Season of Martyrdom

by Jamal Naji

  “Yes,” he replied. “I will be absent from the university. Perhaps God will forgive the sins of my studying there.”

  I made an appeal to Nael, hoping he might step in and persuade him to postpone his Umrah until the summer vacation rather than missing his classes.

  “Leave him to his own matters,” he replied. “He is a good Muslim, mature and sensible and is aware of what he is doing.”

  The day he left for the Umrah, he wished me a heartfelt goodbye. He kissed my hand and forehead three times. Nael, on the other hand, accompanied him to the Umrah travel agency building.

  Al-Walid has not returned since that time. I discovered that he joined the mujahideen. It was Nael who told me; he was pleased al-Walid went to Afghanistan and showed great pride in the fact that his son had joined the mujahideen. Whenever I remembered him and wept, Nael would say to me, “Say that God is One, Hajji. Al-Walid is a mujahid; he is dear to God. God has blessed me with this faithful son who is devoted to his religion and its tenets. And He has blessed you along with me. We will have our reward with God the Sublime. I swear if I were his age, I would join him in jihad.”

  With my palm on my cheek, I gazed at Nael and shook my head.

  But I never thought and never imagined that a day would come when a man named Sari would come to see me, now that I was in my sixties, and ask me if thirty years ago I had given birth to a son named Walid, whose father was Fawaz al-Shardah, now known as Fawaz al-Basha.

  Abu Hudhayfah

  His jihadi name was Sharhabil, after the venerable Companion of the Prophet Sharhabil Bin Hassneh, conqueror of Jordan. It was chosen for him by his spiritual comrade Habibullah al-Tunisi a few months before a raid east of Jalalabad in which the mujahideen destroyed a squad of NATO forces who had gotten too close to a secret mujahideen training camp. They managed to kill six of the thirteen NATO troops while only Habibullah al-Tunisi earned martyrdom. He had thrown himself onto the ground pretending to be dead, which caused the remaining foot soldiers to gather around him. That was when he blew himself up and annihilated them, with help and success granted by God, the Exalted, the Majestic.

  Sharhabil joined the mujahideen in Jalalabad one year after the American invasion of Afghanistan and was trained in their mountain hideouts. He participated in numerous battles and raids and soon developed a reputation for his exceptional skill at firing anti-tank rocket launchers.

  Walid Nael Shakir Dughaybil. That was Sharhabil’s real name, which he decided to change when he joined the mujahideen. Habibullah al-Tunisi, may God have mercy on his soul, helped him choose that particular jihadi name, which he liked.

  When Sharhabil came to us in Kandahar from Jalalabad, we had barricaded ourselves in one of the craggy mountain hideouts and were lying in wait for the NATO forces. They had been carrying out preemptive strikes on us after finding our hideouts, for fear we would carry out attacks on their camps. We were waiting for them to fall into our trap.

  Sharhabil had long hair and a long beard. As for his square face, it appeared very white against all his black hair. I saw in his eyes a kind of radiance that put one at ease at first sight.

  He came to us dressed in Afghan garb. Hanging from his right shoulder was a sack made of linen cloth. His sandals had rubber soles, which he made himself out of a tire from one of the NATO vehicles he destroyed in Jalalabad. His body and face showed clear signs of fatigue, but he gave no indication whatsoever that he wanted to rest or sleep. In fact, he asked our squad leader for his jihadi orders.

  But instead, our commander, Abu Zubayr, with his long face and shiny bald crown, handed him a miswak twig for cleaning his teeth in the coming days, and also some black dates and a bowl of water to provide for his needs and to quench his thirst after his long journey. Then he said to him, “We will talk after you’ve had some sleep and perform night prayers.” Then he looked at me and said, “Abu Hudhayfah, I have entrusted Sharhabil to you so he can see his way through the muddle of our craggy mountain hideouts and trenches.”

  The sun was sinking into the west behind the lofty mountain, which looked pitch-black and seemed to be warning us of a long dark night ahead. I remembered the sunset behind the hills of my village of Harija in Tihamat Asir. I remembered the chaste wife I bid farewell to after only ten months of marriage in order to answer the call to jihad for the sake of God.

  I imagined her in all her virtue and brilliance waiting for me at the gate to our house, bidding farewell to the sunset and traversing the distant roads with her eyes.

  May God be with you, my dear wife. How I have missed you, and how miserable my life has been without you. But it is the call to jihad, and I am merely one of God’s servants who, “. . . have never changed (their determination) in the least . . .”ii

  We were twenty-four mujahideen in the hideout, hunkered down in five trenches that were all connected to each other. Our noses were stuffed up with the smell of dirt and moist earth. Cobwebs clung to our clothes and ants crept inside our clothes to our skin. We armed ourselves with faith and courage and we had an intense longing to reach Paradise, which awaited us, with God’s permission.

  Sharhabil rested his tired body on an animal skin mat we had seized earlier. I looked into his eyes. His droopy eyelids made it clear that he hadn’t slept in a very long time. As was our custom, whenever a new mujahid came to us we vowed to fight if we were attacked by the enemy at night. We wished for each other the great prize of martyrdom and then I left him and returned to my mujahideen brothers to resume keeping watch over our hideout, which we had named “Osama Bin Zayd.” It was one of nine hideouts for the Arab mujahideen in that redhot zone, which extended over more than ten kilometers.

  Samah Shahadeh

  It was possible that the events in Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere were what was bothering Fawaz.

  I knew that his business dealings in those countries had been hurt by the conflicts breaking out in those places. He had to close two of his offices in Libya and a securities investment company branch as well. He also shut down two currency exchange branches he had opened up in Damascus when the Syrian authorities allowed non-Syrians to open up money exchange offices. And as for Baghdad, he told me he would have to close his offices there as well if the bombings continued.

  But how could he have not foreseen what was happening in those countries?

  Ever since the early days of our marriage, it had always been his uncanny and unique intuition that had led to his great success in the various business ventures he managed and carried out.

  He had an intuitive ability to predict disasters and major events before they happened.

  After our marriage, which my father unenthusiastically agreed to, I felt my father gradually warmed up to Fawaz. He asked him to think about some projects that would be of benefit to us. It was only three days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait when Fawaz finished refurbishing two buildings my father owned in the Um Uthaina area. The buildings had been left unfinished and neglected because of permit issues. Fawaz completed restoring them just before the influx of Palestinians and Jordanians who left Kuwait and headed for Jordan after the Iraqi occupation, and rented them out to them at exorbitant prices.

  Likewise, he bought huge sums of Kuwaiti dinars at the time and sold them for many times the rate he had bought them for, after the Iraqi forces pulled out of Kuwait and went back home.

  My father, who could read people with his little blue eyes, said to me, “The difference between Fawaz and other entrepreneurs is that he is good at arithmetic.”

  Then he told me that he had grown to like Fawaz after being skeptical of him at first.

  Actually, my father didn’t like Fawaz. He did stop being wary of him, though. When I asked him if he had changed his opinion about needing to be careful with poor people, he said, “Not at all. The principle of being wary of the poor still stands. That will never change.”

  “Are you st
ill wary of Fawaz?” I asked.

  His answer surprised me. “No, I am not wary of him at all,” he said. “I made him into a rich man after he married you.”

  My father is still living, may God give him many more years. He lives in his house near the Baccalaureate schools west of Amman, with his maid and his security guard and his driver. He still holds three posts in consulting that don’t require any work or regular hours. One is with the Arab League, another is with the Phosphate Company, and the third is with Amman Stock Exchange.

  Even though he submitted his resignation from these posts more than once, they came to him at his home each time and persuaded him to withdraw the resignation, because having his name associated with those posts boosted people’s confidence.

  Fawaz also predicted the invasion of Iraq. He went around making deals buying foods and medicines at discounted prices in order to ship them to Baghdad at international market prices, all in line with the food and drug agreement approved by the United Nations. We reaped formidable profits from that.

  He always followed his intuition, and he always responded to his critics’ admonitions by saying that the difference between him and them was that he trusted his intuition.

  Could his intuition have guided him this time to foresee a new disaster about to happen? Was he contemplating some way to profit from it?

  Even if this were the case, he would turn the disaster into a source of increased wealth, not increased obscurity and anxiety and making me anxious along with him!

  At least that was how he used to be.

  Abu Hudhayfah

  When Sharhabil woke up from his sleep, he recited the shahada, asked God’s forgiveness, performed ablutions, and stood to perform the night prayer, qiyam al-layl.iii

  When he was finished, I informed him of what the two watchmen had relayed to us about a potential raid by the NATO forces. I asked him to go to our commander, Abu al-Zubayr, in the trench next to ours to apprise him of our orders in the event of an attack.

  It soon became clear to me that Sharhabil was different from others who had been sent to us from other hideouts. He didn’t ask a lot of questions and didn’t make anyone feel he needed them. He was a man of few words and shied away from the kinds of exaggerations many mujahideen engaged in when describing their raids. Similarly, the way he sat and walked and spoke, all gave the impression he was one solid mass.

  The first battle he embarked on took place only eight hours after his arrival to our hideout. Our lookouts had informed us from their advanced positions that the NATO troops were preparing for an attack on several of our hideouts, and our commander was expecting them to make a raid on us in a matter of hours. He commanded us to teach them a harsh lesson, with our faith, our courage, our precise aim, and our patience.

  Our commander, Abu al-Zubayr, was correct in his prediction. Just as we were performing the dawn prayers, which he decided should be salat khauf “fearprayer,”iv half of us performed half the number of prescribed prostrations while I stayed with the other half to keep watch, and when they finished they switched to keeping watch while we took our turn performing prostrations with the imam. While Abu al-Zubayr was leading us in prayer, we heard the rumblings of jets. He kept leading us without interruption and he gave no indication we should do anything unlawful out of necessity. When we completed our prayers, he asked God’s forgiveness and then prayed for us to earn either victory or martyrdom. Then he broke to us the good news that “Almighty God deigned for this battle to be our fate,” and then asked us to renew our pledge and recommit ourselves to each other. And before we finished pledging ourselves to achieving either victory or martyrdom, air fire started raining down on us from the skies in all directions. The sound of bullets ricocheting off the rocks and stone was very sharp and could be heard from where we were in our underground tunnels.

  Abu al-Zubayr said, “We must remain under cover and stay alert until the fighter planes finish the round of softening airstrikes they are carrying out in order to clear the way for the entry of armored personnel carriers and ground troops.”

  The sound of gunfire no longer frightened me the way it did when I first joined the mujahideen. Fear used to grip me ahead of a battle with our enemy, but as soon as the fighting began, the fear would dissipate. After that all I cared about was trying to cause the greatest number of losses to our enemy’s ranks.

  Before dawn broke, we heard the distant rumble of machines. Our lookouts had informed us they were coming our way and getting close to our hideouts. And so Abu al-Zubayr told us to scatter to different locations – behind the rocks, in holes in the ground, in caves and tunnels – depending on our weaponry. He said to Sharhabil, as he handed him one of the six anti-tank rocket launchers we captured in a previous raid on a group of Afghan soldiers working with the Americans, “On this blessed dawn you will show us your sharpshooting skills and destroy our enemy’s machines.”

  Sharhabil uttered the formula, “Bismallah al-rahman al-rahim,” (In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful) while puffing air onto his palms, rubbing them together, and then strapping four rockets onto his chest. Then he raised the rocket launcher onto his shoulder and said, “Wa ma ramayta idh ramayta wa lakinna Allah rama,” (When you threw, it was not your act but God’s actv). Then he left the tunnel with clear resolve and determination.

  Abu al-Zubayr was very tough. His words struck us like lightning whenever we forgot something or fell short. He even forbade us from yawning, which he once told us had something feminine about it and was not becoming of men.

  Sari Abu Amineh

  Things did not end with finding Muntaha al-Rayyeh. Next I was asked to meet her and speak with her. I was to find out all there was to know about her son, Walid, plus find out how she got in touch with him: address, telephone number, where he could be found, and whether he had visited her secretly, and if so, when and how?

  Could a fortune-teller’s predictions really elicit so much attention from the Basha?

  My primary concern had been to succeed in giving the Basha a surprise at his birthday party, no matter what the consequences were going to be. At any rate, it hadn’t even been my idea. It was something the Grand Basha, Nayef Shahadeh, had concocted and I borrowed the idea because he was going to have to miss the party due to travel. But I never expected things would turn out the way they did, and cause me to lose control of everything.

  Maybe Uroub had been able to read between the lines when I spoke to her while driving her from her hotel to Fawaz’s house. Maybe she had been able to connect the invisible strings attached to what I was saying and telling her about the Basha. But how could she have come up with the idea that he had an illegitimate son?

  As for the part about her prophecy of the Basha’s demise coming at the hands of this son of his, I could not banish from my heart the conviction that had sprouted after going with the Basha to see Harsha al-Hakim, which was that fate was an undeniable truth that must be acknowledged and that Uroub was an extraordinary woman who possibly did not even belong to the humble human race. Likewise I would no longer be able to hold on to my prior belief that fate was merely an ancient myth that preceded religions, a myth that transformed into an accepted truth because of its connection to the unknown.

  My wife started to annoy me with her questions and the way she kept looking at me. I found myself having to keep my distance from her whenever my phone rang so she wouldn’t hear my conversations. She was very close to Mrs Samah and might tell her what she’d heard me say on the phone.

  True, Rasha was extremely devoted and faithful to me and to my home, but she might not be able to resist the pleasure of passing gossip along to Mrs Samah, who I didn’t doubt had asked her what was going on with me.

  I really started feeling irritated by Rasha. I felt as though the space between us had become highly flammable, could ignite into a flash fire at any moment.

  It was the fourth time dur
ing our marriage that I’d gotten that feeling.

  In the past it had been a gradual feeling that started out obscurely. At first I would be on the lookout for every mistake in her actions and her words. Then I would start analyzing everything she said and finding the hidden meaning behind her words or what they implied. Next, I would look at her in an unkindly manner and start making her feel like she was intentionally trying to harm me when she served me food I didn’t like, or when she went to bed early despite the affectionate advances I started making as soon as the sun went down, or when she asked me about matters that were none of her business, or when she went around the house day and night wearing those loose-fitting linen pants that decreased my desire and nearly turned me off completely. All of that would pile up and suddenly I would find myself casting evil glances I couldn’t hide. On her end, she would start showing signs of being on her guard and couldn’t hide it either. This was the point when the space between us became combustible, and required only the tiniest spark to make it go up in flames.

  This time, the spark that ignited a fight between us was our two children, Suhayl and Suhayla. Suhayl, who had reached age sixteen and whose voice had deepened and whose pale white face had broken out in pimples, was always closing himself off in his room and immersing himself in video games and the Internet. He behaved like a hotel guest in our home. And his sister, Suhayla, was approaching puberty with her own confused emotions. She had started being stubborn with her mother and her brother who was two years older than her. She was always disgruntled. Sometimes she would lock herself in her room and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

  I headed towards the kitchen. Rasha was standing at the sink.

  “Why doesn’t Suhayl pay more attention to his studies instead of spending all his time on the Internet and playing games on the computer?” I said to her, nervously. “And why has his sister gotten so stubborn?”