Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  The greatest crushes were at the major gates, so that it seemed it would take hours for me to enter by any of them, but there was a long narrow covered gallery running along the northern side of it and extending beyond the wall of the mosque proper, like a covered walkway from a non-existent metro station, and this had a series of much smaller and less favored entrances all along its length, and so it took me no more than fifteen minutes to enter by one of these.

  Immediately inside was an ante-room for depositing footwear, thousands of shoes, sandals, sneakers, slippers, already covering the floor, and more being added as we unshod our feet to enter the mosque, so that I wondered how it would ever be possible to find one’s own footwear among it all upon leaving, though no one else seemed to have such qualms. But since I was still carrying my suitcase, I saw no reason not to stuff mine inside.

  We proceeded into a forest of columns supporting interlocking arches forming the ceiling, with the dominantly green tiling making it seem like a grove of trees surrounding the pool of a desert oasis, down to people seated on carpets praying or reading, alone or in groups, like Bedouins camped for shelter under the palm fronds against the noonday heat. And indeed, inward lay the open courtyard, and at its center, a well to quench not the thirst of the body but that of the soul, the Ka’aba, the wellspring of Islam itself.

  We poured inward towards it reciting the entrance prayer, and finally emerged into the great open courtyard where I at last beheld the Ka’aba, or the upper part of it, for the courtyard was filled with pilgrims, obscuring its connection to the earth, so that the four-story black cube seemed to be floating upon a sea of white.

  I stood there silently at the periphery like tens of thousands of others waiting patiently awestruck for my turn to join the tawaf, the circling of this navel of all the world. I had no thoughts, I was eyes beholding, ears filled with the rolling roar of thousands upon thousands of praying voices, skin glorious baking in the hot sun, nostrils inhaling the incense of thousand of the Faithful gathered tightly together at one, all coming together to wash away the world and fill me with itself.

  I stood there until the sea of hadjis began to part before me, like the Red Sea before Moses and his Hebrews, only much more gently, so that I was drawn towards the Ka’aba with the thousands of others waiting, as if caught in a great whirlpool of flesh carrying me inward with a will of its own, the Will of Allah, drawing us unto Itself.

  We spiraled slowly inward until we reached the sacred circling of the tawaf and slid effortlessly into it, beginning the seven-fold revolution at the periphery, moving ever closer to the Ka’aba, like planets being drawn from their orbits into the sun.

  The sun itself beat down, glaring off the sea of white, and the circling, and the heat, and the enveloping whiteness, put me into a dizzying trance, filled me with a blinding brilliance, so that the single stationary point in all that whirling whiteness, the black monolith of the Ka’aba itself, became the center about which the soul and the flesh turned.

  On the fourth or the fifth circuit, I had drawn close enough to see the Ka’aba entire, the black block on its pedestal of gray stones, the gauzy white curtains extending halfway up its base like a woman’s veil, the meteorite set in silver like a jewel on its eastern face to which we offered a special prayer.

  Round and round, lost to ourselves, a single dervish whirling round and round with Allah in His sacred dance.

  But it was very hot, we were pressed together, some of us moving more strongly and rapidly than others, people were stumbling, fainting, staggering, calling out, and on the fifth or sixth circuit, I was jolted out of this dancing communal trance by a body falling against me and a hand reaching out.

  I took it without thought and held him on his feet and, without a word being spoken between us, we completed the tawaf as brothers hand-in-hand.

  The next rite was the drink of water from the Zamzam well, the spring around which Mecca had grown long before Mohammed. The man whose hand I held was not much past middle years, but his face was florid from the heat and sheened with sweat, he was breathing in gasps, I could feel the quaking in his gait, and, so, once more with nothing said or needing to be said, I helped him to the southwestern end of the courtyard where there was a stairway leading down into a cavern containing the well.

  Here it was damp and cool and there were troughs of well-water and paper cups. I filled one for him, he gulped it down, drank another, and seemed to recover somewhat.

  “Merci, mon frère,” he said in French.

  “De rien,” I replied.

  He issued a sigh that was as much a panting for air. “To have come so far, and fail to complete even my umra, let alone the hadj!” he moaned. “I’ll never be able to run the sa’y!”

  The sa’y, or Hagar’s Run, was a seven-fold running between two little domed hillocks within the courtyard. To me, it did not sound like much, something like the silly running back and forth between wickets at a ridiculous and incomprehensible cricket match I had once seen on the BBC.

  “I will not permit you to have come so far, however far that might be, and fail just because you’re no Olympic athlete,” I told him. “We’ll do it together.” I laughed to lighten his burden. “I’ll carry you if I have to.”

  “This is not permitted,” he reminded me, but he let me lead him to the interior of the long gallery through which I had entered the mosque. Here we found a kind of lane between the two little domed hillocks, with pilgrims running, trotting, staggering, walking briskly, back and forth.

  What I had not understood was that this “running track” was at least as long as the distance between the two goals on a soccer field. “Pas possible!” my companion groaned.

  “Allah will provide, and if not, I will,” I assured him, though I was more sure of the power of Allah’s assistance than my own.

  I took him by the hand and off we trotted. By the second leg, he was panting, by the fourth he was beginning to stagger, and by the sixth, I had my right arm around his back and tucked under his right arm. By the tenth, I was supporting his weight, tiring, breathing hard myself, and fearing that neither of us could last the final four.

  I silently prayed to Allah to grant me the strength to support my brother hadji, and glancing aside, I saw that his lips were moving in what must have been a similar prayer. And then my prayers and his were answered, or perhaps it was what runners call “gaining the second wind” or perhaps they are one and the same. For certain of these athletes say that the body’s fatigue dissolves and some mysterious force takes over, and if this is so, where could such power come from save Allah?

  Perhaps that is the very purpose of this rite, the overcoming of the weakness of the flesh by the strength of the spirit engaged in a holy task. Whatever it was, our prayers had been answered, for we found ourselves fairly running the last lap together, grinning in triumph, arm-in-arm.

  “Praise be to you, young man!” he exclaimed in a state of relieved delight after we had finished.

  “All praise to Allah,” I corrected.

  “Praise be to Allah, then,” he told me, “but since I cannot buy Him a glass of tea, let me buy you one, and another for Allah as well. Myself, I think I could drink four of them. Or coffee if you like.”

  He gave me a lidded surreptitious glance and a wink. “I know I should not be saying this, especially here, but were this Paris instead of Mecca, and I not a good Muslim on hadj, I must admit that I would be tempted to buy us both cognacs to go with it as well.”

  CHAPTER 20

  We found a teahouse well away from the crowd around the mosque, yet occupied almost entirely by pilgrims in white robes, and, praise be to Allah, air conditioned. My companion introduced himself as Hassan bin Hamid, a second-generation beur, and I told him I was Osama Mammadi, not my family’s real name, but the one on my passport. On his advice, we ordered a pitcher of iced mint tea, more quenching that the usual little glass
of hot tea or small cups of coffee.

  Hassan owned a small bar with a little cheap hotel above it near the Place Maubert in Paris. “And yes we do serve alcohol to those who want it,” he told me, “there’s not enough profit in coffee and tea to make a living, and the Koran says nothing against selling it to infidels. And yes, I do sin from time to time myself.” His shrug reminded me of Ali. “C’est la France.”

  What could I venture to tell him about myself? Hardly that I was the notorious Osama the Gun! And if I claimed to be a beur we were likely to stray into unknown political waters. But I had to explain my knowledge of French, so I told him that I was studying to become a translator here in the Caliphate; my youth and my less than perfect accent would make that seem credible.

  “You are quite young to be on hadj, if you will pardon me for saying so,” he told me. “You must be a very devout young man.”

  I shrugged, trying to not make it seem too Gallic. “Although it doesn’t seem likely, I might find myself working abroad and not for high wages, and I thought it would be best to do it while I could without having to come up with the air fare.”

  He nodded. “I myself would have made my hadj years ago, if not as young as you, if I could have afforded it. As it is, a hotel room was still beyond my means after the airline ticket. And where are you staying?”

  I realized that I had quite forgotten my predicament. “I had saved up enough money for a cheap hotel room,” I told him, “but when I found out what the agencies were charging, I realized it would completely deplete my funds to rent a room that way. So I foolishly decided that Allah would provide, that I could find something myself when I got here.” I sighed. “He didn’t. Nothing at all to be had. I was very stupid.” Alas, this at least was the complete truth.

  But Hassan smiled. “Ah, but now He has provided. Or at least the Caliphate does. They’ve set up tents on the plain of Arafat, and there’s a tent city closer to Mecca than Mina. The taxi fare is not something you even want to think about, but there are buses that will take you there and they are free. That’s where I’m staying. It’s twelve men to a tent, but it’s only a hundred euros a day, and ours hasn’t filled up yet. If you like, I’ll take you there.”

  “That’s very kind of you.…”

  “But first we’ll have to arrange it through the official Caliphate agency here in Mecca.”

  * * * *

  The agency was close by the monorail station, it was on the third floor of an office building and there was no sign at the building entrance, but still it was crowded. There was a long counter with functionaries behind computer terminals but no system for orderly waiting lines, and Hassan pushed and elbowed his way rudely through the crush like a good Frenchman with me in tow.

  “Give me fifty euros, that should suffice,” he told me when we reached the counter.

  “My son here needs a place in my tent, that’s M-375,” he told the functionary.

  “There are still places available, but tents are assigned at random. I’ll see what I have.”

  “I know there are empty places in my tent.”

  “Be that as it may, I told you, tents are assigned at random.”

  “What?” Hassam cried, puffing up his indignation. “You would prevent a father and son on hadj from lodging together?”

  “Well…I wouldn’t want to do that…the software might be…manipulated to…grant the mercy of Allah under such circumstances…but…”

  “I understand such…special arrangements might be time-consuming and I can see you’re a man whose time is valuable.…” Hassan purred, placing the palm of his hand on the counter with enough of the fifty euro note peering out from under it to make the denomination legible.

  The functionary dropped his pen on the counter and snatched up the baksheesh in the act of retrieving it.

  * * * *

  The bus station was also close by the monorail station, there were scores of buses continually coming and going, the highway out of the bowl in which Mecca was nestled and up onto the desert plain was a good four-lane one, the traffic crawled along descending into the city but was much lighter now in the other direction, and we reached the tent city in less than half an hour.

  Under the still bright late afternoon sun vast orderly rows of tents blazed glaringly like the mirrors that they were, for they were made of silvery mylar to reflect its rays and heat, and therefore its light as well, so that upon approach the entire area seemed like a shimmering desert mirage.

  Once inside the tent city, however, it was at least ten degrees cooler than the surrounding desert because of this clever design, and the aisles between the orderly rows of tents were anything but orderly. Men were gathered around cookfires in front of their tents, stands sold meat, vegetables, rice, spices and other provisions. Kiosks purveyed roasting kebabs, stews, soups, and cous-cous from large kettles. Hawkers paraded back and forth selling guide books, Korans, sunglasses, cold sodas and juices, umbrellas. It was a souk capable of servicing a small city, which was exactly what it was doing.

  Each row of tents was marked with a letter on a pole and each tent was marked with its own number so that there was no difficulty in finding our own amidst the thousands. The tent was a half-cylinder some ten meters long supported by semi-circular plastic hoops. A gauzy flap, now rolled up, could be lowered over the entrance. A more opaque curtain provided privacy for the chemical toilet and washbasin at the far end. The only furnishings were foam mats laid out on both sides of a dividing aisle.

  There were five men in the tent when we arrived, two of them sitting on rugs over their foam mattresses reading Korans, one dozing, the other two squatting together talking, all of course identically dressed in white ihrams. But aside from that there was nothing identical about them.

  The sleeping man, who Hassan awoke to greet me, was Mohammed, an actual camel jockey from the depths of the desert. One of the Koran readers was an Egyptian named Anwar Moustapha, who revealed nothing more, but who Hassan told me was some sort of Sufi mystic. The other was Ruhalla Ramjani, a Shiite Iranian who taught the operation of computers to school children. The two men conversing were Kemal Othman, a Turkish department store clerk, and Yassir Abass, an Arab who nevertheless was not only an Israeli citizen but a clerk in their post office and insisted that he was not a Palestinian.

  I was impressed with these men, not so much as individuals, for with the possible exception of the Egyptian Sufi, they were a collection of ordinary Muslims from all over Dar Al-Islam, even as Ali had told me I would encounter on hadj, and that was the magic of it, the collectivity. I had been immersed in crowds of thousands of ordinary such Muslims from all over the world, but this was different. Now I found myself not merely among them, but within this typical sampling of the Umma; an intimate part of that collectivity.

  * * * *

  After the sunset prayer, there was a new arrival, a wide-eyed Malay waiter from Singapore, who introduced himself in English to those of us who understood the language as Mahathir bin Ibrihim, and said little else afterward. But soon thereafter, another man strode into the tent and immediately filled it with his presence.

  He was tall, with more or less Arabic features but dark brown skin and tight black curls. Though he wore an ihram no different from any other, his bearing was commanding, his stride strong and precise, his gaze measuring, so that on him anything would look like a military uniform.

  I was not surprised when he introduced himself as Bashir Ali Hamza, Sergeant in the Nigerian Army.

  “What are you doing on hadj with a war going on in your country?” I could not refrain from asking.

  “I am strengthening my baraka. “

  “Baraka?”

  “Baraka, fighting heart, spiritual power, it is needed to command men in combat. We Hausa are Muslims, but we are Africans fighting the Americans in Biafra and we need the strongest baraka possible. What stronger baraka than t
hat of the hadji in a jihad against the Great Satan?”

  He looked me up and down appraisingly as if I were a new soldier just assigned to his squad.

  “You are the youngest hadji I have seen here. You question me, I question you. Who are you? What are you, young fellow?”

  “I’m Osama…Mammadi,” I lied uneasily. “I’m studying to be a French translator here in the Caliphate.”

  “French! Their weapons are not tip-top, but at least they do send them.” Hamza laughed humorlessly. “Study well, Osama. Perhaps you will become the man to talk them into sending us their famous Foreign Legion. Waiting for Caliphate troops to fight at our side is like waiting for the Madhi.”

  * * * *

  After the evening prayer, Hassan, Yassir Abass, and Hamza went out into the souk with collective funds to purchase our dinner, and returned with a single large platter of cous-cous and saffroned rice heaped with kebabs, tomato-flavored lamb shanks, strangely-spiced chicken, beef stewed in a fiery coconut milk sauce, and steamed vegetables, food from all over Dar al-Islam. And though the more than balmy temperature hardly required it, we ate it together around a campfire outside for sake of companionship under a brilliantly starry sky possible only over a desert.

  I for the most part silently listened to the conversations, content to eat slowly, gaze up tranquilly into the glorious heavens, and empty my mind of all the events in the world outside that had brought me here, knowing a peace that I had not experienced since I had pulled that trigger as my “entry test” for the spy school as a boy.

  But the world outside could not be entirely kept from intruding.

  Mohammed, the camel tender, seemed in a mood that matched my own. “Praise be to Allah, is it not His blessing that here we all are sharing our food as brothers under the same sky which the Prophet himself sat beneath when Allah came to him with the words of the Koran!”