Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  Sometimes, when Jowad was gossiping in this way, the logic of Yemeni life, which was the only logic on hand, took over. Tribesmen in northern Yemen had been living with the Koran in one hand and the Kalashnikov in the other for generations. The Western talibs wanted this for themselves. Well, why not? Were we not living in the Wild East, beyond the last jurisdiction of the last gun law? We were. At least the young men were doing their gunslinging in the desert wastes; it was better that they do it here than in a subway train at home.

  There were other times when the logic of life in the West took over. I looked at the blank-faced talibs cradling their Korans on the mosque floor, and imagined the arsenals that were growing inside their huts. In Yemen, you can buy grenades for $5, anti-tank mines for $100, and shoulder-launched missiles for less than the cost of a good microwave. With their beards, their memorised verses and their weaponry, it seemed to me they were turning themselves into a league of hut-based warlords. The only reason such people would want women and children in their lives, I thought, was so that they could reign and decree, like domestic deities.

  I could see their pride in themselves taking root, and being in the presence of so much emergent self-confidence reminded me of my former students in Vermont. Those young men had also descended into a period of self-mythologising and gun acquisition. In America, those periods tended to end on the front page of the local newspaper.

  At times like this, I would think: this is clearly no environment for a fourteen-year-old. Someone should do something. But I was in no position to do anything. Nor was Jowad. Nor did he want to do anything.

  Instead of actually going anywhere, we spent a lot of time wandering through the vineyards. If we passed a village guard as we strolled along the pathways, Jowad would tell me if the guard was strict or amenable, and if we passed a group of kids playing football, he would tell me which ones belonged to the sheikh (dozens), which ones belonged to Abbas (only a few) and which ones were Yemeni kids sent from Sana’a and Aden to live on the Straight Path of God. Then we would hang around for a bit in the vicinity of Jowad’s home, at the back of the great mosque. He had kitted out his mattress as a champion visitor to PimpWar.com should. He owned the plushest pillows in the prayer hall and the most velvety duvet. At the head of his bed, next to the pillows, he displayed a magnificent unused, unusable (in Dammaj) pair of basketball shoes. When we were done with this tour of his bedroom we would drink tea on the mosque terrace with the Somalians, or wander a bit more along the paths, or return to the internet cafe for another round of PimpWar. com. This was his life. It was calm, and there was no drinking, clubbing, or robbing of convenience stores involved.

  Stable as this routine was, there were times when the loneliness and boredom of life in Dammaj got to Jowad. Usually this happened when he had just finished a phone conversation with his mum, for instance, or when he was waiting to have one and she did not call and was sending no email messages indicating when she might call. At times like this, Jowad’s mind wandered back to his mother’s house.

  He didn’t have a perfect understanding of what was going on at home but as he talked more about his mother, I for one began to discern the outlines of a familiar family drama unfolding on the other side of the world, in Islington.

  Jowad’s mother, a Yemeni, had arrived in London in 1998 in the company of her only son. She had applied for and received some form of asylum. Now, in 2006, she had learned English, met a new husband, and was settled into an apartment near the Holloway Road.

  This couple had recently had two daughters – twins, as it happened. Jowad’s mum pushed them along the Holloway Road in a twin stroller. The stepfather, Adel, also a Yemeni immigrant, worked in a successful travel agency on the South Bank. His reputation for piety, fluency in recitation, and for the beauty of his voice was now on the rise at his mosque, in Wembley Park. The story, in short, had a happy denouement for everyone but the teenager in the household.

  ‘Ever since I hit puberty, my mum hasn’t wanted me in the house,’ Jowad told me one afternoon as we sat on the steps of the internet cafe. ‘I know that’s the truth. I just wish she would say it, flat out. Then I could make up my own mind. I could go wherever I want to go and be free.’

  When Jowad talked about this subject, he tended to lower his voice. He would shake his head slowly, as if he couldn’t believe what was going on. Sometimes, he would just sit on the cafe stoop with his head in his hands. His mother was clearly busy. That much he understood. But why this business should involve her expelling him from his own house, not calling him, and installing a self-regarding travel agent named Adel in his place Jowad could not (or maybe did not want to) understand.

  Jowad’s biological father had died when Jowad was young. But how? Where? Under what circumstances? Jowad didn’t know. His mother gave him various, contradictory stories. So now in Jowad’s head there existed a vague, vanished father, and a time when everyone had been together as one in Yemen.

  Duringjowad’s darkest moods, when his uncommunicative mum and dead father were weighing on his mind, I would sometimes look at him and think, some day and perhaps not too many days from now, the clouds that are hanging over this kid will break. When that hour comes, he will give himself permission to do things he’s only been daydreaming about. I didn’t have any idea what sorts of things were on his mind. Probably he didn’t either, but it seemed likely that whatever they were, they would be imbued with the emotional logic of the places in which he was spending his time. He was spending a lot of time with the nihilist gang of street warriors at PimpWar.com. He was spending the rest of his time with the soldier scholars in our mosque.

  In actual life, Jowad did not crack. He was much steadier than I gave him credit for being. Every time the clouds above coalesced, he pulled himself together. He would pick up a stone and fling it into the sand, or kick his shoe, or readjust his turban. He would stand up, eventually, and smile. ‘Let’s go pray,’ I would say and soon we would be standing indoors, facing Mecca. The voice of the sheikh, which was soft and paternal, even as he recited the most ominous prophecies, fell across the prayer rows. ‘Straighten your rows,’ he would murmur through the loudspeakers. ‘Straighten them, straighten them,’ he would say again and then he would sing familiar verses in a familiar tone of voice over the microphone. Jowad and I and our prayer-row neighbours would touch our toes together. We would straighten our rows. Soon the entire mosque would be linked together at the feet and shoulders. As we bowed, three thousand sighs would spread through the mosque.

  Jowad was much better at praying than I was. He lost himself quickly in these prayers. I worried about the placement of my hands or the pronunciation of the verses but next to me, in a separate world, Jowad’s body would be rising and falling over the carpet like a little wave.

  One evening, about two weeks after our first meeting, when we were hanging out beneath the cedars, and Jowad was again talking about being cut off from home, and the time for the prayer was closing in, he refused to get up off the stairs. His mother had not called in days. ‘Why not?’ he said without curiosity. ‘I’ll tell you why not. She wants me to stay here. For ever.’ He kicked the sand. After a few moments of silence, a small voice on the steps next to me said, ‘I know this is a test from God, but I should just go to Aden. They have a mall there.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Aden is 800 kilometres away.’

  He sighed. His eyes seemed to dart around beneath a glassy sheen of tears. ‘I’m stuck,’ he murmured.

  Suddenly, I knew exactly what to do. Four years earlier I had come up with a plan to overcome exactly this conundrum: the teenager in the act of giving up on life, resigning himself, allowing the walls to close in. Back then, sitting in my locked-down classroom in Vermont, I had daydreamed about meeting free teenagers, on the road somewhere, anywhere, in the mountains of a believing country.

  I planned to come across them early in their voyage, at a rise in the trail, perhaps, just as they were sizing up the t
erritory ahead. Some adult should make it his business to stand at that place, I had said to myself.

  From jail, it had seemed like a simple idea: go to an interesting spot, make friends, say sensible things, be of use. It had also seemed a vital, important idea because I knew that each of my jail students had arrived at his critical juncture alone, and lonely. They had taken what counsel they could. Usually it came from weird peers who were not all that stable themselves. Sometimes it came from internet role-playing games, and other times from DVD movies about adventurers who lived well by killing well.

  More than anything else in the world, I had thought, such teenagers were in need of decent company. They needed a sensible, sympathetic, older-brother figure in their life who was interested and wanted to listen. In jail, of course, I did listen, but by then it was much too late.

  Back in Vermont, when these ideas were filling my head, my schedule was empty. So I bought a ticket for Yemen. As it turned out, on the ground, in the presence of three-dimensional human beings and an actual Arab society, the plan collapsed.

  Now, listening to Jowad fumble about, the idea of standing at the rise in the road came back to me. It occurred to me that I had been waiting for an opportunity like this for some time, for three and three-quarter years, to be precise, and that it had died several times along the way. Now my dead plan was staring me in the face. It was alive.

  * * *

  In the event, I didn’t say more than a word or two. As I was thinking about carrying out my rescue mission, I was aware that he and I were visible through the mosque windows. We had been visible in this way for almost two weeks now. I was also aware that my presence in the village had awakened suspicions, especially among the French students. Within seconds, I was thinking of the ambient anxiety in Dammaj concerning whisperers, spies, infiltrators and Jews.

  On that occasion, on the bench in front of the internet cafe, I flinched. I said nothing. I’ll lay it all out for him later tonight, I told myself. Or tomorrow or the next day.

  47

  BEFORE I LEFT Dammaj, I did deliver a kind of hortatory speech to Jowad. It came out less like a lecture and more like a conversation. In fact, I had no solutions for him. Going home would not guarantee him an easy adolescence, nor were his parents inviting him home.

  ‘Nothing has been decided or written or predetermined for you,’ I told him, hoping to make the best of a complicated situation. ‘You can leave today if you want.’ We were drinking tea on the front porch of a house, by the edge of the desert. I nodded at a pickup truck that was rolling away into the dunes. ‘I can give that guy, or some guy like him some money. He’ll drop you in Sana’a. What do you say?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You want me to call your parents?’ I asked. Maybe he or I or both of us could persuade them to fetch him. ‘I’ll pay. You want to call them yourself?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Three weeks in Dammaj is long enough for me,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry but I’m finished with this place.’ In fact, I was beginning to worry a bit for my own safety. I gave him my phone number and told him to call me in Sana’a.

  ‘Okay,’ he said glumly. ‘Thanks.’

  We sat in silence for several minutes, eyeing the pickup truck. It hovered on the crests of the dunes, vanished, then reappeared a little further away, in a smaller cloud of dust.

  Evidently our conversation was over. Evidently our friendship was over.

  We both knew what had happened. I had turned up in his life, and had invited him to take control of his future. I had hinted to him in a hundred small but telling ways and in other, bolder ways that freedom was his to take. Just as he was warming to the idea of independence, I had pulled the plug.

  He looked away into the desert. He unwrapped his headscarf, examined it closely, and reapplied it to his forehead. ‘Go,’ he said, smoothing the headband. ‘See ya later.’

  He nodded sleepily. The truck that had been bobbing up and down in the distance was now gone – vanished somewhere behind a dune. Jowad and I were alone with our teas.

  At the time, I had little faith in him. I thought I might see him again in a year or five years or never.

  48

  THE INTERNET CAFE in Dammaj was our village post office. It had its routines and its local characters like village post offices everywhere. In the afternoons, before prayer, an English convert, Abu Dawud from Manchester used to sit in a corner, typing out notes to friends and family back home. He was fifty-nine years old and had been passing through cults on various continents since the seventies.

  ‘They do not write back,’ he would say of his brothers and sisters. ‘Do you see what the family has become in England?’

  Bilal from Nantes would be searching for girlfriends on the internet and Mujahid would be reciting Koran.

  On Fridays, late in the afternoon, Western women would sometimes come to the internet cafe to call home. Yemeni custom dictates that women venturing out of the house should be accompanied by a mahram or guardian. In theory, the mahram protects the woman from insults, while guiding her through the hustle and bustle of everyday life. But in Dammaj, there was no hustle or bustle, and no one who might have insulted the dignity of a woman. When these silent husbands, who were also from Europe and America, entered the cafe in the presence of a woman, the students there cast their eyes on the ground. We did not salaam and stopped talking to one another. The woman would enclose herself in her phone booth and the mahram would likewise keep his eyes on the ground.

  A few seconds of silence would pass and then a high-pitched frantic shouting would issue from the cabin: ‘Hello, Mummie? Mummie? Salaam alaikum!’ Perhaps a second of quiet would follow and then a new round of shouting would ring out: ‘al-hamdulillah! And how are you? Jizak allah u khair, Mummie! We got the money, al-hamdulillah!’ Or: ‘We haven’t got the money, NO! It hasn’t come!’

  And so on.

  The mahram would lean on the wall next door to the phone booth, his eyes on his sandals, his hand in his beard. When the woman was through with her phone call, she would open the phone-booth door and tiptoe towards the exit. She would say nothing to anyone and look at no one. Her shouts would still be echoing from the cinderblock walls but the flesh and blood human with the money issues and the Mummie back home would be gone. In the space she had occupied would be a silent, doll-like figure wrapped up in folds of black nylon.

  In those moments, it was easy to imagine that a ritual of occult communication had just taken place. A medium had been awakened, conducted to a booth, and made to contact the spirit realm. There had been screaming and worry. Now the disturbance had passed. Now the medium would be conducted back to her cave. As the couple glided out of the computer room, the mahram would deposit a small stack of coins in Mujahid’s hand.

  Such was the rhythm of life in our post office. The nearby Shia lived by their own rhythm, which we could hear but not see: their prayer call sounded from their minarets a few minutes earlier than ours did, and their prayers were slightly different, consisting of different supplications, spoken at odd times of the day, and directed to actual people (Hussein and Ali) whom we felt unworthy of attention. We directed our prayers only to God.

  The Shia were also strange in that they chewed qat in the afternoons – unthinkable in our section of the valley, and – so rumour had it – practised the zawaj muta, or ‘pleasure marriage’. The zawaj muta was an arrangement in which Shia men paid women – or their families or friends – for a marriage that both parties agreed would expire after a certain period. The periods could be absurdly brief: a month, a week, even an evening. These marriage contracts were blessed by the Shia authorities; sometimes the authorities themselves took a percentage of the value of the contract.

  By our lights, prostitution was bad enough. But to make out that Islam condoned such a thing, as the Shia did, with their ‘expires at midnight contracts’ and stealthy sex, was to parody Islam. It was real-life PimpWar.com. The studen
ts and the sheikh felt that the Shia did this to poke a stick in the eye of their more powerful neighbours, the Sunni. Likewise they felt that the Shia habit of extolling their ruh-allahs and ayat-allahs (‘spirit of God’ and ‘sign of God’ respectively) from their minarets was a betrayal of the most fundamental principle of Islam, namely monotheism. From our point of view, these incarnations of God – Rafsanjani, Muqtada al-Sadr, Hassan Nasrallah and so forth – were simply religious hucksters.

  ‘How can these people call themselves Muslims?’ our sheikh would thunder from the rooftop of our mosque, ‘when they worship men? Men! Muslims must worship none but Allah! Allah alone! He is one! One!’

  ‘If you continue to insult our leaders,’ the Shia minarets would reply, ‘we will send a missile into your mosque.’

  One evening shortly before I left, a rumour passed through our mosque that war with the Shia had begun. The Shia had taken over the two roads leading from Dammaj to the outside world; we were cut off. We would have to fight our way out. No news came from the mosque loudspeaker but older, more experienced students who’d been around during previous wars with the Shia whispered about what would happen next. The women would not emerge from their huts, not even to attend the daytime prayers in the upstairs foyer of the mosque. Every man would have a war job. The married men would look after their wives. Others would defend the fields and the wells. The sheikh’s militia would defend his person and the mosque. Still other militiamen would do long-range reconnaissance patrols, monitoring the hills above the village, looking for Shia squadrons.