We huddled in our hotel room for a full day watching out the window as Al Masjed Al-Haram Street became the scene of continuous protest turning more and more chaotic and violent, to the point of smashing windows and overturning cars.
The television showed nothing of what else was going on in Mecca or the rest of the Caliphate, confining its broadcasts to abnormally normal prayers, Koran readings, and bland entertainments, but there was a restaurant and a coffee shop in the lobby, and from conversations there, we were able to piece together a picture of what was happening in Mecca at least.
Mobs were everywhere, and while there were no tales of violence against persons of any significance, government buildings were being stoned with a fury previously reserved for the Pillars of Satan at Mina or so it was said. There were more orderly demonstrations outside the mosques, and a continuous mass protest vigil around the Al-Haram Mosque itself, and according to one story, even within it. Many mullahs, far from calling for the riots to end and the demonstrations to disperse, were egging them on. The police were prudently making themselves scarce, perhaps even in part in sympathy with the demonstrations, for some of them were seen joining in.
Kalil took to silently staring out the hotel room window at the perpetual angry mob below, sometimes for an hour at a time, as if by meditating on this most unholy scene taking place in the most holy city in the world, he could hope to make sense of it all.
These long silences made my tense and ignorant boredom all the more difficult to bear and I could feel my mood souring to general anger, at the Caliph, at the Caliphate, at the Americans, at the censoring of television coverage; an ire that I could feel was in danger of being unjustly taken out on him, for want of any other available target but Allah.
“What are you doing, Kalil, is Allah showing you a vision?” I finally ventured in an attempt to break his silence and my irritable mood.
He would not avert his gaze from the window but he did speak. “A vision,” he muttered disconsolately, “but certainly not sent by Allah.”
“What is it that you see?”
“You said it yourself, Osama. The soul of Mecca is dying. Perhaps you were right, and it’s dead already.”
“Then why do you continue to stare out the window?”
Kalil shrugged. “Perhaps to understand what killed it. Or perhaps hoping to see a sign that it only sleeps.” He finally turned away from the window to regard me with haunted eyes. “These are not evil people out there, but they are doing an evil thing.”
“Are they? It seems to me that they’re protesting an evil deed, a stupid and evil deed, and trying to set things right.” I grimaced sourly. “Whether they can succeed or not is another matter. If I believed they could, I might be out there with them.”
“Two evils cannot not add up to a good.”
“Can’t they? Saladin killed thousands to recapture Jerusalem. Osama bin Laden killed thousands to unite Islam against the Great Satan. The Americans and the British killed millions to save the world from the Nazis. I have killed many men for the cause of Islam.”
“What are you saying?” Kalil asked. A question that I realized I was asking myself.
“Was Saladin an evil man? Was bin Laden? Am I?”
Kalil had no answer, but in that moment, it seemed that Allah provided me with one that, however terrible, granted my soul a certain ease.
“Murder is an evil, and war is many murders, and a war such as the Americans waged in Nigeria or what they are doing here is evil. But a just war, a Holy War, a jihad, is not evil, and those who fight in such a war with pure hearts are not evil men. All too often it is necessary to commit a lesser evil to overcome a greater one, and if that means taking the sin on your own soul, even the sin of murder, even the sin of many murders, which after all is what a soldier must do, is that not the greatest sacrifice a man can make for the common good?”
“The Koran says so, if not in so many words,” Kalil admitted.
“And Allah rewards the jihadi in Paradise…”
“But…but…”
“But?”
Kalil sighed. “But I know in my heart that I could never be such a man. Perhaps you are a better man than me, Osama the Gun, certainly a stronger one…perhaps…”
A shadow seemed to pass across his face for a moment, and then it seemed that the light returned to his eyes. “Perhaps that is why it was Allah’s Will that I bring you on what has turned into this dark umrah…perhaps you have such a mission to perform here and I have been your unwitting and uncomprehending guide.”
“And what might that mission be?”
“I have no idea,” the Sufi told me. “But in such terrible times, I fear that it must be something terrible itself. As you say, a lesser evil to overcome a greater one. And seventy-two virgins in Paradise or not, I do not envy you the task.” And to break the somber mood he laughed.
“Either task,” he said.
* * * *
The next day, an attempt by the Caliphate to calm the situation made things both better and worse. The Caliphate Minister of Defense made a very brief appearance on television to declare a state of martial law, and since there was no mention of cities or areas to which it applied I could only assume that it applied to the Caliphate as a whole.
Only an hour or two later armored personnel carriers led by a water cannon paraded down Al Masjed Al-Haram Street, clearing it of demonstrators, after which soldiers in riot gear debarked and spread out to line the sidewalks. Kalil would not leave the hotel, but an hour or two later I decided that I had to venture out into the streets to learn what was truly happening.
Infantry was deployed along the thoroughfares. There were tanks at the major intersections. Water cannon in the plazas and squares. Armored personnel carriers and jeeps patrolled the lesser streets of the city. There were squads of soldiers outside the mosques and in the souks. Even the Al-Haram Mosque was surrounded by troops.
I saw no attempts to damage property, no more marching mobs, order of a grim sort had been restored. But people had not abandoned the streets to the army. In place of mass marches and unruly demonstrations there were small unmoving crowds gathered at intersections, outside government buildings and mosques, and larger ones at the many gates of the Al-Haram mosque.
And the troops did nothing to disperse them. Far from it, individual soldiers mingled with them, allowed themselves to be harangued, and even the majority of those who did not stood around with downcast faces and furtive glances, clearly ashamed, not only of the task they had been ordered to perform, but of their show of military force in the sacred city.
I returned to the hotel in a foul and disconsolate mood. The soul of what had made Mecca holy and the city unlike any other had indeed been slain, by the Americans, by the government that Allah had commissioned as its protector, and these poor soldiers had been pressed, largely against their own will, into serving as the guardians of the corpse.
Kalil was in the bathroom, showering by the sound of it, when I reached our room, and the television, as usual, had been kept on with the sound turned off, in the wan hope that Caliphate Television would finally relent and provide some news of the world outside the occupied city.
But there was nothing to be seen but the face of a bearded imam apparently reciting verses from the Koran. I sat down on the edge of the bed pointlessly staring at the screen while I waited for Kalil to emerge so that I could urinate.
Suddenly the face of the imam faded into a washed-out and fuzzy image of itself. And then that dissolved into a field of multicolored static. A few moments later the scintillating static coalesced into the faint outline of a human head. A moment later the screen came into sharp focus.
A distinguished-looking black man with graying hair cropped close to his skull in the American military manner but wearing a dark suit jacket, white shirt, and blue tie appeared on the screen. The background behind him
was the American flag. I immediately reached out to turn up the sound.
“Good afternoon, citizens of the Caliphate,” he said in perfect Arabic in a deep mellow voice. “Free Caliphate Television is now on the air, coming to you in place of your usual programming via geosynchronous satellite to provide you with the true news that your own government is withholding on a twenty-four hour basis free of commercial interruption. And now a brief summary of the news. We apologize for the lack of quality footage of events inside the Caliphate due to our inability to place camera crews on the ground.”
Kalil emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel and I forgot my own need to use it which now seemed not pressing at all.
“Martial law has been declared throughout the Caliphate and troops have been deployed in the major cities to quell peaceful demonstrations protesting the news blackout and the Caliphate government’s illegal execution of the so-called perpetrators of the so-called military coup without fair and open trial in order to surpress their testimony which would have revealed that they were acting as agents of the Caliphate and neither alone nor as agents of the CIA and to demand free and fair elections to a national assembly to write a democratic constitution for your country.”
This outrageous lie was accompanied by a series of satellite images showing crowds in the streets of various cities taken from on high, but good enough to make out military vehicles, and in the case of Mecca, the Al-Haram Mosque itself.
“What is this?” cried Kalil.
“The Americans have…have conquered Caliphate Television. They’ve somehow overridden its broadcast frequency from space…”
Street scenes in peaceful and orderly cities shot from on the ground, calm traffic, people in Arabic and western dress on the sidewalks, thronged and well-stocked souks, children playing soccer, cafes, restaurants, a soccer match in a packed stadium.
“Meanwhile the newly-liberated republics of Kuwait, the Emirates, Yemen, and Libya remain calm and unaffected, secure and prosperous under the protection of the American fleet which remains offshore for the purpose despite the Caliphate’s cowardly indirect threat.”
A background shot of the United Nations secretariat building in New York as limousines pulled up and Arabic men in both traditional and western garb emerge.
“At a meeting under the unofficial auspices of the United Nations, the ambassadors of Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Morocco, and Algeria have agreed to simultaneous declarations of independence from the Caliphate and a collective application for admission as independent states.”
A shot of the White House.
“In Washington, the President has announced support for this move and assured delegates from these countries that the United States is willing to negotiate mutual defense treaties as soon as legitimate governments can be established.…”
“What is happening, Osama?” Kalil fairly wailed.
“Who is to say?” I told him grimly. “Only the Americans know whatever lies, whatever truths, serve their purpose, whatever that might be. The Caliphate arrogantly chose silence and kept its own people entirely in the dark, and now it’s too late to even try to tell whatever the truth of all this may be or even their own lies. We are at the mercy of the Great Satan for knowledge of anything beyond what we can see and hear with our own eyes and eyes.”
“Like being deaf and blind!”
“Worse than that,” I told him. “For the people of the Caliphate still have eyes and ears, and they will be unable to keep from using them to watch television, no matter how they may pray to Allah to give them the strength to look away.”
“You really believe that, Osama?”
I grimaced. I sighed. I knew.
“You will see,” I told him. “In the end, neither will you or I.”
CHAPTER 41
Even as I had predicted, it was impossible to avert our eyes and ears from the American broadcasts as events unfolded, for they were the only source of anything remotely like news, however perverted.
Caliphate Television was overridden by them and off the air, the Americans were jamming the radio stations, and blocking the interior Internet, and while the Caliphate government tried to counter by loosening the censorship of newspapers, all that could be learned by reading them were official claims that order had been restored, denials of the American charges and a countercharge that evidence had been uncovered that the executed men had indeed been agents of the CIA.
For three days “Free Caliphate Television” pounded away with claims that demonstrations were still going on and beginning to turn into outright riots, and that Caliphate troops were abandoning their positions and joining in, backing them up with satellite footage showing little more than distant shots of crowds in city streets that could easily have been created by special effects studios in Hollywood.
While it was difficult to believe everything that the Americans were saying, since a glance out the hotel room window revealed no such demonstrations or riots on Masjed Al-Haram Street and my brief excursions into the streets uncovered no such thing either, the official Caliphate statements also had no credibility, and the result was that nothing was believable, to the point that I found myself longing for news from Al Jazeera or, may Allah forgive me, even from CNN.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, we heard the noise of some great commotion on the street, and dashing to the window we saw a huge mob trotting down Masjed Al-Haram Street toward the Mosque, screaming, shouting, waving fists, carrying crude banners and placards demanding “Death to the Great Satan,” “Free Elections,” “Long Live the Martyrs,” and any number of other contradictory slogans, while the soldiers on the sidewalks backed up against the buildings, and the armored personnel carriers in the streets pulled aside to let them pass.
The citizens of Mecca were emulating the false news stories of the demonstrations and riots that the Americans had been broadcasting and turning them into the truth. The Americans had created that which they wanted to report by reporting it before it had happened.
This was “psychological warfare” of the most diabolically ingenious sort that made anything Hamza’s Nigerian “psychological warfare corps” had attempted look like the work of jungle primitives and even what the Ski Mask Jihadis had accomplished in Paris unsophisticated, the work of professional masters of this black art.
Nor was this even the final piece of black television magic.
“…this just in. Free Caliphate Television has learned that mass demonstrations against the Caliphate government demanding a full investigation of the coup, an open post-mortem trial of the executed men, and free elections to a constitutional convention have broken out in the holy city of Mecca…”
This we heard from the television even as the march was continuing down Masjed Al-Haram Street. Turning away from the window, we saw that the newsreader was an olive-skinned woman in the most traditional Islamic garb, a black chador with a veil that covered everything but her eyes.
“…there are reports that looting and destruction of property have broken out and isolated instances of soldiers joining the rioters, while the rest of the Caliphate troops occupying the sacred city are standing aside in solidarity with the demands for a democratic government to replace the present dictatorship…”
The news reader was replaced by a satellite image centered on the Al-Haram Mosque itself. Nothing could really be made out from this distant view but the Mosque itself and a huge crowd, like the very pixels on the television screen, flowing unimpeded around immobile military vehicles.
“…the rioting has spread to the area around the Al-Haram Mosque and it is feared that the Mosque itself may be in danger…”
“This can’t be happening!” Kalil moaned.
“Of course it is happening,” I told him caustically, “we’re seeing it on television, aren’t we?”
* * * *
The riots, if there were riots, continued unab
ated for twenty-four hours, or so Free Caliphate Television reported, spreading to other cities and growing worse, or so the Americans claimed, with more vague satellite images to make it credible, while through the window what was revealed was no worse than Masjed Al-Haram Street clogged with a permanent and largely immobile demonstration, more like a vigil than anything else.
Then, immediately after the sundown prayers, the Great Satan revealed the strategic end behind the illusion of chaos that its television weapon had so cunningly created.
“…from Washington, we bring you a message from the President of the United States…”
And there he was, seated behind the desk in his office, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and somber black tie; composed yet sorrowful, regarding the camera and the people of what was left of the Caliphate like an elder brother come to restore order to a schoolyard fracas.
“Citizens of the Caliphate, the people of the United States express their deepest sympathy for the chaos into which your country has been thrown by the lies and perfidy of its undemocratic and incompetent government and assure you of their solidarity, as witness the effort we have already made to counteract the censorship of the news by the Caliphate government by keeping you fully informed of these dire and fateful events. Rest assured that the government and the people of the United States stand beside you in this hour of need.”
How the man could utter such words without choking on them or bursting into satanic laughter I could not fathom. Kalil looked as if he had seen Satan himself appear on the television screen.
“Your lives and property are in danger, the government of the Caliphate has demonstrated its inability or unwillingness to defend them, and even the holiest places of Islam which it is sworn to protect are in danger of destruction. The American people cannot and will not stand by and allow this to happen. And the United States will make a generous offer to prevent catastrophe and liberate the people of the Caliphate from undemocratic rule, which we believe will restore order in a peaceful manner.”
Osama the Gun Page 40
