Leaving Tangier

11. Mohammed-Larbi

MOHAMMED-LARBI was a quiet young man. Off in his corner, all alone, he was putting together his plans to leave the country at last and realize his dream. Twenty years ago his maternal uncle, Sadek, had gone to Belgium and found work, and he had promised to bring his nephew there one day. Sadek was now a leader of the Muslim community in the northern neighbourhoods of Brussels, familiar with all possible and imaginable networks for leaving Morocco, thanks to his contacts throughout most of the Moroccan émigré diaspora. When he left Morocco, Sadek had been twenty years old, remarkably industrious, and determined to succeed, but he hadn’t been a particularly observant Muslim. Nowadays he saw the children of immigrants ‘going bad’ time and again, their parents helpless, overwhelmed, and above all clinging desperately to a culture reduced in general to major religious occasions like Ramadan and Aïd el-Kebir,* although it was becoming increasingly difficult to cut sheep’s throats in a bathtub or backyard. Neighbours and animal protection agencies had protested, and the state had been obliged to intervene. Sheep now came from the slaughterhouses ready to go into the oven or be cut into pieces, which deprived the feast of some of its original meaning and spirit, but the faithful would have to adjust to this as best they could. Sadek could read and write, and one day he had drawn up a list of the typical cultural objects in his daily life: prayer rug, prayer beads, polished black stone for ablutions, Andalusian music, Arab and Berber pop songs, djellaba for going to pray, couscous after prayers on Friday, satellite dish to receive Moroccan television, honey pastries, brass teapot, mint tea, low table, incense, rose water, red tarboosh,* yellow babouches, clock with a picture of Mecca on the face…

And then, abruptly, he’d stopped.

‘Language!’ he exclaimed aloud. ‘What tongue do we speak with our children? Oh — our Arab dialect is so poetic at home and so foreign here… We speak a bad Arabic stuffed with bad French!’

Concluding that Islam was the culture he and his fellow immigrants needed, he began the long, arduous process of convincing the municipal authorities to build a mosque. Thanks to Sadek, after three years the faithful were offered a modest but convenient site for worship in the heart of the Muslim community. That was in the early 1990s, at the very moment when the Algerians had gone to war against themselves.

As for Mohammed-Larbi, he obtained his visa with the utmost discretion. Azel had been friends with him for a time, and at one point, realizing that he hadn’t seen him for a while, he wondered if he’d disappeared, or simply changed neighbourhoods and friends. No, Mohammed-Larbi had not disappeared: instead of going out at night, he was working in a bakery. A nondescript man, neither short nor tall, with the usual dark eyes and complexion, he’d simply been forgotten. Azel did remember that he spoke rapidly and that when he drank, he soon became tipsy and began ranting, insulting religion, jumbling together things sacred and profane. Azel recalled in particular an evening when Mohammed-Larbi took on the entire planet, cursing God and the prophets, spitting at passers-by with whom he tried to pick fights. He was strong, and his companions had struggled to restrain him. Nobody knew why he had these fits of anger, but a keen observer would easily have seen that he was psychologically unstable.

Then Mohammed-Larbi changed his appearance and attitude overnight: he began going daily to the mosque instead of the café, and he no longer spoke to his pals in the neighbourhood. When Kenza ran into him in their street one day, she went up to give him a friendly kiss, the way she used to when they’d played together. He pushed her firmly away.

‘If you want me to shake hands, wrap yours in a Kleenex, and I’d also prefer that you not speak to me in the future — it’s a question of respect.’

He obtained a visa and his friends never saw him again.

As soon as Mohammed-Larbi arrived in Belgium, his uncle Sadek took him in hand, inviting him to join a small group he’d organized that met every evening to read the Koran and listen to an Egyptian speaker, a self-styled alem, or religious sage. There was something lugubrious about these meetings. Already indoctrinated by his uncle, Mohammed-Larbi would never speak, but he listened and heeded the advice of the alem, who addressed a different topic every time, for example, the relations between the sexes: how to maintain the absolute superiority of men over women, how to defeat Western propaganda seeking to destroy masculine power, how to perform one’s conjugal duties without slipping into vice, and so on.

The alem did not mince words.

‘Never forget that women’s wiles are terrible: God Himself has told us so and put us on our guard. Know that Evil springs from the heart and body of woman, but that Good also knows how to take form there: think of our mothers… Above all, pay attention to the future of your daughters, here, on Christian soil. A few days ago, did not the police of this country summon a friend of mine, a virtuous man, to find out why he had beaten his disobedient eldest daughter? She had wanted to go out for the evening wearing make-up and ready for who knows what! God forbid! Do you realize that here they punish a family man for protecting his daughter’s virtue? The West is diseased, and we don’t want it to infect our children. Have you heard about those laws allowing men to marry among themselves and even to adopt children? This society is losing its mind! That is why you must be extra vigilant with your children, especially your daughters, so that they do not stray onto the paths of vice. Just look at the walls of Brussels: they call that advertising! Half-naked girls showing their bottoms to sing the praises of some car or other! Men made up like women, posing to sell perfume! We have nothing in common with all this depravity, this abandonment of values, of the family, of respect for the elderly. We — we are here because such is our destiny: God has wished this, and we are in the hands of God, who is watching us and testing us. Shall we offer this impious society our children? Shall we stand by without saying anything, doing anything? No, my brothers. We are Muslims, responsible and united, we belong to the same house, the same nation, the Umma Islamiya! No one can leave this great house. We are born Muslim and Muslim we shall return to the Creator.’

The alem, naturally, was simply repeating what other immigrants were saying in the cafés. There was nothing original about his talks at all, and Mohammed-Larbi had probably already heard this speech even in Tangier, especially during the summer when immigrant families would return on holiday. Perhaps, on the other hand, he remembered only those arrogant vacationing teenagers, uneducated, violent children neither wholly European nor truly Moroccan, who drove around in fancy cars. This last detail was particularly galling. Where did the money come from? Some people claimed the cars were one of the perks of smuggling kif, while others said they were rented, just for show. It was all rather shady and did not present a pretty picture of immigration.

Mohammed-Larbi knew the Koran because he had learned it by heart as a child, and although he hadn’t understood what he was memorizing, he still remembered the verses. In Brussels, where his uncle had found him a job in an appliance parts store, he returned for the first time to a serious reading of the Holy Book. The alem had given him a copy, saying that he would explain certain chapters to him when he had read the entire book. Meanwhile, Mohammed-Larbi had learned that the alem had two wives, who lived under the same roof. One day, after Friday prayers, the alem invited him home to share the traditional couscous dinner. As he was taking off his shoes, Mohammed-Larbi glimpsed the face of a pretty girl watching him from behind a curtain. The father had not noticed anything, and went on preaching as if he were still in the mosque. Later, as he was preparing to leave, Mohammed-Larbi felt something in his right shoe; pulling out a crumpled note, he quickly stuffed it into his pocket. As soon as the alem’s back was turned, Mohammed-Larbi hurriedly smoothed out the paper and read: Call me at this number between five and six o’clock in the afternoon — Nadia, the girl behind the curtain.

Although quite intrigued, Mohammed-Larbi hesitated awhile before calling. It was a cellphone number. After considering various hypothetical scenarios, he called from a pay phone. Nadia answered and went straight to the point, speaking quite rapidly.

‘I’m being punished, confined at home by my father because he saw me talking with a boy outside my lycée — I’m not allowed to go out and I think he’s told the principal that I’ve dropped out of school. Can you help me, save me? Don’t tell anyone, but find an excuse to come back to the house to ask for me in marriage, take me away with you — I don’t want to get married, but if it’s my only chance to get out of here I’ll take it. I’m seventeen and a half, I can’t breathe in this house anymore: my father has gone crazy, all my sisters have already been married off to men they didn’t want, and I suspect my father is arranging the same for me! If you like, we could escape together. I have to hang up, this is my big brother’s phone and he’ll be coming back from the mosque, where he went with my father. Do you have a number where I can call you?’

‘No, I’m speaking from a pay phone.’

‘Call me Thursday at noon.’

It so happened that later the same week, the alem gave Mohammed-Larbi a cellphone in preparation for the young man’s coming trip to Egypt, where he would be studying religion. His uncle had told him it was an excellent opportunity.

‘You have the alem’s trust: do not disappoint him. There will be ten or twelve of you leaving for Cairo, where our brothers in faith will take care of you. It’s beautiful, Cairo, you’ll see, and the brothers are fine people, good Muslims at war against corruption and immorality.’

The first call Mohammed-Larbi made was to Nadia. The alem answered, and recognized the number. He did not become angry, said nothing, simply shut himself up in his room and made some phone calls using coded language. On that day, Mohammed-Larbi’s fate was sealed. From Egypt he was sent on to a training camp in Pakistan and was never seen again.