What was it that Uncle Ibrahim was after? When he came to broach the idea of my uncle marrying my mother, did he mean it? Was it to be an atonement for taking part in a demonstration outside Ibn Battal’s palace against the deputies and the pious, to show his relatives in Qaseem that it had been the error of a teenage boy?
At the end of that long day, night finally fell and Fahd went out, frustrated and sad. He drove towards Pizza Hut, passing the generator where the black cat hid. He had never liked cats. A shudder would run through his body whenever he caught sight of it hidden away, its eyes staring at him.
As soon as he was past the restaurant, Sulaimaniya supermarket and the petrol station, he stopped at Tareeqati Café and felt his way into the dimly lit interior. He ordered a bitter Turkish coffee and pondered his life, which since his tenth year had rushed by with frightening speed.
When he left the café he did not return home but aimlessly roamed the streets.
Back at the house, at the bottom of the four steps leading up to the front door, he passed the tub full of small roses that he had planted with his father the year before and he recalled his uncle commenting on the flowers: ‘You should grow something useful instead. Courgettes. Tomatoes.’
The man still thought he was in Muraidasiya; anything related to beauty meant nothing to those villagers. What’s the use of looking at something that you can’t eat? That was how they thought. Why remain a widow or divorcee, stuck at home without a man to put food on the table or share your bed?
When Fahd came inside, and while he was climbing the stairs with downcast eyes, he was surprised by his mother, who was sitting on the top step waiting for him. She looked at him. He told her nothing of what they had said. ‘They were just asking about the inheritance and dad’s car, whether we were going to sell it or not.’
She withdrew to her bedroom without saying a thing, but he sensed that she had detected his lie. Perhaps she had been eavesdropping from behind the wooden partition. She would do that a lot and often surprised her children by knowing what they were up to, astonishing them with her insight and teasing them by saying that a gazelle passed on everything they said and so they should never lie to her. It was certainly too embarrassing for his mother to tell him, ‘You’re a liar: they came to ask for my hand in marriage,’ and perhaps it was too embarrassing for him to tell her that as well. His mother was shy and unsure, and it was easy to convince and influence her.
‘But no,’ he muttered to himself as he went to his gloomy bedroom. ‘I will lie, Mother. And as for the gazelle, I killed it when my father died.’
Part 2. Sandals emerging from the darkness
— 10 —
BURAIDA WAS UNFAMILIAR TO young Fahd, despite having lived in the city for months during the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and despite his father’s former life there. Shortly before his death, Suleiman had told Fahd tales from his youth.
Ali had insisted Suleiman study at the National School and Suleiman had kept resisting, but in the end he had consented because it was an opportunity to escape the village of Muraidasiya.
For a while he read Ibn Hajjar’s The Attainment of the Goal with Sheikh al-Duwaish. The sheikh, he told Fahd, had been an extraordinary man with an astonishing memory: he could listen to more than one student reciting the Qur’an at the same time, correcting their errors of pronunciation and intonation even though they were reading separate verses. Even Sheikh al-Albani, who occasionally returned to the text beside him to prompt him as he talked, sought help from al-Duwaish, consulting his computer-like memory. God have mercy on his soul! He died young, in the prime of life.
After sunset, Suleiman studied inheritance law with Sheikh al-Kaleeli, the imam of a mosque close by the home of his friend, al-Ulayti. The first time he went to see him, Suleiman sat flustered before the sheikh, who cast a keen and mistrustful eye over him, then said, ‘You studied at a government school?’
‘Yes.’
He gazed at Suleiman for a moment, closely examining his face as he prepared to hurl his first fatal arrow towards those boyish features. ‘Does the earth revolve?’
‘Yes, sheikh,’ Suleiman replied, confident and candid.
‘There is no power nor strength save in God!’ the sheikh said, then rose to his feet, pulled out a book and handed it to him.
‘Read this book, my boy, and then come back.’
Suleiman read the title: Heaven’s Potent Rage Against Followers of the New Age by Sheikh Hamoud al-Tuwaijri.
He read it in days and understood that it disputed heathen astronomers who believed in the spherical nature of the earth and its revolution and refuted their claims.
The sheikh didn’t dismiss Suleiman as he had expected, but showed him sympathy instead, feeling it his duty to take him by the hand and lead him from falsehood and bewilderment on to the path of righteousness and truth. The earth is flat, as the Lord tells us in His Book, and, contrary to the theories of heathens and atheists, does not revolve about itself or circle the sun. No: it is the sun that turns about the earth.
Suleiman loved these ideas, but quickly moved beyond them. He discovered that the Salafis of Buraida were in fact just doctrinally observant Hanbalis. He felt that he shouldn’t ally himself with any particular doctrinal school, and he found what he was looking for with the Divine Reward Salafist Brothers in Riyadh. He spent hard days of hunger and deprivation with them and suffered through Riyadh’s long winter nights, to the extent that when he accompanied the leader of the group to Buraida and visited his old school, he dropped in to see his family for a day in Quwai then slept for several nights in a classroom. He felt proud when he saw the looks of envy and jealousy from his peers in Buraida. He had begun to move with a commanding, disciplined air and could finally dream of restoring his ruined self-confidence.
The trip was the occasion of the final meeting between the Brothers in Buraida and the Salafist Group that would continue on the path to the Grand Mosque. There was affection and dialogue between the two parties before it turned into hostility and mutual loathing, the conversation gradually metamorphosing into a call to actively bring about a radical change, to do away with corruption, sin and doctrinal constraints. The inhabitants of Buraida followed the Hanbali rite, and the Hanbalis’ severest defeat had come when a group of them debated a Zaharite sheikh in Mecca, who brought them to a standstill with his proofs and logic. Suleiman had witnessed this event and it was then he realised that life and ideas might exist elsewhere, in places other than Buraida. Adventures, fraught with dangers, followed one after the other until he found himself behind bars in Mecca where, one day, he was joined in his cell by the young Mushabbab.