The Empty Quarter

by David L. Robbins

  He puffed. The tobacco, like the qat, swept him away from this room, on the carpet of his memory, to the vivid years in the mountains, fighting and wild, sandals in the snow, stabbing at an enemy, slipping away to do it again. Arif would murder Ghalib if the man touched Nadya. Arif had last killed men twenty-five years ago, but he remembered well enough. He could do it again, if it was qisas, retaliation. The Qur’an gave him that right. Arif exhaled his story with the smoke.

  “Are you aware of Juhayman al-Otaybi?”

  “No.”

  “He was a fanatic. In 1979, with two hundred others, he took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca. After three weeks of siege, destroying much of the Mosque, the army had to flush him out of the tunnels by flooding them. Juhayman was beheaded.”

  “Of course.”

  “Instead of discrediting him as an extremist, the Al Saud embraced what Juhayman stood for. They were afraid, you see.”

  “Of what?”

  “That there were more like him, charismatics demanding a puritanical version of Islam. In other words, men who resisted the Al Saud’s right to rule. So, to appease the Islamists and prevent any more revolts, the monarchy turned the public schools over to the ulema. All education in Saudi Arabia became religious. Of course, this also worked to the advantage of the royals.”

  Ghalib reached for the water pipe’s hose, then leaned back onto an elbow. Before sucking on the mouthpiece, he twirled it in front of him to say Keep going.

  “The Wahhabism the clerics teach makes obedience a pillar. As a boy, I was taught that to obey the rulers of my nation was holy. That the laws of the Al Saud were the laws of God. It has become the Saudi way not to question.”

  “But, I think, not your way.”

  By reply, Arif reached again for the shisha’s hose. When the rich man’s son was slow to give it, Arif snapped his fingers. He’d stopped being the server.

  Ghalib, a chubby, flamboyant man on his feet in the market and today at the funeral, did not seem so feckless reclining in his wealth, holding back the water pipe from Arif. Though the youngest son was manicured, Arif knew the makings of hard men. He began to sense a leavening between himself and Ghalib the Merchant, who surrendered the hose with a sideways tip of his face as if the finger snap awoke in him a new appreciation of Arif the Saudi, as well.

  Arif smoked and settled into the pillows.

  “I was twelve years old when the reforms came. Overnight, all of our learning stemmed only from the Qur’an. No more English, math, or sciences, just rote memorization. We studied theology, the hadiths, Islamic jurisprudence, and the sciences of the heart. I was part of a whole generation of Saudi boys left unprepared to find work outside a mosque. We had no idea of the realities of the modern world. At the same time, oil production in the Kingdom fell. The economy imploded. There were no jobs. And what work there was, few of us were qualified to do.”

  “So you became a radical.”

  “This was the time of the sahwah, the awakening. Hundreds of thousands of us could find no self-respect. We couldn’t raise the money for a dowry, so we didn’t take women. Piety was all the state could give us. Qur’an study groups cropped up everywhere. It was easy to believe that television was evil, that Islam was under attack by the West. I joined a Salafist madrassa. One night my imam drove me to a cemetery. He had me lie in an open grave. I looked up into the dark while he told me stories about the scorpions and spiders of hell, the two blue angels who would come to my own grave to take me there, if I did not find my path to God.”

  Arif laughed, not expecting to do so. He offered back the shisha hose and let himself laugh in the barrel of his chest.

  “I will tell you about Peshawar.”

  “Will this require more tea?”

  “Yes.”

  Ghalib refused the water pipe. He clapped for his akhdam, instructing the old man to bring a fresh tray. In these ways, Ghalib restored Arif to the status of guest.

  “Please. Continue.”

  Arif waited on the tea. When it arrived, he sipped to let a bit of time pass between Ghalib’s request and his compliance.

  “I turned twenty. Like thousands of young Arabs, I took the Russian invasion of Afghanistan personally, as an attack on our Muslim brothers. I wanted to do something, but had no idea what. I had little money.”

  “Your parents?”

  “My father was a third cousin to the royal family. A petroleum engineer. When I was a young boy, he was killed on an oil rig in the desert. My mother worked as an English tutor. She lost her job when the Al Shaykhs took over the schools. She died twenty years ago.”

  “Our parents will be paid in heaven for the good works of their children. I’m sorry.”

  “What have you read beside the Qur’an, Ghalib?”

  “Nothing.”

  The merchant’s son said this with no hint of chagrin. Why should he read else, when all was given and taken by God? Ghalib sat easy in his great home, his small world, his women around him, a servant and a mujahideen at his beckon. His Arabic was formal for a man of so few letters. Perhaps his brothers were better educated and he’d picked up some of their ways.

  Arif would finish his own tale before asking for Ghalib’s, as a guest ought.

  “The government wanted us to fight the Russians. It was a way to get unemployed and radicalized young men out of the country, to keep the next Juhayman occupied. The state airline gave discounts to Peshawar, near the Afghan border. I landed in Pakistan with no clue what to do, how to be a mujahideen. That’s when I met Osama.”

  “Bin Laden? Truly?”

  “He ran a guesthouse in Peshawar. Bayt-Al-Ansar, the House of the Helpers. I stayed there. Osama was a gentle sort then, generous. He talked of jihad in a slow, studied way. There was nothing about him that said he would ever go to the battlefield himself. He was just a wealthy Saudi providing a halfway house for Arabs who’d come to fight. He sent machines over the border to build roads for the mujahideen, that was all. In the souk at the crossing, I bought a Kalashnikov for a thousand riyals. I used it for the three weeks I stayed, then gave it to one of the Afghan fighters. I flew home. I found myself suddenly very popular.”

  Ghalib stroked his goatee.

  “This wasn’t jihad. It was a vacation.”

  “Perhaps. But for the first time in my life I felt at peace. I was away from the madrassas, from talk and study. At the front I was very at ease with the danger. If a bullet or a bomb took me, it would be my entry to paradise. Stories flew around about battlefield miracles. Then when I went home, I was celebrated. People in Riyadh held parties and wanted to know what was going on in Afghanistan. I wanted to go back, but I had no money. That was when I met Nadya.”

  “At one of the parties.”

  “She was on holiday from school in Paris. Women were rare at these events, so she stood out. She was keen to know what was going on at the front. Nadya believed like I did, that the Soviets had to be pushed out of Afghanistan. I looked for her at other parties, and she for me. She couldn’t go on jihad, not as a woman. So she became my patron. She paid for my plane tickets, guns, and food. I wrote her letters. Each time I stayed in the war longer, often for months. One day bin Laden stopped greeting us at the guesthouse. He’d gone off to fight the Russians in person. I saw him often at the front. He was like a piece of leather left outside; he grew browner and craggier. He could move in the hills with the Afghans like a goat.”

  Arif drank more tea, the qat chew having left him dry-mouthed. Ghalib stroked his little beard in the same manner his father Qasim had stroked his great gray one. Both listened in the same fashion, nudging and looking for their own advantage.

  “I saw much fighting.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We were always outmanned, so none of us could do just one thing. I fought as a sniper. I fired Mistral missiles, rigged plastic explosives. We used small
arms, submachine guns. Knives, even bows and arrows. We hit the Soviets’ flanks, where they were weak, never head-on. We learned to live from the land, sleep under bombs, run away, creep back.”

  “You are a dangerous man, Arif.”

  Sweat trickled down Arif’s brow from the hot tea and incense burner, the hastening day outside, his memories. Ghalib reclined in cool silk, unbothered.

  “I have been.”

  “Go on. This is fascinating.”

  “Afghanistan was nothing like what any of us Arabs were used to. We weren’t in the desert or a packed city, just flat, white plains. There were rivers and mountain ranges. Long and colorless winters. The Afghans we fought next to belonged to warlords and drug kings or the CIA. A lot of them were criminals, illiterate. All were braver than any men I’d ever met. If they took a wound, they bled without a whimper, while we Arabs rolled around like we’d been cut in two. Even after writing her these things, Nadya wanted to come see for herself.”

  “But that would be haram.” Forbidden.

  “Not if we were married. We were in love by now. So we signed a milka that allowed us to be alone in each other’s company and to have relations. She gave me the money for her own dowry. I presented myself to her father.”

  “The prince.”

  “I was an uneducated man. But I was a mujahideen, one of the volunteers. I had met and fought alongside Osama bin Laden. And my father had been a distant cousin of the royal family. Abd al-Aziz groaned, but Nadya is just as strong willed. She’d never opposed her father before. The prince agreed, reluctantly of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “We married quickly, another thing that displeased him. Secretly, Nadya flew from Paris to Peshawar. One morning I took her across the border into the battle zone. I showed her how to throw a grenade. I pulled the pin on one and squeezed it between us. ‘If I let this go, we will die. So tell me I am your king, I am your master. Yes?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, and I tossed the grenade away. Nadya grabbed another grenade. She pulled the pin, just as I had, and said, ‘Now listen to me while I tell you who I am.’ ”

  “You are fortunate to have one good wife. I have three wives. I think all of mine would have dropped the grenade.”

  Their laughter eased the tension. On the wall above the jars of tobacco and candy, a golden square of light beamed through the window, climbing to the ceiling from the setting sun. Arif considered how to proceed with Ghalib, who had threatened him. They’d broken bread, shared smoke, qat, tea, some pleasure. Could he now rise and walk away? What would follow him out the door of this house to his own?

  Arif let the mood settle in the scented, hazy air between them.

  “I’ll finish my story, Ghalib. I’ll ask you yours. Then I will choose.”

  Arif took for his battle name Abu Ansar. For a year he did not go home to Riyadh, while Nadya completed her studies in Paris. He fought the Soviets in the mountains and open ranges, and in between battles helped ready the corpses of young Saudis for the truck rides to Peshawar. The bodies were wrapped and embalmed with sweet-smelling fluids to console the grieving parents who had to convince themselves their sons died martyrs.

  But the war against the infidels was being won. Where twenty years earlier the armies of Egypt and the Arabs could not defeat tiny Israel, one of the world’s two superpowers was pulling back a bloody stump against the forces of Islam in Afghanistan. The victory was Allah’s.

  Inside the Kingdom, the people were jubilant. The Saudis had financed much of the war; they also had paid in blood. Abu Ansar was not one of the dead or maimed; he’d not even been wounded, though he was often under fire. Arif credited this to Allah. For a long time he’d made himself ready to die but had done little to prepare himself to live. Nadya had begun to give him this. A missile at his feet finished the job.

  The battle of Jaji marked the beginning of the Soviet retreat. The mujahideen had seized control of the city; the Russians bombarded it to take it back. Working at an aid station, a mortar shell landed only strides from Arif.

  Glaring at the smoking shell, he sensed no fear, only sakina, the serenity that he was not part of this world any longer but linked to God in another place. Arif raised his arms for the bomb to explode and kill him. When the shell fizzled, the door to God was left wide open. He was done with jihad. Arif could go home.

  Once the fighting in Afghanistan turned their way, thousands of young Arabs returned to the Kingdom. They lurched home as hardened mujahideen, savvy with weapons, with experiences and ideas all their own. The monarchy did little to reintegrate these prodigal sons into Saudi society and the Wahhabite culture that had become the way and tool of the Al Saud. In the mosques and madrassas, with stories and scars, these young Islamists, often charismatic, added fuel and credibility to the radicalizing of Saudi youth.

  Immediately upon his own return, before they could reunite, Arif’s father died in an accident on a rig at a remote drilling site. The man left behind more debt than money, and the sorrow that Arif would not get to know him, as men together. The only family remaining for Arif was his wife’s.

  He quickly gave up Abu Ansar, eager to be with Nadya and begin their lives together. Arif’s father-in-law was now responsible for him. Hassan bin Abd al-Aziz provided incentives for Arif to reform. Arif grabbed at them greedily: a house in Riyadh, cash payments, and admission to King Saud University to study computer and information sciences.

  Ghalib sat forward off the cushions.

  “Wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your wife is the daughter of Abd al-Aziz?”

  “She is.”

  Ghalib guffawed, clapped, and turned his face up. He glanced left and right to address an invisible chorus of onlookers.

  “Mo’jiza.” A miracle. “His father-in-law is the head of Saudi Intelligence.”

  “Shall I continue?”

  Ghalib pushed his palms at the floor, tamping down his mirth.

  “I apologize. I had no idea. Please.”

  Nadya began residency at a women’s hospital. In three years, Arif earned a degree in software engineering, then completed graduate work in IT in two more. He took a job with the government handling payrolls. They lived well and privately. Nadya’s family did not warm to Arif.

  “Have you no children?”

  “We were never so fortunate.”

  Ghalib took to his goatee again, fingering it sagely.

  “That is reason to leave her. The Ummah must grow. I have seven daughters, two sons.”

  “The next time you mention my wife, we are done talking.”

  “I meant no offense.”

  Ghalib the Merchant was unschooled but far from ignorant. He intended every word he said. Arif poured more tea for them both, to help the moment pass and to serve, what Ghalib seemed to want most from those around him. The box of sunlight crept up the wall. Along with the tea, Arif handed to the seventh son the destination of his story.

  “We lived in Riyadh for twenty years. I spent the last three of those in prison.”

  “At the invitation of the prince?”

  “I’m sure he was behind it.”

  Ghalib opened his arms as though to offer an embrace.

  “Again, what did you do?”

  “Nothing against the law.”

  “How can that be?”

  Five years ago Nadya told Arif she wanted to go on hajj alone. She wanted, like him, to have her own experience of God. With a million other pilgrims, Nadya traveled to Mecca. She stood for a day in the plain of Arafat, stoned the devil at Mina, walked seven times around the black cube Ka’aba inside the Grand Mosque, and returned. On the way home from the airport, she ordered Arif to pull the car to the curb.

  “She told me that God had come to her in Mecca not as a woman but as a child of the Prophet. She said, ‘Enough.’ I was told to get in the passenger
seat. She would drive.”

  “This is a crime in your country, yes?”

  “It’s only custom. The same way that a woman can’t hail a taxi, or buy music, or walk the street unescorted. There’s nothing in Sharia that prevents these things. It’s only the Al Saud.”

  Ghalib tapped his bare chest between the collars of his silk robe.

  “I have seen your wife drive in Yemen. Wallah! Arif.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I observe without annoying you that your wife is headstrong?”

  Arif nodded. She was more than this. Nadya was the epitome of her father, brilliant and determined. The one daughter among three brothers, she alone had permission from the prince to be educated outside the Kingdom. She was his unstated favorite until she married Arif and left his home. When he demanded grandchildren, she concocted the lie that she was barren to spare Arif more of the prince’s disfavor.

  Ghalib raised a finger beside his head, to announce that he would make a point. The gesture seemed theatrical, artificial, as if Ghalib had seen a wiser man do this, his father or an older brother perhaps, and he did it now.

  “But we must control our women, yes?”

  “Why?”

  “If you let your woman go off with anyone she pleases, that is the end of the tribe. We are a tribal people, Arif. Perhaps the Saudis take this too far. But you agree, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Truly?”

  Arif nodded.

  Ghalib lowered the finger. He looked at it, disappointed, on its way down.

  “How did you wind up in jail? It was not by letting a woman drive, surely.”

  “That only got me a visit from the Mutaween, the religious police. And a lecture from the prince to do a better job keeping his daughter in line. This I would not do. I’ve had three awakenings in my life. An open grave. A mortar shell. And her.”

  “Ah, you’ve turned into the worst of men, Arif the Saudi. You’ve become a reformer.”