Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  Abubakar Mugali was a Muslim from Hindu India, where nevertheless, most of us were surprised to learn, there were over a hundred million of the Faithful. The contention between them had led to the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the birth of Pakistan, its dismemberment in a war, and much other dire history, resulting in remaining ill will between Hindu and Muslim Indians, with the Muslim minority often both hated and feared.

  But India and what became Pakistan had won independence from Britain united together under the Muslim Mohammed Ali Jinna and the Hindu saddhi Mahatma Gandhi and this had been accomplished not by war but by the shaming of the British by mass non-violent action as the Caliphate was attempting to shame the Americans here.

  “So I am here as both a Muslim and an Indian patriot and believer in the way of the Mahatma to demonstrate that such a thing is indeed possible as it once was. Which is why I will march unarmed.”

  Saddam sneered at this. “The Americans are not the British. It would not have worked against Hitler’s Nazis and it will not work against them. You will learn. And you will die.”

  I held my silence, thanks to the presence of Ali Tawafa, a Hausa sergeant who had come like me fresh from the Biafran war and to whom Osama the Gun was a shining hero, and worse still a young French beur who insisted on calling himself Osama bin Osama, both of whom sung the praises of my hidden identity in fulsome manners that filled me with both pride and guilt for taking any pride for what had cost many lives to achieve nothing but failure.

  There were also two mullahs, or at least a mullah and a holy man among our number, but no two such men could have had more different views of the true nature of Islam and what this jihad therefore meant.

  Mullah Mohammed bin Turki was a Wahabbi, which had been the official sect of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia before the Sons of Osama overthrew it and established the Caliphate; fiercely strict in terms of custom and ritual, who believed that not only the Koran but everything Mohammed had uttered as a worldly ruler was also the immutable Word of Allah, and even the Sharia. To him, there was no distinction between the province of Faith and that of obedience to the government that Allah had ordained to rule all of Dar al-Islam. For him, Kuwait and its oil were the property of Allah Himself, America was irredeemably the Great Satan, he carried a gun, and did not believe in the very concept of a Madhi.

  Kalil Basanjadi was a Sufi from Iran, who went unarmed, who claimed that Sufism was a knowledge that predated the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed, therefore a precursor of Islam and a brotherhood which had both accepted Islam and allowed itself to be absorbed within it. To him, Islam had somehow already existed before Mohammed, had been born with Adam, and the Koran had not created Islam, but revealed it to the unknowing.

  “Islam is surrender to the Will of Allah, and to surrender to the Will of Allah is to dwell within His Presence, to experience direct communion with the Divine that sleeps within all men, even the Americans, by whatever means might awaken it, be it dance, be it music, be it meditation, be it what the Buddhists might call an action koan such as the Caliph has posed to the Americans here.”

  “Apostasy!” cried Mullah bin Turki. “What is an apostate like you doing here?”

  “To see if it will work,” Kalil told him gently. “To do my small part in making it so if I can, Inshallah.”

  “To bring forth the Hidden Twelfth Imam, the Madhi, as the Shia believe, I suppose?” the mullah replied witheringly. “And that he is Osama the Gun?”

  “Yes and no…”

  “Yes and no!”

  “A Sufi is a Muslim but neither a Sunni nor a Shia. We do not await the coming of a Hidden Imam. But we long for the awakening of the Madhi in every man.”

  Round and round they would go, Mullah bin Turki quite loathing Kalil but not the theocratic argument, Kalil seemingly incapable of anger at any man.

  I found this fascinating and I would listen, but held my tongue, and took care not to seem to be listening too intently, for fear of being drawn into revealing too much, not to these holy men, but to Moustapha bin Moustapha, one of the two Bedouins in our midst, both of whom brought their own ancient but well-cared for rifles.

  Moussa Kadim was a tribal chieftain or elder of a large family, who prayed a lot, spoke mostly of the superiority of the pure people of the desert over the degenerate folk of the towns, and hoped that the Americans would fight so that he could kill himself a proper brace of them to brag about to his grandchildren.

  But Moustapha bin Moustapha was a simple and devout man the focus of whose devout and all-too-simple faith was that Osama the Gun was the Madhi, and he had come to fight for Islam in his name.

  Nothing could have tormented me more than this. This was a good man, the purest of Muslims in the simplicity of his faith, and in the less simple manner that I had expounded on television, his belief was true, we were all now the Madhi, united behind the mask of Osama the Gun. But in his eyes, Osama the Gun was a single man somewhere among this army of Holy Warriors, and the Madhi who would reveal himself to lead it when the time came.

  I longed to enlighten him but I doubted I could make him understand, and how could I even try, without revealing that I was the object of his sincere but deluded worship? It was torment to hold my tongue but to speak out would have been worse.

  Worse still, Moustapha forced me to realize that there must be thousands of simple, honest, sincere Muslims among these hundreds of thousands of jihadis who probably believed much the same thing.

  * * * *

  Much worse, as I discovered wandering about the tent city waiting impatiently for the march on the Kuwaiti border to begin, there were all too many who not only believed that the Madhi would emerge from within their midst to lead them as Osama the Gun but believed, or at any rate proclaimed, that they were him.

  I had rather concealed myself as one Ahmed bin Abdullah, first son of a Caliphate merchant who had yearned to fight as a jihadi in the Biafran war, but whose father had forbidden him to so risk the life of his heir, but had patriotically relented when it became a matter of defending the heartland of Islam itself.

  This had seemed like a bland enough identity to assume in order to deflect excessive probing on the part of my tentmates, but it caused Moustapha to attach himself to me as a sort of elder brother in arms, the beur who called himself Osama bin Osama to regard me as a kindred spirit, and the Hausa war veteran Ali to volunteer his services as a military mentor and regale me with tales of the heroic feats accomplished by Osama the Gun as the hero of Nigeria.

  I could not spurn such comradeship without drawing suspicion, and so it was in the company of Moustapha and Ali that I chanced to encounter the first of these pretenders as we wandered about the tent city.

  He wore the robes of a Bedouin and one of the cheap synthetic green ski masks that were on sale everywhere and brandished an old and tarnished Kalashnikov as he stood on a crate haranguing a small gathering of no more than a score jihadis, several of them likewise masked, and most of them similarly dressed.

  “…as I led the forces of Islam to victory over the infidels in Nigeria, so will I lead this great army of the Faithful to victory over the Great Satan in Arabia, for Allah has appeared to me in a vision, and told me that Osama the Gun must wear the mantle He draped around the shoulders of Saladin when he drove the Crusaders from Jerusalem, the mantle of Osama bin Ladin, of the Sons of Osama who restored the Caliphate, of the Madhi he has commanded to preserve it from destruction…”

  Moustapha stood there wide-eyed and enthralled. I was outraged, appalled, and disgusted, all the more so because I found myself compelled to hold my tongue. But the scowling Ali spoke out for me.

  “You are Osama the Gun, are you?” he barked. “You led us to victory over the Biafrans, did you? Then tell me, what is the name of the river that was the north border of the Zone? The name of the general who commanded the division where your Ski Mask Jihadis were biv
ouacked? And why you are waving that rusty old Russian junk instead of your famous slide-gun?”

  “Apostate! Agent of the Great Satan!” the speaker roared. “Ignorant black savage!”

  At the last, Ali’s hands balled into fists, he began to surge forward, the listeners seemed about to turn on us, and I grabbed him by the sleeve to restrain him. “Let it be,” I told him. “Let’s not start a fight among Muslim brothers, however deluded, over the words of a madman or a fool, and probably both.”

  Ali let me drag him reluctantly away before it could come to blows, with Moustapha looking back over his shoulder with the air of a small boy being removed from the vicinity of a sweet stand in the souk.

  “You are sure that man was lying?” he said plaintively.

  “I was there,” Ali told him. “I fought beside Osama the Gun!”

  “You did?” Moustapha exclaimed breathlessly. “You saw him? Did you actually speak with the Madhi?”

  “Well…I saw Ski Mask Jihadis and spoke with them once or twice,” Moustapha muttered shamefacedly. And then more forcefully: “But who is to say whether any of them was Osama the Gun? They were all masked. There were hundreds of them. He never revealed his face. He himself proclaimed that anyone who wore the mask could be Osama the Gun. Half of them died in the last great battle. He could even be dead.”

  His vision brightened as with a sudden revelation, and so did mine when I heard his next words. “That is why anyone who would claim to be Osama the Gun cannot be Osama the Gun!”

  “The Hidden Imam!” exclaimed Moustapha, and immediately looked as if he wished he had bitten his tongue.”

  “You are Shia?”

  “Do not insult me,” Moustapha muttered. “Only a manner of speaking, a slip of the tongue. I meant the Madhi…but…but do not the Shia believe thusly too?”

  We quickly discovered that there were many more such imposters infesting the tent city. Some of them were obvious madmen ranting incoherently and therefore probably sincere, many of them seemed cynical charlatans, some of whom had prepared themselves by securing recordings of words I myself had spoken on television and memorizing them.

  This was disturbing enough, but worse, as I observed what was happening that day and the next, I saw that these false Osamas tended to draw small groups of like tribe, nationality, sect, and perhaps even political mind around them; Pakistanis to a Pakistani, Bedouins to a Bedouin, Maghrebians to Osamas from North Africa, veterans of one army or another to a military type, Sunnis to a Sunni, Shia to a Shia, blacks to an African.

  In the absence of any overall leader and in the presence of so many Osama the Guns, so many Madhis revealing themselves to such followings, would the Jihad fragment?

  * * * *

  We all wondered when the march would begin, how, and who would lead it, or if no one led it, how it could hold together or even if it would, and in the tent we talked of little else, save how over half a million men would manage to traverse two hundred miles of seacoast desert and what the Americans would do when we got there.

  I and Mullah Mohammed, being the only among our company who had made the hadj, had more confidence than the others in the Caliphate’s ability to keep half a million men on the march supplied with food and water, since we had experienced a greater logistical miracle as it was accomplished every year. But since it would have been revealing too much for me to provide such reassurance, when it came I let him do the talking.

  Keeping silent when the talk turned to the profusion of Osama the Guns was far more difficult, for this troubled me far more than problems of food and water, and more than any other of our number.

  Mullah Mohammed regarded them as vile apostates, Moustapha clung to the belief that among these false Madhis there was hidden the real one, who would somehow emerge to lead when the time became right, and Osama bin Osama, skeptical about the existence of a Madhi, nevertheless believed that Osama the Gun would be with us on the march.

  Mohammed Karzai, on the other hand, was deeply worried. “No good can come of this,” he insisted. “Afghanistan was a confusion of tribal rivalries even when we had a king, which made it all too easy for the Russians to take over. We united to drive them out, but it was really a unity organized by the American CIA and Pakistani Military Intelligence, and once they were gone, it was back to tribal warfare until the Taliban and bin Laden played the Madhi, but when the Americans drove them into the mountains, it started all over again.…”

  “You think these would-be Madhis are agents of the CIA sent to promote chaos?” said Ahmed Jabbar. “I wouldn’t put it past them!”

  Mohammed Karzai shrugged. “I’m saying the CIA wouldn’t have to do it.”

  “The Caliphate should do what Saddam Hussein would have done,” growled Saddam Tikriti. “Round them all up before the march begins and shoot them.”

  “I find myself agreeing,” said Mullah Mohammed. “They are all blasphemers and apostates, the penalty for either is death. But beheading is the proper means of execution.”

  But Hassan Karim, the Kuwaiti major, shook his head. “Under the circumstances, they’re useful, even essential. An army without a commanding general or chain of command is bad enough, but an army without even sergeants is a mob. If you think of these men as volunteer sergeants holding things together at least on the squad level, you’ll see what I mean.”

  Ali Tawafa agreed. “In Nigeria, the Ski Mask Jihad squads were divided up among five divisions, they were all masked, and no one knew which squad might be led by Osama the Gun. It was very strange, but it worked.”

  I did not know what to think, I had to remain silent, and so had no one with whom I could venture to share my confusion in order to seek some sort of enlightenment. But after the sundown prayer outside the tent, I found myself drawn to the Sufi Kalil, who had said nothing about the matter but had spoken of the Madhi within every man, and took him aside.

  “You have said nothing about these false Madhis…” I began.

  “Did I not say that I long for the awakening of the Madhi in every man?”

  “In these fakes and charlatans?”

  “In every man…Ahmed bin Abdullah…” he told me in a manner I found rather discomforting. “Every man wears a mask of flesh over his true face, does he not, the visage within, that of his soul, revealed unfortunately, often enough, not even to himself, until Allah reveals it to him, and then…”

  “And then…?”

  “And then he…awakens. As a sleeper into full awareness. And whatever he has been before, he becomes…he becomes…”

  “The Madhi?”

  Kalil shook his head. “No man is the Madhi, no man ever was, no man ever will be. Even Mohammed himself never claimed to be such a thing… But those who awaken to find Allah within them become…become a part of what the ignorant call the Madhi. Together, all such awakened souls are the Madhi. And when all men are so awakened, then will there be Allah’s Kingdom upon the Earth, then will the Madhi within us all have come to redeem us.”

  “I do not understand…” I said, feeling the rightness of his words in my soul, but struggling fruitlessly in my mind with the concept.

  Kalil laughed. “There are learned men who understand quite well and yet still sleep behind their masks, and simple men who understand nothing of the concept but yet have awakened.”

  “Those fakers and pretenders out there?” I scoffed.

  Kalil shrugged. “Who is to say what lies behind each and every mask but Allah? But the man who created it…”

  “You speak of…Osama the Gun?” I stammered.

  “Awakening is one thing, remaining awake is another, the state which we Sufis seek to maintain. But sometimes Allah awakens a man for but a brief shining moment for His own purpose, great or small, and that many men experience, whether they know it or not at the time. They act as if Allah moves them like a puppet, or words emerge from their lips
before they think them…”

  And the Sufi looked deep into my eyes. “Have you never experienced such a moment, Ahmed bin Abdullah?”

  I could not answer with words. I did not have to. From his almost imperceptible nod and small smile, I saw that my eyes had spoken for me.

  “When the man who was Osama the Gun declared that the mask he wore was the true face Islam and invited the multitude wear it, I do believe that in that moment at least, the Madhi within him awoke and spoke for Allah through him…”

  I nodded. For I remembered in my heart what I had experienced in that moment.

  Kalil nodded back. “In that moment, Osama the Gun spoke for that which is the only Madhi, as many men had before him, and therefore in that moment the Madhi was him.”

  “And those who wear the mask out there, whatever they are, jihadis, madmen, fakers, you are saying that…that in such moments the Madhi may also become them too?”

  “Inshallah,” said the Sufi. He shrugged. “Heroes, the Faithful, fools, the wise, madmen, charlatans, villains, even the most deluded or meanest of men. It sleeps within us all. And so if Allah would have it so, it will awaken.”

  CHAPTER 36

  It was not possible to provide a general electrical supply to half a million men in the tent city, so there was not widespread television or Internet connection and while there was an abundance of cell phones and radios, batteries were hard to find, and what news of the outside world that reached us filtered through in the ancient form of rumor and word of mouth.

  The Americans, or so it was said, had issued no statement as to how they would react to the jihadi march when it reached the Kuwaiti border, nor had the Caliphate announced when it would start, or how the signal would be given, or who or what would lead it.