  As a student, MacPhee himself was in no position to give naseeha, religious advice, to the strangers and travellers of cyberspace. But the genius of social networking sites allowed the residents of Anaheim and Englewood who were asking the questions at SalafiTalk.net to address the sheikhs on the ground in Yemen directly. Those dialogues have also been uploaded to SalafiTalk.net – for instance, as follows:

  the Imaam Rabee’ ibn Hadee was asked on the 23rd of Ramadhaan 1424:

  ‘What is your opinion of going to study at Daarul Hadith in Dammaj, Yemen, knowing that I am a new student?

  The Imaam answered by saying ‘Indeed it is befitting that you journey to this strong hold from the strong holds of Islaam, to this light house from the light houses of Islaam. Indeed journey should be made to it and the knowledge should be sought there. By Allah, we urge studying at this abode … in this time period in which innovations have accumulated and trials have evolved.’

  Perhaps the most illuminating words I read about Dammaj before I knew much about the place turned out to be the ones spoken by the founder himself, Sheikh Muqbel, in an interview he gave to a pair of reporters from the Yemen Times in 2000. Dammaj, he announced, was the beneficiary of an international trend among young, well-heeled but spiritually empty Westerners:

  They have shifted from a luxurious life in their homelands where they were uncertain what they were living for to a humble life but with faith and deep knowledge inside that there is life after death. They want to know what life is for, why they are living. What is beyond life? What is death? A start or an end?

  How many of these seekers had actually studied in Dammaj? the reporters asked.

  ‘There have been over 100,000 students studying in our institution in Dammaj,’ he replied, ‘and they all know how peaceful the Sunni movement is because it calls for a return to the Holy Koran and to the prophet Muhammad, peace and blessing upon him.’

  At first, when I had only walked along a few of the pathways and had prayed only a half-dozen times in the Great Mosque, I doubted Muqbel’s numbers. To accumulate a total enrolment of 100,000 students the school would have had to bring 5,000 new people to campus every year for each of its twenty years of existence. Was that possible? His school was located in a war zone in a remote canyon in a no man’s land in northern Yemen. It didn’t seem likely.

  Yet something unlikely was clearly under way here. Hundreds of students were camping on the mosque floor when I arrived. Hundreds of huts were being built by hand in the talus fields beneath the cliffs. Everyone had a friend lodging with him and it was common to hear of families and siblings on their way.

  Meanwhile, in an adjacent settlement known as the mizra, or farm, modern life was coming to Dammaj: the huts had running water, upstairs bedrooms, and electricity several hours a day. There was a sewer system, and a local telephone network.

  Closer to the mosque, Indonesian bachelor students had erected a residential area made entirel
y from mud-brick cells. It was less like a suburb than like a giant ant colony. Those who didn’t have enough money for a cell erected one-man sleeping chambers on the roofs of pre-existing cells. Those who wished to expand their cells into houses added vestibules and tin-roofed sheds which spilled outward, beyond the perimeter of the settlement and into the desert.

  To enter this village was to slip into a labyrinth of tracks, adobe staircases and tiny dark windows, like eyes. Often the tracks led round and round, under laundry lines, past doorways made from hanging towels, and into dead ends, which were the execution grounds for the local poultry and filled with chicken feet. Other tracks led on to the roofscape of the settlement. From up here one could take in a view of hundreds of beehive-shaped hovels, and in the distance, across a span of desert, a range of dark brown mountains in southern Saudi Arabia that wavered in the heat.

  I never would have been able to guess at the population of Dammaj by wandering past these shacks and earthen huts, but a decent opportunity to gauge the total number of inhabitants came on the morning of the Eid al-Fitr, which is a high holiday in Yemen and the only moment in the year when the men, women and children of a community pray as one. We prayed outdoors that morning, beneath a band of cliffs lit up in the pink light of dawn. I arrived a bit late, but not too late to miss the thousands of black figures who were kneeling in the desert.

  Further away, on the far side of the black forms, hundreds of rows of men in white were humped over in the sand. The light had turned their robes to pink and the entire assembly – row after row, receding more than two kilometres into the desert – glowed softly.

  It was a stunning, unique and, as it happened, eminently countable display.

  Here were 10,000 men, women and children, give or take 500. Two dozen militiamen watched over them like shepherds. The sheikh stood in the bed of a pickup truck, surrounded by guards, clutching a microphone and speaking softly.

  After that day, Muqbel’s 100,000 estimate did not seem like the exaggeration I took it for at first. In any case, by 2006 the numbers were adding up. If 100,000 students had not come through the village by then, the figure, it seemed to me, would be reached soon enough.

  Muqbel’s Yemen Times interview turned out to be a useful guide in one other respect: he knew the character of his students well. ‘We have students from the UK, the USA, Germany, France, and many other countries, seeking to know more about Islam.’

  They have come of their own will to realize their goal of knowing their religion which they either converted to or knew little about. We accommodate them in simpler rooms with a sociable environment which is less of luxury than what they used to live in. These students don’t want to be comforted in luxury. They keep on praying in the long nights. They suffer hunger sometimes but resist as they have powerful faith.

  In my first evenings in the village, I would sit on the mosque terrace as the moon rose over the grape arbours. Because it was Ramadan, we were all suffering (or anyway enduring) hunger and performing the tarroweah, or night-time prayer, into the early morning hours. Sometimes, I would sit in a circle of Somalians. They would smile at me and push clumps of dates into my palm. The voices of Americans, French and English brothers would rise from the circles nearby. Everyone was famished. No one wanted to leave and we would linger under the moon, sipping tea and speaking to one another in the formal Arabic which has died out elsewhere in the world.

  Yes, I would think to myself, it is all exactly as Muqbel advertised it to be: the hunger, the camaraderie, the students who’ve been called to return to the holy Koran and the repair of Islam. It was all true and happening before my eyes.

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  I FOUND THESE scenes persuasive but I also knew that an alternative story, illuminating a second, less apparent purpose of Dammaj was circulating through the Western embassies in Sana’a.

  This was more a military story than a tale of the revival of the Sunnah, and it did not begin in Dammaj but in Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

  According to this narrative, the Arabs who came from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviets were dismayed by what they saw on the ground: Muslims communicating in a welter of languages, employing a hodgepodge of strategies, responding to several chains of command rather than one, and, in the end, throwing themselves into the breach without purpose or result. From the point of view of these Arab believers, the gravest problem in Afghanistan was that the social and doctrinal fragmentation which afflicted the rest of contemporary Islam was now taking a lethal form, as chaos on the battlefield.

  In 1983, a philosopher of the Afghan jihad, Sheikh Abdullah al-Azzam, issued an appeal to believers everywhere in which he all but denounced the current generation of jihadis for hindering more than they helped. ‘We do not deny’ his message said,

  that a large number of arrivals [in Afghanistan],

  with simple thinking, shallow Islamic juristic knowledge

  drawn from diverse founts and different pedagogic

  schools, and disparity in levels of age and knowledge,

  has brought about a kind of catastrophe … It has cast

  a great burden upon our shoulders. But what could

  we possibly do when so few mature people are

  coming?

  According to this second history of Dammaj, Osama bin Laden, himself a former student of Sheikh Muqbel, felt that only the jihadists who had had religious training in Saudi Arabia and Yemen understood what Islamic warfare actually was. The other soldiers might have been well-meaning but when they spoke no Arabic, prayed according to the traditions of their Uzbek grandfathers or their Kandahari uncles, and recited Koran without understanding what they were saying, they were missing the point: the point was to work in synch with the will of God. The point was to behave according to the battlefield traditions set down in the hadith and the biographies of the Prophet. In the absence of such an ethic, the armies of Islam were not much better than any other kind of ignorant army. They might win or they might not but their victories would be meaningless. Their soldiers would not necessarily be martyrs, and no truly Islamic nation could be founded on territory which they had won. When armies win by chance, chance, they believed, would surely sweep away their gains.

  According to this theory, the success of the Afghan jihad settled into the minds of the Arabs who fought there as an object lesson. In the wake of that victory, they developed a new theory of warfare. These Arabs were offered an opportunity to put the new theory to the test in 1994, in their own backyard. In that year, the last of Yemen’s communists – the former rulers of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen – made an ill-fated attempt to secede from President Saleh’s federation of north and south Yemen.

  For the most part, Saleh fought these secessionists with conventional soldiers and employed conventional army strategies, but it seems he also called on the veterans of the Afghan campaign for support. These veterans brought a new style of warfare to the battlefield. They sent soldiers out in cells of three or four, rather than in platoons, and the cells were led by people who had memorised the Koran, had studied proper Koranic pronunciation, often for years, and knew how to pray in the ultra-calm, unified, trance-like style of the Salafis. The cell leaders were generals made in the image of Muhammad himself: they preached to their fellows as much as they fought the enemy. On the battlefield, of course, they were competent. But they were competent in every realm. They knew how to behave in the mosque, at the dinner table, in the bathroom, and what words to say in the presence of the poor, the sick, the powerful and the deceitful. This self-confidence, which came from having accomplished a complete interiorisation of the Koran and the Hadith, happened to make the soldiers into good teachers. They conquered territory, and at the same time they conquered hearts and minds.

  According to this second story about Muqbel’s soldiers, the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, understood how vital this new fighting force was. He believed it had made important contributions to bringing about the death of th
e Soviet regime in Afghanistan and knew that these believers had helped defeat the communist remnants in Yemen’s south. In recognition of this accomplishment he promised Muqbel permanent political and military protection. His valley in the north – and his school and his pupils – were to remain forever his.

  Perhaps President Saleh had the cultivation of a secret, pro-Saleh fighting force in mind. It would stand in reserve, and would quarter itself in the hills along the Saudi border. Perhaps he simply meant to leave the seminarians to their own devices. In any case, in the wake of the victory over the southern communists, Muqbel’s academy entered its own golden age: money flowed in from Saudi Salafis and occasionally from the Yemeni president himself. Meanwhile, the students drifted in from the big Yemeni cities, southern Saudi Arabia, North Africa, and occasionally from the West.

  Some time in the mid-1990s, it seems, Osama bin Laden turned his sights on a new target: the United States. According to this second narrative, by the time bin Laden got around to drawing up a plan of action, Muqbel’s school in northern Yemen was producing talibs unlike any others on the face of the earth: they were travellers, good at slipping into foreign countries, and sleeping there, perhaps for years. They had been taught well and were themselves good teachers. Because they lived in a war zone amid hostile Shia, they were skilled at lying low and avoiding trouble. Because they were steeped in the teachings of the Salafi, they believed that Allah had called on them to perform three essential tasks: to purify Islam; to reveal the true teachings of the Koran to the world; and to take the fight to the unbelievers.