“What am I going to do now?” asked Amran, rather more quietly.
“Oh, join the army. They’ll take anyone,” replied the clerk. His derision was palpable, pouring out of the window. Some of the bystanders laughed. Farid was seething with fury, but he was afraid to say anything.
“I don’t like armies,” said Amran. His voice suddenly faltered.
“Nor do I, but someone has to defend the Fatherland,” barked the clerk, pushing the thin folder with Amran’s application form back through the window. “Next,” he said, without any emotion. But the next was Amran’s companion. He went up to the window. “My marks are even worse than my friend’s, so I guess I’ll go straight off to join the army, and do you know why?” he asked with assumed civility.
The clerk, for his own part, pretended to be curious. “No, why?”
“Not to defend this filthy Fatherland but so I can fuck your mother without being prosecuted for it. You wait and see, you bastard of a Timur-Leng,” he said. He turned, and walked away at a deliberately slow pace.
The clerk froze. Leaving his window to punish the boy who had insulted him would have been too risky. The other angry peasants’ sons who weren’t admitted would have lynched him.
That was the first time Farid heard the term of abuse frequently used by peasants from the country to insult the Damascenes. Timur-Leng came from Mongolia and had captured the city with his wild horde in 1400, after a long siege. His revenge for the resistance that he encountered was terrible. He had a third of the population driven into the great Ummayad Mosque and set the place on fire. None of the thirty thousand people inside survived. He allowed his soldiers a week in which to rape the women who had not been driven into the mosque, and from those who had survived his revenge he sent scholars, craftsmen, and artists to his capital of Samarkand, leaving only a handful of wretches behind on a smoking pile of rubble. It was said that the Damascenes were so crafty because they were Timur-Leng’s bastards.
Eight years after the incident outside the university, in the autumn of 1967, a young army captain by the name of Amran led a coup. Two days later he appointed himself general, and soon after that President of Syria. He issued a decree giving peasants’ sons bonus points for university entrance. Two years later, President Amran received five honorary doctorates at the University of Damascus, in the faculties of philosophy, literature, mathematics, political science, and medicine. Moscow followed suit. In recognition of a large order from Amran to the Soviet arms industry, it appointed him Honorary Doctor of Philosophy of Moscow University.
173. The State of God
Madeleine opened the door to Farid. “Thank goodness you’re here. He’s beside himself,” she said, concerned, and took him to Josef. Josef was a changed man. He looked at Farid red-eyed.
“Those bastards, they’ve made a second attempt on President Satlan’s life, would you believe it? Suppose the hand grenade had gone off? The criminals, I could murder them all!” Farid didn’t know what to say. Josef sounded as if he were under the influence of drugs. He was snorting rather than breathing, his words came out as if he were retching instead of speaking. It took Farid some time to grasp the fact that one of the Muslim Brotherhood had thrown a hand grenade at the President. Satlan had escaped unscathed while the young fanatic fell, riddled by bullets from the President’s bodyguard.
Farid kept quiet and let Josef rant on. He could understand his friend’s grief and rage, but the assassination attempt meant nothing to him personally. He had been rejoicing all day over news from Rana. She would be alone for an hour in a small church next Sunday, she said, when her brother Jack had to go to the tennis club with his father. Farid was to wait for her under the picture of St. Barbara.
If he had opened his mouth, the only word to emerge would have been “Rana”. So he kept quiet and listened to Josef. Later, Rasuk joined them. He had heard about the attempt on the President’s life on the BBC World Service. The Arab radio stations were saying nothing about it.
“Elizabeth asked me if these were the new Assassins,” he said. “I don’t know much about them — they sound odd. I thought I’d ask you,” he added, turning to Josef.
“Myths and legends proliferate around the Assassins. They are described as murderers, religious fanatics, paid killers, and most often of all as ‘hashish eaters’. At the time no one knew about smoking hashish, people chewed it,” explained Josef, sounding like a walking encyclopaedia. Then he went on. “Well, yes, the Muslim Brotherhood are just like the Assassins of the old days. They murder when the leader of their sect tells them to, they don’t fear death because they already have one foot in Paradise. So you can’t even frighten them.”
“And do they pump themselves full of hashish first?” asked Rasuk.
“No, that bit’s nonsense,” said Josef. “Hashish just makes it easier to get through to other realities. It makes meditation deeper, guides the eye to the essentials, and it’s a help in attaining wisdom.”
This was the first time Farid had ever heard anyone speak in favour of hashish; his parents and his school, his Church and the Party all condemned drugs as harmful.
“But,” objected Rasuk, “Marco Polo said the leaders pumped all new members full of hashish and opium until they were out of their minds. Then servants took the new warrior into a beautiful garden full of naked youths and women dancing about and satisfying all his desires, and he thought he was in Paradise. Later, he was taken back to his lodgings in a dazed state. When he returned to his senses, he was told he would go straight back to that Paradise once he’d carried out the leader’s orders and died a martyr’s death. Don’t laugh,” Rasuk told Farid. “It says so in a book about the Assassins.”
“Yes, you can find an amazing amount of nonsense in books, said Josef dismissively. “Hashish is soothing, it makes you drowsy and sexy. Not exactly the qualities of a fanatical killer who carries out his mission without any thought of loss. A man like the legendary Hassan Sabah, the leader of the sect known as the Assassins, was an ascetic, philosopher, and mathematician and could never have inspired fear if his army was high on drugs. His men wouldn’t have occupied a single village. But they say that Sabah had fifty-three citadels between northern Persia and Damascus in his power by 1092. Marco Polo was certainly an honest man, but how could a traveller with hardly a word of Arabic grasp the principles of such a secretive organization?”
“Why did Marco Polo put all this nonsense together, then?” asked Farid.
“Well, if he’d written honestly after such a long journey that he still didn’t understand many cultures and their customs, people would have taken no notice of him. But if you don’t tell the truth, if you put your audience’s imagination into words instead, they believe you and you’re popular. Those orgies in the Assassins’ citadels really did take place in Marco Polo’s fantasies about the East.”
“What drove them to do it, though, if it wasn’t expecting to have all their desires satisfied in Paradise?” asked Rasuk, interested.
“Exactly what drives today’s fanatics: a sense of divine mission that makes them the elect. It’s the only drug that can enable young men who enjoy life to overcome the fear of death and despise life itself. The idea of going to Paradise is the most dangerous of all civilized inventions. That’s where communism and religion meet, and the only difference is in defining its location. In this world, say the communists. No, in the next world, says religion. The Muslim Brotherhood tried to synthesize the two. They want to set up the state of God here on earth, because they think that would solve all problems. Although it’s the biggest problem of all in itself.”