“And me as well, Kalil? Having witnessed the same thing, why is there only bitterness and anger and despair in my heart? What is the point of the umrah that brought me here? What is the purpose of my whole failed life?”
“Only Allah knows that,” he told me. “I have given you only words that you might understand, and perhaps that is why Allah brought us here together, but the knowledge of what they mean sleeps within you, and only when Allah awakens you to that will you know.”
I shook my head. “I envy you, Kalil Basanjadi.”
“Strange as it may seem, I envy you, Osama the Gun. Allah may not have granted you peace, but you have served His Will in this world courageously and faithfully with a holy warrior’s purity of heart. And remember, the story of a man’s life is not over—”
“—until it’s over.”
And we embraced, and then my only friend in this fallen city was gone.
* * * *
Free Caliphate Television was off the air, but it had created dissatisfaction with the official channel’s heavy-handed censorship, or perhaps the government of the defeated Caliphate realized that the absence of any news of dire events had been worse than at least some degree of public knowledge, or probably both, and Caliphate Television allowed some limited coverage of the American deployments.
There was footage of the American robot forces and their detachments of human troops in Kuwait being withdrawn to their fleet. Of the surface ships departing, and then of the dozen Whales submerging. And Caliphate Television devoted much air time and commentary boasting of this so-called “victory,” the “forcing” of this mighty armada into “ignominious” retreat.
But this was a diversion from the occasionally intercut pictures of the American deployment in the oil fields and pumping stations, along the pipelines, only a few minutes at a time, and presented without commentary. Cargo planes and helicopters landing and disgorging construction crews and equipment. Laser fences and gas fences going up around the oil fields and pumping stations. Troops converting lengths of pipeline to the deadly self-defending versions I knew all too well. Mines being layed. Other things I did not understand.
I could not bear watching this for very long. I knew what was happening and what the result would be. Or thought I did. It did not take the Americans very long, a matter of a few weeks, no more.
During this period I kept the room in the hotel that Kalil and I had shared, even though the meager funds I was able to have transferred from my Nigerian pension were not enough to cover the rent and my savings were being steadily depleted. I prayed at the mosques, more often than required, often at the Al-Haram Mosque, but never circling with the sparse and gloomy crowds around the Ka’aba. I wandered the streets alone and aimlessly, I slept more than was needful. If alcohol had been available, I probably would have been reduced to drunkenness.
I was in Mecca, but not of it, nor did I want to be; if it had become a ghost city to me, I made myself a ghost to it, the ghost of Osama the Gun, now a man without hope or purpose, waiting for I knew not what or even had the heart to care. Sleeping long hours, eating meals with no savor, wandering the streets like a feral dog, reciting unanswered prayers, and otherwise passing the empty hours staring at the television set.
Finally it was Caliphate Television, not Allah, which granted me a vision which awakened me from this emotionless trance. But it was a vision of horror and the emotions it awakened were were fury, and hatred, and despair.
Caliphate Television ran a full fifteen minute documentary on the completed American installations. They had cameras on the ground well outside the extended defensive perimeters and mine fields. They had been allowed to fly camera drones over it, for the Americans were no doubt proud of what they had wrought.
Oil fields surrounded not only by laser fences and interior fences that could release poison gas, but wide mine fields around those defenses where the desert sands had been dyed bright red as a warning. Hordes of robot mini-tanks within the laser fences, between the laser fences and the minefields, and the large robot Crabs patrolling beyond that. Pumping stations similarly protected. Pipelines within electronic killing zones and these too patrolled by robot mini-tanks with more minefields beyond.
The announcer made little of the deadly mechanisms of these defenses and said nothing at all about the technical details, but instead continually hammered home what the eye already could see, that true to their word, there was not a single human American soldier to be seen defiling Caliphate soil.
The documentary concluded with satellite images, first images of individual oil fields, pumping stations, sectors of pipeline, then pulling slowly back to show larger and larger segments of the installations.
“…thus the oil remains entirely ours, moving from wells, through pipelines and pumping stations untouched by a single American hand, with the payments likewise flowing unimpeded from the computers of American banks into our own, without a single infidel foot defiling our sacred soil. Think of it as a single enormous self-service petrol station…”
My gorge rose. I did not think of it as a “petrol station” at all.
The satellite camera pulled back further and further, so that most of Arabia was visible from on high or at least the areas where the oil was to be found. At this resolution, the pipelines were silvery spider-silk strands, the oil fields and pumping stations barely visible nodes in a vast web. But that web was a single enormous all-encompassing vampiric network, an undead but unliving parasite stuck to the sandy skin of the body of Arabia, pulsing with obscene mechanical pseudo-life in the mind’s eye as it sucked up its life-blood to feed its satanic American masters, and would until, as in Biafra, the land was drained dry.
I hated this evil monstrosity more than I had ever hated any living thing. It was far worse than a vampire bat or a filthy leech or a horde of mosquitoes. It was worse because it was not an organism but a mechanism. It was worse for what it was even more than for what it was doing.
It was the perfected contempt of America for Arabia, for its people, for Islam. We were not even worth conquest. We were beneath human attention. This thing cared not at all whether we lived or died. It had not even the capacity to care for its human masters. Should every American die tomorrow it would go on. It had no life. It had no soul.
What I beheld was Satan’s countenance nakedly unmasked. This, not a mere fiery pit of human torment, was Hell. This was what his defeat of Islam would make of the world.
I still had my Kalashnikov. In a black rage, I snatched it from the closet.
I was not quite mad enough to open fire in a hotel room.
But I smashed the television screen with my gun butt.
* * * *
The Caliphate seemed to adapt to this strange and unprecedented form of occupation that was not exactly occupation even if I could not or would not. The Americans had been after a specific commodity, a vital economic need, and once they had secured it, they had no greed for land or power over a subject people, or anything else, not even the paradoxical imposition of their notion of “democracy” imposed by superior force or the conversion of Muslims to Christianity.
These were not modern-day Crusaders, they had no religious or political cause. They had no desire to rule the lands of Islam or the Caliphate, only to control its oil, and once the demand for democratic elections had served its tactical purpose, they lost interest even in that.
The Caliphate, having been reduced to the government of most of the Arabian Peninsula, had been relieved of the responsibility of feeding the teeming masses of the oil-poor former provinces of Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, and the like, and found unexpected economic advantage in this arrangement. For now its oil revenues need only buy enough grain abroad to supplement its own production to feed its own reduced population, and this was easily enough obtained from Canada and Argentina and Siberia.
But it seemed to me that something larger than
America had conquered something larger than the Caliphate. That conqueror was what was variously called “globalism,” the “modern world,” “secularism,” “multinationalism,” and while America was its greatest champion and beneficiary, perhaps it had been conquered too.
For what had been conquered was the soul of the world, the very knowledge that there could be anything of greater and more absolute value than “the global economic system,” the “modern world,” and the material things of it. A conquest that put Kalil’s Madhi that dwelt within the hearts of all men to sleep and erected mechanisms to keep it from awakening, to the point where those soulless mechanisms ruled the hearts of men.
Witnessing this done to the Caliphate, to Mecca, I finally understood that this, not a country called America, was the true Great Satan against which Islam had waged jihad since the time of Mohammed, and America only Satan’s ultimate weapon, for if it prevailed, the Earth would be Hell, and men would become as the web of robot machinery that had already ensnared the oil fields without so much as a spider at its heart, only an absence of animating soul that was the true Satan, a nothingness where the spirit should be.
Smashing the television screen which had inflicted this terrible vision on me had of course been an act of futility that had only served to have me ejected from the hotel even after I paid for the damages, thought at least it served to awaken me to the fact that my funds would be depleted if I had remained, and so I moved to a much cheaper and far less luxurious room in a kind of pension in a poorer quarter farther from the center of the city.
There was a bed, a closet, a rough amoire, a chair, a simple dressing table, and a bathroom, nothing more save an old television set, from which I learned that there remained scattered bands of jihadis still faithful to the cause of Allah trying to fight back.
The rule of the Caliphate government had loosened and hollowed out; satellite dishes were still illegal but the law, now having been made unpopular by the Caliphate Television news blackout during the crisis that had changed everything, was fecklessly enforced, and Al Jazeera, which had strengthened its broadcast signal, was not jammed. Newspapers were no longer obviously censored. Even Caliphate Television, forced to compete, was freer to report unfavorable news. That which had conquered the oil fields had partially conquered the Caliphate’s rule of the news too.
There were attempts to bomb oil fields and pipelines, all ineffectual. The Americans responded with aerial patrols by their Falcons. The Caliphate government protested that such overflights violated the agreement with the United States. The Americans denied this and declared that the use of the drone fighter-bombs had only been made necessary by the Caliphate’s indifference to preventing these attempts at sabotage or even its complicity.
Political parties were forming to contest the elections that were supposedly to be held after the Hadj; most of these seemed to be creatures of the government headed by imams and devoted to preserving strict Sharia law and the supremacy of the Council and the Caliph over a powerless National Assembly. A few called for a jihad to drive the Americans out. There was a small one calling for a true republic.
Little attention was paid to any of this until, prodded by the Americans to do something and by protests against the flights by a few politicians searching for a meaningful issue, the Caliphate exerted itself to the point of capturing the members of a few jihadi cells or perhaps just rounding up petty criminals and making a show of beheading them.
This created something of an uproar for a while. There were factions outraged at the Caliphate government for acting at the behest of the Americans to which the executed men were patriotic Islamic heroes. There were factions who applauded the executions and considered the jihadis troublemakers who were making an admittedly unjust and unpopular but as least peaceful and prosperous situation that much worse.
The sporadic attempts at sabotage continued and so did the overflights. It soon died down to grumbling acceptance of the situation as normalcy by the populace and a topic of pointless debate among the parties seeking leverage in the otherwise meaningless election to come. Thus had democracy come to the Caliphate. A certain amount of sound and a short burst of empty fury, nothing more.
And what was I doing? Nothing as well. I ate, I slept, I watched television, I wandered the streets like a lost soul, for it seemed to me that my soul had indeed been lost, had been taken from me, leaving behind an empty body like those robot simulations of humanity in a theme park, following a meaningless path through the streets, among a populace that seemed much the same in my mind’s eye.
What, after all, was there for me to do? Seek to join a futile sabotage cell? Seek out some form of menial employment when my Nigerian pension was enough to keep me pointlessly alive? Don the mask and stand in a souk proclaiming myself Osama the Gun?
To what end? There were madmen already doing that. What few people stopped to listen for a while treated them as a bad joke and the police didn’t even bother to arrest them. Small boys wore the mask while playing with toy guns in the manner of children playing cowboys and indians or soldiers of Saladin and Crusaders. Perhaps one day robot replicas of Osama the Gun and his men would do much the same in a Jihadi theme park.
I took to prayer. I haunted the Al-Haram Mosque. I even joined the tawaf circling the Ka’aba upon occasion, seeking to regain that which I had felt on my hadj. Nothing awakened my sleeping soul. I listened to imams and mullahs preaching in the mosques. They quoted the Koran. They extolled Allah and the Prophet. They exhorted the listeners to seek solace in their Faith. They spoke of the coming Hadj. But nothing they said had any connection to anything outside the mosque. It was as if they had retreated back into the lost Golden Age of the Prophet. As if Islam itself had retreated backwards into itself in surrender from what the world had become, and become a theme park of itself.
It seemed that I had reached the ending of the story of my life only to discover that it had no meaning at all, and so finally I decided there was nowhere to seek escape from my soul’s malaise but within, and I tried something I had never tried before.
I remained in my little room sitting on the floor, taking neither food nor water, staring fixedly at a blank and dingy white wall. I attempted to empty my mind of all thought, to create a void within so that Allah might enter, as He had in those moments before when I had felt Him speaking through me, but now to speak to me, to me alone.
But finding it impossible to empty my mind of all that tormented it, I resorted to driving out such thoughts by filling it with prayer. I implored Allah to grant me some vision. I praised His Beneficence and Mercy. May Allah forgive me, I even chastised Him for what He had made of the life of one who had sincerely surrendered to His Will. I forgave Him. I begged Him. I chanted what I fancied were appropriate surahs from the Koran.
I grew hungry. I grew thirsty. The hunger and the thirst passed. I became dizzy. The dizziness became a lightheadedness that was almost pleasant, as if my soul had at last been forced from the confines of the body I was tormenting to float freely before the blank wall.
And then I was the wall. I passed into the whiteness. I returned to where I had been when I was a hadji in my pure white ihram circling the Ka’aba among the Faithful, joyously dissolving into the Oneness of Dar al-Islam. Into a pure white light. The Light of Allah. And then I was not in the Light, but it was within in me.
No words spoke to my ears. But I knew that this was the true Paradise, not an oasis garden with seventy-two virgins, but purely the Presence of Allah and my soul within It.
This and only this was Islam.
This was the soul of the world.
This was the Madhi that slept within all men. That now had awakened in me and I in It.
I must put aside my fears and despair. I must put aside myself.
This was the Will of and Blessing of Allah. For me and for all men.
The story of my life was not over and I still knew not
what it would mean.
But I did know that if I remained faithful, if I gave over asking, imploring, despairing, cajoling, even hoping, and surrendered to the Will of Allah and let Him take me where He would, it could only end in this.
In the pure White Light that was the Paradise of His Presence, forever and ever, time without end.
CHAPTER 43
I awakened on the floor of my room with a great thirst and a hunger, with the memory of my vision intact, if without any notion of what it would lead me to do, but this was a refreshment, a purification, for I found that I no longer cared. My life in the world would end as the lives of all faithful Muslims would end, and what the completion of its story would mean was in the hands of Allah, as it had always been, and I now understood that I had no need to know what it would be as long as I allowed surrender to His Will to carry me along to it like a leaf riding a river to the sea.
I cannot say that this relieved my despair at what I beheld in Mecca or on television, but I had been granted a newfound patience in the conviction that Allah would reveal the use to which I would be put when the time was ripe.
All praise to Allah the Merciful, He did not leave me waiting overlong. A week later, I was awakened in the middle of the night by an orderly knocking at the door of my room. I blinked, rubbed sleep from my eyes, rolled out of bed to my feet, and opened it without fear or thought before I was fully awake.
Three men strode boldly into my room. Though they wore traditional white robes, something about their bearing, their calm hard eyes, told me that beneath them they were soldiers or police, and no doubt armed. Two of them immediately took up positions flanking the doorway with their feet spread wide and their hands clasped behind their backs.
The leader, somewhat older, snapped out a command in the manner of a sergeant rather than a policeman.
“Get dressed quickly.”
Osama the Gun Page 42
