Fahd put his head between his hands as he sighed and said, ‘There is no recourse nor strength save through God.’ Then, firmly and with a faint tremor, he muttered, ‘Oh Lord! Oh Lord, help us!’
The short man with the eyes of a hawk and a brown spot on his forehead rebuked him. ‘You discover God after you’ve committed the sin.’
With no apparent humility he recited from the Qur’an: ‘“Now, when they embark upon a voyage, they call on God and worship him alone, but when He has delivered them to dry land, they give a share of their worship to others.”’
On the verge of tears, Fahd said, ‘Protect us, God help you! At least keep her from harm!’
And so it was, in this country of fear and confusion, that Fahd was transformed in an instant from confident and collected to flustered, uncertain and defeated. Perhaps it was the sight of Tarfah weeping that so affected him, and then again, what might her brother Abdullah do, he who had so very courageously defied her desire to enrol at nursing college before finally surrendering to her limitless obstinacy? What would her poor mother do? How would her little girl, Sara, sleep at night? What embrace would compensate Sara for the warmth of her mother’s arms? What embrace will comfort me?
— 2 —
WITH HIS EXAGGERATED AIR of exquisite dignity and grace, the sheikh with the cream mashlah looked exactly like the man who had whispered in the ear of Fahd’s father, Suleiman, twenty-five years before. As Fahd climbed into the back seat of the Committee’s GMC he couldn’t help thinking of his father getting into the secret police jeep in Buraida’s Jurida market all that time ago. His father had told him the story many times.
The morning of 3 November 1979 was mild and a light breeze bathed the faces of the rural vendors spread through the marketplace. Fahd’s father noticed two men dressed in black winter clothes. One had his shimagh wrapped across his face and the other wore a black overcoat and dark glasses — and it was this man who approached him, whispering in his ear in front of the customers that he wanted him for a moment. So, leaving his neighbour Ibn Qanas in charge of the crates of courgettes and tomatoes, he walked off with them. He would never return to his crates.
Fahd learnt later that the journey his father endured was exhausting. He was sat before an investigating officer who interrogated him bluntly and unnervingly about his role in the Salafist group whose ambitions had extended to overthrowing the country’s rulers. Smelling of fresh vegetables pulled from the fields of Khabb al-Muraidasiya, his sleeves rolled up and his shimagh cocked back like a truck driver, a worried Suleiman sat there and answered the questions honestly and clearly while the clerk beside the officer wrote it all down.
Suleiman had explained that all he cared for in the world were his crates of courgettes, tomatoes and beans and that for over a year he’d had no connection to the group which two days before had assaulted the Grand Mosque on Mecca. The interrogation ran for six hours and when he asked if he might perform the afternoon prayer the scowling officer only asked him if he thought he was on holiday.
‘Don’t assume you’ll be going home to your mother any time soon.’
And indeed, he didn’t return for four years, during which time he was moved from Buraida to Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca. He entered a temporary prison on Airport Road in Riyadh, then a new facility outside Mecca where he made friends. There was Mushabbab the Southerner, Salah the Egyptian, Bandar Bin Khalaf and Deifallah, and there were the guards, whose shifts might change, though their eyes, frozen like the eyes of the dead, never did. They were like those who ready bodies for burial, who wash the corpses indifferent and inured, and so they never knew his woe and his regret at having turned down his father’s plea that he do as his brother did and continue his education in Buraida, taking himself off instead to a run-down house in the Riyadh neighbourhood of Umm Sulaym.
How small and tame Umm Sulaym had been in the 1970s. From the roundabout to the old neighbourhood facing Al-Jahiz School it was a considerable distance, the whole way lined with street-vendors and students. He did not enjoy studying at the Imam al-Daawa Institute in Deira: studying Ibn Malik’s Alfiyya in his grammar classes rattled his brain and left him dizzy and he was encouraged to rebel when they taught him that studying in government schools was dishonourable and that he must seek true and lawful knowledge from sheikhs and scholars in the colonnades of mosques and the galleries of Mecca and Medina.
That afternoon, as their son Suleiman quitted the Jurida market for the last time, his mother, Fahd’s grandmother, was in the village of Muraidasiya setting down the coffee pot and a few sugared dates in front of her husband. Throwing her shawl over her head and shoulders and sitting before him to pour the first cup, she thought nothing of her striped green thaub, but he flung the dregs of the coffee behind him in the direction of the old mulberry tree, and cried, ‘Your thaub’s on inside out, woman.’
At this, the grandmother was perturbed and examined her sleeves, muttering, ‘God, make it well.’
The following day they sent Suleiman’s brother Saleh to the market to ask after him and Ibn Qanas told him that two strange men had turned up and spoken with him. Suleiman had gone with them and had not yet returned.
Suleiman reached Riyadh cuffed hand and foot and accompanied by a young policeman, returning once more to the accursed city that had destroyed his modest dreams of learning and wealth and introduced him to a strange world of religious groups and parties.
It had been a simple enough beginning: murmuring invocations after the afternoon prayers and listening to the silken voice of the imam as he invited anyone who wanted to take part in a retreat that coming Thursday to register his name with the muezzin. So it was that his name first found its way into the records of a small mosque in Umm Sulaym.
They left for the Hassi River in two cars, Suleiman riding in the Volvo belonging to the mosque’s imam, an upright young man from Beir. When they arrived they set up a tent, cooked some food and formed a dhikr. Then they listened to selections of the prophetic hadith, played a bit of football and returned home the next day. After two months of these trips a benefactor from the congregation sponsored an umra to Mecca and taking the decision to abandon the Imam al-Daawa Institute and the hated Alfiyya of Ibn Malik, Suleiman’s arduous journey began. He dropped in on the owner of the petrol station where he worked and handed in his notice, saying that he was going to travel in search of knowledge, and received one hundred and fifty riyals, two months wages, which he put in his pocket and departed with the others in a small microbus.
Inside the Grand Mosque, making his way to the ambulatory around the Kaaba, Suleiman passed a gallery where a sheikh was debating with his students and, joining them, heard the name of Sheikh al-Albani for the first time. He hunted for his writings in the bookshops around the mosque, read up on the prophetic hadith, both authenticated and doubtful, and studied the prayer habits of the Prophet. He had no idea what Divine Reward Salafism meant, but was embarrassed to ask the Brothers. He read a lot and understood little. He pored over his two-part study of hadith authenticity, Instigation and Dissuasion, and leafed through The Night Ride to Jerusalem and the Ladder about the Prophet’s miraculous flight from Mecca to Jerusalem and his ascent to the heavens. He loved the books of Nasser al-Deen al-Albani and little expected that one day he would meet him face to face, so the first time he saw him in the flesh within the Grand Mosque, his astonishment was considerable: his mouth gaped and he was rooted to the spot. He had felt much as his son, Fahd, felt when he was joined in the lift at Mamlaka Tower by the singer Rashed al-Fares with his brown skin, long black overcoat and manager, to whom he chatted away. Each of them was encountering his idoclass="underline" Suleiman had read much of Sheikh al-Albani and loved his ideas, while Fahd listened to al-Fares and adored his rapid music, a taste he tried to impose on his girlfriend Tarfah.