The Good Son

18

A t dawn, before the azan has sounded for the Fajr prayer, Bahram Alakazai sweeps into the prisoners’ room with his usual guards and announces that an important al-Qaeda leader, Khalid ibn Hassan al-Zaydun, has been killed by an American missile strike, along with twenty innocents, as a result of which there will be an execution that day at noon. Before that, the people will gather to hear the lies of the infidels and apostates refuted by those who know the true word of God. He speaks for some time. When he leaves, Sonia asks Manjit what he thought of the speech and the man.

“I thought he was needlessly prolix and vehement,” replies the Indian. “Why bother making such a passionate speech to his victims? We are certainly unlikely to convert to his way of thinking, and he need have no concern for what we think. I believe the real audience was his Praetorian guards.”

“I believe you’re right,” says Sonia. “He has the sound of a man unsure of his authority.”

“Your plan is working, then.”

“There is no plan. I told you already, people come to me and I help them. If Alakazai came to me I would try to help him too.”

“Do you think you could? He’s a true believer, and in my experience true believers are essentially unreachable by ordinary therapeutic means. They don’t suffer. Every setback or difficulty is projected onto others or onto the supposed enemy. Any offered help would appear as an assault on the perfection of his interior constructs, and we would undoubtedly see an abreaction, which, given the situation, might be personally dangerous.”

She looks at him and sees the sly smile on his face. “Yes,” she says, “and wouldn’t it improve therapeutic practice immensely if all therapists were held hostage by heavily armed patients? It would at least limit the power games we so often play. But no, I think our host is beyond my help. It will require a miracle to penetrate the armor of his righteousness.”

“And are you preparing such a miracle?”

“Manjit, what a conspirator you’ve become! Always seeing plots, with me in the center. Karl-Heinz is the same. Frankly, I almost wish there was some secret scheme to get us out of here, because I fear that the most likely outcome is that Alakazai will make a holocaust of all of us at once to reestablish his bona fides among his more bloodthirsty troops.”

Before long these troops appear and once again herd the prisoners against one wall of the room, while others move the charpoys against two other walls, leaving the wall with the door in it clear. Sonia notices that Idris and the handsome man whom they had seen before Cosgrove’s execution are seated on the wall opposite from where Alakazai sits, not in the seats of honor at his side where they had previously been placed.

From Sonia’s right comes a whisper: Amin. “I see we have a full house again. And I notice Idris has fallen out of favor with Alakazai. He has been exiled to the opposite wall.”

“Yes,” says Sonia quietly, “and so have the Arabs and their leader.”

“A Pashtun by his looks. What do you suppose they’re doing in the village?”

“Making bombs, according to Rashida. The Pashtun calls himself Abu Lais.”

“All of them are armed to the teeth. Do you notice a certain tension in the air? Perhaps this is your doing.”

“I did not discourage it,” says Sonia.

Now, again, the emir rises and voices the statement of grievance: the murder of a leader of jihad, and his family and friends, all innocents, by the weapons of the great Satan, and the consequent demand on the cursed apostate Sonia Laghari that she choose who should be killed in just revenge. Sonia names Harold Ashton, and he is duly pulled out into the center of the room by the man in the black striped turban, Sarbaz Khalid Khan, and his usual sidekick, the shaven-head with the bushy beard.

Ashton is pale but stands straight with his legs slightly apart and his hands clasped in the small of his back-parade rest, Sonia thinks; it is a military stance and must have some symbolism for the Englishman, a kind of defiance in his last moments. He addresses Alakazai directly, speaking good Pashto in a loud clear voice.

“Emir, noble Pashtuns, believers! I greet you as one of your enemies. My tribe is the Ingrezi, who ruled this land in your fathers’ time. I was born here and my father and his father, and we drank the milk of your women from the breast when we were babies, the same milk as you drank. I tell you this so that you know I am not a stranger, but a milk brother to the Pashtuns. My grandfathers fought your grandfathers, and their fathers before them, two hundred years of fighting. Once you defeated us, and we defeated you every other time. Let others argue if we were good rulers or not, but I think we were not the worst. When we ruled, a child could walk unmolested from Peshawar to Kerala with a bag of gold in his fist, and perhaps that is no longer true. In any case, we were not thrown from the country by force of arms, but we grew tired and poor and changed our beliefs. We thought it was wrong for one man to go to another’s house and rule him, even for some great good. I still believe it is wrong, even to do it in the name of God.”

He pauses to see how this is going down and looks as though he finds it satisfactory. At least he is a man and is speaking to them in their own language, and in the kind of oratorical phrasing they are used to in their own jirgas.

“When I was a youth I was a warrior, as you are now, and killed and saw much death in different places. I am your prisoner now, but only because I came, as I thought, under a truce, as a maker of peace with these others, and had not thought the Pashtuns would make war on unarmed old men and women. But I was wrong. When I fought as a warrior, perhaps you would not have captured me and perhaps some of you would be dead. But no matter. I fought alongside your fathers, and even some of you perhaps, in the Russian jihad, although I am an unbeliever. And after what I saw there, being no longer a youth but a man and growing tired of war, I began to think. I thought about the Pashtuns, and how they loved freedom and how well they fought to defend their homelands, and how little they got from it, how for many, many years the great powers had used them as pawns. And in the Russian jihad you were pawns too, for you would not have won without the help of the Americans and the Pakistanis. And beyond the Pashtuns I looked at the whole of the umma and I saw what we see today and what has been true also for hundreds of years: a people who are weak and poor and backward and ignorant. From Pakistan to Morocco, the Muslims invent nothing, manufacture nothing that anyone wants to buy. Is there a Muslim cell phone? Is there a Muslim car? Is there even a Muslim gun or a Muslim bullet? You know there is not, although you use these things happily enough. Was this why the Holy Qur’an was given to you, so you could be like the birds who peck grains from the dung of cattle?”

Uproar: they did not like this, not so much for the analysis as for the use of “dung” and “Qur’an” in the same sentence, but he was not dismayed.

“Listen!” he cried in a parade-ground voice. “Listen, believers, and let no one say you were afraid of hearing the words of a dead man. These are my last words, and I do not lie.”

They settled, and he resumed.

“Everyone knows this, but everyone disagrees about what should be done. Some say, abandon the traditional ways and become just like the rich countries, but no Muslim country has been able to do this except Turkey, which is a special case and only partly successful. Others say socialism-or said, because that has proven a false hope. Still others say, and you among them, let us return to living under the sharia, the law of God. If you meant that, no one would oppose you. Who in the West would give two pins if you all decided to live simply and be devoted to God? In America there are people, Christians called Amish, who live as their forefathers did, without electricity or machines, simple lives of peace, and everyone praises them and even envies them, a little. Or there are Jews who follow the exact law of Moses and dress as they did three hundred years ago, and who bothers them? But you don’t want to live under sharia, if living so means living peacefully in a museum. No, not at all. You want to rule. You want all the goods of the West, you want Viagra and tanks and missiles and electricity and cell phones and computers. But you can’t pay for these things because you also want to remain ignorant and uneducated, so you become tools of the oil sheikhs and sell drugs. You become the dogs of anyone who will buy you a gun. Is this the word of God? And who are these strangers you follow, from Arabia, from Egypt, who tell you it is forbidden to do things that your fathers and their fathers’ fathers did for as long as there have been Pashtuns? Were your fathers infidels? O Pashtuns, who taught you to spit on the graves of your ancestors?”

Now a more violent pandemonium than before. Every mujahid in the room is up and shouting. One man draws a huge knife and runs at Ashton, jabbing and screaming insults. Ashton holds his ground and two men rush out from the throng and lead the enraged man away. Sonia looks at Alakazai. He is shouting for silence, but his voice does not carry; it is an office voice and grows shrill, like a girl’s, when he puts power behind it. But now Idris Ghulan calls for silence with a voice of brass, and pulls out a pistol and fires two rounds into the ceiling.

Instant shocked silence, every ear rings from the shots, and all watch the sparkling dust float down from the bullet spalls and dance in the light bars streaming from the high windows.

“Let the man speak,” says Idris, and Sonia sees that the emir looks like he has been struck. All the men sit, if they have a place, and Ashton speaks again, as if he had never been interrupted.

“Now as to this teaching. Where does it come from? None of you would drink from a stream unless you knew the water was pure and unpolluted, or eat meat that was not prepared according to the law of halal, but you don’t take the same care of what you put into your minds, although the mind is the seat of the soul and it is the soul that will live in paradise, as you believe. Would you bring a polluted soul before God? So you must have a care with what you believe.”

Sonia sees looks of puzzlement cross the faces of the assembly. The idea of questioning their received beliefs has never occurred to them. It is like thinking about whether air really sustains life. But Ashton launches forth, unconcerned, into a history of modern jihadism, starting with its godfather, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahab, in eighteenth-century Arabia, and his Salafist belief that the first three generations after the Prophet practiced the only pure form of Islam and that all Muslims must return to this purity. Then he moves forward by leaps through the period of colonialism and the discontents it caused, with a side trip through the Indian Mutiny, then on to the effects of the dissolution of the caliphate in 1924, the feelings of abandonment that spread through the umma as a result, the writings and influence of Abdul Ala el-Mawdudi here in what became Pakistan, his passionate appeal for a rejection of the Enlightenment and the modernity that followed it, establishing the premise for a new kind of jihad. Not only were Muslims to resist the colonial oppressors, for it was abominable for infidels to rule over them, but, even more important, they were to resist the interior colonialist, their admiration for the power of the infidels, their sneaking urge to imitate them and grow rich and powerful themselves. This was a form of idolatry, he wrote, as bad as the jahiliya that the Prophet had overthrown.

Now Sonia sees nodding heads-the infidel is starting to make sense. Ashton has loosened his stance; he is gesturing dramatically now, but only with his left hand. He keeps his right arm clenched to his side, as if it has been wounded.

He speaks further in the same vein, about the great Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian who first extended these ideas to a condemnation not only of colonial regimes but also to supposed Muslim states that aped the infidels and pursued modernism, socialism, democracy, and liberalism. The poverty and weakness of the Muslim lands was their fault, Qutb said, because they had turned from the true religion. They were apostates, illegitimate, and every real Muslim was bound to resist them. The goal was nothing less than the restoration of the caliphate, a system in which state, religion, and society were again one, unfragmented, guided by the eternal word of God, embodied in the sharia. Qutb died a martyr, but his ideas could not be killed so easily. They spread, urged on by the shame of the Zionist usurpation of Palestine and the holy city, Al Quds, and the assaults on the umma by the Russians and the Americans. They were turned into action by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and here Ashton tells the familiar story of triumph and defeat and renewal. He says, “These ideas now live on in you. This is why you are here.”

Ashton pauses and looks out at the ring of dark, bearded faces. They are silent now, waiting, interested. He hitches up his right shoulder in a peculiar way and continues.

“The question now is whether you will succeed. Will you bring the caliphate to life again and erase five centuries of history? And the answer is that of course you will not. As the poet says, The moving finger, having writ, moves on; the Muslims may yet have another golden age, but it will not be like the last one, not at all. And your terrorism is futile. Terror is always futile, an announcement of impotence, the rage of a spoiled child. The powers of the earth will never allow a regime forged by terror to survive. The Palestinians have been crushed, the Chechens have been crushed, and the Russians left Afghanistan for the reason that all foreign powers leave Afghanistan, not because of the valor of the Pashtuns but because Afghanistan is worthless, a dry, rocky country that produces nothing but apricots and opium.”

At these words the audience begins to rumble menacingly, but Ashton raises his voice and goes on.

“At some level you know this, and that knowledge is symbolized by the suicide bomber. In all history, no campaign of suicide has ever prevailed. It is the last stage of impotent fury-meaningless, insane. At last we come to that word, and the purpose of the conference you have held hostage, which was to examine the psychological basis of the jihad. I am not a psychologist, but I have a theory. Perhaps my colleagues will disagree and call me foolish, but I will not be around to hear it, and I speak, therefore, without fear of contradiction. The key lies, I believe, in the one feature that marks all Salafist regimes, from Saudi Arabia to the Taliban, and that is the oppression of women.

“Why should this be? The Prophet was respectful of women, of his wives, Khadija and Aisha, and his daughter, Fatima, and the rightly guided caliphs consulted them in Islam’s early days, those days for which you pretend a deep and reverent nostalgia. The Qur’an is not notably against women, not even as much as the Bible. So I must conclude that the oppression of women is not a by-product of the jihad movement but its purpose. What drives you to murder and suicide is not the love of God but the fear of women, of educated women, of women released from the absolute domination of men. Because women are a true mirror. They are more sensible than you are, they want their children to flourish, and if they were free they would look at you all, and ask, ‘O believers, why so poor, why so ignorant, why so despised by the world?’ And they would despise you too. You fight to prevent this, you fight to preserve not the modesty but the stupidity of women, and where you succeed these stupid women produce even stupider sons-yourselves-and if there were a God he would be laughing in all your faces.”

Sonia can barely hear the last of this peroration because of the enraged screaming echoing from the walls and ceiling of the room, the cry of a culture gored in its vitals. The roar coalesces into a chant: Death, death, kill him, kill him! Dispensing with reasoned rebuttal, the two guards dart toward Ashton. The big one raises his AK, clearly meaning to smash the Englishman in the face, but Ashton backs away from him, in the direction of the wall against which the prisoners sit. It looks like he is trying to hide behind one of the thick pillars that support the roof beams.

The other guard, Sarbaz, slips around between Ashton and the wall, and jabs him viciously in the small of his back with the muzzle of his stockless Kalashnikov. The crowd is on its feet. The noise is tremendous, like that at a bullfight and for the same reason.

Then Ashton whirls around to his left, knocking Sarbaz’s muzzle aside with his left forearm. Sonia is only a few yards away and she sees the weighted sock he has held in his armpit drop into his right hand. A blur, as he swings it around, sending the stone crashing into Sarbaz’s temple, at the same instant grabbing the barrel of the AK with his left hand. Sarbaz collapses. Ashton flips the weapon into firing position, comes around the pillar, shoots down the other guard, takes a few steps away from the wall, and directs an accurate stream of automatic fire at Bahram Alakazai and the people sitting near him.

He has certainly handled a Kalashnikov before, thinks Sonia, and it was wise of him to step away from the prisoners. He gets off most of a magazine before the crowd understands what is happening. Thirty or so weapons answer Mr. Ashton’s arguments, and he falls, and the crowd rushes forward to fire more rounds into the heap of bloody rags and kick it and scream imprecations.

Now is the moment of greatest peril, Sonia knows, when the rage will turn toward the most convenient helpless objects, and all the hostages will be massacred. Several in the mob make just this suggestion, but a voice cries out, “The emir has been hurt, save the emir!” and this distracts them for a moment and they all rush over to surround the place where the emir and the group of his closest supporters lie in their blood. Within seconds of that cry, the Arab mujahideen dash forward, surround the hostages with weapons pointed, and hustle them out of the room, out of the inn, down a steep narrow street, and into a large private house, a two-story mud-brick structure surrounded by an eight-foot wall topped with rusty strands of barbed wire.

The prisoners are escorted to two rooms on the second level of the house, in the back, the men in one and Annette and Sonia in the other. The room holds two charpoys set at random in the middle of the floor, a pile of bedding, and a plastic water jug and basin. Light comes from a high window, a thin horizontal slit of blue. When the door is closed and locked, the two women look at each other, begin to weep, and fall together in a desperate hug. Their legs cannot hold them upright; clutched together, they slide to the floor. In two minutes the spasm is over. Sonia mops her face with her dupatta and grins.

“Well. We’re still alive. Oh, God, that poor bastard! He said he didn’t want to go out like a sheep and he didn’t. The emir is turning on a spit in Hell and we’re still here.”

“Did you know what he was going to do?” asks Annette.

“More or less,” Sonia admits.

“You arranged that massacre?” says Annette, her eyes widening.

“Of course not. How could I have arranged anything? I’m a helpless prisoner, just like you.”

“But what about what Karl-Heinz said, about what you were doing with Idris? He wasn’t killed. You must have told him what Ashton was going to do.”

“No. What we just saw was the result of a rivalry between factions of the mujahideen. Idris and Alakazai were at odds and Alakazai was plotting to kill Idris, and this insight emerged in Idris’s dreams. This happens all the time, but most people ignore it. I don’t, and obviously neither did Idris. For all we know, Idris arranged the whole thing. As you point out, Idris was sitting on the other side of the room, away from the line of fire.”

Sonia sees Annette nodding as she accepts this explanation. Sonia dislikes prevarication but she feels no need to dispense the truth in full to people who are better kept innocent. It is an ancient reflex of hers, and she has learned to live with it.

Annette says, “So what now? We seem to be in the hands of a different group of bastards. Are they going to kill us too?”

“It’s hard to say. It may just be a temporary respite until the pecking order gets sorted out. My sense of these Abu Lais guys is that they’re mainly interested in the bombs being made in the village. You’ve heard all the machine noises and the diesel cranking all night. I don’t think they have much interest in being burdened down with hostages. Idris might demand our return or he might have sold us to these Arabs in a side deal. Maybe he decided he doesn’t want to do any more executions, or maybe the Arabs would like to do them to spice up their own Web site, or maybe they have some kind of prisoner exchange in mind. I expect we’ll find out in due time. Meanwhile, I’m interested in when we’re getting fed. We would have had our postbeheading lunch by now, had it not been for Ashton’s stunt… What?”

Annette was looking at her as at a video of a traffic accident. “I don’t understand how you can be you. I mean, one minute you’re kind and caring and say you want to help people and the next you’re like, I don’t know, some kind of calculating monster. We’ve just witnessed an unbelievable horror and we might die horribly at any minute and all you can think about is lunch?”

“One thing has nothing to do with the other,” says Sonia, with a dismissive air. “Compassion is an obligation of the faith and I’m a therapist by inclination and training, and my instinct is to help where I can. All that is perfectly sincere. The other is me in my Islamic mode. Fate is in the hands of God and it’s ignoble to worry about what might or might not happen. Also, I think existing in two cultures the way I do provides a different perspective on things. It inclines one to the long view.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, take yourself, for example. By your own admission you’re a corn-fed midwestern woman, and despite the fact that you’ve been around the world in some pretty rough places, you retain that basic American optimism: folks are the same all over, everyone wants the good things in life, and so on. Being American, and Protestant in the bargain, you’re all for individual responsibility and the individual conscience that goes with it. You’re basically in control. If you’re in a church that doesn’t suit you for some reason, you’re out the door into another or you start your own. And you believe in progress. We can help people to advance, to be like us: bill of rights, elections, clean water, flush toilets, antibiotics, refrigerators and cars, the works.”

“Don’t you?”

“Up to a point. But as I said, I have the long view ingrained, along with all my co-religionists. Look at us now, locked up in what we think of as the ass-end of nowhere, but this area was once connected to a universal empire that stretched from Spain to Indonesia. A thousand years ago, Baghdad was the capital of the world, the richest city since the fall of Rome. Basra was the intellectual center of that world. Ever been to Basra? Today it’s easily distinguishable from Silicon Valley, but back then they were inventing paper and mathematics based on Arabic numerals, and they had more books per capita than anywhere else. Hell, there were more books and scholars in Timbuktu than there were in Paris. Timbuktu! The metonym for isolation!

“I’ll tell you a story. I’m in the middle of Central Asia, following my pir from shrine to shrine, all these decrepit little hovels watched over by shriveled men with no teeth. A devastated country, full of nothing but bones and blowing yellow sands-even the Soviets couldn’t make much of it-and it looked like it had been that way forever. We’d had days of storms, the sand blowing so thick you couldn’t see your hand, so we stopped outside a miserable village and pitched camp in the lee of some mounds, just a low brown scarp growing up near the track we were following.

“But in the middle of the night the wind dropped, fell off entirely, and it woke me up, the silence after days of that continual maddening howl, and I saw the most wonderful buttery light coming down from the sky. We were under a kind of tent, really just a crude windbreak, and I threw off my blankets and walked out. The sky was perfectly clear, thick with stars, and the moon was full, which we hadn’t been able to see in days. And I walked away from our camp through those mounds, to take a pee, and suddenly I found myself walking on a solid floor, not crunching sand; I was walking on a mosaic. The wind had blown the sand away and I realized that the mounds I thought were some geological feature were actually ruins. The mosaic was exquisite, the work of real masters, I could see that even by the moon, and I took out my pocket flash and looked at it. It wasn’t a floor at all, I saw; it was gently curved and it had calligraphy on it, worked out in mosaic tiles, black letters against a ground of lapis blue and gold. It said believe in the Unseen; that’s from the Qur’an, the second sura: That is the Book, wherein is no doubt, a guidance to the God-fearing who believe in the Unseen and perform the prayer. It must have been part of the dome of an absolutely enormous mosque.”

“Like in that poem.”

“Yes, ‘Ozymandias.’ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! But the thing here was that no one cared. It wasn’t an archaeological dig. Central Asia is thick with the ruins of completely forgotten cities, and this was one of them. When the Mongols came through they just destroyed everything and killed everyone. They didn’t like cities, the Mongols. So once you’ve had an experience like that, the cities of the West can’t look the same, and by extension the whole culture seems almost provisional. There’s nothing immortal about us either. Or you, I should say, the culture you represent.”

“Yes, but what do you do with that? How can you keep that in your mind? I mean, you’d never bother to do laundry.”

Sonia laughs at that. “Laundry is indeed one of the eternal things. Of course I live a daily life like anyone else, but always sub specie aeternitatis, if that makes sense. I’m religious, for one thing, and that helps; I suppose that’s what attracted me to Jung, besides the fact that I went crazy in Zurich and needed help. Jung thought there was something real going on beyond the scrim of nature and that it was the most interesting thing in the universe; the playing out of consciousness, both divine consciousness and the little fragment that we’re given to fool around with. Ah, the door opens! That has to be either lunch or death.”

It is lunch. One of the Arabs leans in and, with a scowl but without a word, places a tray on the floor, on which sits a blackened metal pot, a steaming can of tea, and two chipped cups. When the door is closed behind him, Sonia washes her hands and kneels by the tray.

“What is it?” Annette asks, without interest.

Sonia reaches into the pot and tastes. “It’s rice and peas and… by God, it’s mutton! Actual meat! I think we’ve received an upgrade, probably because we’re such good customers. Come on, it’s wonderful!”

The two women dip their fingers in the mess and eat, although Annette eats gingerly.

Sonia leaves off sucking on a small bone and asks, “What’s the matter, no appetite?”

“Not really. All I can think about is poor Harold looking like something from a butcher shop. I might be off meat for a while.”

“Suit yourself, but I intend to eat as much as I can, including your share.” Which she does and leans back against the wall, nearly content, sipping tea.

“You’re amazing,” says Annette.

“Why? Because I eat after observing a massacre and the slaughter of a colleague? Consider this: it might well be my last meal, or someone else might get hold of us and not feed us for a week. Here’s a tip: anytime you’re cut loose from the groove of Western bourgeois life, eat anything you can until you can’t eat anymore, just like four-fifths of humanity does every day. Uh-oh, I hope that’s dessert.”

A key rattles in the lock and the same guard steps in, holding a rifle. Both women stand. He gestures to Sonia. He says, “You come,” and, to Annette, “You stay.”

The man takes Sonia to another room. It is furnished with a charpoy, a simple wooden table, and a straight chair. In one corner sits a boxy shape the size of a small chest covered by a canvas tarpaulin. Sonia sits on the charpoy, and the Arab shuts the door behind him without a word.

Sonia waits. She is filled with a strange exultant expectation; she thinks it must be like waiting for a blind date who could be the one and only, or opening a fat envelope from a college admissions office, although she has never had these experiences. She reckons that nearly an hour must have passed when she hears steps outside. The door opens, and in walks the Engineer, Abu Lais. He looks at her and smiles and says, in barely accented English, “Well, Sonia, what the hell am I supposed to do with you now?”