But none of this reaches the tourists at the resorts.
The resorts each occupy an entire island, they are the island, essentially, and they are just for foreigners. They are such a world in themselves that on the ferries that run between one atoll and another, when the Maldivians see a resort with its bungalows and palm trees, its limpid, endless beaches, the blue sea, they all start taking pictures, their noses glued to the windows. Tourists in their own country.
And none of this, nothing about the Maldives, touches the other tourists either: the tourists at the guesthouses. Which are a more recent idea. Nasheed’s idea. The president who succeeded Gayoom in 2008. Unlike the resorts, the guesthouses are on the normal islands. Inhabited islands. They’re surrounded by real life. Because the objective wasn’t just to create some income: Nasheed’s objective was to create relationships and contacts as well. Let in some fresh air. Because Gayoom’s government was a kind of quarantine that immunized the Maldives from the world much more than geography did. Now, with the guesthouses, the tourists stay among the Maldivians.
The guesthouses were Nasheed’s first reform. An idea both economic and political.
And beyond that, a social idea. In the proper sense of societal. Because it’s true that if you live here, you are removed from the world, and no matter how beautiful the sea is, after a day you feel claustrophobic. But it’s also true that in the end, it’s the world that comes to you here.
And it’s the journey that changes you, right? That opens you up. It’s not the places, it’s the people.
The first guesthouse was introduced here in Maafushi. At four euros and two hours by ferry from Male. Or forty euros and half an hour by speedboat. It’s always like that in the Maldives, it’s always very clear-cut: stay here or there, half an hour or two hours.
One country, two worlds.
Or three worlds. For the resorts you arrive in a seaplane.
Maafushi is a tiny island. With practically nothing there. Just a mosque, and a scruffy little soccer field. In ten minutes, you can go from one end to the other. It’s such a small island that there are no cars or motor scooters, only luggage carts, with wheels that score squiggles on the wide streets of packed sand, between sparsely scattered one-story houses of raw concrete. There are no supermarkets either. Only a couple of general stores like you used to see at one time, with a grocer in his apron. And there isn’t even any fresh fruit. You quickly see what they mean here, when they say that you have to go to Male for whatever you need.
The only thing you can easily find is fishing twine. Shelves and shelves of fishing twine . . .
You have to go to Male even just to buy some cookies, not only to see a doctor—apart from the fact that the clinic is a station wagon, so you don’t really need a doctor here: you die first.
And Maafushi is one of the most well equipped islands.
“Letting us open a guesthouse isn’t enough,” says the owner of the only kind of shop that isn’t lacking: a souvenir shop. “There is nothing here. Only the sea. And tourists don’t just want a bed and coffee in the morning. They’re tourists, not refugees,” he says. He essentially sells shells.
Shell mirrors.
Shell magnets. Shell purses.
T-shirts.
A lacquered wood banana tree.
Baseball caps.
“Nasheed was right. Probably too right,” he says. “The guest-houses could change the Maldives. So now they try to obstruct them in every way. Getting a permit to open one,” he says, “isn’t difficult. The difficulty comes afterward. To attract tourists, it takes a lot more. For instance, we’ve been asking them to widen the bikini beach for years.” Which is the term they use here to refer to beaches for Westerners, since bikinis are forbidden in the Maldives. Women swim in their clothes. “For years we’ve been asking for festivals and concerts. A movie theater. Here there’s nothing in the evening. However, the government won’t invest a cent,” he says. “But mainly the problem is the immigrants.”
The law requires 65 percent of employees to be local. Both in the resorts and in the guesthouses. At all times.
“But it’s a law,” he says, “that no one respects. Because here everything is based on agreements between entrepreneurs and politicians. Politicians, in exchange for keeping silent, accept bribes with which to build their networks. And so you pay—and no one sends the inspectors to you. They’re all from Bangladesh here. They work like dogs. And for next to nothing,” he says. “If they protest, you fire them.
“After all,” he says, “Bangladesh has a hundred and fifty million people. You lose one, and there are a hundred more.”
“They tell us that to attract tourists we should be less rigid. Sell vodka and things like that,” says a passerby who has joined the conversation. “That’s all they talk about. About alcohol, about bikinis. But the problem isn’t Islam. The problem here is Bangladesh.
“The problem is the others,” he says. “Not us.”
The guesthouse where I’m staying is in the middle of nowhere. It’s little more than a private home. The room has a window on a kind of air well, whose wall is the external wall of the power plant, which buzzes constantly. And which is not adequate in any case. The power often fails. And with the power, the water. And there is no street lighting. In the evening you go around with a flashlight. Behind the power station there’s nothing. Only sand. Sand, not a beach—that’s on the opposite side of Maafushi. On my side there’s only sand. And garbage.
A long stretch of garbage. It’s burned like that. All together.
On my side there is only sand, and the smell of dioxin.
Because in the Maldives a guesthouse is everything that a resort is not. The most run-down B&B serving as a hotel. The White Sand is on the main, or better yet, central road. It has fourteen rooms. A double, on average, costs a hundred dollars, depending on the season; the rooms are spacious and bright, furnished the way rooms at hotels of this type, of this category, are furnished all over the world nowadays: entirely in wood, somewhat reminiscent of Ikea. There are five employees, and they all come from Bangladesh. Three live here, in a room on the ground floor. All three in one room. Yassan is twenty-six; he came here when he was twenty and still hasn’t been back home, even once, because he can’t afford the airfare. He has no shifts, no work schedule, no days off: he is always on call. For six years. And this is his entire life.
“Maafushi has nothing,” says Hani, who is twenty-four years old and has been here for two years. “And we still have no friends,” he says. He won’t say anything more. I try to ask him something, but he won’t speak. Embarrassed, he says, “But I’m no one.”
“I was interested in your opinion,” I say.
“What can it matter?” he says. “I’m just someone who vacuums the floor.”
At Beachwood, a little farther on, a double costs $120 a night on average. There are twenty rooms. And here too the staff is all foreign. Half from Bangladesh and half from the Philippines. “But our hotel is very different from the others,” the manager assures me. She is around thirty, very elegant and refined, in a suit and makeup; her nails, her hair, all impeccable. “Beachwood offers a great many activities,” she says. “For all tastes and all ages.” Posted on the bulletin board at the entrance, in fact, are three densely filled lists. Besides the fishing and diving excursions, there is also a trip to a resort: for $250, you can observe the rich for a whole day. Because you have to stay on the beach: you cannot use the resort’s facilities. “But it’s the same thing,” she says. “You feel like you’re one of them. And drinks and sandwiches are included in the price.”
Then too there is the Sand Bank, also known as Sex Beach. Basically, it’s a shoal in the middle of the ocean where you can have sex until you drop.
They leave you there, and then come back to get you later.
“In the evening?” I ask.
“After the sunset prayer,” she says.
The best of the guesthouses is most likely the Crystal Sands, which, rather than a guesthouse, is a genuine four-star hotel complete with an international restaurant. Just steps away from the sea. And it’s quite beautiful, objectively, even though it has nothing even vaguely to do with the Maldives. Not an ashtray, a lamp, a teaspoon. Nothing. It has eighteen rooms. The average price is $130. The young man who shows me a double—a spacious, brightly lit, quiet room, well appointed in every detail—is from Bangladesh, and has been here for two years. I try to ask him something, but he won’t speak. Embarrassed. “Maybe you’d like some coffee,” he says. “Can I bring you some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I just wanted to know a little about how living here is.”
He looks at me.
“Maybe you’d like an orange juice.”
“No, no, I’m fine, thank you. But I was wondering about you instead, how are you?”
“I’m fine, ma’am. If you’re fine. Are you fine?”
He’s twenty-one years old.
“Hotels like the Crystal Sands are a unique experience,” the manager assures me. He is around thirty, very elegant and refined, in a shirt and tie, his cuff links, his tone of voice, all impeccable. “At a resort, you’re on an island in the middle of the ocean. You’re on a magnificent island, of course, but it might well be the Pacific Ocean. Or any other ocean,” he says. “Only here do you have the chance to live the way people in the Maldives live. To be among Maldivians.” And in a way, it’s true. There is a stretch of palmlined sand in front of the entrance, and hanging from the palm trees are rope chairs with iron frames, characteristic of the islands. Three men in their seventies, in tunics and beards, are swinging in the shade. I greet them deferentially in Arabic.
They’re scowling, staring behind me at an Australian woman in a bikini.
They glance at me for a moment.
Then they ignore me.
“If you’re looking for a real guesthouse, a family-run guesthouse, the only one here is the Sunshine View,” the owner of a souvenir shop tells me. “Some of these places call themselves guesthouses, but as you’ve seen, they’re something else.” He essentially sells shells.
Shell koalas.
Shell magnets. Shell purses.
Shell owls.
T-shirts. Plastic dolphins.
A happy dolphin, a sad dolphin.
A puzzled dolphin.
The Israeli brainteaser I bought in Athens.
Baseball caps.
“They’re like locusts,” he says. He’s talking about Male’s entrepreneurs. “They smelled a deal, and they’ve already bought the entire frontage line of oceanfront properties. One or two years and they’ll become hotels. From one story to four stories. And for the rest of us it will be over,” he says. “They’ll offer the tourists saunas and gyms. Yoga and swimming pools. I too rent out a room, but the most I can offer tourists is my wife’s grilled fish.”
However, even just renovating a room is difficult here. Or opening a shop. During Gayoom’s time, the Bank of Maldives, the national bank, lent 73.2 percent of its rufiyaa to only two clients: Gasim Ibrahim and Ahmed Shiyam. Both deputies. For everyone else, the only option for starting a business is to turn to people like them.
Which means paying exorbitant interest rates.
“We’re caught in the middle. On one side, at the bottom, the poor from Bangladesh, and on the other side, at the top, Male’s wealthy. We’re in the middle. More squeezed every day.”
“But maybe one could look for a foreign partner,” I say. I mean an ordinary partner. It depends on the type of guesthouse one has in mind, obviously, and it depends on the island, but we’re talking about figures that are quite reasonable. For a guesthouse like the ones Nasheed was thinking of, prices start at 50,000 euros. With 50,000 euros you can’t even buy a basement unit in Rome.
“But then the profits are divided so that seventy percent goes to the foreigner, and thirty percent to the Maldivian,” he says. “Even though the Maldivian is the one who lives here. And takes care of everything. But he doesn’t have the capital. Same old story, with you whites.”
“You whites”: that’s exactly what he says.
The Sunshine View is on a cross street off the main road; it’s a beautiful house, with bamboo furnishings and a floor that’s half sand, half wood. At the entrance are masks, flippers, and mouthpieces. It has four rooms, all on the upper floor. The proprietors, a husband and wife, and their two children live on the ground floor. Both boys are students. A room costs fifty dollars a night.
“The rooms are typically occupied for about twenty days a month. Here it’s always high season. And so, despite a sixteen percent total tax, a family can live on a guesthouse. And live well,” says Mohamed Shafeeq, the owner. Who nonetheless, to be prudent, has not left his salaried job as a teacher. Because while accounts balance for now, taxes have just been increased. In addition to the lack of infrastructure, taxes are another way, the real way, the government tries to hamper guesthouses. “Taxes are now the same for both us and the resorts. They are the same in absolute value: ‘x’ number of dollars. Which, of course, has a greater impact on the forty-or fifty-dollar rate of a guesthouse than on the $1,000, $2,000, or even $6,000 resort rates,” he says. “For now, we’re holding out. But, frankly, a lot will depend on the new hotels being built. On the prices they will charge. They are the kind of developers who can afford to offer low rates for months, at the beginning,” he says. “So as to wipe out the competition.”
Because they can balance their accounts with other types of income. From other sources.
“There’s a lot of talk about a wider beach. About concerts, theaters. And obviously I too would like better transportation, for example. Real transportation. Because at the moment Maafushi is connected only to Male and to another nearby island. To get anyplace else, you have to arrange for a private boat. And you end up paying fifty dollars for the room, maybe, but five hundred dollars for a speedboat to the airport,” he says.
That’s another legacy of Gayoom. Of his attempt to control the population: it was Nasheed who introduced connections between the islands. And still today, you can never go and return from an island on the same day. Except by speedboat: except at a cost that only tourists can afford.
“But that’s not the problem,” he says. “The problem here isn’t whether to sell alcohol or not. The problem isn’t Islam, or how wide the bikini beach is. The problem is illegality.
“Either you fight illegality or all this,” he says, “will be pointless. We’ll shut down. And we’ll call accommodations that are actually something else guesthouses.”
“Despite everything, however, things have improved much in recent years,” says the owner of a third souvenir shop. He essentially sells coconuts. Coconut shampoo. Coconut milk. Coconut oil. Coconut soap.
Coconut wood ladles.
Watercolors on coconuts.
Candles inside coconuts. Coconut handbags.
Even coconut lamps.
T-shirts. Flip-flops with Bob Marley.
Flip-flops with Che Guevara.
The Irish flute I bought in Amsterdam.
Baseball caps.
“At first it wasn’t easy, it’s true. Everyone was mistrustful. Me too. We were worried about becoming the Las Vegas of the tropics,” he says. With an oceanfront McDonald’s. “But the truth is that things have improved with the guesthouses. Before there was nothing here. Absolutely nothing. Nothing and nobody. You went fishing all day, and in the evening you smoked heroin. You sniffed glue. Gasoline. Anything. We’d reached such a low point that the tsunami overturned everything.”
“The tsunami?” I ask.
“The tsunami. That’s right,” he says. “It’s no coincidence that it was December 26. December 26, 2004. The day after Christmas. Because many Muslims now celebrate Christmas with the Christians. Now even Muslims drink, enjoy the mixed company of men and women together. Think more about themselves, about their career, than about the family. But God called us back to an authentically Islamic life.
“A life,” he says, “in accordance with long-established values.”
“Actually,” I say, “you can’t even find a hat here anymore.”
“A hat?”
“A palm leaf hat.”
“They’re back there.”
He points me to a stack of straw hats.
“No, not straw. Palm. I wanted a local hat, characteristic of here.”
“What do you mean by characteristic?”
“The hat that people wore at one time.”
“Do you have a photo?”
“No. It’s for a friend. A friend for whom I buy a hat from every country I go to. I wanted a typical hat, I don’t know: like the Cossack hat in Russia, the fez in Turkey. A hat, you know? The kind you can’t mistake when you see it and say that guy comes from the Maldives.”
He looks at me.
“A hat that is sort of symbolic?”
“Let’s say symbolic. Sure.”
“This one then,” he says. And he pulls out a hat in the shape of Nemo. The fish. The one in the Disney film. The orange fish.
Besides that, it’s more of a cap than a hat. A Nemo-shaped cap.
“But that’s Nemo.”
“No, it’s not Nemo.”
“Yes it is Nemo.”
He looks at me.
“See?” he says. “It’s actually the symbol of the Maldives. This fish is ours,” he says. “It is not yours.” I look at him.
“Whoever it belongs to, this fish is Nemo.”
“And I say no. Absolutely not. This fish is not Nemo, it is our most common fish. But you people come here, and you appropriate everything. And you transform everything into a world for your own purposes and consumption. But it’s all fake. Your world is all fake. It doesn’t exist. This fish is not Nemo. You wanted a symbol of the Maldives?” he says. “Here it is.
“You come here and think you’ve been to the Maldives. But in fact you’ve never been to the Maldives. You’ve never been anywhere,” he says.
“Others maybe,” I say. “But I’m staying in Male. I’m not at a resort.”
“What difference does it make?” he says. “You observe, you don’t live here. You don’t know what that’s really like.
“Or do you think you know what it means to sweat all your life,” he says, “all day, every day, constantly, and be forced to beg a deputy just to pay for a doctor? With those stinking rich people, on television, who say, ‘I earned every last penny of it. I deserved it.’ As if they were better than you. And instead they were only more crooked.
“But God, thankfully, was clear,” he says. “And He called us back to an authentically Islamic life.”
“Not that you seem very Islamic to me, in all honesty. What about the Sand Bank?” I ask. “I mean, the entire economy here is based on a kind of tourism that is poles apart from the Koran. Not to mention that on weekends you’re all in Sri Lanka, having a good time.”
“So what?” he says. “At moments of change that’s always the way. These are complicated days. Confused. But it’s just a matter of time. Just a matter of getting used to it. Things change,” he says. “Things resolve themselves.”
But it doesn’t seem all that clear to me.
The tsunami, for one thing. God could well have explained Himself better.
What does he mean, get used to it? Get used to what? Alcohol? The Koran?
Both?
A group of Chinese tourists enters. “Anyway, look,” he says. “Go to an island like Himandhoo. For the hat,” he says. “If it’s something traditional, you’ll find it on Himandhoo.”
“Imandu?”
“Himandhoo. With an H.”
Right after the Chinese, some Lebanese enter. And in fact, now that I think about it, the clocks here in the hotels—those round clocks at the reception desks, you know? that indicate the time in cities around the world—here they don’t show the time in London. Or New York. They show the time in Beijing. In Istanbul. In Moscow. In Riyadh. And it’s a little like the feeling you get when you arrive at Fiumicino Airport in Rome, at passport control, and find two lines: one for EU citizens and the other for the rest of the world. And the one for the EU people is always shorter.
Because there are always fewer of us.
We make up only 5 percent of the world’s population by now. And maybe the truth is that what we think of those others no longer matters, what matters is what the others think of us.
Because there are many more of them.
Billions more.
Then too, what does he mean by “it’s just a matter of time now”?
That over time we’ll learn to know and not fear one another? That we’ll learn to accept one another? Or that in time Muslims will form the majority?
And no one will talk about the matter of the bikini anymore?
In any case, one of Lebanese buys the Nemo hat.
“Anyway,” I say, “it doesn’t seem to me that things have improved. Between one hotel and another, some of the houses are nothing but matting and sheet metal, they look like displaced persons’ camps. Hordes of kids, windows covered with strips of cloth instead of glass panes. I don’t understand why no one in this country protests,” I say. “Now they’re even going to rob you of the guesthouses, yet no one objects.”
“Here you’re either a fisherman or a public employee,” he says. “If you’re a public employee, and you protest, you get fired. If you’re a fisherman, and protest, you won’t eat in the evening. That’s it,” he says. “But truthfully, they don’t even have to go that far. And use force. We’re afraid, of course. Talking here is dangerous—they told you, didn’t they? About that boy. Rilwan. The message wasn’t lost on anyone. But in the end, there are few of us. You go to a deputy, you have him sign a check, and that’s the end of it. And if it’s a more general problem instead, a bad fishing season, all you have to do is ask for a donation from a friendly country.”
“Or from an NGO ready to help these underdeveloped Maldivians,” his son adds. He is here at the moment, but he studies economics at the university. “None of the NGOs ever say that poverty has political reasons, they don’t want to complicate their lives. So they treat poverty as if it were a natural phenomenon. Like smog and malaria. They don’t look into the Bank of Maldives—they give you a microloan to sell sand bottles. You know what they say in college: Don’t give us fish, teach us how to fish. So, now they teach you to fish. But the problem isn’t that you don’t know how to fish, on the contrary, you know how to fish better than someone who was born in London and graduated in anthropology. The problem is that they’ve stolen your fishing rod.
“And anyway,” he says, “it’s not true that nobody protests here. That no one is trying to change things.
“Many go to Syria,” he says.
“The jihadists are normal guys. Young people like us,” says Ailam. She’s twenty-five, and is a lawyer. And her brother is in Syria with ISIS. “Some of them have problems, that’s true. They’re running away—if not actually running from the police, they’re running from themselves. But my brother, for example, had a life. A life of friends, evenings out. Girls. We’re a family like a thousand others. We’re Muslims, obviously, but there are four of us sisters, plus my brother, and we all studied, we were never kept shut up at home by my father or anything like that. We’ve lived like all twentyyear-olds do. Here nobody forces you to do anything,” she says. “We are not extremists. This is certainly not Saudi Arabia.
“Nor is it France,” she adds.
“And my brother, too,” she says. “He was like everyone else. Then he became interested in Syria, and little by little, he changed. One reason being that he started working at a resort during that same time. And at the resorts, true, you have a salary, but you stay there for months, removed from everything, either serving the clients or alone in your room when your shift ends. You’re not allowed to wander around the island: you feel like a zero.”
It’s not that they hadn’t noticed anything, she says: “All he talked about was Syria, about the oppression of Muslims. And all he read was the Koran. And I said to him: But oppression is everywhere, it’s not such a simple matter, Muslims against non-Muslims. And then, if you want to fight injustice, I told him, why not go to Palestine? Palestine is where it all started. Israel.”
“But the Koran says to begin with Syria,” I say.
“No, no,” she replies, “the Koran does not say to begin with Syria. The Koran says to begin with ourselves. Nothing about killing others. If you want a better society, you have to be a better person. God is omnipotent: if He’d wanted to, He would have created a world solely of Muslims. A world without Christians, without Jews. Instead, He wanted it this way: with day and night, tuna and bears. Christians and Jews. Who are we to know better than God? My brother didn’t go to Jerusalem simply because Israel won’t let them into Jerusalem. They can say what they like—but they go to Syria because in Syria they let them in.
“Every now and then I took a peek at his books. And honestly, they are identical to ours. To our university books,” she says. “They explain Islam in a way that is essentially correct. But then there’s all that stuff about jihad that is scattered here and there, underlying everything to some degree, even though it’s not covered in a systematic way. And Islam can be interpreted in many ways, but not all ways. The concept of jihad is fairly precise. You can expand it as far as you like, but you can’t take a truck and crash into people. In those books, however, jihad is taken out of context.
“It’s as if they were saying: The world is unjust, react,” she says.
“Still, in all honesty it’s not a question of books. No matter what’s written in those books. It’s that all his friends were going to Syria. And when one of them died at the front, it was the final straw. At that point he spoke of nothing else,” she says. “He was always sitting there reading the Koran. Dressed like an Arab.”
But then, for a while, he went back to being the young man he’d been before. And the family lowered their guard.
“He started swimming again,” Ailam says. “Running. Just like that. All of a sudden. Every morning, as he used to. And he changed jobs. He stopped talking about Syria. We could never have imagined that he was training to fight, and that the new job was to pay for a ticket to Turkey. When he disappeared, we immediately understood. And we phoned the police to stop him in Istanbul, but it was no use. They didn’t even call us back. And my brother reappeared on Facebook with a Kalashnikov.”
She is the only one in the family who is still in touch with him. “He’s there with other guys from here, and with foreigners from other places. The only ones I don’t see, in the photos, are the Syrians whom he claims he’s helping. And yet . . . Yet I’m a little afraid to hear from him, I must admit. Because I’m afraid he’ll convince me. Sometimes I think: What if he’s right? Here we are as if nothing is happening, while in Syria everyone is dying. I can’t help being doubtful, he’s my brother. And I know he’s not a lunatic. The lunatic in Syria is Assad.
“In the evening, when I go home,” she says, “I watch the news from Aleppo because I’m always afraid he’s been killed. News that is always the same, because everybody is dying in Aleppo, they die and that’s it. And I think, if you want a better world, you have to be a better person, right? Starting with yourself.
“But instead here we are. As if nothing were happening,” she says. “And I think: Maybe he isn’t right. But I’m certainly not right either.
“I think . . . “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I think.”
She looks at me.
She says: “I don’t know who I am. It’s not just that I don’t know who my brother really is. I don’t know who I am anymore. None of us here knows who he is anymore.”
But none of this reaches the tourists. None of it.
“Aleppo?” a Spanish man on the beach says to me. “You live in Aleppo? But wasn’t Gaddafi killed? Are they still fighting?”
On islands like Maafushi, tourists stay among the Maldivians, true, and Maldivians live among tourists, but in fact they never talk to one another. Never run into one another. The staff who deals with the clients is European; tourists only come into contact with other Westerners. Other whites. Immigrants cook, wash the windows, mop the floors. Unload the luggage. But at the reception desk you find a Frenchman, an Englishman. The tourists all stay there on their Indian reservation, on their bikini beach, on that strip of sand surrounded by a bamboo fence, with a café, a restaurant, and a canoe rental stand: as if the rest of Maafushi didn’t exist. When they venture out, they go around in a bathing suit and sarong, a transparent sarong, meaning basically just a bathing suit, with a respect for the local culture that is as much a formality as is the Maldivians’ acceptance of Western culture. All in all, it is nothing more than a commercial relationship. On both sides. No one here is the least bit interested in the other. They coexist without any interaction. Impervious to one another.
Not together: simply in the same place.
For no reason. By chance.
On YouTube you can still find the wedding of a European couple, in 2010. A Swiss couple. At the Vilu Reef Resort. The classic seaside ceremony. Barefoot, with a garland of flowers. Sunset. Candlelight. For $2,500. With the locals in traditional costume, of course, speaking only in Dhivehi: “You’re nothing but fornicating infidels, aren’t you?” they say. “Bastards.”
The two smile happily.
“I do,” they swear. “I do.”
Four Neapolitans are roaming around the beach, bewildered. They arrived yesterday, all four in their forties, separated or divorced. They had no idea that the Maldives were a Muslim country. “And they’re also a hotbed of ISIS,” I tell them.
“Maronn, Mother of God.” Roberto’s eyes pop. Then he says to one of his friends: “Guagliò, did you hear that? ISIS is here. Not even a woman.”
Apart from the beach, and the mosque, Maafushi really has nothing more than a couple of cafés. “In the evening, the only entertainment is crab racing,” Roberto says, forlornly. “You pay the price to come here and that’s it. Just to say you were in the Maldives. Just to post a couple of photos on Facebook and let everyone know that you’re not in Cesenatico, you’ve made some money. You’re not at the shore at your mother-in-law’s,” he says, and stares at the resort across from Maafushi. They’d thought of moving there, but it costs $1,000 a night. “Here we pay a hundred dollars, so we said: It’s the same sea. But for a hundred dollars, they told us, at most all we can see are the fish,” he says. “And only for an hour,” he says.
“If I wanted to see fish,” he says, I would have bought a nature video.”
Equally disappointed is a Spaniard. “For what it costs,” he says, “considering that the flight here is expensive, the Red Sea makes more sense. Where you have the same type of sea, but you also have all the rest. Then too,” he says, “here it’s one big construction site. They’re building all over the place. In four or five years,” he says, “it will be like Ibiza. But worst of all, they come to our country and insist on swimming with . . . what do you call it: a burkini. Then we come here, and all you see are coconuts. Coconuts, coconuts, coconuts. But I pay. These people make a living thanks to me. I have the right to have a beer.”
“But here they’re Muslim,” I say.
“And I’m the customer,” he says. “The customer is always right.
“Anyway,” he says, “Let’s not talk about the Maldives. Let’s talk about Syria. When will I ever get the chance to talk with someone who’s been to Syria?” he says. “But can just anyone go to Syria? I mean, because I’d like to see war just one time. If you ask me, a man isn’t complete if he’s never been to war. If he’s never been on the verge of dying. He can’t call himself a man.”
“Well,” I say. “Right now, Syria is a bit unstable. A little . . . A little tough.”
“But I can take it,” he says. “I can adapt to anything. I’ve traveled a lot in a camper.”
There actually is beer, however. There’s a boat, offshore, where they sell alcohol. That way no one in Maafushi sells alcohol, and the Koran is respected. But the Neapolitans haven’t yet discovered it; one of the four is wandering around the minimarket bare-chested, checking each bottle of fruit juice one by one in a desperate search for a drop of alcohol. We’re in front of the mosque. The men are giving him glowering looks. He knows what I’m thinking. “It’s hot,” he says. “And I have all that salt on my skin besides. My T-shirt sticks to me.” A woman in a niqab comes by; she turns away quickly, embarrassed. “That’s it, run, you ugly dog,” he says. “Who the hell wants you.” He looks at the husband. “Tinatill! You can keep her!”
Although really it’s not even a question of mosques. Jamal and Firas are Tunisians, and they’re staying at a hotel two hundred yards from that of the Neapolitans. In which Kareem, an Egyptian, is staying. Three tourists like all the others. Except that they are career jihadists.
All together the three are veterans of seven wars.
The Tunisians began with Bosnia; the Egyptian, who is a little younger, with Iraq. Although they count differently than I do. They don’t list the countries. They don’t tell me: Libya, Syria. Chechnya. They list the individual battles they fought in. As if it were all one war. One single goal. From Fallujah to Paris.
They are here to talk with Abu Yasser, who instead started with Afghanistan and is something of a doyen. And although he was born in Iraq, he says: “I was born in Baghdad. I don’t know what Iraq is.
“Iraq,” he says, “is an invention of the British.”
They are here for what they call a business meeting.
“On an island in the Maldives?” I say, curious. “It’s really the last place I would have thought of,” I add.
“Exactly,” says Abu Yasser.
They’re here because no one would imagine it.
And probably because no one watches them.
They are logistics specialists, basically. Or at least so they describe themselves. Let’s say they deal with men and weapons. And they’re neither al-Qaeda nor ISIS. Or maybe they’re both: because the differences and, especially, the relationships between the two organizations are still not very clear. Certainly not to us. But maybe not even to them. Technically the Islamic State was originally al-Qaeda in Iraq. Then in 2014, during the war in Syria, it became independent, and most importantly it became a state, compared to al-Qaeda, which instead was formed in Afghanistan—not the Afghanistan that resisted the Americans, but the earlier one, the one that resisted the Soviets after the 1979 invasion. And which for a long time has been a terrorist group and nothing more. A traditional terrorist group. Meaning it didn’t want to have a territory of its own. Didn’t want to change the map of the Middle East. It wanted to influence existing governments. Not replace them.
Al-Qaeda had both Western and Arab governments in its sights: Bin Laden’s foremost enemy was not the United States, it was Saudi Arabia. From September 11, 2001, to 2015, 16,721 individuals were victims of terrorism. Ninety-eight percent of them in non-Western countries.
All this, however, in theory. Because on the ground things are always more ambiguous, and the men you meet are almost all like Jamal, Firas, Kareem. Abu Yasser. They not only go from one country to another, but from one organization to another, from one acronym to another, depending on the moment, on how a war is going—and depending on financial backing. And they never simply go from al-Qaeda to ISIS. Or from ISIS to al-Qaeda. There are hundreds of jihadist groups, hundreds in every single country, more or less radical. And they are joined together in alliances, and alliances of alliances, and alliances of alliances of alliances: and only in the end are they affiliated with al-Qaeda or ISIS. Or not affiliated with anything. And sometimes they rule, sometimes they fight. Mostly, they fight. Occasionally they merge. Or they tolerate each other and split up the territory.
Neither united nor divided.
And the problem is that the same can be said of their enemies as well. Who would be us. In theory, we are all aligned against terrorism; on the ground, however, things are always more ambiguous. Sometimes the priority is another enemy. And it doesn’t matter if the enemy of my enemy, instead, exterminates the Yazids. If it uses phosphorus. Gases. Erdogan’s priority is the Kurds. For Assad it’s the rebels. For us, oil.
Essentially, jihadists are used by everybody.
And they in turn use everybody.
Basically, it’s a mess. Analysts always have those maps in various colors, nice and orderly, those very reassuring maps, blue is the army, red is the rebels, green is al-Qaeda. Black is ISIS. Those maps arranged group by group. Sunnis here, Shiites there. Islamists here, seculars there. Good here, evil there. And you, on the other hand, always have maps like those scribbled pads of paper in the stationery store, where you try out the pens. Those maps from commander to commander. From checkpoint to checkpoint.
All the same color. Because you never know who you’re going to find.
Or what he thinks, whose side he’s on. What he’s fighting for.
Whether he’ll shoot you or not.
Muslims usually only talk about the Salafites, no matter what group they’re referring to. They talk about Islamists, that is, those who preach the Islam of the origins, the Islam of Mohammed’s times—about the Salafi, in fact: the forefathers. Or, they simply talk about al-Qaeda. Because, for one thing, al-Qaeda is not a term coined by the jihadists. That is, it wasn’t al-Qaeda that called itself al-Qaeda. It was the CIA, in the nineties, that named it that. And in a sense, created it by doing so. Created it the only way it could confront it. Because in Arabic al-qaeda has various meanings. It can be translated as “base,” in a material sense, a military base, an operational base, but also in a more abstract sense, such as a “foundation.” The founding principles. And also as a vanguard, in the Gramscian sense: the minority that makes up the forefront, advancing and leading the majority that will follow. The meaning that Muslims never mention to you is the one that Westerners cite: an organization. A networked organization, perhaps, fluid, but in any case an organization. As Kareem, the Egyptian, says: “Al-Qaeda is a way of being in the world.” But how do you fight a way of being in the world?
In our legal systems, for example, to issue an arrest warrant for conspiracy, which is the typical charge against those planning a terror attack, the alleged perpetrators must belong to an organization. You can’t arrest a person for what he believes.
For his vision of the world.
Even though that’s what al-Qaeda is.
Much more than an organization. A way of being.
An interpretation of the world.
Literally: of the entire world. “When we used a bulldozer to demolish the border between Syria and Iraq, as the first act of the caliphate, you immediately rushed to bomb us. But why? How did you create Europe, sixty years ago? You created it the same way,” Abu Yasser says. “If a border between a Pole and a Portuguese doesn’t make sense to you, why should a border between a Syrian and an Iraqi, who speak the same language, make sense to us? You have this fixation about the inviolability of borders. Even leaving aside the fact that they were drawn up at a table in order to divide and rule, so that we now find ourselves with countries such as Libya or Lebanon, which make no sense. The point isn’t that so much; it’s that regardless of borders, states are in crisis everywhere. You people are the first to say that problems are global nowadays, but politics is local. And that this is a tragedy, because corporations, on the other hand, are indeed global, and they relocate where it’s most convenient for them. They’re constantly relocating because they always find a country that is more convenient, and therefore better than nothing: they evade taxes, circumvent the law, they evade everything. And they earn more than all of Australia. And so,” he says, “what difference is there between my caliphate and your European Union? In the end, we want the same thing,” he says. “We want to take control of our lives again.
“Then in actual fact the caliphate can be many things,” he says. “And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t recognize this self-appointed caliph. But it doesn’t make sense to judge us with the same criteria one uses to judge, who knows, four years of the Obama administration. We’re constantly bombarded, we live amidst rubble; before worrying about Sharia, we have to think about water and electricity. As to whether the caliphate will be a federation or otherwise, we’ll see. The caliphate is a beginning. But defending borders like that, a priori, borders instead of people, makes no sense.
“For me the caliphate, rather than a solution, is the acknowledgment of a problem,” he says.
Abu Yasser comes from a Bedouin family. “And if you ask our people, where are you from? where did you come from?, they’ll say: ‘From my father, and from my father’s father.’ They don’t say, ‘From Iraq.’ I come from God, and from those who made me what I am. I come from those who loved me and those who betrayed me. I come from many things,” he says, “but not from Iraq. Because the problem,” he says, “is that when you think of the state, you think of hospitals, of highways. Of pensions. You think of something that protects you,” he says. “I think of something that I must protect myself from.”
In fact, in Baghdad nobody knows the mayor’s name. That he exists. But if you have a problem in Baghdad, a practical problem, if a street light blows out, if the manholes get clogged, if the market down below your house leaves a mess every night, all the crates lying around, you don’t go to the municipality—for every problem, for every type of problem, and for each area, you have a specific family. As if they were councilmen, more or less.
More or less.
“You want to impose on us the very two things you criticize the most,” says Kareem. “A national state and democracy. You’re always saying that democracy is in crisis, that real power is now in the hands of the banks, the multinationals. That governments no longer count for anything. And in fact, think about the Greeks: they can elect whoever they want, in the end Brussels decides, not the Greeks—so why should we want democracy? A system that you are the first to say doesn’t work? You defend numbers rather than values. Principles. But what’s more important, to decide well, or to decide the way the majority decides? Which for that matter isn’t even a real majority, it’s only the majority of the minority that goes to vote,” he says. “And who often doesn’t even know what it voted for. Why then is it not acceptable to look for a better system?” he says.
“Why is it forbidden to try Sharia?” he asks.
“But hey,” he says, “you have no idea what either of them is, neither Sharia nor democracy. No one here wants to be at war. Ask anybody. A jihadist, a marine. Anybody. A man can no longer call himself a man after going to war. God only knows what I’ve seen. But when Morsi was elected president, I said to myself, yes, maybe it’s time to believe in it. For me, Morsi was not the ideal choice. And I’m not talking about Sharia, I’m talking about the army, which in EgypT is the real problem: because we’re starving and the army controls two-thirds of the economy. More than controls, owns. In Egypt, all the major corporations are owned by the army. And Morsi would not have sought discord with the army, but compromise. Because the Muslim Brothers are reformists. Gradualists. But I thought to myself: Maybe it’s time to believe in it. Try it. But you quickly overthrew him with a coup. And not because otherwise Sharia would have taken effect; Sharia has always been in effect in Egypt. You didn’t overthrow him to defend the Egyptians, but to defend your own business interests. Your wide-ranging friends.
“No,” he says. “It makes no sense to believe in democracy.
“Democracy,” he says, “doesn’t exist.”
And indeed it’s not surprising that Kareem, who is Egyptian, ends up talking about Egypt. Ultimately, that’s always the way. The Chechens talk about Chechnya, the Afghans about Afghanistan. The British about Blair. The border between Syria and Iraq has been demolished, it’s true, and for the jihadists it is now a single country—but it’s not a single war. Not at all. The jihadists are profoundly influenced by national contexts. Iraq, in the end, pays the consequences of American occupation. Saddam’s Ba’ath Party was declared illegitimate, and all party-related public employees were fired. But Saddam’s regime was a bit like fascism, when without a party card you couldn’t work: overnight, Iraq found itself without teachers in its schools, without engineers to run the waterworks. Without doctors in hospitals. The state vanished. Overnight. While the Americans also dissolved the army, and thousands of men found themselves in the street. Without a salary. Without anything anymore, except a weapon. In Iraq, in the end, today’s jihadists are the Sunnis who were in power with Saddam, and who lost everything with Saddam’s downfall. And they ended up in the sights of the Shiites and their reprisals. But even a few miles away, in Syria, it’s not a question of Sunni or Shiite. It’s about Assad: in Syria either you’re with Assad or you’re against Assad. And if you’re against Assad, you’re so alone that you’re ready for anything. You’re ready to accept anyone who helps you. Even al-Qaeda. In Syria they tell you: The priority now is Assad. We’ll worry about al-Qaeda later. Because with the jihadists, they say, if nothing else you know what is permissible and what is forbidden. You know what the rules are, they tell you. But with Assad there are no rules. With Assad, you die, period.
And they really do just die.
Estimating is complicated, true, but in Syria there is a death every seven minutes more or less.
Then you go to Tunisia, for example, and discover that in Tunisia it’s not a political issue, but an economic one. People go to Syria the way they went to Lampedusa at one time. To Europe.
To find work.
You go to Tunisia, and you see a crowd of people in the street. Standing around in a circle. A crowd, and a young man on a roof. And you stop, because you think he’s a performing artist, you think it’s some kind of contemporary art routine, a poetry reading, or maybe a rally, an improvised rally, like in London, like at Hyde Park Corner, because Tunisia is a model of the Arab Spring’s success, right? In Tunisia there’s democracy, there’s freedom now. And instead the young man is up there to commit suicide. Because he has nothing; he has a doctorate in astrophysics and not even enough money to buy cigarettes.
And the people, down below, are trying to stop him.
“Well, sure,” I say. “With the terrorist attacks at the Bardo Museum and then at Sousse Beach in 2015, you’ve sunk Tunisia’s economy. What’s the point of such operations? You killed Western tourists, but above all you reduced thousands of Muslim workers to poverty. The hotels are empty. The hotels, the shops. The restaurants. There’s nobody anymore.”
“We didn’t sink anything,” Jamal says. “Haven’t you seen how they live here?” he asks. “You work all day, and you can’t pay the rent on a house. You can’t afford a dentist. And these are the Maldives. That attract tourists willing to pay three hundred dollars for an aperitif. For three hundred dollars, Tunisian tourists want a whole vacation. And when you pay three hundred dollars a week in Tunisia, flight included, ask yourself how much your waiter is paid. You’re not missing anything if you skip that kind of tourism. Absolutely nothing. The only ones who make money are the tour operators. And in fact,” he says, “being on the threshold of survival, living on the edge, is the most dangerous part. Because you’re still in the system in any case. Regardless, you have a salary. And you delude yourself into thinking that maybe if you go up a level, right?, if you go from dishwasher to headwaiter, things will get better. You convince yourself that instead of disobeying, you should obey even more. But the truth is that if you’re twenty years old and in Tunisia, you have nothing to lose.
“Have you been to Zarzis?” he asks.
He adds: “My brother is in Zarzis.”
Zarzis is on the coast of Tunisia. It’s across from Lampedusa; it’s the city from which people leave for Europe. There’s a spot, offshore, where the fishermen no longer go. Because you fish dead bodies there. You walk along the water in Zarzis, walk on the sand, and you find shoes. Dozens and dozens of shoes.
Shoes, and boat wrecks.
“My brother lives in Zarzis,” he says. “He lives on Zarzis beach. Whereas you people stay on Sousse beach.”
“And anyway, every country is different,” Firas says. “Here, for example, nobody has ever attacked tourists. And not just tourists—nothing has ever happened here,” he says.
“Except that time in Himandhoo,” he says. “Years ago.”
“Himandhoo?”
“Himandhoo, yes. A bomb exploded in Male. And the police went to Himandhoo to investigate, which here is more or less a Salafite center. It’s the island from which the Maldives’ most famous preacher comes. So the police went there. But they were welcomed with stones and lead pipes.”
“In Himandhoo? With an H?”
“Himandhoo. That’s right. With an H. It’s one of those places that isn’t talked about much. Partly because the last journalist who tried to write about it had his finger cut off, if I remember right.”
“And it actually has an H.”
“Himandhoo. That’s right.”
“And anyway,” says Firas, “Bardo, Sousse: we fight with whatever means we have. We don’t have your drones, that’s true. Your missiles. We can’t defeat you. We can’t change things,” he says. “But we can make your life impossible, and force you to change them.
“The time when you were the masters is over,” he says.
“Nothing,” he says, “is the way it was before.”
For now, though, life in Maafushi goes on the same as always. It’s evening, the Westerners are strolling up and down their three hundred yards of beach, awaiting the crab racing, with Rihanna’s music already blaring. A young man clutches two blonde girls on either side of him; they’re wearing shorts and nothing else, and all three are wasted, barefoot. They’re laughing. The boy staggers, sucking the ear of the girl on his right, his hand in the shorts of the girl on his left. Behind them are three Maldivian girls in silvery evening dresses with red embroidery. Pale blue hijabs. They move as though parading on a runway.
Then one of them smiles: she is completely toothless.
I watch the latest news from Aleppo. Jabhat al-Nusra, which would be al-Qaeda, is trying to break the siege; it’s the end, by now. For almost a year Russia has been bombing and bombing everything in sight: either that or surrender. The jihadists are crashing through Assad’s lines packed with TNT. You see a man, in a film clip, a man about sixty years old, sitting on a sidewalk. Next to a black bag. And he’s talking to the bag, he’s saying, “Come on, let’s go home.”
He says: “Come on, it’s late. Let’s go.”
It’s his son.
An American comes by. A journalist. Half-American, actually. His family is from Beirut. We’ve run into each other numerous times in recent years. But he earned enough with the Arab Spring, he told me yesterday, to take a vacation for six months.
“Still fixed on Syria?” he says. “Get over it, come on,” he says.
“It’s not my fault,” I say. “It’s the war that just keeps going.”
“Say the hell with it,” he says. “In the end when you go back, even if you go back in three years, they’ll still be there shooting one another.”
Tomorrow he’s moving to the Seychelles.
One of the Neapolitans comes by. “Where were you?” he says. “Come on, come with me,” he says. “We found beer. For once you’re not surrounded by al-Qaeda, c’mon, come and have a drink. We’re down there,” he says. “Where the road ends. Where that gray wall is.”
Actually the road doesn’t end there. That’s the prison wall.
Humam is there, behind that wall. Kinan’s brother.
Waiting to be executed.