Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  “A good man!” I cried. “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? I’ve killed more men than I can ever know! I’ve caused innocent people to die! I’m responsible for the deaths of ten thousand Nigerian soldiers who died for nothing! And if it weren’t for Osama the Gun, this disaster wouldn’t have happened here.”

  “All in the service of the Will of Allah as He gave you to see it. That you have never betrayed.”

  “What are you telling me?” I shouted angrily. “That Allah betrayed me?”

  “Men betrayed you. But Allah awakened you.”

  “Next you will tell me that I am the Madhi?” I fairly snarled.

  “The Madhi sleeps within all men. And when you gave the mask of Osama the Gun to be worn by the Madhi within all who you might awake to wear it, you felt Allah speaking through you, did you not?”

  Kalil’s visage became wistful. Was that envy that I heard in his voice?

  “I have had many moments of awakening, but I have never known such a moment of awakening as that. You were the Madhi in that moment, Osama. And perhaps something more. What the buddhists call a bodhisatva. The Madhi whose holy mission it is to awaken the Madhi in those who still sleep.”

  I waved my arms to indicate the abandoned encampment of the defeated. “And the result was this!” I wailed.

  “A wise man said that whatever happens to a man, nothing can take away what he has already done. What he has already been.”

  “And what am I now?”

  “Now your are asleep. I would awaken you if I could, but I have not been granted…”

  Kalil paused. A certain light came into his eyes. “But perhaps…perhaps…”

  “Perhaps?”

  “Perhaps you have awakened me. For now my decision has been made. I will go to Mecca. I will do it now, in the worst of times.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Because while the Hadj is a collective pilgrimage that all Muslims must try to make at least once, the umrah is a personal pilgrimage to Mecca that a man should make when Allah calls him to it for an individual purpose. As I do now.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” the Sufi admitted. “Perhaps to find out. Or perhaps I have been told that my purpose is to bring you with me on your own umrah, Osama the Gun. To help you complete the story of your life so that you, and I, and perhaps the world, may in the end know what it means. Or perhaps the task of the Madhi that sleeps within me is to awaken once more that which now sleeps within you.”

  “But to do what?”

  “I don’t know that either, but another wise man once said it’s not over until it’s over.”

  “What’s not over until it’s over?”

  “The story of a man’s life. And what it means. What it will mean in the end.”

  CHAPTER 38

  I had nothing to do for the sake of myself or any cause, and while I could not quite believe that I would learn something of value on such an umrah of my own, I agreed to accompany Kalil to Mecca, for this was at least a service I could perform for another soul.

  This not being the time of the Hadj, it was easy enough to get there. We were able to get to Riyadh by purchasing a ride on a bus. The capital was in a great commotion when we got there, there were mobs running through the streets waving Caliphate flags, and troops in the streets; riot troops with shields and electric batons, water cannon, armored personnel carriers, tanks and machine gun nests at the roads into the city.

  Whatever was happening, neither of us had any desire to be caught up in it, and with the flow of people towards the center, and the troops not impeding passage out of the city, we were able to take a taxi directly to the airport. The airport was eerily half-deserted, and so booking a flight to Jeddah proved not difficult at all.

  There was a large television screen in the departure lounge and I knew that it would only be carrying Caliphate Television. Everyone in the departure lounge, no more than two score people, were gathered in a tight crowd before it, staring intently as if transfixed, but gabbling and apparently arguing about something in a great passion.

  The camera was wobbly and struggling to stay in focus, as if whoever was behind it lacked professional skill, and what was being broadcast in this amateurish fashion was the bearded face of a hard-looking and wild-eyed man in the uniform of a Caliphate Army Colonel. He was shouting as if addressing a live audience without a microphone.

  “…faithful Muslims and loyal soldiers of the Caliphate who do not seek to overthrow the government, and our orders to all troops who support us is to hold position or remain in your barracks, and take no action against civilians.…”

  “What’s happening?” I demanded of no one in particular.

  “A coup!”

  “They’ve taken over the television station!”

  “…tanks around it…”

  “It’s not a coup!”

  “It is!”

  “They only want to broadcast their demands!”

  “…call upon citizens of Riyadh to surround the palace but remain peaceful and for everyone else to go to the mosque and pray that Allah will grant the Caliph and the Council the courage and wisdom to comply.…”

  “Not a coup, is it?”

  “…will remain in control of Caliphate Television until the Caliph issues this ultimatum to the Great Satan…”

  “What ultimatum?” I demanded.

  “They’re demanding that the Caliph give the Americans twenty-four hours to withdraw from the Arabian Peninsula—”

  “And remove their fleet from the Arabian Sea—”

  “Or use our nuclear weapons to destroy it…”

  “Madness!” I cried. “The Americans would retaliate by destroying everything!”

  “He’s right!”

  “Not if we threatened to launch nuclear missiles at New York and Washington and backed up the threat by hitting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem first!”

  “Jerusalem! You would destroy the Dome of the Rock?”

  “The Americans would destroy Mecca!”

  “We are Muslims, not infidel servants of Satan!”

  “…unless fired upon. When the Caliph has done what we demand and restored the honor of Islam, we will surrender Caliphate Television to the government and allow ourselves to be tried for treason if anyone believes that treason this is…”

  “You hear him? That is a true Muslim talking!”

  “Who would have us all die!”

  “Who would die himself to defend the honor Islam!”

  “Who would see Mecca destroyed!”

  “Would you prefer to allow the Americans to destroy Islam?”

  “They only want the oil!”

  “You believe such lies?”

  “…surround the television building. Do not allow them to take us off—”

  The television screen went blank. Its voice went silent. But not the voices of the little crowd before it, which fell into angry argument, with voices raised into shouts, and fists waving in the air, and threatening to be wielded in earnest.

  Kalil tugged at my sleeve to pull me away, which I gratefully allowed him to do, having no desire to be drawn into a brawl among Muslims We withdrew to seats at the far end of the lounge to await our flight to Jedda.

  “The Americans could not have created a worse situation if this junta were working for the CIA.…” I found myself muttering. And then, hearing my own words: “Perhaps they are.”

  “Surely you don’t believe…”

  Kalil let the words hang, and against my own will, I found myself thinking like Osama the Gun, all too well-schooled in such labyrinths of betrayal. If the Caliph acceded to the coup’s demand, the Americans would never back down, and if any Caliphate nuclear missile were launched, it would give them an excuse before the world to bomb the Caliphate into total s
ubmission, leaving only the oil fields intact, and occupy them as in Nigeria. But if he didn’t, the honor of the Caliphate would be destroyed before its own populace, before all of Islam.… Either way, it seemed only American purposes could be served.…

  “It really doesn’t matter,” I told Kalil. “Only disaster can come of this. These men are either traitors or fools. The Caliphate is finished. I see no way that it can survive this.”

  “Nor do I,” said Kalil. “But the first Caliphate too came and went. And Islam still survives. As it will even if all of Arabia is turned into a radioactive wasteland.”

  “Even Mecca? Even the Ka’aba, the navel of the world?”

  “Even that,” said Kalil. “The Temple of Solomon was the navel of the Jews’ world, and Rome tore it to the ground, and for two thousand years they had not even an inch of soil that was their own. And yet they survived. Because they were, as the Koran itself proclaims, the People of the Book. Are Muslims a lesser people than Jews? Are we not also the People of the Book? The greatest of all books? The Final Word of Allah to the world? Is the Koran a lesser refuge than the Book of the Jews? Islam sleeps in the souls of all men, and so it will survive to awaken, no matter how dark the night.”

  “You really believe this, Kalil?”

  “And you do not, Osama?”

  Did I? In that awful moment, I knew not. But I knew that if I had lost that belief and could not regain it, what meaning could there be to my life? To the life of any Muslim so lost? That much, at least I knew that I believed, in that much I knew that Kalil must be right, for if that was destroyed in the hearts of men, the victory of the enemy of the soul would be completed, and Satan would forever rule the world.

  “I will pray to Allah as hard and as often as I know how not to let that belief die within me,” I told the Sufi.

  * * * *

  The flight to the Jeddah airport was all but empty, an ominous contrast to the crowded plane I had experienced on the Hadj, and the signs at the airport even more ominous. The military terminal was surrounded by tanks, there were some score anti-aircraft missile batteries set up and many Caliphate fighters parked on the tarmac. Long lines of airliners waited beside the runways to take off, and it took nearly an hour to reach an arrival gate because the few arriving flights were backed up behind departures.

  The arrival lounge was almost empty, the departure lounge was full, and the customs guards regarded arriving passengers as madmen, looking as if they wanted nothing more than to quit the area themselves.

  When the monorail from Mecca pulled into the station, it was like the worse rush hour I had even seen on the Paris Metro as people poured out, but when we boarded it for the trip to the city, we had a whole car to ourselves. The inbound lanes of the highway that paralleled the monorail track were all but empty, but the outbound lanes were one continuous traffic jam all the way back to the city.

  When we emerged from the monorail station onto Al Masjed Al-Haram Street, the situation was bleak, but from a selfish viewpoint that served us to advantage.

  When I had arrived on the Hadj, this thoroughfare leading to the Al-Haram Mosque had been so crowded with pilgrims that it had been closed to vehicular traffic, and while the streets had been lined with hotels of every class, it had been impossible to find a room at any price.

  Now there was sparse traffic, diversely clothed people abroad though in no great numbers, many of the shops, restaurants and tea houses were shuttered, and even the grandest hotels were offering steep discounts in futile efforts to fill their empty rooms. Even so, Kalil and I hardly possessed unlimited funds, and so we agreed to share a large but well-appointed room without a view of anything but the street in one of the more modest ones.

  The room had two separate beds as we required, and a television set, which I was not at all sure I required. Still I could not leave the thing alone. The proper custom was for Muslims entering the city to proceed immediately to the Al-Haram Mosque to perform the tawaf, but while we were unpacking our minimal baggage, I thought it no sin to turn it on, or if sin it was, I simply could not help myself.

  I might as well not have bothered. The screen was filled with multicolored static. Caliphate Television, the only channel allowed, was still off the air.

  “A wise man has said that no news is good news, or at least a fool,” I told Kalil sarcastically.

  “How so?”

  I shrugged. “At least this must mean that the Caliphate has so far done nothing.”

  * * * *

  There was no river of white-clad pilgrims flowing sluggishly down Al Masjed Al-Haram Street towards the Mosque to impede us, but the streets and plazas immediately surrounding the great green mosque itself were filled with ordinarily-dressed people flocking to it, not from the four corners of Dar al-Islam, but from every quarter of the city.

  Surrounded by worshippers filing in though the Al-Haram Mosque was nothing like the crush of pilgrims during the hadj, and though the sight of it buoyed my spirits, there was also a miasma of gloom and fear in the eyes of the people, in the hunching of shoulders, in the strange near-quiet, in the very smell of this multitude, so unlike the excited jubilation of triumphantly arriving hadjis.

  Things being what they were, we were able to enter through the magnificent Al Fatah Gate with its glorious tilework and flanked by its towering minarets, as I had been unable to do on my hadj. Even under these circumstances, I could not but take this as a gift from Allah.

  “Beautiful, is it not?” I murmured.

  Kalil nodded. “As beautiful as the Masjid-i-Shah Mosque in Isfahan, or even the Masjid-i-Shaikh Lutfullah, the spirit of Islam preserved in stone.…”

  Inside the mosque, though, that spirit seemed less preserved than imprisoned. The galleries leading to the interior courtyard containing the Ka’aba, with their tiled arches supported by a forest of graceful columns, were no less beautiful to the eye than when I had first walked through them, the air no less cool and welcoming to the skin after the outdoor sun, and as before there were many people kneeling and prostrating themselves in prayer, more of them tarrying here than during the hadj, in fact.

  The words of the prayers were the same as they had always been, and so too the notes and the cadences, but the rhythm was faster to the point of frenzied supplication, and many of the Faithful, consciously or not, were bobbing their heads nervously, as I had seen in a documentary of Jews before their Wailing Wall, and indeed the collective chorus echoing through the galleries was more of a wail than a hymn of joy.

  The effect was far from that of the tranquil holy worship in any mosque on a Friday, let alone that of a company of hadjis awaiting their turn to circle the Ka’aba; that of trapped refugees from a some disaster yet to come pleading insistently for mercy.

  The look that Kalil gave me told me that he felt it too, and he quickened his pace and took the lead as we made our way through this holy gloom towards the sunlight filtering through the shadowy forest of columns in the distance, towards the open air of the courtyard, towards the navel of the world, towards the Ka’aba.

  Emerging from the shadows into the bright light was momentarily blinding to the eyes and instantly uplifting to the spirit, as if here the prayers of the fearful supplicants back in those shadows were suddenly answered and would be forever. The dry heat of the sun was like the touch of the hand of Allah, the blinding white light that of His countenance upon which no man could directly gaze.

  And when the moment of glorious blindness lifted, there was the great black cube of the Ka’aba upon its pedestal of stone, arising through its pure white drapery, the holiest object on Earth, the navel of the world, the center of Islam, immutable, implacable, eternal, as it had been since before Mohammed, before the memory of any tale, as it would be forever, Inshallah.

  Circling it was the seven-fold procession of the tawaf, the most sacred rite in all the world, equally ancient, Inshallah equally ete
rnal. But as I saw to my dismay, not equally immutable.

  During the Hadj, the pilgrims in their identical ihrams formed a dazzling circle of white under the bright sun, a vision of purity of purpose and communal oneness. The hadjis had circled round the Ka’aba in a stately but joyous rhythm, and the chanting of prayers had been a paean of praise to Allah.

  But now the circling throng wore every sort of dress expressing their individuality and station in life; white desert robes, dark western business suits, workers’ jeans and shirts, even a few military and police uniforms. And the pace was too rapid, the chanting shriller and agitated, angry and imploringly supplicating at the same time, putting me in mind of the mood of the crowds at Mina stoning the pillars of Satan, as if they were almost ready to toss pebbles at the Ka’aba, were such available and it not the most terrible blasphemy imaginable.

  Kalil and I exchanged dispirited glances. “Not exactly what you expected, is it?” I muttered disconsolately.

  “Perhaps not what I hoped,” he told me, “but I shed expectations in order that the experience might be pure.”

  “I see little purity in this,” I said sourly, “only fear, and anger, and something somehow even worse.”

  Kalil shrugged. “That seems to be the reality,” he admitted, “but under the circumstances, would not anything else be self-delusion or madness?”

  Nevertheless, we joined in the circumambulation, and so doing, I found it impossible not to partake of the agitated pace, the wailing tone of the chants, the odor of despair, and I was forced to understand what that something even worse was. There was a oneness of spirit enveloping me, I did feel immersion in the communal soul of Islam, but there was nothing uplifting or holy about it. This was more like a funeral procession for something that had died, or at best some pagan ritual desperately attempting to bring it back from the brink of death. Satan had cast his pall over the heart of Islam itself, over the souls of the inhabitants of the threatened holy city, nor could I escape from under it myself.