“Insh’Allah sulameh—thanks be to Allah for your well-being. I am so very glad for you. Yes, so nice.”
“And how are you this morning, Ali?”
“Thanks be to Allah, life is good. Yes. You will take something? A cool drink, perhaps?”
“That would be lovely. Thank you.”
“Just a moment.” He was gone and back in no time. “You like anything else?”
“Not just now, thank you.”
“You need, you call me. I help.” He surveyed the semblance of order that her office was gradually approaching. “All people here say you do big work. I think yes, is so.”
“A lot needed to be done,” Allison agreed.
“Yes, you have met with very little of difficulties. All is going very smooth.” He nodded. “Allah must smile on your work, I think.”
She picked up the first form in her box, surveyed the questions to be answered, and said, “I’m not sure how much Allah had to do with this.”
Ali scoffed. “This is opinion of who? You? You are expert? You have witnessed all life?”
“No,” she said, determined to work despite the interruption. Maybe he would get the idea and leave. “But I’m just not sure how the hand of Allah has been busy in this office.”
“This is something not yet revealed,” Ali agreed. “Maybe sometime in future, all will be told for you, but not yet.”
Ben chose that moment to step into view outside her doorway. “Ali, are you bothering Miss Taylor?”
The young man looked positively offended. “I am only standing here. Bring cool drink. I wonder how you can throw on me such accuses.”
“I think your services are required elsewhere,” Ben said.
“You need helps, Western Lady, you call, yes?” With that he was gone.
“Ali tends to linger where he is not wanted,” Ben said.
“So I’ve noticed.”
“I thought we would visit one of the local camps today. When can you be ready to leave?”
Suddenly Allison lost all interest in the forms. She stood from her desk and replied, “Right now.”
“Camps like these are to some extent a microcosm of the entire Arab world,” Ben told her. “They are small-scale, face-to-face communities, organized in many respects as villages were in the days of our Lord. The inhabitants live in wards or neighborhoods defined by kinship and marriage and destiny.”
Fareed, Ben’s driver, drove them in the clinic’s only transport, a battered Land Rover. They traveled through the mountains encircling Aqaba and entered the dry desert reaches. Allison tried to pay attention to Ben, yet the surrounding images haunted her.
A lone woman in head-to-toe black djellaba and chador head scarf walked through miles of utter emptiness, following a snaking yellow track down to the main highway. From where had she come? Where was she going? What was the life she led?
Razor-sharp sandstone ridges jutted aggressively from a blank desert landscape—from utter flatness to a thousand feet high and back to flatness in the space of fifty yards.
The silence. Even in a rattling car with Arabic music blaring from the radio, the silence was not dispelled. They traveled in a tiny shell of noise through a vast kingdom of quiet.
And now, unforgettably, the refugee camp.
“What you see before you is true living history,” Ben said as Fareed parked the car in front of a noisome cafe and remained seated behind the wheel as they continued on by foot. “The attitudes of the people in these camps are the same as those of two thousand years ago. Long-suffering. Patient. Hard-bitten. Pessimistic. Shrewd.”
No sign was needed to announce that they had crossed an invisible barrier separating the town from the refugee camp. The buildings did not change, save by degree. Yet it was clear even to Allison that they were entering another world.
“As you probably know, the first Palestinian camps were formed in Lebanon and Jordan in 1948, after the founding of the state of Israel,” Ben explained. “Nowadays the remaining Jordanian camps resemble enclosed, crumbling suburbs, with shops and apartments and families who have lived there for two generations. They no longer require papers. The strongest chains of imprisonment are invisible, down deep where none but the other camp inhabitants can see.”
The road was hard-packed clay and lined with mud and refuse. The fences were rusted and crumpled, more lines of demarcation than barriers.
“The refugee camps are Middle Eastern ghettos at their most brutal,” he said. “And the greatest tragedy is that the money is available to transform them right now, this very day. But to do so would rob the Arab world of their greatest propaganda weapon against Israel and the West. So these Arab states that wallow in oil wealth and decry the Palestinian plight at every opportunity sit back and do nothing. They allow the people trapped here to remain pawns in the game of international politics.”
The rubble grew and formed into crumbling walls. Gradually the walls tightened their grip upon the dusty road until its width was halved and then halved again.
“If the Palestinians’ situation were to improve,” he went on, “then Israel and the West could say there is no need for us to do anything; they are all okay.” He breathed a weary sigh. “There is a vast chasm between the human potential for change and the political reality of hatred between peoples and nations. By politicizing the situation, they have dehumanized the people trapped here.”
The fitful breeze chose that moment to back around, surrounding Allison with the stench of rotting refuse. She stumbled, almost blinded by the reek.
“There is no drainage whatsoever and only the most rudimentary of sewage systems,” he explained. “Whenever there is a heavy rain, the water turns these streets into filthy knee-deep torrents.”
Buildings rose and sent corroding balconies out overhead, draping the street with shadows and trapping the fetid air. Mangy dogs and cats scurried furtively down alleyways so narrow that Allison could have reached out and touched both walls. At each turning, crowds of children scampered and played and watched her passage with old-young eyes. Oncoming cars and trucks announced their passage with blaring horns and black clouds of exhaust. Donkey carts added to the confusion. Wherever a doorway or building corner allowed a fraction of space, there sprouted a tumbledown stall selling fruit or dry goods or cigarettes or papers. Allison squeezed her way down the cramped, squalid way and felt eyes follow her everywhere.
The road was now so narrow that women could pass articles overhead from balcony to balcony. Old men sat on upturned crates beside crumbling doorways, smoking hookahs and cigarettes, sipping tea, eyeing the strange western woman with blank expressions. Their faces spoke of a lifetime’s experience at giving nothing away.
Their passage suddenly opened into a large, unpaved square. To one side, a large group of men were digging at the dusty earth.
“The local radicals do great good as well as great harm,” Ben told her quietly. “They do not simply harangue crowds. Right now, for instance, they are gathering many of the jobless young men and putting them to work building a new communal mosque. They pay the families with food and medicines. They give the young men a sense of purpose, of belonging. And they use this time to draw them into the fundamentalist fold.”
He stopped her with a single finger on her shoulder, pointed with a minute jerk of his head, and murmured for her alone, “There ahead of me. The most radical of the local imams. Sheikh Omar.”
The imam was a white-robed older man crowned with a bright scarlet turban. He wore a long gray beard and carried a silver-tipped cane. When he spotted Allison he glared fiercely, shook his cane at her, then turned away in disgust.
“What was all that about?” she demanded.
“You are western,” Ben answered very softly. “You are infidel. You are female. By your very presence you challenge his hold over all the males and tempt them into sin.”
“That is the most preposterous—”
“Come,” he murmured. “It is no longer safe here.”
They reentered the winding series of nameless alleyways. Allison walked as closely behind Ben as she could, fighting off a sense of suffocation.
They entered an apartment block festooned with black electric cables. They climbed crumbling concrete stairs up three floors. Their knock was answered by a young woman whose pinched features looked aged far beyond her years. She did her best to smile for the doctor, opened the door, and softly invited them in.
“This is Sarah,” Ben said, “a special friend.”
“It is the doctor who is special,” she replied in softly accented English. “Would you care for tea?”
“Why don’t you two see to refreshments,” he said. “And I shall see to our patient. How has he been?”
“Better, thanks to you and the Lord above,” she replied. “He awaits you.”
When Ben had disappeared into the bedroom, Sarah led Allison into the kitchen alcove. It was as bare as the living room and just as spotless. The enamel top of the vintage stove had been scrubbed so hard and so often that the enamel had been worn away in places. Sarah asked, “You are American?”
“Yes. Are you Palestinian?”
“My husband is. I was born in Amman.”
Allison glanced at the only adornment on the walls, a crucifix, and wondered at her own surprise. She had heard that many Palestinians and other Arabs were Christians. She asked politely, “Do you mind living away from your family?”
Sarah hesitated in the act of lighting the stove, then said quietly, “I have not returned to my home for twenty-one years.”
“Why not?”
Again there was the hesitation, again a quiet reply. “Conversion is a very big problem for young Muslim women.” “You converted to Christianity?”
Sarah nodded. “In the strict Muslim world, the unmarried woman is not considered independent. She is just a part of her family. So for some who become Christian, the family simply makes her disappear.”
Allison was not sure she had heard correctly. “What do you mean, disappear?”
“I have a friend who went to Bible study with me. We were caught together with the forbidden Book. I was locked away for nine months before I escaped and went to England. I never heard from my friend again. I have looked everywhere, as hard as I know how. She has simply disappeared.”
“I—I don’t understand,” she stumbled over the words. “You were locked up? Like in a prison?”
“For nine months,” Sarah repeated. “I was put in a room, and the door was locked. I was not permitted out at all. My brother was very young then, not even seven. One night he slipped in and told me that the family had been discussing plans to kill me. Because he loved me, he helped me escape. The church put me in a school in England because I could not stay in my country. But now my parents are dead, and I have come back to my homeland with the blessing of my brother, who is head of the family. But still I am not allowed to go home.”
Allison was still trying to process what she had heard. “Your own family was going to kill you—just because you had adopted a different religion?”
“It is not all that uncommon,” she replied. “We hear of such incidents at least once a month. A young woman converts to Christianity. She is locked in a room, and after a while, if she refuses to recant, her food is stopped.” She nodded slowly. “Very common. In every church here there is at least one person whom they know for a fact has been made to disappear. Sometimes they die. Sometimes you never know. Perhaps she has been sold to a wealthy family in another country as a servant. So many people, you see, they become sick, they have a fever, and they die. Such a case does not come to the police. How could it? The police are Muslim, too.”
Sarah was silent a long moment, then said quietly, “Forget the police. Forget the authorities. If you know of such a case, it is better that you dig a hole and bring them out.”
As they left the apartment, Allison said to herself as much as to Ben, “I will never understand this place.”
He smiled sadly. “She told you of her family?”
Allison nodded. “How could parents ever act that way toward their own child? I’m sorry, I simply could never understand that.”
Ben was a long time in answering. “There are few places in the Koran where one finds the word forgiveness. The Islamic attitude is, forgive or not forgive—who knows? Even Mohammed had to keep asking for Allah’s forgiveness. Mercy is spoken of in the Koran—but only Allah’s mercy, mind you, not man’s.
“Arabs love to discuss, to argue,” he continued. “It is a favorite form of entertainment in a world where little else is offered, especially to the poor. In my own discussions, I find that many Arab Muslims simply cannot fathom the concept of Jesus. Why? Because they have little concept of holy love. There comes a point in such discussions when they say something like yes, all right, so you tell me that God so loved the world that he what? He did what? He gave who? His son? No. That is simply beyond their understanding. Unless one first accepts the concept of infinite love, the gift of universal salvation is impossible to accept.
“In the Arab world,” Ben went on, “the family is ruled by the father. If no father, then by the uncle. If no uncle, then the grandfather or the brother or the cousin. It is a male-dominated world, one where domination takes on meanings that cannot be fathomed in the West. Yet these same men have no command to love. Thus many of these families are dominated by fear. When discussing this with young men, I hear so often the response, ‘No, I cannot think of such things, I do not know what my father would say.’ And this answer is not given out of family respect or honor or love, but rather out of fear.
“Family ethics are mirrored by religious ethics, you see. The primary command, therefore, is not to love Allah but to fear Allah. Fear his judgment. Fear his condemnation. Fear his wrath. The very word Islam means to submit; Muslim means the one who submits. Almost no emphasis is given to the why of this submission, do you see? Fear, love, societal dictates—the key is not the internal basis, but the act. Submit to this fearsome Allah, and perhaps he will show you mercy.”
A pair of clattering scooters drowned out further talk. Once they had passed, Ben continued, “You can see how this affects personal relationships. Where fear rules, how can a wife give her family a truly loving, joyful home? What urges a husband to grant his family loving compassion and heartfelt guidance? Thus for our Arab converts, the responsibility, the command for lifelong love is a whole new concept. It is the greatest challenge they face in becoming a Christian: to substitute love for fear.”
Three hours later they finally returned to the car. Allison groaned her way into the seat and forced herself to return Fareed’s welcoming smile. She was hot, dusty, and tired, her feet throbbed, and her head felt swollen from all she had seen and heard. Twice young fundamentalists had shouted at her, their threat losing none of its force by being in a tongue she did not understand. Once a mullah had raised his staff as if to attack her. Each time Ben had responded with quiet calm, defusing the situation with open-handed respect.
Everywhere she had felt herself followed by eyes, trapped in silent hostility.
Once underway, she found herself unable to relax and release the day’s images. She asked, “Why are the fundamentalists so violent?”
“Because,” Ben replied, his own voice tinted with fatigue, “they live in the past.”
“I don’t understand.”
“For many fundamentalists the past two hundred years are not important,” Ben explained. “Their minds dwell in the period when Islam ruled their world. They see the humiliation and degradation of the past two centuries as something that must be changed. Fundamentalists insist that all Arabs must return to Islam and submit to Koranic law; then their star will once again rise in the East.”
Allison watched the desert roll past outside their car. A solitary tree grew in the midst of dust and rock and lifelessness. The tree did not offer a gift of green. It merely heightened the desolate loneliness.
“Capitalism
and democracy are being declared manmade idols,” Ben went on. “Radical mullahs throughout the Middle East are openly calling for a jihad, a holy war, against Western modernism. The fundamentalist splits the world into two distinct segments. Dar al-Islam refers to the domain of the faithful. Dar al-harb is the domain of war. In other words, you either live as a devout Muslim, or you are an enemy. The Hezbollah faction is typical of this attitude. Hezbollah means party of Allah; it comes from the Koranic verse meaning the party of Allah is the victorious one. That same verse goes on to say that all who oppose the work of Allah’s faction belong to the devil’s world. The party of Allah must remain in battle with the forces of darkness that dominate all the world not ruled by Islam. Their mullahs call the faithful to take the western sword of science and use it to cut the West’s throat.”
Allison stared through the cracked and dusty windshield, the beauty surrounding her at complete odds with Ben’s chilling words. The desert landscape was anything but monotonous. She had never imagined there could be so many different hues of yellow. A single cloud flitting overhead transformed the earthbound canvas with its shadow.
“ ‘War, war until victory for Allah,’ ” Ben recited. “Perhaps the most chilling verse in the entire Koran. Up until now, the fundamentalists’ numbers were limited and their power chained. But the turning point would be if they or one of their sponsoring countries were to obtain nuclear armaments. Small, portable nuclear weapons would be the ultimate terrorist weapon. Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya—were any of these governments to gain control of such weapons, the West would not be able to sleep peacefully. Not ever again. Which is why, my dear,” Ben said gravely, “we must absolutely not fail.”
11
As the morning light strengthened into brooding grayness, the trucks crested a rise and confronted two vast cliffs. A narrow slit between the mountains grudgingly permitted passage to both the river and the road. At that moment the softly falling veil of snow lifted unexpectedly, granting passage to brilliant shafts of early sunlight.
Riders of the Pale Horse Page 13
