Acts of faith (34 page)

“Yes, uncle.”

“See to the horses, yours and mine. It’s another two days’ ride to the airfield, and I think Barakat has a sore foreleg, the right. Give him some of that stinking Chinese stuff. Maybe it will work for him.”

“And you?”

Miriam, Miriam, she was there again, her hands digging deep into his legs.

“It doesn’t burn anymore, and yes, I feel better, so maybe that fat Lebanese knew what he was talking about. I still prefer butter.”

As his nephew walked off, he poured a little water out of his goatskin flask and rinsed his glass, recalling the days, not very long ago, when young men left Dar Humr only to work for wages so they could save up to buy a cow and start a herd. Quite a few still did, but there were too many like Abbas who went away to madrassahs and government training camps, from which they emerged impatient to die for the faith, to the point that nothing else mattered. They had no interest in cattle, nor in the sweet things that owning them brought to a man—women, prestige, power. They could tell you what the Prophet had to say about this subject or that subject, but nothing about which grasses grew in what kind of soil and where and in what seasons they grew there. Why trouble yourself, acquiring such skills and knowledge, when your purpose was to die? Why yearn for prestige and position when your true yearning was for the martyr’s grave?

Ibrahim Idris couldn’t understand it. The old saying was true; cattle were
fadd umm suf
—silver with hair—yet they were more than that. His attachment to his own considerable herd was almost mystical. Everything he had and everything he was he owed to cattle, and he owed his cattle to God, from whom all blessings flow; to God, yes, but also to his own shrewdness, for the proverb states that the owner’s eye brings increase; to his industriousness, for the proverb states that wealth lies between the upper and lower millstones; and to his pastoral skills, the sharp bargains he’d driven with his daughter’s suitors, and the years of self-denial that had given him the resources to add to his herds. Today more than eight hundred head bore his brand. Rarely did he sell his stock for cash, but when he did, the proceeds were more than enough to keep his wives in tea, sugar, soaps, and perfumes. To each he’d provided one riding bull and several milk cows, so each could churn butter for sale and thus keep herself in good blue cloth and gold earrings and other luxuries.

Wealth had brought him power; power, responsibilities. His poorer kinsmen came to him for milk and millet. He provided calves to nephews, nieces, and cousins as well as to his own children. Guests from all over were drawn to his tent, and to them he extended lavish hospitality. His advice was sought on various matters, from stockbreeding to politics to clan disputes over property and women, which he arbitrated with fairness and wisdom. Although Ibrahim had achieved fame among the Salamat for his physical courage, his generosity was what had made his name. The minstrels sang in praise of his liberality, not only in the camps of the Salamat but in the camps of the other omodiyas as well.

Nevertheless, slanderous campaigns continued to be mounted by factions determined to unseat him. He fought them off successfully, thanks be to God and to his relationship with the nazir, cemented by the marriage of his eldest daughter to the nazir’s youngest son. Despite his cares, he was sometimes able to enjoy the fruits of all his effort. Whether in the dry-season camps in the south or in the wet-season camps amid the millet fields and ebony trees of the north, he would sit or lie beneath the Men’s Tree, drinking the tea and eating the meals his wives brought to him, talking to guests who honored him with their presence and whom he honored with bowls of sour milk and with a slaughtered sheep from the flocks his cattle wealth had enabled him to establish.

The hours would pass in ease and comfort, and before he knew it, evening would come, and that was the sweetest time, with the heat gone and the smoke rising from the wood and dung fires his servants had built and his sons and kinsmen returning with the cattle, bawling and lowing as they milled into the kraals. It was a pleasure to walk among them, inspecting them for ticks or signs of disease, smelling them, rubbing their humps and dewlaps and bellies, filled with the best graze his sons had been able to find. A pleasure too to watch the calves released for milking. Sometimes, as one wife sprinkled his tent with scent, he would milk a cow himself, and another wife would churn liquid butter from the milk and massage his legs with the butter before he entered his fragrant tent to sleep contentedly until awakened by the sound of someone churning the morning’s milk outside his door.

Such days were rare, and after the coup that brought the National Islamic Front to power, they all but vanished from his life. News of the coup reached the Humr quickly, but few paid much attention to it at first; far removed from Khartoum, the Humr and the other Bagarra tribes were seldom affected by changes in government. But this coup was different, it was a revolution, and like the
haboub,
the cold wind from the northern deserts, it soon blew into the tribal lands, bringing changes. The provincial governor was removed from office for displaying insufficient zeal for the new regime’s policies, and replaced by a man of Khartoum’s choosing; in the towns, civil officials, police officers, and military commanders were purged for the same reason, and it was rumored that some had been imprisoned or executed. The tribal leaders were left alone; even this militant new government was afraid of infringing on the rights and privileges of the fiercely independent nomads. Still, it was clear to Ibrahim, and to all the others, that their wealth and popularity among their people would no longer guarantee their appointments; from now on they would also have to prove their fitness by displaying loyalty to the regime and that other virtue, piety, the virtue in which Ibrahim had always been deficient. Fearful that his laxity would provide new ammunition to his enemies, he made sure to behave properly. He would break off conversations with his guests or negotiations with disputing parties and bow to Mecca, trusting that his devoutness would be noticed and remarked on. Fortunately, those who witnessed these exhibitions couldn’t see that his thoughts were usually far from God, dwelling on some quarrel he’d been asked to arbitrate, or on the sale of a bull calf, or—oh, he’d hoped he wouldn’t burn in hell for this—making love to one of his younger wives.

Beyond the new emphasis on religion, life among the Humr didn’t change much for about a year after the coup. The harvest came in, the millet was stacked and threshed. The cool winds of the early dry season turned warm, then hot, and the Humr moved south with their herds. No matter what passed in the affairs of men and government, cattle had to heed the call of the green grass. They stayed in the south till the air grew heavy and still and thunderstorms filled the wadis and insects began to swarm, sending the Humr northward again, there to plant a new millet crop and let their herds graze on the stubble of last year’s fields. The big rains came and went, the skies grew miserly once more, announcing the advent of another harvest, and as the mown grain rose high on the drying platforms, the wind spun around to the north and the herdsmen began to muster their stock for the next migration to the southern pastures.

But that migration was to be like no other that Ibrahim Idris could remember. A short time before it began, army officers arrived in the Humr camps to call for young men to fight in the war. Ibrahim’s was visited by a major and a captain, who came one afternoon in a Land Rover accompanied by a lorry filled with soldiers in tan uniforms. The officers, Humr themselves, declined Ibrahim’s offer to stay for a feast of roast mutton, pleading that they had to see another omda before the day was done. As they relaxed under the Men’s Tree, the major told him—in case he hadn’t heard—that a
fatwa
had been issued in Khartoum declaring that the war was now a jihad. Ibrahim Idris nodded. And it was high time, the major said, sweating through his uniform. The way the previous government waged the war was a disgrace. So many defeats, so many soldiers deserting, so many officers tearing off their epaulets when ordered to the south. All that had changed. The army had been purged of cowards and traitors and reorganized into battalions of Islamic warriors trained by the Iranians. The major gestured at the soldiers in the lorry, some of whom wore scarves around their heads, printed with the profession of the faith,
La Allah ill Allah wah Muhammad rasoul Allah.
Already these warriors had won important triumphs, the major went on, sweating even more from the excitement he’d worked up. More were to come, inshallah, until the whole of the south was claimed for Islam. And now it was time for the nomads to join the holy cause.

He wiped his forehead and hands with a rag and pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket.

“First, I wish to read to you some words from the fatwa—”

“I can read,” said Ibrahim, gesturing for the paper.

The major told him to pay attention to the words at the bottom, which said: “All Muslims who deal with the rebels or who raise doubts about the legality of jihad are hypocrites and dissenters and apostates to the faith, and shall suffer torture in hell for all eternity.”

The major looked at him intently.

“One thing it doesn’t say is that such dissidents and apostates will suffer tortures on this earth as well.”

“Perhaps my honored guest will tell me what he means?”

“Ya, Ibrahim! Esmah!” His hand went to his heart to sign his sincerity. “I am Humr, and I know that our people have made friends with many Dinka and other abid. I know that we are in the custom of making arrangements with them to allow our cattle to graze in their pastures in the south. That is the kind of thing that must now stop. That is the kind of dealing the fatwa forbids.”

“Tell me, does the fatwa say how, then, we are to graze our cattle?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see it here,” he said, scowling at the smudged paper.

The major smiled a broad smile. “Ya, Ibrahim! Has it ever made sense to you that abid should have such fine pastures as they do? Has it ever made sense that we should bargain with them for grazing rights, when grass such as theirs rightfully is ours?”

He replied that, no, it didn’t make sense; nevertheless that was how things were.

“No longer.”

At a nod from the major, the captain drew out a map from the case he carried, spread it on the ground, and pinned its corners with rocks.

“We’re clearing the blacks out, from here to here.” Joining three fingers, the major swiped a vast corridor of land. “It will be, inshallah, a land without a people. And all the Baggara tribes will help make it so, and their reward will be all that pasture. It will be theirs alone.”

Ibrahim stared at the map, his heart racing at the vision of those lush, immense savannahs, there for the taking. But how, he asked, would the Baggara help make that so?

“The army asks for each omda to furnish a certain number of men, as many as can be spared,” the major said, wiping his brow once again. “The omdas will choose the men themselves. These murahaleen will be our cavalry.”

Each fighter would be provided with a modern rifle, an enlistment bonus of fifty thousand pounds, and a horse if he didn’t have a mount of his own. The army would give the recruits a fortnight’s training, to learn military discipline and how to use Kalashnikov rifles. From time to time during the dry season, or whenever conditions were suitable for mounted operations, the murahaleen would be ordered to make raids on southern villages and towns. Sometimes they might be commanded to escort government trains and convoys, to protect them from rebel ambushes. And of course anyone who was killed in this sacred struggle would be honored as a martyr, and his family would be paid a pension for life.

“The murahaleen will be under the command of my commander, Colonel Ahmar,” the major said. “Colonel Ahmar knows the army is asking a lot of you. With so many men away on operations, who will look after livestock? Who will tend the fields? So he has authorized me to tell you omdas that the taking of captives on the raids is permitted. Those old laws forbidding it are lifted. Those laws were imposed by the English.” He spat. “The government encourages you to seize as many captives as you wish, to do the work the fighters would be doing. After all, these blacks are not called abid for nothing. They are slaves. Why pay for labor when you can get it for nothing?”

It wasn’t difficult to find recruits. Some were zealots, but many were from the poorest of the Salamat. The ownership of a horse made each of them a knight, at least in his own eyes; the fifty thousand pounds was more than enough to buy a cow, and what stock it didn’t buy could be got on raids, so that the most destitute had a chance of accumulating a bride-price. And so the herds trekked south that season watched over by children and graybeards while Ibrahim Idris and two hundred men of fighting age went north to an army training ground to learn how to maneuver their horses in battle and to fire the Kalashnikov rifle. The Humr had not practiced the arts of war for a long time, not since the slave- and cattle-raiding days of their grandfathers’ time, but war was in their blood and the men learned quickly. When they were through, mullahs blessed them and presented each fighter with a booklet of sayings from the Koran and with a key that would open the gates of Paradise if he was martyred. The men hung the keys around their necks by leather thongs—keys of different shapes, sizes, and colors, some, like the one given to Ibrahim, attached to plastic tabs with mysterious writing and numbers on them. Curious about what they said, he asked several Brothers if they could interpret the message. None could. The major who’d recruited him cleared up the mystery, explaining that the words were in English and that they said “Khartoum Intercontinental.” With an incredulous laugh, Ibrahim Idris asked, “I am to unlock the gates of Paradise with a hotel key?” The major smiled his broad smile. “Put it away, omda. These are things for the young men, to inspire them.”