Kinan grew up in a house like those. Six in one room, parents who clashed constantly. The sea to bathe in. In family photos he is a child whom you can barely glimpse, always hiding behind a cousin, an uncle. As though to protect himself. Today I’m going around with him, and everyone steps aside. Today he is thirty-one, and is one of the most well-known, most feared names in Male’s criminal world.
Male is split up among approximately thirty gangs. Although no one here talks about gangs. The guys say “the group.” Because a gang is such a normal thing, so ordinary that it’s not a gang—it’s a group of friends. One day you organize a little soccer match, the next day a robbery. Each gang has between fifty and five hundred affiliates, more or less. As usual, estimating is complicated. But it means that gangs here essentially involve one-fifth of the youth, who make up the majority of the population—the vast majority, since the median age in the Maldives is 18.7 years.
In the first and last study of street violence, a study carried out by the government in 2009, 63 percent of those surveyed said they did not feel safe walking around alone.
And 43 percent said they did not feel safe at home either.
Kinan ended up in jail for the first time when he was fifteen. For a brawl. He’s been a heroin addict and an alcoholic since he was seventeen. And even now, he sells drugs for a living. “Because no one here gives you a second chance,” he says. “I’m willing to take any job, but nobody ever wanted me. Nobody. Not even as a dockhand at the port. Sooner or later we all get arrested, all of us for drugs, because when you live ten people to a room, the truth is that you live on the street. You don’t have two feet of space where you can study, concentrate on a book; the only future you have is being a waiter. You see the world on television, and then you look around you. Exiled on this island, far away from everything. So what’s left?” he says. “Heroin.”
One reason being that alcohol is forbidden outside the resorts: heroin costs much less than vodka.
“You can’t change your life, but you can forget it. Because after all,” he says, “whether you’re in or out of jail, in Male you’re a prisoner no matter what.
“And the most insane thing,” he continues, “is that the more trivial the crime, the more severe the sentence is. If you steal a mango, not even from a store, from a tree, from your neighbor’s tree, you do a year in jail. And worst of all, you’re marked for life. And yet, at the same time, there is absolute tolerance—there is absolute impunity, because in reality we are at the service of the politicians. They hire you for everything and anything, from distributing leaflets to stabbing someone. Complete with a fee schedule: $1,200 to smash a shop window, $600 to burn a car, $1,600 to assault a reporter. So if they want to, if you’re useful to them, they’ll get you out of jail.
“More than tolerance,” he says, “it’s complicity.
“Sometimes,” he says, “they call you to simply distract public opinion. When people start talking about the lack of hospitals, transportation systems that don’t work, kickbacks and bribes, they ask you to stir up a little disturbance. A little brawl at the stadium. A little bloodshed. So people will think about something else. So they’ll think that the problem in this country is us.”
Kinan was sentenced twice, but never served out his term. Like his friend Naaif.
“And you, what do you do for a living?” I ask Naaif. He laughs.
“I’m paying off twenty-five years in prison.”
About $3.5 billion a year comes from tourism. But it’s all in the hands of four or five businessmen. And their foreign partners. The Maldivians don’t see a penny of it. Just a token to throw a Molotov. Fracture a nose. Tourism here is a tourism managed by tour operators; you pay the travel agency for everything. All at one time. All in advance. Essentially, the money doesn’t even pass through the Maldives. Even though someone like Kinan appears elegantly dressed, in a jacket and shirt, leather shoes. A briefcase in his hand. He looks very professional. He looks like someone who works in a bank. Or in a multinational. The air of a financial planner. Instead, the briefcase contains notes about his life—the heroin has destroyed his memory.
He doesn’t even remember when he was born.
He only remembers one thing, from the last thirty-one years.
“They all beat me up when I was little. The bigger boys wanted money, and they beat me. My parents beat me for stealing it from them. If I went to school, the kids beat me. If I didn’t go to school, my parents beat me. When I got arrested, I realized that I had to learn to defend myself,” he says. “That I had to beat them first.”
He looks at me.
“It’s not a justification.”
But it’s an explanation.
Because in the end Kinan doesn’t deny his responsibilities. He’s killed more than once.
“I’d like to tell you that I didn’t want to. That I only wanted to hurt them, threaten them. Only scare them. But no. That was what I wanted. It was exactly what I wanted—I knew what I was doing. But I also know what others do. I’m not the only criminal here. I’m just the most visible.
“I’m not the strongest,” he says. “The truth is, I’m the weakest.”
For ten years he’s been trying to change his life. And since no one is willing to offer him a second chance, he has now decided to offer himself a second chance: he’s decided to leave. He’s decided to go to Syria.
“It’s not difficult. No one checks you. Nobody stops you. They have every reason to get rid of us; we’ve committed all their crimes, we know all their secrets. And we all want to leave. Anything is better than Male.
“In Syria,” he says, “if nothing else, I’d be killed for a worthier reason.”
He’s still here, but only because he’s trying to save his brother. After a sixty-year moratorium, the death penalty is once again in force in the Maldives. And his brother, Humam, is first on the list: he is accused of having stabbed a deputy. Humam is twenty-two. He later retracted his confession, accusing the police of pressuring him. Above all, according to Amnesty International, he repeatedly showed signs of insanity. In any case, he is at most guilty of carrying out orders for what was a political homicide. Afrasheem Ali had announced that he wanted to run for president, and Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who was president of the Maldives for thirty years, from 1978 to 2008, and is still today considered the father of his country, had just declared that his party would support the most authoritative candidate in matters of Islam. The most experienced candidate. Who at that point would be Afrasheem Ali, rather than Abdulla Yameen, the current president.
But as he was returning home one evening, Afrasheem Ali was killed.
“For many people here, Syria is not only an economic opportunity but a moral one: something like a form of redemption,” Aishaat Ali Naaz, in the next room, tells me. “Going to Syria means having a house, a salary, friends. And most of all, an identity: a role, at last. Some meaning. Going to Syria means remedying your mistakes. Paying for your wrongs, and starting over from scratch. It may be because I’m a psychologist,” she says, “and I’m interested not so much in what someone does, as in why he ends up doing it, but honestly, for me these young men are just as much victims as their victims.” She is thirty-nine years old and heads the Maldives Institute of Psychological Services, Training and Research (MIPSTAR). The center where Kinan volunteers. They treat recovering drug addicts. They treat a little of everything, in fact: drug addicts, delinquents, alcoholics. Those suffering from depression. Individuals who are divorced. “Because life in Male is terrible,” she says. “And I’m not just referring to crime. You’re in the middle of the ocean. I mean, it’s fantastic, sure, but only for a day. A week. But then you’re trapped here. And what’s more, without a cinema, without a park, a theater, a concert. Anything. Every day the same as any other.”
Literally speaking: you don’t even have seasons here. The temperature is constant, between 77 and 88 degrees. The light is always the same in the Maldives. All year long. You don’t have summer and winter. You always wear the same clothes. The monsoons occur from May to October, and it rains, but it’s not cold.
“The Maldives are extraordinarily beautiful, of course,” says Aishaat Ali Naaz, “but it’s not as though you live on beauty. You live . . . You live on life.
“And in fact, it’s no accident,” she says, “that enemies have always been imprisoned on islands.
“Then too people have only one opportunity here,” she says. “To work in the resorts. But it’s a little like being a seaman, you’re away for eight, nine months. And families collapse. And besides, you can barely pay the rent for a house on that salary. With the whole country concentrated here, with so little space available, the demand is far greater than the supply, and prices are sky-high: a house in Male costs as much as a house in Paris. I’m a psychologist, I earn a good living, I have just one daughter, yet I have only two thousand dollars in the bank. Which means that if I get sick, I can’t afford a doctor. Many people participate in MIPSTAR activities just to come for a meal. No. It’s not a life,” she says.
“So what’s left?” she says. “Heroin.”
Heroin, or anything else. They chew glue. Smoke roots. They’re so desperate here that they invented a concoction called “cola water.” Essentially, it’s Pepsi mixed with eau de cologne.
Essentially, it’s cologne.
Essentially, you pass out.
A bit like in Gaza, where Tramadol, a painkiller, is used. Some people snort coke to feel like a million bucks, others just want to zone out and disappear.
Because the Middle East has other priorities now, but meanwhile in Gaza the Palestinians have been under siege for ten years. They no longer even have water: only seawater, only salt water. You feel sticky all day in Gaza, day after day, for years—and every now and then an F16 comes and drops its bombs. It comes and you die.
And then people talk about Hamas.
Aishaat Ali Naaz started out coping with drugs. Then prisons. Then gangs. Now she is coping with jihadists: “A progression,” she says, “which indeed explains a lot. The recruiting centers here are not the mosques. They are mainly the prisons. Because the youths begin taking drugs as kids. Around twelve years old. Sooner or later they’re arrested, and they usually go from being occasional delinquents to habitual offenders. Ninety-four percent of drug addicts have no previous convictions. They join a gang afterward. After the heroin. Partly because it’s the only way to protect themselves against the other gangs: with all those addicts, street violence erupts just for staring too long, or because of a misunderstood word. Or even for no reason at all. If the others go around in a pack, the only way is for you to go around in a pack too. The police in Male are nonexistent. Police are perceived as one of the many gangs. And so you go in and out of prison until a recruiter arrives; in theory he’s there to convince you to study, to learn a trade, and he gives you a Koran. He talks to you about Syria. About the children in Syria. Because the idea here is not so much to go and establish the caliphate, but to overthrow Assad. To help those children who are so much like the child you once were.
“The problem here isn’t Islam,” says Aishaat Ali Naaz. “The problem is heroin.”
According to a study conducted by the United Nations, 98 percent of those living in the Maldives have a friend who is a drug addict.
Forty-four percent have a drug addict at home.
Which is a bit like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s story. The founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq: what today is the Islamic State. Al-Zarqawi was essentially a thug. Until he ended up in jail for drug pushing and rape, and came into contact with Islam. To atone for his sins, he decided to go to Afghanistan.
The Syria of his generation.
He had so many tattoos that he was nicknamed “the green man.” He scraped them off himself, with a razor. Tattoos are forbidden by Islam, since they alter God’s creation. They alter man from the way God wanted him. So one day he scraped them off with a razor. Just like that. On his own. Skin and all. Because it was like scraping away his old life.
“Here all you do is work, work, work,” Aishaat Ali Naaz says. “Just to pay the rent,” she says. “I wake up in the morning, and I ask myself, what’s the point. I wake up, and I’m just exhausted.
“And everyone,” she says, “thinks this is paradise. What paradise?”
You arrive in the Maldives, and suddenly you are in another world.
Suddenly everything is different.
Different from what you know. And also from what you imagined.
Different from what you thought you knew.
Because the problem is that at some point the idea of globalization came about. Just because you get to Moscow, and you find a McDonald’s in Red Square. The idea that the whole world is a village. And then you come here, and it doesn’t matter that we all have a brother, a cousin, a friend who has been to the Maldives on vacation: the truth is that you get here, and you don’t even recognize the fruit they’re selling on the street. You walk along, and you see these indeterminate objects. A type of melon that looks like a mango. Kind of like a rugby ball. And then cylindrical forms that look like wooden logs, and small tubers scattered on the ground as if they were almonds, though they remind you of tulip bulbs more than almonds. Strange-looking peppers.
Or maybe they’re carrots.
Maybe you don’t eat them.
Maybe they’re batteries. For flashlights.
You come to the Maldives, and the truth is that everything is different.
All so unclassifiable.
Not only is the Lonely Planet guide the only book about the Maldives on Amazon, but there is no bookstore in Male. Which, if you’re a journalist, is one of the first places you go to when you arrive in a country for the first time. That is, there’s only an Islamic bookstore here, a couple of blocks past Aishaat Ali Naaz’s center. It’s also a very nice bookstore, very organized, with the kind of parquet floors that squeak. Only apart from books in Arabic, and a couple of titles in English, it’s all in Dhivehi, the local language.
And then they say English is a universal language.
Instead English is still the language of a minority. And a minority that is often rich, white and educated.
They say: No matter, now there’s Google Translate.
But there is no Dhivehi on Google Translate. It’s nowhere to be found.
I read a few titles. The Role of the Mosque. Humility in Prayer. A Guide to Interaction between Men and Women. They are all printed in Saudi Arabia. Sacrifice. Pilgrimage to Mecca. Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi, 15 Ways to Increase Your Earnings from the Qur’an and Sunnah.
How to Conquer Your Wife’s Heart.
“I’ll just shelve these books about jihad and be right with you. Just one minute.”
I look at the clerk.
“Jihad?”
“Yes, jihad.”
He looks at me.
“It doesn’t mean war, you know. It means struggle. The struggle to live in accordance with God’s will. Consistently. In accordance with your values. Jihad is everything that makes you a good Muslim.
“Or a good person,” he says. “If the word ‘Muslim’ alarms you.”
He is straightening out the shelves for children’s books.
Books such as At the Table. At School.
Getting Dressed. Little girls must dress as girls and little boys as boys. You have to put on your clothes starting from the right side. And there must be no animal images on the T-shirts. You must change your T-shirt after playing ball.
There is also a book for when you are sick. It says that you must repeat three times: Bismillah, “In the name of God.” And then nine times a’oozu bi’izzatillaahi wa qudratihi min and something that sounds like “Jesus, help me.” But aside from that, when you’re all better, it says, you must not forget those who are still ill. Those who are still in the hospital.
You must go visit them.
And if you’ve received a lot of games as gifts, now you can give some to those who don’t have any.
Because, you see, the book says, in reality we are always fortunate.
Some in one way, some in another.
And that is why, it says, we live together. To balance each other. To complete one another.
Maybe this is a book to read.
In the end I buy Problems and Solutions. That’s it. No further specifics. Any and all problems and solutions. Fifty-nine pages. The young man at the desk is watching Aleppo on an iPad. On YouTube. Beside him is a friend of his who is studying in Pakistan and is home for a couple of weeks.
“And what do you do?” he asks me. “Are you Muslim?”
“No,” I tell him. “But I live in Ramallah. I work for the Palestinians.”
It’s not Aleppo, it’s Idlib. They bombed a school. You see a child’s arm, on the ground, the hand still clutching a backpack.
“You look Arab.”
“I’m Italian.”
He looks at me.
“Italian,” he says.
“I saw those photos of . . . What’s his name? The ones with all the Muslims praying in supermarket parking lots.”
His name is Nicolò Degiorgis. The photographer.
Italy has 1.3 million Muslims. And eight mosques. Muslims pray in abandoned gyms, empty lots. In outskirts of cement and smokestacks. Under old tarpaulins.
Sheltered by sheets of plastic.
And Nicolò Degiorgis went to photograph them.
“And where did you see his photos?” I ask.
“In Time,” he says.
“Time?”
I look at him.
“And you’re studying in Pakistan?” I say.
“We read your books. We read your newspapers. You’re the ones who don’t know a word of Arabic. And yet you try to teach us how we should live. You probably don’t even know where Pakistan is. And yet your drones have been bombing Pakistan for twelve years.”
He looks at me.
“So you live in Ramallah. Have you been to Jerusalem?”
“Yes. Sure, it’s less than ten miles away. It’s close. I mean, no, it’s not close: it takes two hours. Three maybe. It depends. It depends on the Wall. There’s a checkpoint involved.”
“But you can go there.”
“Foreigners can, yes. We can go there. The Palestinians can’t.”
“And you work for the Palestinians?”
“Yes. I teach music to . . .”
“But you can go to Jerusalem.”
“That’s right.”
“You will never understand the Palestinians.”
And he goes back to watching Syria.
Fortunately, in addition to books, there are also newspapers. And local reporters.
Who will always explain everything to you.
And who are the true heroes, actually. The true journalists. For years they’ve been writing about what we are only beginning to write about now that it’s all a tragedy, now that it’s too late and what used to be demonstrations turned into revolutions, and what were revolutions have become wars: now that everyone is dead. Except that we write for the Guardian, and we amass prizes, whereas they write for the Mosul weekly. And all they amass are bombs.
The door of Minivan News has no nameplate, no logo, nothing: it’s an anonymous door in an anonymous condominium. You can tell you’re on the right floor because of the security cameras. In Dhivehi, “minivan” means “independent.” It’s the only paper in the Maldives that is independent of the government—and it’s the door where they stuck a machete. According to Reporters Without Borders, threats against the press are so frequent here, such an everyday occurrence, that 43 percent of journalists have decided not to report them anymore. Worst of all, 30 percent of journalists have decided to cover other matters. To ignore crime and corruption. Politics. To write about soccer and potholes in the streets.
Minivan’s headlines, on the other hand, seem more like those found in a Mexican tabloid than a newspaper in the Maldives. More what you’d expect from a paper in El Salvador. Torture, drug trafficking, prostitution. Kickbacks. Protests to demand electricity. To demand running water.
On the islands, 40 percent of the population falls below the poverty line.
But the government’s priority, these days, is a defamation law. Even though its definition of defamation lacks the fundamental adjective: namely, that the claim must be false. According to the government, a claim is damaging to a person’s reputation when it is contrary to what people think about that individual.
According to the government, defaming does not mean lying. It means criticizing.
It means thinking.
So now everyone in the Minivan newsroom is focused on that. All under a photo of Rilwan. Who is twenty-eight years old, with curly hair, and looks like a guy who’d be playing the guitar on the beach at night. The look of a guy who has it all together. The last time he was seen was midnight, and he was returning home. He was getting on a ferry to Hulhumale. It was August 8, 2014. Half an hour later a figure was seen, near his house, being dragged by a red car. Since then, there’s been no word of Rilwan. No one ever investigated.
Even though there are only two red cars here in Male.
And one of them, on August 8, was in Hulhumale.
“Not all mysteries can be solved,” declared the minister of the interior. “Americans are still trying to figure out who killed Kennedy.”
Yameen Rasheed is one of Rilwan’s best friends. He’s wearing a threadbare white shirt and silver cuff links, and though he has a very different look than Rilwan’s, he has the same head of hair. He is one of the only two secular bloggers in the Maldives. The only one who still writes. The other one was attacked and almost decapitated, barely stitched back together in the hospital. After that he moved to Sri Lanka.
I ask Yameen why he is still here. He graduated in India, he’s a computer specialist and speaks perfect English: he could go anywhere.
He says simply: “I was born here. I live here. And sometimes, living in a place, you can express an opinion.”
He says simply: “I’m not the foreigner here.”
The problem is that his opinion is a forbidden opinion here: the constitution recognizes freedom of opinion, but only if it is not exercised in a way contrary to Islam. Islam is the state religion. Only Muslims can be citizens of the Maldives. Apostasy is a crime. A crime punishable by death. You cannot have another religion, nor can you have no religion. Up till now, four people admitted to being atheists. The first was hanged. The second repented-in prison. The third is Hilath Rasheed. The one who was almost decapitated.
The fourth is missing.
The fourth is Rilwan.
“But it’s not a question of Islam,” Yameen Rasheed says. “In the seventies, when Gayoom came to power, the Maldives were an archipelago of primitive fishermen. Gayoom had studied at al-Azhar in Cairo. The best university in the Islamic world. For the Maldives at that time, a little like for Gaddafi’s Libya, his word was not the word of a president, it was the word of God,” he says.
Not having popular legitimacy, Gayoom created a religious legitimacy.
“Every decision was justified as a decision dictated by the Koran. What we call God’s will here has always been a very worldly will,” he says.
It was Gayoom who came up with the idea of resorts. For tourism at $5,000 a night.
“It was a way to modernize the country,” Yameen Rasheed says. And it worked: the country went from the third world to the first. Yet it was also a way to control it. By concentrating the population on Male. And most of all, by preventing any contact with other cultures. Of the 1,192 islands, only 199 are inhabited, and 111 are resorts—but there is no interaction. Not even among the resorts. Outside of working hours, employees are forbidden to stay around.
“What’s more, the resorts were built by foreign developers,” Yameen Rasheed continues, “because at the time no one had the capital required to build them. Or the skills necessary to run them. And that’s still the case today. Opening a resort is not like opening a hotel. The law requires foreign entrepreneurs to have a Maldivian associate, who is essentially the partner to whom the concession to an island is granted. For that reason, he is obviously a Maldivian who is generally very close to a politician. Or he’s a politician himself,” he says. “And that’s why, in the end, according to the opposition’s estimates, five percent of the population owns ninety-five percent of the wealth here.”
“Every developer has his own specific party,” adds Ahmed Naish, who specializes in crime and judicial news. “And each party has its own specific gang. And it’s difficult to change things, to challenge the system, because the judges are part of the operation: if you try to challenge it, you are completely vulnerable. Completely on your own.”
There are about two hundred judges, and they are still those appointed by Gayoom. Often they don’t even have a degree. Sixty percent of them only have a middle school diploma. Twenty-five percent have criminal records. But they are protected by the constitution. They are protected by the principle of judiciary autonomy. Abdulla Mohammed, the head of the Penal Court, has absolved criminals of all kinds, who have violated all types of laws, but no one has ever been able to arrest him, or even take any disciplinary measures against him, because he carries the court’s stamp in his pocket. At all times. Even at night: he takes it home with him. Yet when Mohamed Nasheed became president in 2008—the first elected president in the history of the Maldives— and tried to remove him, everybody accused him of attacking the judiciary.
Of trying to make the judiciary’s power subject to executive control.
Which is why Minivan News is now also in English. Because defending human rights is already complicated enough, but at times it’s necessary to defend yourself against human rights defenders as well.
“No, it’s not a question of Islam,” Yameen Rasheed says.
“Because Islam here is political, not religious. With Gayoom, every dissident has become much more than a dissident: he’s become an infidel. Even the tsunami, in 2004, was seen as a punishment from God,” he says. “They show you all these videos in which the water sweeps away everything on an island except the mosque. But the problem isn’t Islam. Behind Islam, there is always something else. The champion of the alcohol prohibition law was Gasim Ibrahim, a deputy who, in addition to being a faithful follower, is a fervent businessman: he is the biggest importer of everything that he has banned. His resorts are the major consumers of whiskey and vodka. Wines of all kinds. It’s nothing new. Religion is the opium of the people. The problem is when it also becomes the opium of the analysts.
“Because the problem here is not Islam,” he says. “The problem is the economy.
“The economy,” he repeats. “Because the problem isn’t poverty, but inequality. It’s not that there are no resources here, it’s that they are not fairly distributed.”
“But I don’t understand why no one protests,” I say. “Given that it’s not a lack of resources. The Maldives are certainly not Biafra. Why don’t people demonstrate?”
“Simple. Because no one here can afford to demonstrate. Nobody earns enough to save: if you get arrested, your family instantly goes hungry. The last time I was in jail, when they stopped me at a rally a year ago, there were twenty-seven of us in a cell. Everyone was fired. And if you have a prior record, then no one will hire you anymore,” he says. “Especially in public administration.” Which here, not surprisingly, employs 12 percent of workers. In a country that could be run by a computer and two secretaries.
An old tactic employed by regimes in every period and at every latitude.
“Politics,” he says, “is the first luxury a poor man can’t afford.”
Gayoom remained in power until 2008. In Asia, his was the authoritarian regime that lasted the longest. Then Nasheed, one of his long-time opponents, became president, but after a few years he was overthrown by a coup. That is to say, he stepped down. Because in theory, the Maldives are a democracy. Even though, since 2013, the president has been Abdulla Yameen. Gayoom’s half-brother.
The one whose rival was Afrasheem Ali.
But there’s a government here. There’s a parliament. Freely elected. Even so, Male’s main square, Republic Square, the square where demonstrations take place, eloquently conveys how democracy works here. In its center is the Maldives flag—green, of course, the green of Islam, with the crescent—with a red border, symbolizing sacrifice for the country. On one side of the square is the Grand Friday Mosque. The most important mosque in Male. To the left is the police headquarters. To the right, the security forces control center.
The fourth side is bounded by the sea.
Should anyone think about getting away.
Majeedhee Magu, one of the main streets that cuts through the city, leads off from a corner of the square. It’s the street with all the souvenir shops. Although the souvenirs are actually from China, because the Maldives are so lacking in everything that there are no local crafts. I think the Maldives are the only country in the world where there is no local cuisine. No characteristic fare. Only fish. Fish and coconuts. And besides that, the fish—all those great fish you see in the travel agency ads—are generally also poisonous.
The Maldives produce only shells. Shells and coral.
And shark teeth.
And sand. Dozens and dozens of sand bottles.
The rest comes from China.
And yet, despite it all, I’m here because I’m looking for a hat. A hat for a friend for whom I buy a hat from every country I go to, and I saw on Google that there’s a guy, in Guatemala, or maybe it was Honduras, a guy who still makes the traditional Maldivian hat: a palm leaf hat. Coconut palm.
Woven coconut palm leaves.
Except I asked everyone, and no one has any idea what I’m talking about. And they told me that this is the only possible street. That if the hat exists, it’s here. In one of these shops.
The first one I go into essentially sells shells. Shell necklaces, shell brooches, shell picture frames. Shell boxes. Painted shells. Shell ashtrays, shell soap dishes, shell sugar bowls. Shell bottle-openers.
Shell magnets. Shell purses.
“I’m looking for a hat. A palm leaf hat.”
“They’re back there.”
The owner points me to a stack of straw hats.
“But these are panama hats, right? I wanted a local hat, characteristic of here.”
“Characteristic?”
“I wanted a hat . . . The hat that everyone here wears.”
He directs me to a stack of baseball caps.
“This is what everybody wears,” he says.
“No. Maybe not characteristic: traditional. I wanted the traditional hat of the Maldives.”
“What do you mean by traditional?”
“Traditional. The traditional hat.”
“Like my father’s hat?”
“Yes, something like that. What kind of a hat did your father have?”
“What kind of a hat does he have—he’s still alive, thank God. He has a cap like these.”
“No, no . . . Your grandfather then. Your grandfather, for instance, what kind of hat did he have?”
“My grandfather?”
He looks at me.
“I honestly don’t know if he had a hat,” he says. “I think he wore a kerchief on his head. For the sun. A white kerchief. But what does that tell you? If he had seen these, he would have worn one of them, wouldn’t he? He used candles, but if he had seen light bulbs, do you think he would still have used candles? No, he would have bought one of these caps here.
“Right,” he dismisses me. “If you ask me, these are the characteristic hats.”
So characteristic that even the dead would wear them.
In the second store, there are two Danish tourists. And there’s a bit of everything. T-shirts, mats, wooden dolphins, plastic dolphins, ceramic dolphins. Flip-flops. Lighters. Framed scorpions. Framed spiders. Refrigerator magnets. Mother-of-pearl coasters, fish-shaped coasters, panda-shaped coasters.
There is also a foxtail.
“I’m looking for a hat. A palm leaf hat.”
“They’re over here.”
The owner points me to a stack of straw hats.
“No. Palm. Not straw. A palm leaf hat.”
“Palm leaves?”
“But of course,” the Danish man says. “The green hat. The one that later turns yellow.”
“That’s right. The traditional hat from here.”
“What do you mean by traditional?”
“The kind that everybody wears. The one in that ad . . . That’s right. The green one.”
The Danes are husband and wife. They’ve been coming to the Maldives for ten years.
They’re on their way to the airport.
Because tourists stop at Male for a couple of hours at most, just to buy a few sand bottles. Or they don’t stop at all. If you look for weather forecasts on your iPhone, you won’t find Male, you’ll be taken straight to Male Airport.
It’s the first thing you notice here. You arrive, you’re in the Maldives—and there are no hotels.
There are no tourists.
While the Danish couple is paying, I rummage around a while longer.
Coconut shampoo. Coconut milk. Coconut oil. Coconut soap. Coconut wood ladles.
“So then,” the owner says. “Let’s see about this hat. Do you have a photo?”
Right. A photo. The guy from Guatemala.
Or from Jamaica, wherever the hell it was.
I hand him my phone.
Watercolors on coconuts. Candles inside coconuts. Coconut handbags. Four cat figurines with glitter.
“But this is Syria.”
He looks at me.
“Are you Syrian?”
“No,” I say.
“But this is Aleppo.”
“I’m not Syrian. But I live in Syria. I’m a journalist.”
“Dear God. Everything there is destroyed.”
“More or less.”
“They’re all dead.”
“Almost all. Assad is alive.”
“And are you here to write about the Maldives?”
“No. I mean, yes. But I’m here for the hat.”
“Finally! A journalist!”
“Maybe you know someone here, who still knows how . . .”
“Tell the truth, you’re here because of the jihadists. But you have to write about the Maldives. You have to tell everything. Because lately I don’t read anything anymore, you know? Especially anything about the war. You go there, and you even risk your lives, and you write that there’s shooting. Of course there’s shooting: it’s a war. But because you risk your lives, I want you to explain to me why they’re shooting. You understand, don’t you?”
“Sure. Yes, of course, you’re right, but for now I have this friend, you see, for whom . . .”
“Did you see what the lady bought?”
“. . . for whom I need a hat.”
“The lady who was here. The Danish lady. She bought some coins. Some actual coins: some rufiyaa. They’re one of the best-selling souvenirs. Because here you pay for everything with a credit card. And you just stay in the resorts. No one has any idea of how we live. What Male is all about. Then one day someone blows himself up, and everyone says it’s Islam.”
“Maybe on an island. What do you think? Maybe on an island somebody still knows how to weave a . . .”
“Everyone says: They’re crazy!”
“. . . maybe on an island of fishermen. Because in the city, no way . . . whereas on an island, maybe they still follow tradition possibly? Maybe you know an island . . .”
“But they aren’t crazy. No, they’re not crazy. The problem isn’t Islam. The problem is everything else. I worked in the resorts for ten years. We took leftovers from the plates, in the rooms. And I swear to you, even today, I’ve never tasted anything better. There it is. Our life is such a shitty life that the best for us is what’s garbage for others.”
“No? Well . . . So how old is this Gayoom? Ninety? How long . . .”
“We’re invisible. Completely invisible. And we’ll continue to be until one of these guys blows himself up along with thirty tourists, then the whole world will realize what living here is really like. And at that point no one will come here anymore. And the economy will collapse, and the government will arrest everyone. And it will be a tragedy. It will be even worse than now. You have to write about the Maldives now. Not later. Later it will be useless.”
“But I’m actually here. And I’ll write about it now. I’ll write all about it. I swear. But if meanwhile you should . . . But anyway, even on the Internet really. From the guy in Guatemala. What do you think? Maybe I could buy that hat on the Internet. Maybe that would be simpler.”
“You hear all those analyses, all those theories . . . I mean, is it so hard to understand? A world like this is a world that can’t function. This is our only life—and we want to live it. Of course, if people think this is paradise, then we seem crazy. But you have to tell all about it. Every last thing. You have time for coffee, right? I’ll help you. Leave it to me.”
“Do you know someone who makes the hat?”
“I have a grandson.”
“You have a grandson who makes the hat?”
“I have a grandson who is going to Syria.”
Ali is twenty-five years old, thin, somewhat ascetic, with a modest, unassuming air and a three-or four-inch beard; he’s wearing flip-flops,ankle-length jeans, and a light-colored shirt with a Korean collar that resembles a tunic. He’s a shy, taciturn young man. Abrupt at times. But he’s one of those people you can tell is just insecure. Most of all, he’s ready: the trip costs $3,000 and he’s accumulated $2,730. Saved up by selling hashish. “Let’s say $2,700: I’ll need a backpack. Make that $2,600: I might also need a jacket,” he says. “A hoodie. It will be cold. Will it be cold there?” he asks me. He’s never been out of the Maldives. Now however his phone has every map of Turkey, and he follows the battle minute by minute, inch by inch; he knows everything about the front. About the rebels, about the regime. Who’s advancing, who’s retreating. Who’s winning. Who’s losing. He knows less about Syria. About its complexity. About the secular activists, the looting, the smuggling, the internal clashes, the feuds, the war as a business, the numerous checkpoints on both sides of the front whose purpose by now is no longer to impede the enemy, but to extort the last remaining cent from civilians. Although in a way, he’s not going to Syria after all. He says: “I’m going to paradise.”
And in any case, he knows even less about the Islamic State he’d like to live in. “The problem,” he says, “is democracy: the problem is men’s demand to decide things of their own free will rather than according to God’s will.” But for the rest, he’s vague about the Syria to come.
“What do you expect to find?” I ask him. He has no uncertainty. “Brotherhood,” he says. A new life. A different life. “A society in which we are all men, not vultures. Predators, like here. Where everyone profits from one another. And the only thing that matters is having the latest iPhone, the latest iPad. To acquire. To acquire and nothing more. And to acquire, we’re willing to do anything. Because you think you don’t believe in anything,” he says, “but instead you do believe, you believe as much as I do. You believe in the world as it is.
“We are all at the front,” he says. “Those who don’t fight are in fact rooting for the strongest.”
Those who don’t fight are in fact the strongest.
And the world is okay with them that way.
As for the Islamic State, mostly he knows what it shouldn’t be. But his friend Mohamed laughs when I tell him that where I come from we say that the foreign fighters don’t really know Islam. When I tell him about the guy at the Birmingham airport who, before leaving, bought a study guide on Sharia. And it seems he’s not an isolated case. A kind of archive was found in Syria. Of index cards. Hundreds of cards, filled out by foreign jihadists upon arrival. Name. Occupation. Education. Languages spoken. Do you have a driver’s license? Can you drive a tank? Things like that. And 75 percent of the recruits, apparently, stated that they had only elementary impressions about Islam. But that doesn’t mean anything to Mohamed.
“No Muslim would call himself an expert on Islam,” he says. “The Koran begins by saying: study.” Then he looks at me and says: “Like Kant, right? Sapere aude.”
Mohamed is twenty years old and an omnivorous reader. A reader not only of the Koran: he is passionate about philosophy and literature, especially American literature. About international relations. He looks like what he is, a student: jeans, polo shirt, and shoulder bag. Studying Sharia.
“Islam is justice. Justice understood as it is understood everywhere, as equality of rights and opportunities. In your world when a person says Sharia he is thinking about the Taliban. About severed hands, about decapitated heads. Whereas Sharia is the opposite. Sharia protects you. Yours is a law developed by legislators. Ours on the other hand is a law developed by expert authorities. And that means that it is a law that binds everyone—even legislators. That is the fundamental principle of Sharia. No one is above the law. No one is exempt from the rules. Not even those who govern,” he says. “Sharia is with you. Not against you.
“Sharia has the same objective as your constitutionalism: to limit power. Placing individuals at the center of the society. Not the sovereign. Not the one in power, the leader of the moment. The bully of the day,” he says. “In Mohammed’s time, people lived in tribes. They lived in groups because life was harsh. A single individual was merely part of the group, he had no autonomy. He had no value in and of himself. And in fact, there were no responsibilities for the individual: neither blame nor merit. Everything was attributed to the tribe as a whole. The Koran overturned all that. It was revolutionary, literally—because it was individualistic. In Islam you have no intermediaries; in Islam you have a direct relationship with God. It is you and you alone who will one day be judged. And only for your own actions. Islam, it’s true, means submission,” he says. “But it is submission to what makes you free.
“It means submission to God instead of to Assad,” he says.
“It means steering straight ahead, even when the world around you is adrift,” he says. “Staying the course: Sharia, ‘the right way.’ Because it doesn’t matter what the majority decides. The majority also chose Hitler.”
Mohamed too is leaving. But he didn’t have to sell hashish for the $3,000. He comes from a very religious family. He asked his father for the money.
“The Maldives could be like Dubai,” he says. “Like Switzerland. The population is small, we are more or less three hundred and fifty thousand, and tourism generates billions of dollars. And yet everything here is a favor. A concession. If you get sick, you knock on the president’s door, and they pay for your treatment in Sri Lanka. Which is why no one rebels. Because that’s the way everyone solves his problems. Thinking only of himself. We’re not citizens, we’re mendicants.”
On the other hand, Mohamed explains, Islam is clear. “Islam tells you: You stand before God. Hold your head up. It tells you: You have no excuses. Choose. Choose which side you are on.”
“But then, why don’t you start your battle in the Maldives?” I ask him. “Why Syria?”
“We are Muslims. We are a single community. And Syria is simply the priority. The opposite would be strange,” he says. “If given the five hundred thousand deaths, we were to think more about ourselves than about Syria. But the truth is that Syria is the new Bosnia,” he says, “a war that no one cares about, that no one stops, because after all it’s Muslims who are being exterminated. If it were Christians, the UN would have intervened immediately. The real question,” he says, “isn’t: Why are you going to Syria? The real question is: Why are you still here? The odd ones are those who, with five hundred thousand deaths, don’t think about going.”
His role model, after Mohammed, is Malcolm X.
Nevertheless, those like Ali and Mohamed would have a lot to work on in the Maldives. Only Muslims can be citizens here, while at school Islam is the main subject, and shops close for prayer five times a day—though the shop clerks stay inside and drink coffee, rather than go to the mosque. And the same goes for alcohol: it’s forbidden, but it’s sold at the bar of the Island Hotel. Next to the airport. You just have to pay. A judge was even filmed with two prostitutes.
But if you’re a woman, any woman, and you engage in sex outside the marriage, they whip you publicly in front of the courthouse.
Because it’s true that here everything is forbidden. But then on the weekend everyone goes to Sri Lanka.
Where everything is permitted.
“It doesn’t matter that IslAm is the state religion. At present, a truly Islamic state doesn’t exist,” Ali says. “The problem is that the Koran focuses on principles. It’s not an instruction manual: it outlines the underlying tenets, which must then be rendered specific in more concrete rules. It is therefore complemented by the Hadith, examples drawn from Mohammed’s life.” And by the Sunna, the words and acts of Mohammed’s life. Tradition. From which we get the term “Sunnis.” The Shiites instead look not only to Mohammed but also to their religious leaders. Who are direct descendants of Mohammed.
“The Hadith are basically anecdotes,” Ali says. “And they have been handed down orally for centuries. The most reliable number is about five thousand: but all in all there are half a million of them. And so the problem is that whatever argument you want to support, you will always find a hadith that confirms your thesis.
“Because,” Ali continues, “many hadiths do not at all convey tradition, the practice in Mohammed’s times, but the interests of those who have handed them down. It is said that Mohammed loved biscuits. But the one who said it was a certain Mohammed Mahai: a man who sold biscuits.
“Not even Saudi Arabia,” he says, “is a truly Islamic state. On the contrary, it’s the least Islamic state of all. Starting with its name. A Saudi citizen, by definition, is a follower of Saud, the royal family, rather than a follower of God. Saudi Arabia is based on idolatry.”
“But they are among your principal financial backers,” I say.
“They have billions of dollars. Billions and billions of dollars. And how many Syrian refugees have they taken in? Zero,” he says. “No. There is no truly Islamic state today.”
“And so?” I ask.
“And so Syria is just the beginning.”
It’s as though Male were squeezing you tightly.
Closing in on you. Making it hard to breathe.
It reminds me a little of Naples. The Spanish Quarter. But without the charm and elegance of a fallen aristocracy. You walk along, and it’s a metropolis like a thousand others. Undistinguished. Nothing of note. Partly because the city is so crowded that you are totally focused on pushing your way through kids playing, guys standing around a post smoking, friends chatting, elderly people moving slowly, construction workers, women with their cumbersome shopping bags, pocketbooks, parcels. Backpacks. Motorbikes. Motorbikes everywhere. And even if you do notice anything, it’s a guy who looks like a financial planner. Instead he’s a killer.
You spot a tree. Just one tree, at the end of the street. Behind a blue wall. It looks like an interior garden, the kind they had at one time, the kind with glazed majolica tiles and citrus trees. But then, through two rectangular holes that are probably windows, you see a refrigerator, a sofa. A tin ceiling. A father goes in with his son.
It used to be an interior garden—now it’s a dwelling.
The tree is sticking out of the kitchen.
A tourist comes by, takes a photo.
On the next block, on the street where Minivan News is, on the ground floor, thirteen people live in one house. A husband and wife with five adult children, plus three sons- and daughters-in-law and three children. There are four rooms in all, one of which is the kitchen and one the entry we’re in, namely, a space with a small Formica table and two chairs; the rest is a jumble of tricycles, clothes, sandals, umbrellas, objects of every kind. A microwave oven. A blender. A buoy. Everyone works: one pilots motorboats, one is a clerk in a stationery store, one a scuba-diving instructor. Another one works at the customs office. Yet this house is all they can afford. “How can that be?” I ask. “Just for this house?” “No,” the motorboat driver tells me. “No, no, of course not, not just the house. Food as well.”
And all of Male is like that. Even Majeedhee Magu, the main street. You don’t notice anything partly because most of the time there are no front doors, just openings between one building and the next. And that’s the entrance to a house. But all you see are shops. Only shop windows. Except a cat is watching you from there, among the scraps and sandals. The jerricans of water. A saucer for flowerpots, a snack box. The walls are practically falling down. Practically crumbling. There are no windows. The man sitting on the bed—with a tangle of clothes in the corner because there is no closet, and other clothes hanging from the ceiling to dry—is an airport attendant. He earns a salary of 12,000 rufiyaa. Jackets and ties drip from the ceiling. His grandson Hisaan, who is nineteen years old and works at a resort, translates it all for me; he is here for two days with his mother, who has an appointment with a cardiologist.
“This is all deliberate,” he says. “It’s not poverty, it’s politics. We are forced to come to Male for whatever we need, to see a doctor, to go to the bank, to attend college, and for everything else as well, even just to buy a pair of shoes. And obviously the rents are disproportionate. Prices in Male are London prices— with Burundi’s standard of living. And it’s deliberate,” he says. “A starving population is a population that has neither the time nor the energy to organize and overthrow the government. Because by now we are merely chauffeurs and waiters.” Hisaan’s teeth are oddly deformed. The two canines are large, they are almost twice as large as the other teeth, and they protrude more, almost half an inch more. They’re white. Very white against his dark skin. “Sorry,” he says. He’s silent for a moment. He offers me some juice. Then he falls silent again. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what to talk about. Here we work to pay the rent, and we pay the rent so we can work. That’s all,” he says. “I can’t talk about a movie, a record. A book. Sorry,” he says, and remains silent, embarrassed. He looks away, and I too look away, actually, because I can only wonder how it must be to be nineteen years old and have two teeth for which no girl would ever dream of kissing you, two simple teeth that any dentist could extract in two minutes, except you can’t afford a dentist and so you stay that way: nineteen years old with no girl who would ever dream of kissing you.
Because of two teeth.
Riley, however, is his opposite. She has a thousand questions.
Thousands of things to talk about. She’s thirty-one years old, with short, unruly hair, and a lively, curious air, like someone you’d love to have as a friend. Her husband is a designer, but she’s at home all day with two children, ages three and four, and her ailing father-in-law, who has a room all to himself. The rest of the house is a tiny kitchen full of guitars and drums, and a room with a sleeping loft. In fact, now that they are going to paint the walls in bright colors, if it weren’t without windows, and excruciatingly hot, with no air and no light, if it didn’t leak every time it rains—and here it rains for six months out of the year—I mean, really, aside from that, this house would look like those in an interior design magazine, or an Ikea catalog at least. Or maybe it’s she who makes you feel like you could be in Brooklyn. In Berlin. In one of those old assembly shops renovated by artists. Except that she stays home all day. If she worked, she would have to pay someone to look after the children and her father-in-law, and there would be nothing left of her salary. And so she stays home all day and reads. She reads whatever she can find. And she has a thousand questions, a thousand things to ask me: she doesn’t trust the government-controlled press. She asks me if it’s true that Bin Laden is still alive, if it’s true that the terror attacks in Europe, Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan in Paris, were Israel’s doing. If it’s true that September 11 was actually so the Americans could invade the Middle East. And if it’s true, as they’ve been writing these days, that the veil has been banned in France. That the police are patrolling the beaches to strip Muslims. “Because here they write all kinds of things, you know?” she says.
She doesn’t go out much. “In Male they’re all either poor, and stoned out of their minds, and they don’t talk, or they’re immensely rich, and then all they talk about is themselves. Every day the same. You drift along, that’s it.
“Until one day you’re the father-in-law, and a daughter-in-law takes care of you,” she says.
“I wish I were born brave like you,” she says. “Free.”
Then she’s silent for a moment. She says: “Or maybe I wish I’d been born in Italy.
“Fortunate like you.”
All of Male is like that. At the end of Buruzu Magu, which is a street that crosses the city from one end to the other, parallel to the sea, at some point there is a gate, and behind the gate is a courtyard full of bags, each bag full of plastic bottles. There are only women in the house. I don’t quite understand who lives where, that is, in which room; the house is a dark, damp burrow, one room after another. A young girl with her husband and son live in the first room on the right. Her mother lives in the room after that with her other daughters and the youngest of her children, who I think is more or less her grandson’s age—I can’t make it out. Nineteen people live here. All I see are shoes. Shoes and kids. And women. They all crowd around me, all I hear are voices, voices talking over each other, they never go out, because the men, the fathers and husbands, work at the resorts, they work far away, and they don’t want the women to go out alone; and so they are all here, at home, all the time, nineteen of them or maybe fifty, because all I know is that at a certain point I start counting and there are eleven of us in a room less than two hundred square feet: eleven plus a TV that is talking about Syria.
“They’ve begun the counteroffensive,” a young man tells me. “Al-Nusra is trying to break the siege,” he says casually, the way someone else, in another country, in another world, talking about a game, would say that a counteroffensive had begun; only this young man is not talking about a game, he’s talking about the rebels, he’s talking about Aleppo, while his sisters, or mother and wives, or whatever they are, stare at me. They stare at my jeans, my shirt, they finger the fabric, they touch my hair, my hands, my skin, they look at the ring I have on my finger, the Hebrew engraving. They stare at me as if they’ve never seen anything or anybody. They’ve never been out of Male. They’re shut up in here all day. Every day. And what’s more they’d stay in here even if they weren’t forced to, because they’re afraid. They’re afraid of the gangs. Even though there seem to be gangs in the house actually: shouts are suddenly heard, screaming, objects overturned, and a half-dressed girl runs out of one of the rooms, jerked around by a guy, a young man who is also half-dressed, who grabs a flashlight from the wall and hurls it on the floor, followed by a small mirror; he bangs a door with his elbow and a little girl hides behind me, hugging my knees, as the guy walks by me, looks at me, then goes into what passes for a kitchen, kicks aside a chair, spits, and sits down on the other chair. He lights a cigarette that doesn’t smell like a cigarette, and after two or three drags he quiets down, eyes open, while the little girl straightens the chair. He offers me what’s left of the cigarette and watches me hold it in my hand, when a text arrives and my phone lights up. As if nothing had happened, there’s an oooh of general amazement, because it’s an iPhone and no one has ever seen an iPhone here; and meanwhile the guy is still sitting there, his eyes still open—and what can you say at that point? Because in situations like that, at times like that, there’s nothing you can say. Yet there’s this silence now, there’s this heavy silence, as they all stare at the iPhone and the guy, behind them, goes on sitting there, with his eyes permanently open, and you’re trying to feel less ashamed of yourself, about the whole thing, explaining that it’s not worth what it costs, because Apple is all show. The battery doesn’t last an hour, you hear yourself say as you look for the door, you’re always glued to an outlet, whereas the fifteen-year-old Nokia is much better, you hear yourself say, and with that one they can’t track you, with that one they can’t bomb you, it’s much better than the iPhone. And meanwhile the little girl watches you with the cigarette still in your hand, she watches you, calmly, and says, “I don’t understand. Who’s bombing you?”
Where’s the door?
How does one get out of here?
Because it was a message from one of the young men leaving for Syria—and you suddenly see what they mean here when they tell you they just want to leave. That anything is better than Male. The young man tells me that tomorrow a “very respected man”— that’s all, no other identification—would like to meet privately with me at Villingili. The island where I’m staying. Five minutes from here. Even though just yesterday he’d told me to pretend I didn’t know him if we accidentally ran into each other in the street, because he was given a talking-to for having spoken to a journalist without requesting authorization; he’d also told me that people generally believe I’m actually a spy.
He’d told me: “Watch your step.”
And now—how does he know that I’m staying in Villingili?
All of a sudden, I realize I’m on my own. Completely on my own.
Completely vulnerable. There isn’t even a Western embassy here. They’re all in Sri Lanka. And the police are nonexistent.
I phone Kinan. All he says about Villingili is: “There you’ll disappear.” He says: “Insist on meeting him in Male.”
But it’s not just Male, it’s Mexico. It’s El Salvador. Scampia. You have to analyze the situation yourself, and find a solution on your own. Some protection. Because if others go around in a pack, the truth is that the only way is for you too to go around in a pack.
The only hope is to strike first.
The young man also asks if I can show up at the meeting wearing a hijab. Wearing a veil. Not that it’s an odd request, but it also means that no one around will think I’m a foreigner. Partly because it’s a private meeting, as he says again.
With a very, very respected man. Though he really can’t tell me the man’s name beforehand.
No one will help me, in the event it’s necessary.
The most likely thing, really, is that they just want to make sure that I’m actually a journalist. After all, when you arrive in a new country, you introduce yourself to your embassy, right? And to a couple of ministers. And here you introduce yourself to al-Qaeda. The problem, however, isn’t which hypothesis is the most likely; the problem, in this line of work, is always which hypothesis is the worst-case scenario. Talking to them, I think I could convince them that I am not a spy. Nor someone who will then return home and write that they are all murderers. But what if the problem isn’t so much that they don’t want hostile journalists as that they don’t want any journalists? Any at all? That is, what if the problem isn’t how I might or might not describe Islam, but that they don’t want to see a story in the newspapers about the Maldives being a jihadist hotbed? For one thing because it’s not clear what the $3,000 is used for. A ticket to Turkey costs much less.
Where does the money end up?
Is it only jihadists I’m working on?
Then too the problem here is that you are not really dealing with jihadists. With men who, radical though they may be, have goals and strategies, a logic of their own, as in Syria, as in Iraq. Men who reflect. Who assess. Consider. Here you’re dealing with young guys who don’t even understand that laying a hand on a foreign journalist attracts more attention than ten news features.
Guys who are here today, gone tomorrow. A far cry from jihadists.
Christ. This city is more dangerous than Baghdad.
But no, I tell myself, it would be senseless. They’re not idiots.
Then I remind myself: Regeni.
Because, what does make sense here?
What is it that’s most likely? Here anything is just as likely as anything else. I think back to college; I think about all those classes in game theory. If A chooses X, then you’ll see, B will choose Y, right? Because it’s logical. Because it’s rational.
Rational?
Going to Syria?
How simple the world was, before. How wrong it was.
Or maybe, more simply, it was just smaller than the actual one.
Because now that I’m in the Maldives, instead of in Syria, everyone is finally content.
Everyone writes to me: “Good for you.” “Relax a little.”
“Stay in Villingili tonight,” Kinan says. “Then tomorrow move to another island. Meanwhile,” he says, “I’ll try to find out who this man is. But for a while, stay away from Male.”
I walk back to the ferry terminal, staying close to the walls. Suddenly on the alert once more, like at the front. My guard raised, again aware of every sound, every shadow. Every detail. Anything that wasn’t there before.
Anything that’s out of place.
And I swear: I’m sure nobody followed me. Yet I get there, I close the gate behind me, and two guys come in right after me. Two local guys. In a residence for foreigners. They ask the owner to see a room. And the owner looks at me, then looks at them—nervously. He unlocks a room on the ground floor. Instinct tells me to get out of there, to run; my head tells me to stay where I am. Among other people.
They come out.
They walk by me. One of them stops.
He pulls out a knife, stares at me for a moment. Rudely.
Then he goes away.
It’s midnight when Kinan texts me. “The gang I told you about,” he says, “the one whose name I didn’t remember. It’s called Bosnia.”
Who knows how many, one day, will call themselves Aleppo.