* * * *
We did not seek to refresh ourselves with tea when we left the mosque, both of us wished to shower before we did anything else, to cleanse our bodies after the flight and the day under the sun, and at least as far as I was concerned, to bathe away the miasma of the rite from my soul.
We spoke little at first on the walk back to the hotel. The sky was a clear and cloudless blue, but I could all but see the shadow hanging over it, the shadow of an impending mushroom pillar cloud that might or might not destroy the whole city, but the shadow too of something that had already happened.
To my eye, Al Masjed Al-Haram Street seemed even emptier than it really was, the people abroad already scurrying refugees from a disaster than had already come, the shuttered shops markers of that disaster rather than omens, even the signs offering discounts at the near-empty hotels a depressing shutting down of the city’s life.
“Mecca is dying already.…” I muttered.
“But you only saw it before during the Hadj,” Kalil reminded me in an attempt to lift my gloom. “Perhaps what you see now is just a normal city.”
“You call this a normal city?” I growled.
“I see buildings and streets. Pavements and stones. Cars and pedestrians. A city like any other.”
“Shuttered shops. Mostly empty sidewalks. Hardly any traffic.”
“A normal city under threat, then,” Kalil insisted unconvincingly.
“Mecca is not a normal city,” I told him irritably. “Mecca is not an…an ordinary city. Mecca is…Mecca! The Holy City! The city of Mohammed! The city of Allah! Will you tell me you do not feel it? Will you tell me that the soul of Mecca has not already died?”
“Mecca is a city built by men, even the Ka’aba was built by men to house a meteorite discovered by men after it fell from the sky,” Kalil said, and now there was passionate conviction in his voice. “It is Islam that made Mecca holy, not Mecca Islam, Osama, not even that star that Allah sent down from the heavens. Mecca is but one place where dwells the soul of Islam, and if all these buildings should crumble, if there should remain nothing more here than a radioactive crater, Islam will not die because Islam dwells everywhere forever in the hearts of men.”
“You really believe that, Kalil?
“And you do not?”
I thought hard about it, and finally came to believe that I believed, but not to understand just what it was that I believed in any more, save Allah alone.
“The Hindus say that all material things, buildings, stones, flesh, the very Earth itself and everything upon, are illusion, what they call maya, and only the soul that inhabits them for a time and then moves on is real, and that soul is everything,” said the Sufi. “I understood the concept before I came here. But now I see that those infidels might know it not, but they speak of Allah.”
This high-minded discourse, however, did not have the effect on me that he had no doubt intended, for what I understood of what he had said put in my mind the most low-minded thought that had ever intruded therein.
If Mecca were truly no more than a city built by men, then the junta holed up in the Caliphate Television building was right, was it not, the Caliph had made a terrible mistake, and so had we all when we fled after the atomic bomb blast rather than attempt to fight our way into Kuwait.
For even had we died to a man, the Americans would have allowed this city to be evacuated, and indeed it was beginning to evacuate itself nevertheless now, and then they would have destroyed Mecca.
And even if not a single Meccan died in that nuclear fire, not a Muslim in all the world would feel less than what I already felt now. Shock and despair to be sure, but such outrage and hatred as would have ignited the Jihad that would have swept the Great Satan from the world if it took an army of a billion jihadis a thousand years.
Had not the Caliphate, had not we put the sparing of Mecca above the ignition of that ultimate and final Jihad out of blindness and cowardice, and thereby snatched victory for the Great Satan out of the jaws of a Holy War that would have redeemed the world?
I spoke no more on the way back to the hotel, where I immediately immersed myself in a long and almost scalding shower so as to wash away this thought, but however long and harshly I abluted myself, I could not.
I emerged from the bathroom with the urge to bare it to Kalil, a man surely wiser than I, but the television, which I realized we had not bothered to turn off, had come alive again, and Kalil was standing before it.
“The coup is over!” Kalil cried. “They’ve stormed the television station and killed or arrested them all!”
Caliphate Television was showing some dozen bare-headed men in disheveled army uniforms with their hands cuffed behind their backs being prodded at gunpoint into the back of armored personnel carrier by helmeted soldiers in full combat dress.
“…is over,” said the voice of a newsreader. “The Caliph and the Caliphate Council have denied the outrageous American charges and promised that all who took part will be tried and punished.…”
“What happened, Kalil? What outrageous American charges?”
“It’s hard to say, the news broadcast is obviously being censored by a heavy hand,” Kalil told me. “They’re not even releasing the names of the men they’ve killed or arrested. From what I could gather, the Americans accuse the Caliphate of being behind the coup…or something like that…”
“The Caliphate is supposed to have seized its own television station?” I muttered. “It makes no sense…”
Or did it?
“Unless…unless they did it to deliver the ultimatum to use their nuclear weapons as a bluff through unofficial means that would let them back down if the Americans called it.…” I said, thinking aloud.
“Which seems to be what happened…”
I shook my head. “No, the Caliphate couldn’t have been behind the coup,” I said, contradicting myself. For while by now I knew enough about the Caliphate government to believe that it was capable of such cynical treachery, I could not see what it could hope to gain by such a thing.
“The Americans haven’t withdrawn, so they must have made some kind of threat or the Caliphate wouldn’t have shut down the coup if they were behind it,” I told Kalil. “And they would have had to be incredibly stupid not to realize that would happen. So the junta must have been telling the truth, they could only have been sincere Muslims and foolish patriots acting alone. Only…”
My tongue froze in my mouth as I remembered what I had said in the Jedda airport.
The Americans could not have created a worse situation if this junta were working for the CIA.…
“Only what?”
“Only the Americans had anything to gain from fomenting this.”
Kalil gave me a look of utter befuddlement. “The Americans wanted a threat against themselves?”
“If there was a nuclear first strike by the Caliphate or even a failed attempt, they’d become innocent victims before the world, and it would be the perfect excuse to do whatever they wanted to the Caliphate…”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “But the Caliphate Council probably does. And the Caliphate won’t let that be broadcast, won’t even admit that there was a threat because storming the station under threat would make them look like cowards and traitors to Islam.…”
Kalil regarded me as if I had gone quite mad.
“The Americans created a threat against themselves and charged the Caliphate with being behind it just so they could force the Caliphate to back down? You’ll pardon me, Osama, but you are not making any sense. Or at least not any kind of sense that I care to understand.”
Under such a gaze, I began to realize that I had not exactly been making a kind of sense that I really wanted to understand either, and certainly my string of suppositions was not something I wanted to believe in, true or not.<
br />
Indeed especially if true.
For the Americans had charged the Caliphate with being behind the coup, and the Caliphate had disowned the junta and the ultimatum it demanded and ended the occupation of Caliphate Television by force, which could only appear as appeasement of the American invaders in the eyes of anyone who saw even this censored coverage.
Either the Americans had set out to discredit the Caliphate government in the eyes of its own citizens or the same result had been handed to them by misguided patriots.
It didn’t matter. Either way this was another bloodless victory for the Great Satan. What mattered now was what further evil the Americans would make of it.
“I’m hungry, are you not?” Kalil said in a casual tone obviously crafted to draw my mind out of such somber and tortured thoughts, and forced or not, I found that indeed I was, and grateful for the gesture.
I nodded my agreement. “Let’s find a place to eat,” I told him. “No doubt the truth will come out during the trial.”
What I saw no reason to tell him was that I was also grateful to be in Mecca where no such temptation was available, for were this Paris, I knew that under the circumstances I would have been sorely tempted to wash the meal down and the taste in my mouth away with wine. Perhaps even followed by cognac.
CHAPTER 39
But there was no trial of the coup leaders and their followers, or if there was, it was a court martial held in secret. And what came out during the next three days was any number of versions of the truth, for while Caliphate Television might be controlled by the government, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and the rest of them were not, and while access to such foreign news outlets might be legally forbidden, their coverage was accessible via clandestine satellite dishes and recordings, and put generally abroad wildly mutated by word of mouth.
The Americans were accusing the Caliphate government of being behind the coup which was why it was refusing to allow interviews with the men who had been arrested. They had once more threatened to bomb Mecca if the station were not stormed before the twenty-four hour deadline. Before a forty-eight hour deadline. The Americans had been behind the whole thing. They demanded to try the captured men themselves. They were demanding to interrogate them before the Caliphate tried them. They wanted them tried before an international court in the Hague. They were threatening a formal declaration of war against the Caliphate. The Mossad was behind it all. The Shiite Iranians. The Kurds. The Turks. The Roman Catholic Church. American oil companies.
The only thing that seemed clear to me was that the Caliphate had made a terrible mistake by trying to keep foreign broadcasts out and blatantly censor its own. The technology that existed had made it impossible to keep Hollywood films and television shows out when I had been a boy and made it impossible to keep foreign versions of the news out now. The result was that the censored official version could not be believed, and while none of the other versions could be generally believed either, there were many more and wilder versions circulating than had been broadcast in the first place.
The CIA and the Mossad and CNN working together could not have done a better job of sowing chaos, fear, disbelief in the government, and confusion. Mecca and no doubt the rest of what remained of the Caliphate boiled with these rumors. The exodus from Mecca continued, and from more rumors, it seemed that people were beginning to flee from other cities too. The people who remained flocked to the mosques when they were not arguing in the teahouses and the streets. There were demonstrations demanding the release of the “Faithful Muslim Patriots.” There were demonstrations demanding the executions of the “Traitorous Agents of the CIA.” There were demonstrations demanding the broadcast of the trial on Caliphate Television.
Kalil and I gave up on Caliphate Television and most of everyone else probably did too. All that it was broadcasting was footage of people praying in the mosques, readings from the Koran, pointless old documentaries, and Egyptian movies and soap operas. Local Caliphate radio stations carried no news. Short wave broadcasts were jammed. Newspapers carried no reporting of anything of importance.
It was a news blackout. It was like being dropped back into another century. Whoever had proclaimed that “no news is good news” had gotten it very wrong, at least under these circumstances. For imagination filled the void with multiple versions of the worst news possible.
We prayed in the Al-Haram Mosque. We aimlessly wandered the streets, increasingly empty except for the demonstrations, and the half-deserted souks of a Mecca turning into a ghost city. Only the restaurants, cafes, and tea-houses were full, and at all legal hours, with remaining Meccans seeking the comfort of communal company but mostly discomforting each other with obsessive speculation instead.
Kalil and I found ourselves haunting such environs too, for there was really nothing to do but wait in ignorance for we knew not what. The effect on Kalil seemed worse than even my agitated distress; I had never seen the firmly optimistic Sufi steeped in such gloom, not even on the march back to the tent city from the known catastrophe that already had happened.
“I fear that you were right when you said that the soul of Mecca is dying, Osama,” he told me as we sat on cushions well after lunch in a coffee house. “I don’t believe that Allah has abandoned Mecca, but it is harder and harder to believe that this city does not believe that He has, and so has abandoned its faith in Him.”
The interior of the coffee house was hung with printed draperies emulating a tent and the low brass tables and cushions extended beyond the open front onto a little pavilion under an awning in similar style. It was crowded with men gathered around hookahs, fecklessly playing backgammon or dominos, talking argumentatively, glancing furtively over their shoulders and scowling at the large flat-screen television hung on the back wall and turned down to low volume, where a bearded man in traditional dress was reciting verses from the Koran.
“You were the one who told me that it is Islam which made Mecca Holy, not Mecca Islam.”
Kalil nodded. He sipped at his coffee. “And if this city should crumble it will live on in the hearts of men and that I still believe. But I believed that Allah had called me to Mecca to learn something of great value, or to help awaken you to such a thing, Osama. But what I beheld was a cube of black stone, a city in fear and in danger of losing its faith, and what I fear is that Allah called me to Mecca only to bear unwilling witness to its fall for a reason I doubt I really even want to understand.”
“But did you also not say that the stories of men’s lives are not over until they are over, and only then can we know what they—”
There was a sudden shout, like a massive intake of collective breath, and all eyes turned to the television screen.
A stretch of neatly raked sand with nothing else visible to reveal where it might be. Ten wooden blocks were arranged in a line. Behind each block stood a man in traditional white desert dress bearing a heavy unsheathed sword.
Behind them stood the Caliph himself.
“Turn up the sound!” several men shouted and someone did.
Ten men, bareheaded and wearing only white shifts open at the shoulders and necks, and with their hands tied behind their backs, were led to the blocks by Caliphate soldiers and prodded to their knees by rifles.
“In the name of Allah, the Merciful, these men have been found guilty of attempting to overthrow the government of the Caliphate, the rightful government of Islam, and by their own public admission, in order to bring down the wrath of America upon the Faithful and so serve the cause of Satan himself,” the Caliph proclaimed in a stern harsh voice within which I could nevertheless detect a certain quaver.
“Thus they are guiltily of treason and apostasy, the punishment for either of which is death by beheading. May Allah have mercy upon them as His…as His servant on Earth cannot.”
The Caliph raised his right arm shakily.
The executioners brought up their swords.
When he brought his arm down, they brought down theirs.
Their work was well done.
In a moment, there were ten bodies twitching and jerking and gushing blood from their headless necks, and ten heads rolling on the Arabian sands.
CHAPTER 40
What the Caliph or the Caliphate Council believed they would accomplish by beheading the coup leaders on television I could not fathom, nor how they could fail to foretell the resulting outrage. The patrons of the coffee house poured into the street to vent their spleen, many of them not even pausing to pay their checks, shouting and waving their fists.
I too was enraged at the barbarity of the act, but more so at its arrogant stupidity. Half the populace of the Caliphate had considered these men courageous Holy Warriors of Islam and many of those who did not believed they were agents of the CIA. To the former, they were now martyrs already being rewarded by Allah in Paradise, and the latter would have only been satisfied if they had been forced to confess before being consigned to Hell. So their execution without a public trial reeked of a cover-up in all nostrils.
Kalil’s face was ashen, having never witnessed a thing. He held me back until the rush out of the coffee house had passed, and only then did we venture out into the street.
The coffee house was on a secondary avenue with several such establishments as well as a few restaurants and shops, in a residential quarter south of the Al-Haram Mosque, and people were still pouring out of them and their apartments and had already become an angry mob moving towards the open areas around the Mosque.
My curiosity overcame caution and I wanted to join them, but Kalil insisted that we retreat as directly as possible to the safety of the hotel. We waited until the mob had passed, then circled around south, east, and then north through a maze of side streets to Al Masjed Al-Haram Street, where traffic was already at a standstill and the sidewalks clogged as smaller cross-streets and avenues fed a foaming river of protestors heading to the Mosque, so that we had to resort to side-streets again to reach the hotel, and shove and elbow our way through the crush to enter the lobby.
Osama the Gun Page 39
