Where Pigeons Don't Fly Read online

  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 idol: 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.

  On the back seat of the Committee vehicle Fahd watched the drivers hurtle down the roads in their cars and thought of his father’s ordeal. Suleiman had been questioned interminably until it was finally established that he had not taken up arms to hijack the Grand Mosque when they stripped his clothes off and one of them examined the front of his shoulders to determine if the butt of a Belgian rifle had jarred against them and left a bruise.

  He was sentenced to jail then transferred to a new prison outside Mecca whose walls gave off the smell
of fresh paint. He and his companions were the first guests to enter that now venerable building. How Fahd wished that his father had not bequeathed him this part of his life and revealed to him his secret papers.

  Suleiman left a part of his secret life to Fahd for one reason: his fear that his son might become embroiled in the activities of extremist groups and that he might not stop at distributing pamphlets in the court of the Grand Mosque, as his adolescent father had done back in the dying days of Ramadan in August 1979, but take up arms or strap an explosive belt to his body. Fahd came to understand that Suleiman had been afraid, that his fear became an obsession, and before he passed away he set aside a few possessions for his son, instructing his wife to hold them in trust and hand them over when he had grown, as though anticipating a sudden death in the midst of his young life.

  So it was that Fahd got his hands on his father’s old books: Apprising the People of the Signs of Discord and the Portents of the Hour, A Vindication of the Religion of Abraham, Upon Him be Peace, and pages written in a shaky hand, memoirs and diaries. There was a small and dirty string of prayer beads made from olive stones and a blue biro with a grubby plaster stuck on for a grip. There was a photograph of Suleiman and a man with long hair sitting together in the terraces of Malaz Stadium, another of him with a group of young men around a fire on a sand dune in Maizeela outside Riyadh, and a third and final picture in black-and-white of Suleiman alongside his father, Ali, old and oblivious of the camera, and his brother Saleh.

  As he sat in the back of the vehicle looking out of the window, Fahd recalled when his sister, Lulua, had handed him a leather bag, black, ancient and falling apart. Their mother had asked her to give it to him as a bequest from his father. Inside he found the timeworn, personal effects that his father had insisted be handed over to him only once he had come of age. Why his mother had waited until he was in his early twenties he didn’t know. Maybe because of their relationship, which for the last three years had been bleak. He had opened the bag in a fever of excitement. There was no money, no treasure, just his father’s stupid journals: his years in prison and words of wisdom for his son.

  –3 –

  THE GMC WITH THE Committee’s logo on the driver and passenger-side doors moved off and headed down a side street in Wuroud, the driver looking to skip the traffic on King Abdullah Road. Fahd thought of how many times he had crossed this road with Tarfah, the two of them staring at the vast advertising hoardings by the corner of the Ministry for Municipal and Rural Affairs and laughing, their fingers entwined.

  ‘Remember your aunt’s house that’s up for rent in King Fahd?’ he had asked her one night. They had gone to the house and stretched out naked in a sitting room devoid of furniture, the echo bouncing from the bare walls parroting their voices, their laughter and their moans.

  He twisted about, looking for Tarfah. Where have they taken her? Where will they take me? His fearful muttering was interspersed by the hawk-eyed man’s directions to the driver.

  At the Owais Markets traffic lights the driver crossed straight over instead of turning left into the King Fahd neighbourhood. The streets were very quiet; there was none of the usual bustle around Haram Mall, which lured shoppers in with its cheap, low-quality goods.

  Fahd sighed and muttered a prayer; perhaps these moans and murmurs might move the hawk-eyed man to pity him. But it was no use: the man was like a butcher at Eid al-Adha, dragging the animal by its foot, the handle of a sharpened knife clamped between his teeth as he listened to the latest joke from his colleague.

  ‘It’s just a few papers to sign and you’ll be on your way.’

  That is what the man had said, encouraging Fahd to talk briefly and clearly. Fahd sighed and directed his gaze to the street, thinking again of Tarfah. What are you doing now? Where are you? Has the sheikh in the cream mashlah, his eyes full of calm and warmth, taken you off in his colleague’s car to the Committee or the women’s shelter? Don’t put your faith in his deceptive courtesy, his claims that it’s just a few official documents, just a signature on a pledge and you can go home. They’ll tell you that they are looking out for you, but they lie. He’ll trick you as he tricked me. He’ll lock you up or ask your family to collect you. The scandal!

  Fahd imagined Tarfah bobbing on the back seat like a freshly slaughtered pigeon, her door secured with a safety catch that could only be opened from outside while doubtless the sheikh in the cream mashlah rode up front, reciting hadith on the virtues of the chaste, inviolable woman who stayed at home. He longed to call her and make sure she was all right, but they had taken away his phone and all his papers.

  The GMC stopped outside a building. The man with hawk-like eyes opened the door and glared at Fahd, who remained inside with the policeman and the driver. There was a short delay then he emerged from the building accompanied by a bulky man, a toothstick poking out of his thick lips, which he bit on every now and again as he muttered and spat and looked over at Fahd. The short man gestured at the driver, who got out with the bag containing Fahd’s possessions and stood next to them. Then the big man came forward, opened the rear door and took Fahd to the building while the bag swayed in his other hand.

  He sat down facing the men. There were three of them, waited on by an Indonesian, who brought them tea. The big man came over and stood in front of Fahd.

  ‘Stand up. Lift your hands in the air.’

  Fahd raised his hands as though he were at a custom’s check or airport security and the man began to pat down his pockets and body, front and back; he even felt beneath his balls. The hawk-eyed man gave a shout, springing towards Fahd and yanking at his upraised left hand.

  ‘What’s this?’

  He removed the prayer beads that had been left to him by his father, a small string of beads that he had wrapped twice about his wrist the week before: olive stones that had been stored in his father’s bag for nearly twenty-five years.

  In his diaries, his father had told him that he had kept the beads as a reminder of the long prison nights and their boredom: the darkness, the isolation, the sadness. He wanted to remember how he had passed the time fashioning prayer beads from olive stones or breeding cockroaches, letting them multiply before destroying them all.

  My son, keeping hold of that which reminds you of tragedy will prevent you forgetting it, and so you will be able to avoid the things that led me into its trap. All I ask of you is that you keep it safe after I am gone and remember that the ultimate destiny of the political parties and religious groups that vex the government is extinction, failure and psychological torment. While your contemporaries are seizing their opportunities and succeeding, you will have wasted the best years of your youth chasing after lost dreams.

  –4 –

  THE MEN WHO WERE artfully guiding Fahd into the Committee’s detention cells reminded him of his grandfather, Ali. These men took him into their snare where they unleashed accusations like maddened horses and set about destroying his life with malice and spirit. But had he been alive, his grandfather might have done worse: he might have flogged his grandson before the people in Tahliya Street for consorting in private with a strange woman, he might even have approved of beheading him with a sword.

  When his grandfather had been sent the news of a baby boy he didn’t go straight home to his wife’s family after evening prayers. Instead, he stayed in the mud-brick mosque with the congregation, praying through a watch of the night until his misgivings had abated and the moon had reappeared, for that night, fifteenth of Shaaban, 1379 AH, there had been an eclipse.

  Ali was miserable, distraught and full of foreboding. An eclipse of the moon as a child entered the world! For a newborn to arrive accompanied by the wrath of God was terrifying; the baby’s whole life and future was in doubt.

  ‘I said he was defective from the day he was born.’

  Words he repeated throughout his son Suleiman’s life, until the boy’s childhood became filled with injustice and misfortune and he lived all his days with a sense
of guilt for what had befallen his family.

  At first Suleiman’s mother, Noura, told her husband, ‘Seek protection from the Devil and stop prophesying like a pagan!’ But just a week later she herself was shouting in fear and every member of the household wailing when they were told that her younger brother, Ibrahim, and his school friends had been seized by the police outside Muhanna Palace and taken to Riyadh, where he remained for two whole months before returning to Buraida to be flogged before the crowds with his companions. Only then was Noura persuaded that her son Suleiman truly was a curse on her family.

  Noura’s family in Buraida maintained a somewhat open-minded household, unlike that of her husband’s family in Muraidasiya, who were said to be so excessively credulous and superstitious that they gave their cockerel a ritual washing to cleanse him of impurity before he mated with the hens. Her father was one of the great itinerant merchants of the Nejd, who had spread out to Egypt, Iraq and Palestine in the early twentieth century, while in the early 1920s her brother Ibrahim and his friends had despaired of the extremism of the parliamentary deputies who walked the streets carrying long staffs made from the branches of the shauhat tree, white turbans on their heads. The deputies exhorted people to pray, warned against gatherings of young people, denounced the wearing of the white ghatra and aqqal and decried the spread of cafés serving tea and shisha. They banned the motorbike, which they referred to as ‘Satan’s steed’, and whenever they found a young man in possession of one, they would confiscate it.

  At this, Fahd’s Uncle Ibrahim and his friends, nineteen young men all told, decided to march in a demonstration to Muhanna Palace, the residence of the city’s governor, Ibn Battal, carrying on their shoulders a young man acting the clown and dubbed the akia. They came to a halt outside the palace shouting fearlessly and wildly, ‘Down with Ibn Battal! Long live the youth! Down with the deputies! Long live the akia!’