Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  We did not know who the women were and the scores of the football games meant nothing to either of us. We kept the sound low.

  Outside, curtains of rain swept in from Tourcoing and Waterloo. It had been a rainy spring. Now the grass on the lawn in front of Said’s mother’s house was knee deep. A disused, padlocked chapel at the far end of the lawn was being set upon by a jungle of saplings. If it hadn’t been for the police car circling the streets of Said’s housing development, it would have been easy to imagine that humans had abandoned the area and that the luxuriant flora of northern France now had the upper hand.

  Such was Hem, Said’s Algerian enclave outside Roubaix, in early summer, 2007. Hem was empty, with rain showers splashing through the plane trees.

  In the afternoon on my first day there, the sun burned through an opening in the clouds. Said and I walked out to a recreational lake nearby to hunt ducks. It had been six months since Said’s return from his excursion through the jails of Yemen and Algeria. In that time, he had not looked for a job, and had found no place to live other than his childhood bedroom in his mother’s house. She was vacationing in Algeria for the summer.

  He had, however, developed a scheme to take advantage of what he felt he was entitled to as a Muslim and a citizen of the French Republic. His plan, which he had already implemented in part, was to live off the fat of the land. He would harvest ducks and potatoes as necessary, while visiting the French supermarkets only for staples such as coffee and sugar. Meanwhile, he would construct a proper Islamic course of study for himself from the diversity of options available in Roubaix – the mosques, the study groups, a branch of the Institut du Monde Arabe, the internet – many of which wouldn’t cost a penny. Therefore, he would not need to work.

  Our first order of business that afternoon was to pursue ducks. ‘You sure those things are halal?’ I wondered, as he stood in the shallows of the recreational lake, eyeing a family of mallards.

  ‘“Lawful to you is the pursuit of water game, and its use for food.” Sura Ma’ida, Ayat ninety-six,’ he replied, without moving a muscle.

  Evidently he was finished with his search for a true Islamic life in Yemen?

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘And finished with Algeria, too?’

  Of course. He had spent two weeks in his mother’s Algerian village after his release from the Yemeni jail. The people there had disappointed him: he had found no religious enthusiasm and there had been no formal instruction in the Koran or the hadith in that village or anywhere nearby. As soon as he had adequate cash in hand, he left for France.

  Waiting for the mallards to paddle closer to the edge of the lake, Said mused about his experience in Arabia.

  ‘The entire Arab world is a catastrophe,’ he said. ‘On the level of their economies, their governments, their hospitals, their legal system – every individual thing – and the totality of it is,’ he said, ‘une catastrophe énorme.’

  France had its problems, I countered. The teenagers in his neighbourhood sold marijuana in broad daylight and at night they torched cars for the sheer pleasure of it. They drank themselves silly, I said, and smashed the city bus shelters, so that in the morning nurses waiting for buses had to stand in pools of shattered glass, like war victims.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘And so?’

  At least there was food enough to live by and if you sought it out at the right mosques, in certain corners of the internet and among knowing friends, the possibility of a proper education. ‘You can lead a proper Muslim life here,’ he said. ‘You have to be very discerning, and very careful to avoid the false doctrines.’ He inched towards the ducks. ‘It’s not complicated,’ he whispered. ‘Read carefully and believe in Allah. Voilá, c’est tout.’

  The ducks knew what he was up to. As Said held out his arms, a mother duck went scudding away into the blue depths. Soon the whole family was speeding towards the centre of the lake, where French windsurfers were zipping around in glistening wetsuits.

  On that afternoon, Said only managed to catch a tiny crayfish. ‘Some Shia forbid the eating of shellfish,’ he said as he cradled it in his palm. ‘But there is no textual basis for it. We permit it.’ We, however, would have had to catch dozens of those crayfish to have had enough for lunch. We ended up eating at Quick Burger.

  During this visit to Hem, my arrangement with Said was that I would stay in his father’s apartment, which was near his mother’s house but in a separate building. Said’s father, like his mother, was away in Algeria for the summer. He had given Said the keys to the apartment and had asked him to keep an eye on things. Now this bachelor flat was my home in Hem.

  * * *

  It contained a heavy TV set, heavy curtains, a single bed, an armchair, a kitchen chair, and place settings for one. On the wall in the kitchen hung a bank calendar which showed the proper prayer times for Muslims living in France. The months of April and May had careful check marks. In the kitchen pantry, I discovered several varieties of tea and a row of half-empty honey-pots. Beyond these hints of personal identity, the apartment was as barren and as anonymous as a hotel room.

  After the hunting expedition, Said and I sat at his father’s kitchen table, drinking tea and chatting.

  ‘What was the reason behind your parents’ divorce?’ I asked. He shrugged. It had happened a long time ago.

  I knew that his mother and father had arrived in France from Algeria in 1981, and that the father had worked in a textile mill in nearby Roubaix. He had raised three children in Hem, had acquired the large TV, the bachelor flat, and the divorce.

  Other than this, the father seemed to have lived out his sojourn in France the way the Koran says humans pass through the world of this life: like a shadow.

  I was curious: how, in Said’s opinion, had these twenty-six years changed his father? Was he pleased with his sojourn in France or did he regret it? What kind of a person was he, anyway? A dreamer? Angry? Forgiving? Pious? I wanted to know what Said stood to inherit from his father’s life. To judge from the apartment itself, he wasn’t going to inherit much in the way of things. Maybe the father hoped to pass on an understanding of Islam? or of the French? or of French–Algerian relations?

  I tried to ferret out the answers to these questions. They baffled Said. Soon, they were annoying him. ‘Why are you so curious?’ he wondered when I asked about his father’s view of his career in France. ‘Why aren’t we discussing the unity of God? In any case, as you can see, my father is gone.’

  It was true. Both Said’s mother and father had retreated to Algeria for an indefinite period. Which left Said by himself in Hem with his plans for an Islamic Emirate of the suburbs. Until I turned up to visit him, he was the only citizen in his emirate. The good thing about my arrival was that it satisfied his need for a subject. Now there was someone to govern, to guide, and to teach.

  We spent the next few days wandering through the back alleys of Roubaix, looking for places where we might undertake two weeks of profitable Islamic study. When we were too wet, we ducked into cafes to drink hot Belgian chocolate and to chat with Said’s friends, who were, like him, unemployed French Algerian men.

  One afternoon, we sat in the car of an ex-distributor of pharmaceutical products as Said told the story of his search for the time of the Prophet in Yemen. The friend listened for several minutes, then interrupted.

  ‘Look, my young friend,’ he said, annoyed. ‘What to you is the essence of Islam?’

  Said stared back at him: there were the five pillars, he said. There were the six articles of the faith.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the friend. ‘We don’t pray and we don’t go to Mecca, yet we are Muslims. No, the essence is respecting your mother and father. The rest is optional. Go tell that to your imams in Yemen.’

  Thus ended our conversation. We stepped out of the car into a rain shower.

  Later that afternoon, we passed the Da’wa Mosque but declined to go inside. The people there were too finicky and too doctrinaire, Sa
id said. ‘Ils haramment tout.’ We passed the Institut du Monde Arabe – too governmental – and a storefront Arabic language institute into which we poked our heads. Classes had been suspended for the summer.

  ‘Come back in September,’ said a secretary.

  ‘Merci, madame,’ we said.

  In the middle of an especially violent downpour we took shelter in the cellphone shop of a Salafi brother. We considered buying a cellphone equipped with an electronic muezzin but the cost was out of reach for both of us. The shop owner, a friend from Said’s estate, invited us to pray in the stockroom. He locked the door of the shop and we stood on chilly tiles in our soaking clothing as a computer file made the call to prayer.

  On our way back to Said’s house, we encountered an acquaintance, Tarek, strolling across a lawn. It was possible to study the true Islam in France via the internet, Tarek suggested, but not in the French mosques. He wore a long beard, slacks and carried a baguette, which was destined, apparently, for a wife and child in a nearby apartment.

  ‘Before 9/11, the government used to let in preachers from Algeria, from Yemen, from everywhere,’ he said. ‘You could live here and at the same time really study Islam. But now they’ve blocked it all at the borders. If you really want to study,’ he advised, ‘you’ve got to go abroad.’ He nodded at his baguette: ‘I have a child and a wife here. I have my obligations.’

  Later that evening, we dropped by the mosque around the corner from Said’s mother’s house. In the early sixties, when the housing development was young, the mosque had been a supermarket. Now the freezers and shelves had been replaced by wall-to-wall carpeting.

  As we stepped inside, the call to prayer tinkled through the public-address system. It was so faint that it might have been an echo of the vanished shopping music.

  Said and I washed in the sinks that had once been used by butchers and supermarket fishmongers, then prostrated ourselves in a row of elderly Algerians. It was a quick, mechanical prayer performed without an imam. When we were finished, the retired men with whom we were praying shuffled away from the rows in silence, with their eyes on the ground, as if they were embarrassed by what they had done.

  Since Said and I had nowhere to go afterwards, we spent the remainder of the evening sitting outside, on the plaza of the former supermarket. A local figure named Rachid gave audiences there in the evening. On this occasion, he happened to be holding forth on the education he had received in Saudi Arabia. A cluster of curious onlookers in tracksuits listened as he described the discipline of his life there, the heat, and the not always sincere Saudi practice of Islam.

  During the discussion, one of the tracksuits asked Rachid to comment on Said’s practice: what about his programme of living on the bounty of the French countryside? ‘Those are French ducks,’ Rachid scolded, ‘and that is a French lake for windsurfers.’ He turned a cold eye on Said: ‘You are stealing from the municipality if you eat those ducks,’ he said. ‘This is one of the major sins and wrongs in Islam.’

  ‘They are the ducks of Allah,’ Said protested.

  A squabble ensued. At least Said had a programme and a plan for living an Islamic life in France, said Said. Whereas Rachid, in Said’s view, had no job, no plans for a job, and spent his free time hanging out on the mosque terrace, blowing hot air.

  Rachid’s face darkened. He accused Said of blabbering about Islam when in fact he knew very little. He accused Said of bringing me, a person who might possibly be an American spy and who was certainly an outsider, to the neighbourhood mosque. ‘You told Thabit that I spent five years in Saudi Arabia. Why?’ he demanded. ‘Why?’

  Said apologised.

  ‘I don’t like it when people speak about me at all, period,’ Rachid announced. He stood up from the wall on which we were sitting, shook hands in silence, and walked away, alone.

  In Rachid’s absence, the role of ranking Islamic authority on the mosque plaza reverted to Said. The half-dozen young men in tracksuits knew he was no academic expert but they were interested in his adventures. They knew he had been in jail, and knew that Yemen was a dangerous, even an extreme place in which to be a Muslim. They wanted to hear more.

  At first Said and I chatted with them, dropping hints but revealing little. We watched the sun set, and looked down the street to where the teenage drug dealers of Hem were assembling for an evening of friendship and commerce.

  Eventually Said warmed to his topic. His diffidence about the Arab world fell away. He did have some knowledge to share, after all, it turned out. It wasn’t knowledge of the Jews such as we had gained in Yemen nor was it exactly knowledge of the time of the Prophet. He skipped over the qat addiction and the decrepit state of the bureaucracy, aspects of life which had tortured him when he was in Sana’a.

  Instead, he spoke about the 5,000 brothers who stood at one’s shoulders as one prayed in Dammaj, and the way any student could become fluent in the ancient Arabic of the Koran just by going about his daily life in the streets of Sana’a. He also spoke at length about the Yemeni-Salafi style of prayer, derived from the hadiths. In his view, this was exactly how the Prophet had prayed, and it had been preserved in Yemen as nowhere else on earth.

  The six young men on the mosque plaza did not argue or fidget or challenge. Perhaps they didn’t believe everything Said said but they were clearly prepared to listen to any tale involving a departure from Hem.

  So for a little while, as the drug dealers swooped around on their BMX bikes, and a new trickle of Algerian pensioners shuffled into the supermarket, Said owned the mosque plaza. He expatiated. No other authority, religious or otherwise, was vying for the souls of his audience, as far as I could tell, except perhaps for the drug dealers who were, for the time being, otherwise occupied.

  So Said talked on, like someone who had come into his own at last, after a long period of pennilessness. ‘Are you Muslims?’ he said. ‘Well, take what’s yours then. They don’t sell knowledge in the Arabic world; it belongs to us all. It is free.’

  Everything he said was true. It wasn’t the entire truth exactly but it did establish that something exciting was happening in Yemen, and it communicated how open and welcoming the Straight Path in Yemen was. In fact Said had developed a skill in the mosques of Sana’a and Dammaj: he had become an effective communicator of the da’wa – the invitation to Islam. Now he was working with powerful subject matter – the simple beauty of life on the Straight Path – and on this evening, the combination was more than enough to keep his audience from wandering away.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781448105182

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by The Bodley Head 2011

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Theo Padnos 2011

  Theo Padnos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  The Bodley Head

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.bodleyhead.co.uk

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House
Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781847920843