At Risk

20

With each click of her scissors, another rat’s-tail of black hair fell to the floor. Outside, the sky was dark with unshed rain. Faraj Mansoor was seated on a wooden chair in front of her, a white bath-towel around his shoulders. He didn’t look like a murderer, but by his own account that was exactly what he had become-and within an hour of entering the United Kingdom for the first time.

That made her… what? A conspirator to murder? An accessory after the fact? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the operation and its security. All that was necessary was that they remain invisible.

There was much, of course, that she didn’t know. It had to be this way-she wouldn’t have had it any other. If she was taken, and subjected to whatever truth drugs and interrogation techniques the security services employed these days, it was essential that she had nothing to tell them.

She shivered, and almost cut him. If they were seen together or connected in any way, then this was her end-game. There would be, quite literally, nowhere to hide. She had been told enough about Faraj Mansoor, however, to know that he was a consummately professional operative. If he had shot and killed the boatman last night, then that would have been the best course of action at that particular moment. If it didn’t worry him that he had ended the man’s life, then it shouldn’t worry her.

He was, she supposed, quite a good-looking man. She had preferred him as he had been when he’d woken up-still the wild-haired fighter. Now, beardless and neatly cropped, he looked like a successful website designer or advertising copywriter. Handing him the blued-steel scissors, she took the binoculars, stepped out on to the shingle, and scanned the horizon.

Nothing. No one.

The book that she had picked up shortly after her fifteenth birthday was a life of Saladin, the twelfth-century leader of the Saracens who had fought the Crusaders for possession of Jerusalem.

She had flicked through the first few pages, her mind on other things. She had never had much of a taste for history, and the events she was reading about had taken place in a past so distant, and in a culture so obscure, that they might as well have been science fiction.

Unexpectedly, however, she had found herself engaged by the book’s subject. She pictured Saladin as a spare, hawk-faced figure, black-bearded and spike-helmeted. She learned how to write the name of his wife, Asimat, in Arabic script, and imagined her rather like herself. And when she read of the final surrender of Jerusalem to the Saracen prince in 1187, she was in no doubt that this was the outcome she would have wished.

The book represented the first step of what she would later describe as her orientalist phase. She read haphazardly and indiscriminately about the Mohammedan world, from swooning love stories set in Cairo, Lucknow and Samarkand to The Arabian Nights. In the hope of acquiring a Scheherezade-like mystique, she dyed her mouse-brown hair jet black, perfumed herself with rosewater, and took to painting the insides of her eyelids with kohl from the Pakistani corner shop. Her parents were bemused by this behaviour, but were pleased that she had found an interest and that she spent so much of her time reading.

Her early impressions of the Islamic world, refracted as they were through the prism of teenage escapism, would not have been recognised by many Muslims. Within a couple of years, however, the romantic novels had given way to dense volumes of Islamic doctrine and history, and she had begun to teach herself Arabic.

Essentially, she longed for transformation. For years now she had dreamed of leaving her unhappy and unremarkable background behind her, and of entering a new world where she would, for the first time, find total and joyous acceptance. Islam, it seemed, offered precisely the transformation she sought. It would fill the void inside her, the terrible vacuum in her heart.

She took to visiting the local Islamic centre, and, without telling her parents or teachers, receiving instruction in the Koran. Soon she was regularly visiting the mosque. She was accepted there, it seemed to her, as she had never been accepted before. Her eyes would meet those of other worshippers and she would see in them the same quiet certainty that she felt herself. That this was the right path, the only path. That the truths offered by Islam were absolute.

She told her teacher that she wanted to convert and he suggested that she speak to the imam at the mosque. She did so, and the imam considered her case. He was a cautious man, and something about this ardent, unsmiling girl worried him. She had done the necessary study, however, and he had no wish to turn her away. He visited her parents, who expressed themselves “totally cool” with the idea, and shortly after her eighteenth birthday he received her into the Islamic faith. Later that year she visited Pakistan with a local family who had relatives in Karachi. Soon, as well as speaking fluent Arabic, she was proficient in Urdu. When she was twenty, after returning twice more to Pakistan, she was accepted as an undergraduate at the Department of Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne in Paris.

It was at the beginning of her second year at the university that the frustration began to bite. She was trapped, it seemed to her, within an utterly alien culture. Islam prohibited the belief in any god but Allah, and this prohibition included the false gods of money, status or commercial power. But everywhere she looked, amongst Muslims as well as unbelievers, she saw a crass materialism, and the worshipping of these very gods.

In response, she stripped her life to the bone, and sought out the mosques which preached the strictest and most austere forms of Islam. Here, the religious teachings were placed in a context of hard-line political theory. The imams preached the need to reject all that was not of Islam, and especially all that pertained to the great Satan-America. Her faith became her armour, and her abhorrence of the culture that she saw around her-a bloated and spiritless corporatism indifferent to anything except its own profit margins-grew to a silent, all-consuming, twenty-four-hours-a-day fury.

One day she was sitting on a Métro station bench, returning from the mosque, when she was joined by a young, leather-jacketed North African with a straggly beard. His face seemed vaguely familiar.

“Salaam aleikum,” he murmured, glancing at her.

“Aleikum salaam.”

“I have seen you at prayers.” His Arabic was Algerian in inflexion.

She half closed her book, looked meaningfully at her watch, and said nothing.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

Expressionless, she angled the book so that he could see the title. It was the autobiography of Malcolm X.

“Our brother Malik Shabazz,” he said, giving the civil rights activist his Islamic name. “Peace upon him.”

“Just so.”

The young man leaned forward over his knees. “Sheik Ruhallah is preaching at the mosque this afternoon.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“You must come.”

She looked at him, surprised. Despite his unkempt appearance, there was a quiet authority about him.

“So what is it that this Sheik Ruhallah preaches?” she asked.

The young man frowned. “He preaches jihad,” he said. “He preaches war.”