Where Pigeons Don't Fly (22 page)

‘Who's that?' said Saeed anxiously. ‘Don't tell me it's the Hejaz one?'

Fahd nodded his head.

 

–31 –

A
S FAHD CLIMBED INTO
the Committee's vehicle that morning he wondered whether Thuraya was behind what had happened. On several occasions she had threatened to take her revenge if he didn't respond to her desires. Had she reported the sea-blue Hyundai Accent? Had she told them that it was a car like a blue wave adrift in an arid desert? Had she taken down the number plate when she came out of the entrance of Iman Hospital that time, or as she left the World of Dreams hair salon? Had Tarfah's old boyfriend wanted to revenge himself on her and been stalking her, his mind filled with suspicion? Had it been the uncle who hated him and thought of him as a shameless sinner?

He often thought of his arrest as he walked out alone along Great Yarmouth's sandy shoreline and saw the lovers stretched out beneath the little bushes, whispering together, or embracing, still as stones, for hours on end. How hard it was for him to recall a passage from one of the three books his father had left behind in his bag, which discussed the societies of the
jahiliya
. The passage described how the writers, journalists and novelists in these societies openly told their young women and wives that …
there is nothing morally repugnant about conducting free relations. Immorality is when a young man deceives his girlfriend or a young woman her boyfriend and does not keep her affection solely
for him. Indeed, it is immoral for a wife to remain celibate once desire for her husband has died down, and virtue is when she seeks out a friend to whom she can safely entrust her body! There are dozens of stories with this message at their core and hundreds of educational programmes, cartoons, jokes and comedies that promote it…

Had the hand that drew the wavering blue line beneath these words in
Milestones
really been shaking as it seemed? Was it his father's hand? Was it some sign, something his father wanted to keep before him at all times? Was it really some precocious and successful attempt at prophecy?

In recent days Fahd had opened the leather satchel, stuffed with documents and diaries, stories and memories, specialist books and picture books, secret pamphlets, pens, the olive stone prayer beads and a picture—how it had been taken and by whom he had no idea—showing his father and fellow inmates in the prison yard. These mementoes of his father had yet to claim his attention, with the exception of the green volume, a black line across the middle of the cover and on the first page a title in
thulathi
script that read
Milestones
with the name
Sayyid Qutb
in beautiful
farsi
typeface in the top right corner, then the words
Dar Dimashq Publishing
. The handwriting inside was in his father's hand, notes in the margins written long ago.

Back then his father, or perhaps just the author, believed that all societies existed in
jahiliya
, a state of godless ignorance, and were either …
atheistic communist societies, pagan societies in India, Japan, the Philippines and Africa, or Christian and Jewish societies that followed their deviant creeds.

Within this definition of
jahiliya
societies he included those that professed to be Muslim, but in fact submitted to an authority other than God. It was as though the words in the book Fahd leafed through were being uttered by his cousin
Yasser. Was this the well from which his father, his uncle and Yasser had all drunk? The common source for all those that followed the call to wage war on society, to the extent that some of them abandoned their normal lives and took up residence in ghettos for their kind?

Haraa Sharqiya on the outskirts of Mecca, the neighbourhood where the families of the Divine Reward Salafist Group lived, was little more than a chaotic assemblage of houses and buildings, between which ran exceptionally narrow alleys like cattle pens, scarcely wide enough for two people to pass at the same time. Their homes were ferro concrete structures with three doors. The rear entrance of each house led directly to the front door of the house behind it, and was commonly used by the women to meet, hold whispered conversations and swap favours and cooking ingredients—they were also the doors through which many of them fled during the raids carried out by the security services shortly before the occupation of the Grand Mosque.

Suleiman al-Safeelawi was brave and reckless, returning at night with rare courage to a neighbourhood under surveillance and making his way inside via the back door that opened on to the whip-thin alleyway, to rescue his bag containing his proofs of identity—his ID documents and certificates from primary and secondary school—before slipping away while the detectives and soldiers stood watch over the front doors.

He could hear his own heart thudding as he crept to the house of the group's leader, silent as a butterfly as he passed through the darkness to the men's
majlis
where he slept at night, to find his bedding folded up as he had left it and beside it his black leather satchel. He picked it up without opening
it and, fleeing to the cattle pen behind the house, made his way out of the sprawling district, most of whose modest dwellings housed members of the group—Brothers as they called themselves—along with a few students from the Islamic University.

That moment, back at the time of the second wave of arrests and now sunk in dread and silence and forgetting, did not permanently distance young Suleiman from the group. Even so, he began to attend lessons with the blind sheikh at Imam Mosque in Deira in the company of a young man of a similar age, before being joined by a third student, then a fourth. The group's military commander sent a messenger to warn against keeping company with government sheikhs lest they draw attention to themselves, unaware that the young men had grown impatient with the group and its impetuosity. Nevertheless, when Suleiman met Mushabbab that afternoon outside the Kutub Watania publishing house he almost flew with joy to learn that the leader was asking after him and expected him to arrive on the tenth of Ramadan; joy, because the leader's eye only singled people out if he had confidence in them, when their abilities and talents set them apart from the rest.

So Suleiman travelled to see him at a farm in the village of Ammar, west of Riyadh, where some of the Brothers were gathered. The leader took him by the hand and led him to a long narrow room like a corridor and showed him the red string onion bags packed with yellow pamphlets that bore the title of his first message to the
umma
:
Correcting Confusion over the Faith of he whom God Has Made Imam over All People
. It was only once Suleiman had driven the bags to their destination that he actually read the contents of this message, at a little
house in Mecca, where the leader of the Meccan Brothers, entrusted with handing out the pamphlets in the Grand Mosque, was staying. It was the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan.

That first message, sent fluttering into the skies over Mecca, Riyadh, Ta'if and Qaseem by Suleiman and his zealous companions, made reference to part of a prophetic
hadith
that contained the following saying of the Prophet, upon him be the blessings and peace of God: ‘The religion of God shall only be established by he who is secured on all sides.'

Or, as the pamphlet explained:
The story of this hadith, for whose sake we have come to divide ourselves into groups, is that the need to keep aloof from those who deny the oneness of God, to expose their enmity and cleave to the truth, was seen by some as an embarrassment and a hardship, an obstacle to spreading the faith that repelled the common people. Some were lax in applying this principle, while others abandoned it entirely. But we say that it is not as they believed, for God has lifted the embarrassment from us and adjured us to this principle, for if there were any embarrassment in it he would not have so commanded us. Listen to His exalted words:

‘And strive in His cause as you ought to strive. He has chosen you, and has imposed no difficulties on you in religion; it is the faith of your father, Abraham. It is He who named you Muslims, both before and in this revelation; that the Messenger may be a witness for you.'

If God Himself has commanded us to strive and made it clear to us that there is no embarrassment in it, and that this is the faith of Abraham, then know that adherence to this principle—striving and following the faith of Abraham—is what sets the true Muslim apart from the pretender.

And so in their eyes all people were pretenders and hypocrites, and it was their duty to exhort them, unembarrassed,
to wash their hands of those who denied God's oneness, for if they did not, they were of them. The faith was not to be established through sycophancy and silence but by cleaving to the truth and forbearance in the face of suffering.

The initial wave of arrests sent Suleiman fleeing into the desert in the company of the group's leader, the two of them wandering the wastes for two weeks living on lizards captured in their burrows. Forty days later, after most of the group's members had been released from prison and after the second wave of arrests prior to the assault on the Grand Mosque, Suleiman decided that things were now in deadly earnest. No longer was this a matter of a pellet gun puncturing the heart of a loudspeaker, as his brother had done in Muraidasiya, nor was it a handful of boys demonstrating outside the governor's palace in Buraida. It had gone beyond mere jail terms: they now faced execution by the sword.

So Suleiman began to shun the group. Like black hawks, accusations of neglecting his duty to the cause eventually caught up with him, but he had vanished from sight, returning to a tiny burrow in Umm Sulaym before deciding to escape to Buraida. He would never leave again, he decided; he would be buried there. That was before the two security agents took him away from the Jurida marketplace to lose four years of his youth in a cold-walled prison. Yet this was certainly more forgiving than standing in Justice Square, waiting for the rattle of a sharp sword.

And so Suleiman's fear saved him. He did not join the Brothers in their assault on the Grand Mosque at dawn on the first of Muharram, the first day of the fourteenth century after the Prophet's flight.

 

–32 –

T
HE NEXT TIME AROUND
Fahd set the alarm on his phone to six o'clock, but only came to when he heard Saeed's shout beside him, as though issuing from the depths of a cave.

‘Your mother called on the landline. She says your mobile's off.'

Fahd quickly washed his face, put on his robe and throwing his headscarf over his shoulder said, ‘I'm late, I've got an urgent appointment. If she calls, say I have a meeting at the university.'

Before closing the door he looked back in. ‘Saeed! Tell her I've gone to enrol in a summer course.'

‘It's almost sunset, you lunatic!' Saeed shouted. ‘What university?'

He shut the door behind him, started the car and set out for Granada Centre in East Riyadh, towards the heavenly face of his beloved, the face that had shaken his weak and ever-eager heart to the core.

Switching on his mobile, he found three messages.

From Lulua:
Mother's asking for you. Where are you?

From Thuraya:
All I ask is a word, to say you're mine and you miss me. Answer me, Syrian!

From Tarfah:
Where are you? I've been waiting an hour for your call. Shall I head out? It's a long journey from Suwaidi, sweetheart
.

He called Tarfah and told her to set off. ‘Sorry baby, I overslept.'

‘So, shall I bring anything?' she asked with delicious playfulness.

When he burst out laughing she cut him off. ‘No, really. What do you long for most?'

‘Your heart!' he replied passionately.

‘Trickster. Hustler,' she cried in exasperation. ‘You leave me no way out.'

‘Your mouth, then.'

She sighed deeply and contentedly. ‘Now I believe you.'

When he started the car Rashed al-Majed was singing
Oh, Don't Keep Me from Him!
on MBC FM and he thought of Noha, her tears and her choked and hesitant voice. He stopped at a petrol station and asked the attendant to fill his tank while he rushed into the little shop and bought a box of
Fine
tissues and a couple of bottles of water picked from the back of the refrigerator.

Tarfah described the different entrances to the vast Granada Mall: ‘Come to Entrance Two. Turn in off the Eastern Ring Road and it's next to Dr Keif. You'll see the main entrance in front of you with a picture of Marah Oasis hanging over it.'

‘I know the Extra Café at the end on the left,' he replied. ‘Is it before that?'

‘Well, of course it is, and before Paris Gallery. I'm not talking about Entrance One, OK? That's the one by Costa Coffee and Espresso. I'm talking about Entrance Two. You turn in off theEastern Ring Road and if you look right you'll see Dr Keif. The entrance right next to it.'

As he turned at the traffic lights at the Imam Street exit he looked left and saw the green Dr Keif sign. It was nearly eight
o'clock. He took a right, then another at the small roundabout facing the main entrance. Passing Entrance Two he saw that it really was a forgotten spot: nobody was about.

He called her before he stopped the car and she answered eagerly. ‘Where are you?'

She had gone in via the main entrance then headed into the VaVaVoom Beauty Salon, walking out again a few minutes later and going for a wander that took her past the family section of Starbucks, where she ordered two small cappuccinos. She walked to the main hall and turned right as if towards the up escalator, but marched straight past it in the direction of Etam. Her black bag swinging, she emerged from Entrance Two.

He took the Starbucks cups from her and slowly moved off. He asked her about the unusually heavy crowds around the main entrance.