The trip is endless. The boat is a sixty-five-foot-long wooden craft, with an old engine that occasionally gives up and dies. It takes over ten hours, ten hours on an open sea, with wind and rain, the hull struggling to fend off the waves. It’s a gunmetal sea, desolate.
As desolate as Himandhoo itself.
There’s not a soul.
Only two women, in a corner, completely covered.
All in black.
They stare at me from beneath the niqab, while the two seamen unload boxes of canned food, bottles of water, sacks of rice and sugar. The mail. I’m the only passenger. There is no one and nothing around, only these bright green palms, and some other trees—I have no idea what kind of tree they are—with large, thick leaves; they’re huge, tall trees that don’t resemble any of our trees. They close in densely over your head, as crows squawk overhead.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
There’s nothing. Absolutely nothing, not even a road. I pass through scattered objects, and only later do I realize that these are yards, the interiors of houses. A faded yellow canoe, a light blue hammock. Three glasses, on the ground. A tablecloth hanging from a cord. But it’s not the wash, it’s at a window, like a curtain.
There is no street, you make your way along like that, through the tangle of trees.
And there’s nobody.
Absolutely no one.
Finding the guesthouse where I’d made a reservation, which is the only guesthouse here, is not complicated however: it’s the only real house. There is a sandy clearing among the trees at some point, and in the clearing a swing. And in front of the swing, a table. And in front of the table, a door. A blue door. The boy at the reception desk, or better yet, at the entrance, doesn’t speak English. And he had no idea that a guest was arriving. “Moment,” he says. “Wait.” I take off my backpack, meanwhile, and pull out my notebook. The notebook and some pen cartridges. My pen is out of ink. The young man looks at me.
“You, okay?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “Okay. Thanks.”
I twist off the pen cap.
It’s a pen from the fifties. A silver pen.
The boy keeps looking at me.
Looks at the pen, actually. The cartridges.
Then he runs to the kitchen.
He comes back with a glass of water and a handkerchief.
And some disinfectant. He thinks it’s something like insulin. Something for giving an injection.
He’s never seen a fountain pen.
On the main road, or rather, the wider one, there is only a single store. A tiny market, tiny and dark, because there is no light, there’s no electricity, and the lady at the cash register is barely visible under her niqab. A dark shadow like everything else. There aren’t even any cookies. Only pasta, tuna, canned vegetables, shampoo. Fishing twine. The only edible-looking thing is some kind of chips, but they aren’t potato chips, they’re banana chips, I think. Or maybe leaves. Fried leaves. The owner of the guesthouse, Kyle, catches up with me immediately; you’re unlikely to go unnoticed here. They all look at me. I walk by and they stop and stare at me. But without any expression. Blankly. They don’t smile, they don’t say hello, nothing: they just stare at me.
These women completely covered.
All in black.
Even the little girls.
Kyle speaks Italian perfectly, he learned it by ear, at the resorts. And now he’s even married to a girl from Tuscany.
It’s with her that he opened Palm Heaven. Andrea and Stefania are in the room across from mine; they’re from Milan and are here because they’re friends of Kyle and his wife. They’ve been coming to the Maldives for years. They know every island. Every shoal. Andrea is a diving enthusiast. Laura and Alessandro, on the other hand, are in the room next door to me and they are from Naples; it’s their first time in the Maldives. They chose Himandhoo because they wanted to stay on an authentic island. Among Maldivians.
And to be sure, here it’s not like Maafushi; here you really are among Maldivians.
Right where all the jihadists are.
Because even if we’re only fifty-five miles away from Male, we’re in another country, in fact: for its six hundred inhabitants, this is not an island, it’s the emirate of Himandhoo.
Himandhoo is the bastion of radical Islam here. The terrorist attack they told me about—the first and last in Maldives history—took place in 2007. It was July 29, and a homemade explosive device built out of a gas canister and washing machine parts exploded in the center of Male, injuring two tourists. On August 10, the police landed here looking for those responsible. Himandhoo had been under observation for some time, because its inhabitants had built an alternative mosque to that of the state—and many had left for Afghanistan. The police found themselves facing dozens of hooded men, armed with lead pipes, stones, and knives. And they were forced to flee.
One policeman had his hand cut off.
On the tallest tree, among the branches, there is still a branch that isn’t really a branch: it’s a pole that had flown the al-Qaeda flag.
Palm Heaven opened two years ago. “And still today, it’s not easy,” says Kyle. “We continue to be under special scrutiny. At first they were all against it. They said that Himandhoo would no longer be Himandhoo, that it would lose its identity. Even though in reality, Islam here, or at least this form of extreme Islam,” he says, “is a relatively new phenomenon. Thirty years ago, when I was a kid, it was all very different. We celebrated Eid, and on Friday we went to the mosque—a bit like in Italy, where on Sunday you go to Mass and then to the avenue for an aperitif. More to be with others than to be with God, right?” he says. “My mother, for example, didn’t wear the veil. Now they all wear the niqab. Now alcohol is forbidden. Music is forbidden. I can’t tell you why, honestly, it’s what everyone asks me. But I think not even the Muslims have a response. The only thing that’s certain is that nobody here is forced to do anything. We are not in Iran. Everything you see here is the result of free choice.”
Which is what they tell you everywhere in the Middle East. In Baghdad. In Cairo.
They tell you: Identity. Tradition.
And yet they tell you: “My mother, for example. Didn’t wear the veil.”
“It all started in the seventies,” Kyle says. “It all started with Gayoom. He didn’t have real popular legitimization. He had no base, no consensus. He was nobody. But he had studied at al-Azhar. And who would ever dispute the interpretation of Islam from someone who came from al-Azhar?” he says. A constitution was approved. And not only was Islam declared the state religion, but the president was declared the ultimate authority on Islam. “Gayoom justified every decision he made as a decision dictated by the Koran. Gayoom did not rule, Gayoom enacted God’s word. He didn’t decide, he carried out. The problem is that after a few years many young people who had gone abroad to study began returning to the Maldives. From Pakistan. From Saudi Arabia,” he says. “Or perhaps from Egypt. From al-Azhar.”
Male has a small university, but even today, the only real choice is to study abroad. And the only way to study abroad is to have some form of financial support. “Which means turning to the rich countries of the Gulf: that’s the easiest way,” he says. “And it’s especially easy if you decide to study Sharia, rather than film. Even today,” he says, “it’s why so many study Sharia.”
Because it’s the only school they can afford.
“In this regard, however, the story of the Maldives is the story of many other countries,” he says.
In 1967, Nasser’s Egypt sought war with Israel, certain of ultimately wiping it off the map of the Middle East. Instead, Israel not only won, and quickly, but occupied all that remained of Palestine. For a great many Muslims, everywhere, the Six-Day War was proof that Arabs like Nasser, secular Arabs, would never be able to eliminate Israel and, with it, Western domination in the Middle East: it was proof that it was necessary to return to Islam. In 1967 it was seen as a sign from God. As a call from God. Then, after a few years, billions of dollars poured in from the sudden rise in oil prices. And the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan resulted in a logistics base. A no-man’s-land in which to train hundreds and hundreds of fighters.
“All in all, a great many went to study or work in the Gulf countries in the seventies. And when they returned, Gayoom immediately realized that they were a danger. Much more so than the secular element. He could dismiss the seculars as infidels. But these individuals? They knew Islam as well as Gayoom. With them, Gayoom could not say: Do this because this is what the Koran says.
“And before long,” he says, “it was a disaster. Because at that point, both those who held power and those who wanted power claimed to be acting in accordance with the Koran. To be implementing the word of God. Each accused the other of not being a true Muslim. But it wasn’t really a battle for Islam. It was a battle for power.
“And yet,” he says, “what’s hard to understand from outside is that the Salafites’ strength was just that. They were not seen as extremists. Precisely because it wasn’t a question of religion. The conflict wasn’t between extremists and moderates, but between freedom and oppression, justice and injustice—between a regime and its enemies. Gayoom invented The resorts, and with the resorts, in a way, he invented the Maldives. He is recognized by everyone for this. The resorts were not a bad idea. On the contrary. Before, there was nothing here. It’s just that they were handled badly. The Salafites were fighting for real wages. For schools, hospitals. Rights. Dignity,” he says. “Until a few years ago, for example, pensions didn’t even exist here, you depended on your children. So it’s obvious,” he says, “that blood ties are more important. That the state remains irrelevant to you.”
Because it’s a state from which you get nothing.
“More than Islam, the Salafites for many represented opposition to Gayoom,” he says. “For one thing because they were all arrested. One by one. And often tortured, killed. Transformed into heroes. They were not seen as extremists, they were seen . . . They were seen for what they were: dissidents.
“I honestly don’t know why the Maldives have become this way,” he says. “Because here no one is forced to do anything after all, we are not in Iran; Islam is a free choice. I mean, if you ask around, everyone will say that it’s right to ban alcohol. But then on the weekend those who can afford it all go to Sri Lanka to drink whiskey. And I ask myself, what’s the point? The only thing I’m sure of, however, is that everything is a lot more complex than it seems. The problem isn’t Islam. The problem . . . The problem is actually a thousand problems. The economy, of course. Gayoom. Politics. And Islam too, certain interpretations of the Koran rather than others. How can we deny that Islam has a role in all this? But then there is also the role played by preachers, for example. By individuals. Fareed, for instance, who is one of the most charismatic and has lived here for a long time. And dragged along hundreds and hundreds of followers. And then, certainly, heroin. Personal problems. Islam as salvation. But also, for example, social pressure: on such small islands, where everyone knows everyone, where everyone watches everyone and judges everyone. And where being different is so difficult. Thousands of reasons. Public and private reasons. Domestic and international. The tsunami,” he says. “And now this other tsunami that is Syria.
“And this is the result,” he says.
“But who would ever have imagined it,” he says, “thirty years ago? That we would one day be here talking about Syria, everyone talking about Syria,” he says, “and God only knows where Syria is.”
Actually it’s hard to imagine it even now. To imagine that from an island like this one, an island in the middle of nowhere, so many have left for Syria. And not only for Syria. For Libya, for Iraq. For Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine that someone like the father of Hassan Shifazee, killed fighting at the front with ISIS, lives in one of these houses. All he said to the journalists was: “I’m proud of my son.”
Himandhoo appears so unassuming. Especially for those who, like me, come from the Middle East. You don’t have the rancor here, the bitterness, the open wounds that you have in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Yemen—the unsettled accounts, the thirst for reprisal, for retaliation, for revenge, in those countries where everyone you talk to always has stories about brothers who’ve been killed, fathers who disappeared into thin air, mothers who were raped. For generations, only stories about wars, about deaths, about escaping. About fear. This is not Baghdad, where you have five, six, seven car bombings a day. You go into a café in Baghdad and instinctively you sit in a corner, back to the wall, in case everything should suddenly explode around you—whereas the Americans, meanwhile, the Westerners and their allies in the government, stay safely in the Green Zone. In their embassies. In their ministries. And they never go out. Never. Safe inside, and they have everything in there, while those outside have nothing. No. This is only Himandhoo. Only an island in the middle of the ocean. You return from Aleppo ready to rage against everyone, especially against indifference, what you’ve seen is so savage; everyone seems complicit, guilty. You return from Aleppo hating the world, hating everyone, you return with a need to shut yourself up in the house and be alone, all by yourself: or you’ll attack the first person you come across. But this is only an island of fishermen. In the middle of nowhere. Only an island of palm trees and sand, and these tiny shops, just a few square feet, a little like the general stores of one time, with their unlikely objects, depending on whatever boats come by—one has piles and piles of pillows, another a whole shelf of adhesive tape. A lampshade, sandals, an antitheft device for bicycles. A clothes iron. But you don’t get the feeling of poverty. You get the feeling of an island where people live as they once lived, not a poor island.
An island stopped in time. That’s all.
Male you would say is poor, but not Himandhoo, no.
Himandhoo you would say is simple.
And yet.
Yet there are these women who look at you, furtively, from beneath the niqab.
Fully covered.
All in black.
Even the little girls.
They look at you, and vanish into the house.
As if they too were saying: I’m proud of my son.
Even though not even Himandhoo is so simple, so stopped in time, as to still have the hat. The palm leaf hat. The only man who knows how to make them, they tell me, lives across from the pole with the al-Qaeda flag, but the only one home is a nephew, or something like that, a sixty-year-old man in a white undershirt, with a towel around his neck, whose wife is trimming his hair. The uncle is in a coma.
“In a coma?” I say. “What do you mean?”
“Why? Did you know him?”
“No. I’m sorry . . . But . . . a coma sounds a bit extreme. Maybe it’s just the flu.”
“He’s ninety years old.”
“What luck!”
“No, no, he was a lucky man. He had a peaceful life.”
“No, I meant . . . Excuse me. Look, over the years you didn’t by any chance learn to . . . to make . . .”
“The hat?”
“The hat, yes. I’ve come from really far away.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“And I almost drowned. The sea was awful.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And your uncle didn’t leave . . . any notes, maybe?”
I look around. The room is overflowing with the most varied objects, the floor littered with fishhooks, fishing twine, plastic bowls, spools of cord, bolts of fabric, and a stove. The engine of a rubber dinghy is propped in a corner, as if it were an umbrella.
“Notes?”
“Like . . . Like a notebook, you know? A notebook with the recipe for parmigiana. For meatballs. My grandmother wrote everything down. All in block letters. Neatly printed. Maybe your uncle also left . . .”
He looks at me.
“ . . . the recipe. Right? For the hat.”
“No. I’m sorry. Where are you from anyway? You look Arab.”
“Maybe there’s a hat left here somewhere. Did you check? Around here someplace, maybe . . . No, I’m not Arab. But I live in the Middle East. Maybe in there, in that . . .”
“In the Middle East?”
“That’s right. I work with Syrian refugees. Over there, see, in that kind of . . .”
“With the Syrians! May God bless you, my daughter. Good for you. If I were younger, I too would go to Syria.”
To Syria?
What would he do there, this guy?
“But I really can’t . . .” he explains.
A neighbor comes in.
“Did you hear? This girl. Such a good person. She lives with the Syrians.”
“You live with al-Nusra?”
“I . . . I . . . No, I mean, I . . . help the refugees. I don’t fight.”
“Good for you, my daughter. Good for you. But remember, it’s not enough to help the refugees, we must stop them from becoming refugees. An injured person is not an injured person. He is a victim.
“Remember,” he says. “It is Assad who must go, not the Syrians.
“May God bless you,” he says.
“If I were younger,” he says, “I would be on the front line.” And he looks me straight in the eye. As if to say: Hang in there.
Honestly, it’s the thing that strikes me the most. Not just about Himandhoo, but about all the Maldives: how normal it is here to talk about Syria.
To talk about jihad. Without even lowering one’s voice.
To talk about the Battle of Aleppo as if it were the Cup Final.
On the other hand, yesterday another Maldivian was killed in Syria. The third since I arrived here. The third in less than a month. Then the government denies it.
They say there are no Maldivians in Syria.
Yet it’s true, as Kyle says, that this is all a relatively new phenomenon. Islam came to the Maldives in the twelfth century, along with the merchants: it was grafted onto Buddhism. The closest country here, the country that dominates the area, is India. In 2012 the Museum of Male was attacked, and every trace of previous ages was demolished, smashed. But to reconstruct it you need only enter the oldest mosques, such as the one on a side road of the main street here. A small white building, in a grassy clearing. It doesn’t face in the direction of Mecca, but that of the sun. It was once a temple. Mecca’s direction is indicated on the floor that was added later and installed diagonally.
Yet today only a Muslim can be a Maldivian citizen.
It is forbidden to have a Bible. A Torah.
And in the schools, the main subject, in every curriculum and at every level, is Practicing Islam. With textbooks that teach you that democracy is dangerous, because it allows you to debate any topic—whereas not everything is debatable, they say. Not everything can be decided. Some things are the way they are, period. Because it’s the will of God.
The Himandhoo school, just a few steps from the mosque, is a lovely, impeccably maintained school, in vivid colors. Blue, red, yellow. With bright, spacious classrooms. It even has a lawn: it looks like a hotel. With beach umbrellas, wicker chairs. Four teachers enter.
One of them has a radio, one of those little radios for listening to the game. But they’re not listening to the game, they’re listening to the Koran.
All four completely covered.
All in black.
Razan teaches Islam. And if it were up to her, it would not be the major subject, it would be the only subject. Because Islam holds the solution to everything, she says: “Islam is very different from the way it is described. It is not a fossil. On the contrary. The Koran is immutable, but Sharia isn’t, Sharia is extremely flexible,” she says. “Much more flexible than your law. Because it is essentially a product of the society rather than of the state. Sharia isn’t based on law, but on fatwa. The ruling of an authority on the Koran. Or more accurately, the fatwas. Plural. Because they aren’t binding opinions, they are all the more authoritative the more they are heeded, and the more they are applied by judges. Sharia does not need to wait for parliament; it is constantly evolving. It has no masters. It does not depend on this or that majority, it is everyone’s. Primarily,” she says, “because it is accessible to everyone. Anyone can ask for a fatwa. Because, excuse me, what sense does it make to have laws, if they are so complicated that in the end you have no idea where to begin? If you don’t even know that they exist? And if the party who prevails is not the one who is right, but the one who has the shrewdest lawyer?” she says.
“Your law is not an instrument for coexistence, but for dominion,” she says.
“But in reality,” she says, “Sharia is not just a different law, it is actually a different concept of life. Essentially, Islam is the belief that everything is God’s will. That everything has a meaning. An explanation. Even mistakes,” she says. “In Sharia the objective is always mediation. Agreement between the parties, rather than a judgment. Because we all have a responsibility in what happens. Life is never black and white. The problem is not to condemn, but to understand. To learn. To comprehend what God wanted to tell us, and to change. Improve.
“And possibly,” she says, “to all improve together. Because even after the worst of crimes, we still have to live together. To share this world. This time that we are given. Yours, on the other hand, is a violent society,” she says. “One that excludes. You see good and evil. A person is in or out. And coincidentally,” she says, “it’s always the poor who are out. The blacks.
“The Muslims,” she says.
“And Sharia is sufficient. A society doesn’t need anything more. Because Islam has the solution to everything. Naturally not the particulars,” she says. “But it points the way. Unequivocally: because the Koran has made progress in all fields. It takes non-Muslims into consideration. In exchange for a tax, they lived free—at a time when Europe had the Inquisition. While Europe had Hitler, Baghdad had a Jewish majority.
“In reality,” she says, “we all have a religion. We all have undisputed principles. Not believing is as much an act of faith as is believing. What’s the difference between Iran, which prescribes the hijab and covers you forcibly, and Turkey, which forbids the hijab and forcibly exposes you?” she asks.
“But here,” I say, “it’s far more than a hijab. All of you are in black. Down to your feet. I tried the niqab, and I swear,” I say, “you can’t walk.”
“But,” she says, “in four-inch heels you managed to? You can’t walk in four-inch heels either. No one forces me to cover up. I’m doing the forcing and it’s the opposite: I’m forcing those who talk to me to judge me for what I am, and not on my appearance.
“You,” she says, “depend on men far more than me. You want to free us,” she says, in her gentle voice. “And we want to free you.
“That’s all,” she says.
And she hands me a kind of green ball with a hole in it, and then a straw, from which I assume it’s something to drink. Actually, my attention is on a map on the wall. The Maldives are in the center. So Europe is on the left, and America on the right. “It looks like another world,” I say.
She says: “It is another world.”
And she’s right.
Himandhoo is palm trees, nothing but palm trees and sand, inscrutable, with interiors that are seemingly superimposed on the outdoors, indistinct. You can tell that there’s a house here only by a sagging sheet that’s swaying in the breeze, only it’s not a sheet, it’s a door. And behind it, those yards that seem like junkyards: a bucket, a wheel, a canoe, a laundry basket, buoys, ropes, sandals, a radio, a yellow jerrican, all jumbled up, as if tossed there by a storm. Under a tap, two pans and some shaving foam. An apple. No one has ever trimmed the trees here, or pruned the shrubs and plants, or swept away the branches and leaves, the coconuts; you step into the vegetation, on this sand veined with roots, and now and then you simply find yourself in a house.
With these women who look at you, furtively, from beneath the niqab.
Fully covered.
All in black.
Even the little girls.
They look at you, and vanish into the house.
In a house that often isn’t a house, really, but an agglomeration of cement blocks and a bit of this and that, sheet metal, beams. Mats. Plywood panels. Surrounded by these strange sounds, which you’ve never heard, these cries of animals you’ve never seen.
Some kind of hamsters with wings, and then snakes, iguanas, crows. Hundreds of crows.
Crabs.
Every type of shell, every stone, in fact, is alive here.
During the day everyone is off at sea, fishing. During the day, Himandhoo is deserted. There are only these three or four tiny stores that sell a little of everything, rice, lentils, fans, frames, a pair of skates, windshield wipers, with no rhyme or reason. And then a café. A café with blue walls, corroded by salt. A small café with two rooms and a garden, some plastic tables and a counter displaying four kinds of cake in four plastic containers.
All four with coconut. Those or fish sandwiches.
Nothing else.
The only pastime here is sports. Boys and girls separately, of course. The boys play soccer, the girls bashi. In bashi, there are two teams, and a rectangular field with a low net in the middle, like a tennis court. It’s somewhat like baseball, a team must catch the ball thrown by the batter of the opposing team, who stands with her back to the net on the other side of the field, on a platform. With a racket.
A racket and the niqab.
That’s all there is in Himandhoo.
Being twenty years old here must be excruciatingly dull.
There’s no one around in the evening. Only the sound of the sea, and a strange light, because all the houses are under a pall of green vegetation, and you don’t see windows, you don’t see lit lamps. Only the glimmer of the stars reflected in planetary parabolas, like a silvery light.
Only this light that is neither day nor night.
Like everything here: only this light that you really couldn’t call light.
Kyle spends all evening on the Internet. On Skype. His wife went back to Italy for the birth of their first child, Jacopo. And she decided not to return. He would close Palm Heaven tomorrow, if it were up to him, tomorrow morning, and move to Italy, if it’s better for his wife in Italy, even though in Italy he would have to start over from scratch, from who knows what, given the financial crisis that exists there. Still, he is ready to shut it all down, and invent another life for himself, as a waiter, a bricklayer, anything; the important thing is to have a life close to his son. But so far, he hasn’t even been able to acknowledge him. Give him his surname. From what I understand, the wife is afraid that Kyle could one day take him away. After all, he’s Muslim, right? How many stories have we heard about mothers barricaded in our embassies? About children stolen by their fathers? And to prevent your child from being stolen, you steal him first.
Kyle spends every evening in front of Skype. Every night. All night.
Waiting for a call.
It was actually Andrea and Stefania who told me everything. Kyle, reticent, only says: “I’m checking the mail. I’m checking the reservations, a minute or two, then I’m going to bed.” He tells you he’s worried about this new law being discussed, another law to hamper guesthouses: it requires having a minimum of ten rooms. And here there are only three.
He says he has to do the accounts.
And he shows you the calculator. The folders with the invoices and bills.
But you see him there until late at night. One a.m. Two.
In front of the screen. Waiting for a call.
He’s not the only one.
They’re all on Skype here in the evening.
Talking to other countries, however. Talking to Afghanistan, Pakistan.
Syria.
“Call me Mohammed,” a boy from a nearby island says, speaking from Aleppo: the same words a young man, another Syrian veteran, said to me in Sarajevo. “Call me Mohammed. To you, we are all the same. All Muslims,” he told me. “To you we are all violent, ignorant. Nothing but fanatics.”
“But you, why did you go to Syria?” the present Mohammed asks me.
“To stop the war,” I say. “Or anyway, something like that. So that someone might know, and might stop it,” I say. And like the Mohammed of Sarajevo, he tells me: “You see? We went to Syria for the same reason. Only I prefer actions to words.”
Then he says: “Only you’re white and you’re a hero. But I’m a killer. Because I’m a Muslim,” he says.
“Though that’s the only difference,” he says. “Since we are certainly not the only foreigners here. But to you, the Europeans who fight with the Kurds are fighting for freedom. Yet they’re fighting their war. Like us. Like everyone else,” he says. “The Kurds want a state, nothing more. And in return for autonomy, they were willing to join forces with Assad. To betray everyone. And why? To build a democratic state? Because they have the oil. Only because they have the oil. And they want to control it single-handedly. Plain and simple. And that’s why they’re your friends,” he says, “not because they are champions of freedom: because they have the oil.”
Because almost all the oil is in northern Iraq.
“And while they may have been persecuted and exterminated in Saddam’s time, now that it’s their turn, they’re getting rid of the Arabs in the same way. They fight only where it’s profitable for them to fight. And I’m not the only one to say it,” he adds.
In fact, Amnesty International also says so. The Kurds have fought against the jihadists only within the boundaries of what they would like to be their state. And it seems that some cities, with a primarily Arab population, were burned down after being recaptured. Not before. To prevent refugees from returning.
“Everyone writes about the Kurdish women. About the women at the front. If you’d ever read about Sulaymaniyya . . . Have you ever written about Sulaymaniyya?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “But I would have liked to.”
“But you haven’t written anything,” he says. “You would have liked to,” he says. “But it wasn’t a priority for you.”
Sulaymaniyya is in Iraq, and it’s sort of the cultural capital of the Kurds. And of infibulation, which is practiced on many women.
“These things are never a priority for you people,” he says.
The practice is a local tradition.
Not of the Kurds. A tradition in the Sulaymaniyya area.
“Against Assad all you did was watch. While five hundred thousand were killed. You just watched. But as soon as it involved Mosul, you all intervened. And why? Because there’s oil in Mosul. Because that’s your priority. Oil.
“Had we established a caliphate in Angola, no one would have noticed,” he says.
A plane can be heard, passing close by.
Artillery strikes are heard. Voices.
An explosion.
“You’ve never written about Sulaymaniyya,” he says. “Yet surely you have written about Abu Sakkar,” he says.
Abu Sakkar wasn’t a jihadist, actually. He fought with the rebels. With the Free Army. And his photo went around the world, that’s right: a photo of him feasting on the heart of a dead enemy. I wrote about Abu Sakkar, that’s true. We all wrote about Abu Sakkar. Just as we all wrote about the guy in Birmingham who, at the airport, before leaving, bought a study guide on Sharia. Or the woman who asked if there was a laundromat in Raqqa. Or the jihadist I read about yesterday—he had planned a terror attack on a porno cinema in Jordan, but he got distracted, all wrapped up in the film; the bomb exploded on him. He ended up being the only one injured. Yes, I wrote about Abu Sakkar. Even though nine times out of ten the people you meet in Syria, Iraq, Bosnia, are like Mohammed, still, I wrote about Abu Sakkar, about the study guide fellow, and the laundromat woman, because—because that’s how journalism is today.
The world isn’t like that—but those who write about it are.
“You always focus on the bizarre cases. On the idiots. The fanatics. As if the American army were all like those Abu Ghraib soldiers. When it’s clear, this is a war. And war is war. Reprisals. Executions. But we’re no more brutal than any of the others,” he says. “Not at all. If we had drones, we too would be demolishing you by remote control. Without a spatter of blood. But the death penalty, for example. Or flogging. They’re used much more frequently, the less consolidated the state is, because it’s a time of general anarchy, and you don’t have the means to patrol every street, to surveil everything. By shooting one insurgent, you warn them all. Then over time,” he says, “the methods change, because the society changes. And so it doesn’t matter if the punishment is harsh,” he says. “What matters is whether it follows a rule. And with us you know exactly what is forbidden and what is allowed. You were here when Aleppo was governed by the Islamic State, and no one ever laid a hand on you.
“You are proof of what Sharia is,” he says.
In fact, it was 2013. The Islamic State existed, but it had not yet declared itself the caliphate. And we had hit rock bottom: the only way to get a piece of bread was to go to the mosque. The jihadists had everything. They had rice, sugar. They even had meat. Even water—we only had rain water. But it’s true, those who live under the jihadists say so: They tell you that, if anything, the rules are clear. And that if you respect the rules, no one will lay a hand on you. But then, to be truthful, they also say something else. They say: Let them govern, since they govern so badly they’ll defeat themselves. They say: There’s no need to bomb. In three months’ time, everyone will turn against them.
“It’s too soon to say. What’s certain is that Assad doesn’t govern either. Not now and not before. What are we talking about? When the war began, the Syrians were starving,” he says. “And that’s the reason a war starts.
“And what about Gayoom?” he says. “Does he govern? And al-Sisi? In Egypt you go hungry, and if you protest you disappear . . . Does al-Sisi govern? What does he govern? His own affairs.”
“But,” I say, “by now you’re pulling out everywhere. You’re losing one city after another.” Then—“Do you hear that?”
“What?” he says.
The explosions: we’ve been talking for an hour, and for an hour everything has been exploding around him, but it’s as if nothing were happening. He hasn’t even noticed.
“At some point Mosul will fall, of course,” he says. “Just as Raqqa will also fall. And maybe even Aleppo, someday. We have the whole world against us. So?” he says. “What matters isn’t the news, it’s history. The direction of history. Before September eleventh, Islam didn’t exist for you; today we are on front pages throughout the world. Hamtramck today has a Muslim majority. And it is near Detroit—it is an American city. Don’t look at the news, look at history,” he says. “Because the direction of history is clear.
“After all, where did al-Baghdadi come from?” he says. “From Bin Laden’s defeat. But earlier no one would bet a cent on Mohammed, and in the early years he was so persecuted that he was forced to leave Mecca. To triumph in Medina: it’s our history. Defeat is not the loss of a city, even if it were a capital, it’s not the loss of a caliph or of an entire army; it’s the loss of the will to fight.
“You all look to Israel,” he says. “You all study their methods. Buy its technology, its surveillance systems. And in fact,” he says, “it’s just the country to learn from. For seventy years it has controlled the Palestinians step by step. It has spies, video cameras. Checkpoints everywhere. It knows everything about everybody. And it’s not restricted; no one says anything about what Israel does, it can shoot whomever it wants. Yet it’s still unable to stop kids with stones,” he says. “Yes indeed, it’s just the country to learn from . . . because in war it’s not the strongest who wins. Never. In the end, the one who is right wins.
“September eleventh cost five hundred thousand dollars. Paris, Brussels, a few bullets. Security doesn’t depend on weapons, it’s pointless,” he says. “It depends on justice.”
“But you, what were you like,” I ask, “before Islam? I mean, before becoming a practitioner. Let’s put it that way. Given that you’d like us all to be Muslims. Like us all to convert. What were you like?”
“I was like you,” he says. “I drifted. I drifted and drifted. It was all right in front of me, it was all right there, plain as day, yet I didn’t see it. I thought I was the problem. That I was the misfit who couldn’t find his niche. But instead the problem was the system. Not me,” he says. “The system.”
He says: “Have you been to Greece?”
Three bombs explode, in rapid succession.
Close by. I also hear a building collapsing, screams. Machine gun fire in response.
A plane, flying low. Another bomb.
Then another.
“To Greece?” I say. “With the Syrians?”
“No,” he says. “With the Greeks.” He says: “Have you been to Greece?”
“I’ve been to Greece, yes.”
I was in Greece for the refugees.
Only at dawn, in Athens, at the port of Piraeus, these ferries would arrive from the islands. And the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Afghans would quickly head straight for the subway, to the city center, to leave immediately for the north. For Germany. Sweden. After a couple of hours, the only ones left in the streets were the Greeks, on the ground, in the sun, still asleep in their cardboard cartons. Scrawny, in threadbare clothes, weathered skin: they scraped together bits and pieces, reselling almost everything they found. Old radios, old telephones, old clothing, worn-out shoes, a hair dryer. A drill. A half-empty perfume bottle.
I’ve been to Greece, yes.
And at noon everyone lined up in front of a church. At a lunchroom. All identical to you, lined up without saying a word, their eyes down—with their All-Stars and Eastpak backpacks just like yours. There was a distinguished gentleman, who looked like a university professor, with a gray suit, a leather briefcase. And a young girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old: eyeglasses, black hair, a book under her arm, she looked as though she’d stopped by there on her way home from school. Stopped by to beg for her bowl of rice and chicken and a piece of bread.
I’ve been to Greece. Yes.
“But that’s not Greece,” he says. “That’s Europe. That’s your generation. Everyone out of work, without rights, and yet everyone is silent. All suppressed. Everyone against one another.” he says. “In today’s world, a minority of the population owns everything. What percentage can it be? Ten percent? And yet it doesn’t occur to you that a world like that can’t function: instead what you think is that you would like to be in that ten percent. Then you call me violent. You have war at home.
“Maybe we’ll fail,” he says. “But meanwhile we’ve tried.”
Another explosion.
“Five hundred thousand dead, and you ask me why. Why I’m here,” he says.
“Well, that’s what I was like. I was like you,” he says. “I didn’t understand. It was all right in front of me, it was all right there, plain as day. But no,” he says, “I didn’t see it.
“I just didn’t get it. I was like you,” he says. “I just didn’t see it.”
But not everyone in Himandhoo is trying that way, by going to Syria. Some are trying by staying here.
And opening a café.
It’s called Chucks, and it’s almost finished. All in wood, pale wood. On two floors. Four guys are nailing up the last planks and assembling the tables. They wanted a stereo system, but they were told no. Music is forbidden here. “And we’ll obey because we have no choice,” one of them tells me in the corner, half hidden—we aren’t allowed to talk to each other: we’re not married. “But a lot depends on you,” he says. “On you Westerners. There’s still plenty of mistrust, it’s true. But there’s also the realization that it is no longer possible to live on fishing alone. To live on nothing. If you come here, like in Maafushi, with that mindset, if you come here and say, ‘I’m paying, so do as I say,’ we’ll be forced to close,” he says. “But if you are a little considerate of our culture, willing to understand it, to respect it, you will help us save it,” he says.
Because by culture he doesn’t mean Islam. Or rather, not just Islam. The five-rufiyaa bill here depicts the traditional drum of the Maldives.
Music is as much a part of the Maldives as Islam.
“When I was little,” he says, “we had parties. All the time.
“Remember cassettes?” he says. “Cassettes. I had all of Queen’s cassettes. The Doors.”
He says: “My mother didn’t wear the veil.”
He says: “You should have seen Himandhoo, twenty years ago. How different it was.
“How lively it was,” he says.
And as he speaks, I am reminded a little of Gaza. Of a day during the last war. In 2014. A day when I thought of trying to find old photos of Gaza, because earlier, by chance, I had seen this photograph of a young woman, during the sixties, in a café. A girl in a miniskirt, holding a cigarette. Her hair worn the way it was in those years. In Gaza: it looked like Paris. The Sorbonne. And yet it was Gaza. And so I thought about those pictures of Palestinians: holding an old photo of themselves, the same person, in the same place, but surrounded by the war’s devastation now. And of Hamas. Of life under Hamas. But I couldn’t find one single photo. What with the bombings and destruction, relocations and emigrations, no one in Gaza had any photos anymore. Nobody.
Not one single photo.
And at that point it’s easy for Hamas, for al-Qaeda, for anyone, to say: Let’s go back to the past. To tradition. God has called us back to a former way of life.
Let’s go back to when all women wore the veil.
“Only there was no war here,” I say. “No fleeing. No destruction.
“Why is it so easy to change history here? Reinvent history?” I ask.
“Why don’t you take out a picture of your mother?” I ask him.
“There was no war,” he says, “but there was Saudi Arabia.”
Many schools here are financed by Saudi Arabia.
“Which,” he says, “is even more senseless because it isn’t necessary. It’s not like we are Somalia. We have millions and millions of dollars. We have one of the most sophisticated astronomical observatories in Southeast Asia. But it’s not for students, nor for researchers—it’s for the tourists.”
It’s at a resort.
“But the problem isn’t Islam,” he says. “At the time of Tahrir Square, the first days of the Arab Spring, you were all surprised that twenty-year-olds in Cairo spoke English, that they were educated. Dressed the same as you. They were young people, right? ‘Westernized.’ Egypt’s best. And the same thing here, with Nasheed. With his supporters,” he says. “But no. Being against al-Qaeda doesn’t mean being on your side. Why should we be? For you nothing else exists. Only your lifestyle, your kind of economy. Your type of society. All the rest doesn’t count. All the rest is backward. But your model doesn’t work. If you have everything, it’s because others have nothing. Not because you’re the most intelligent, but because you’re the strongest. Because you’re the masters. And you use the resources belonging to everyone only for yourselves. I don’t want to be among the masses of those exploited. But frankly, I don’t want to be part of the minority of exploiters either.
“I don’t see eye to eye with al-Qaeda. Not at all,” he says. “But the caliphate, the terror attacks, are all wrong solutions to the right problems,” he says. “Real problems.
“Don’t look at the jihadists’ answers,” he says. “Look at the questions. Because they are the questions everyone has.
“Do you know what one of the most humiliating things is, if you’re not white?” he says. “It’s that everyone asks you if you’d like to live in Europe. In fact,” he says, “it’s implicit. Westerners all think that if you are courteous, it’s because you hope to then get help to move to Europe. But I would never want to live in Germany. In Sweden. I’d like to ski, sure. I’ve never seen snow. But how many of you would like to move here? They are very different societies. At most I would choose India. But not Europe. The world is a lot more. You’re not everyone’s dream. You’re not perfect. Do you think all I want from life is an iPhone like yours? Do you think that’s really all there is to it,” he says, “that that’s the change I want? You’re not the best,” he says. “Most importantly of all, you’re not irreplaceable.
“The problem here isn’t Islam. The problem is you Westerners,” he says.
That’s what he says. Point-blank.
“The problem is you.”
Nevertheless he has a strange way of saying it: kindly, in a sense. As two women stare at me, from under the niqab. As usual. Fully covered.
All in black.
In Male they’re all afraid of Himandhoo. They all tell you not to go there. They say: It’s dangerous. But then you come and you find four Italians. Four Italians on vacation. They’re always with Kyle, all day long. And even in the evening—they’re never alone. And yet all in all they’re here. Alive and well.
On vacation.
Amid these indecipherable houses. Fareed’s mosque is by the sea, right in front of the dock; it’s a sort of concrete shed. Rectangular. Now it’s no longer a mosque, it’s a granary. The windows covered over by plywood panels. It’s hard to imagine that years ago they proclaimed an emirate inside here: among these frayed jute sacks, on this floor of sand and flour. It’s a little like Molenbeek. In Brussels. Because in Molenbeek you are basically twenty minutes away from the town center: there is a direct route, which among other things is one of the most fashionable streets in Brussels, and in twenty minutes you’re in the Grand Place, Brussels’s central square. Molenbeek is not on the outskirts—on the contrary, it’s a neighborhood like a thousand others. And yet there is a mosque on every corner. You don’t notice anything because they don’t have domes, they don’t have minarets; they’re normal apartments. But then on Friday you look up, and on the second floor, on the third floor, you realize that everyone is on their knees facing toward Mecca.
They’re all prayer rooms.
And honestly, it’s the thing that strikes you the most. Each time. Not only in Molenbeek. Because each time you expect it to be a dangerous place. With Jihadi John, there, behind the corner, ready to decapitate you. Because ultimately it would be far more reassuring, in a way, if they were all like Abu Sakkar, wouldn’t it? If they were standing in front of you with a Sharia study guide, asking you if there’s a laundromat in Raqqa. All nut jobs. It would be much easier.
But instead there they are discussing Greece.
And you, for some reason, are here.
Although who knows who those around you talk to in the evening, on Skype.
Kyle is still there. In front of the screen. “Why don’t you call a lawyer?” I ask him. “You’re the father. You count as much as the mother; it’s your right to acknowledge your son.” He looks at me. “What do you mean?” he asks me. He speaks Italian: but he has never lived in Italy. He knows our laws about as much as we do those of the Maldives. “Go see a lawyer,” I tell him. “It’s not a complicated case.”
I tell him: “It’s your right.”
He says: “I don’t know where to start.”
He says: “The law, actually, depends. It depends on whether you have the power to be able to enforce it.
“But you,” he says, “why aren’t you sleeping?”
“Aleppo,” I tell him. “I’m reading the news from Aleppo.”
Which is always the same.
I haven’t slept in five years.
I open the book I bought in Male. Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid, Problems and Solutions. In reality, there are only five problems that it solves. But the fourth one is “Staying up late.” That is a serious problem, the book says, because then you skip the morning prayer. According to the Koran, however, in some circumstances you’re justified. For example, if you are traveling. Or if you’re on guard duty. If you’re a jihadist. But if you stay awake to watch television or play games on PlayStation, or worse, it says, things we don’t even want to name, it’s a serious problem: you skip prayer, or you’re present but have no idea what the imam is saying. Then too you’re always yawning. You’re tired at school. Tired at the office. Electricity, he says, is a disaster. Before when it got dark you had to go to sleep; now you turn on the light. And that alters the cycle of night and day.
It alters the will of God.
And so. The solutions. Get married, that way your wife will force you to stay with her, and you won’t be able to go carousing with your buddies anymore. But above all, he says, deal with the world’s problems. That way you’ll see that there is no time to waste. That at dawn, we must all be awake, ready and able.
Never mind sleeping.
And in fact, it’s not that late, yet there’s nobody around when I walk back to the beach. With the air like silver. I sift the fine, pale sand, this diaphanous sand in the fragile evening light, while rustling and croaking can still be heard at times from the dark shadows of the trees. Because every type of shell, every stone, in fact, lives here.
In this sand that drifts between my fingers. And is instead a world.
Today, right here, there was a mother with her two daughters. Two little girls, around four or five years old, with their pails and shovels and sand molds; one girl in a blue-striped white T-shirt, the other in a yellow T-shirt, their ponytails held with red elastic bands. The mother completely covered. All in black. She smiled at me politely; she didn’t speak English, that is, I didn’t speak Dhivehi, so she smiled, politely, as she played with her daughters, all three laughing and cheerful, throwing sand all over one another, and . . . and who am I to judge? To decide that a woman like that isn’t free? Why, am I? To what extent are my choices really mine?
And anyway, what do I know about her, in the end? About any of this?
I know nothing.
At some point, I glimpse a young woman. Or rather, a shadow in the shadows. Under the niqab. She approaches me and says, “You are the one who wanted the hat, aren’t you?”
“The hat?”
“The traditional hat of the Maldives, yes. You are the one, aren’t you? It’s ready.”
“Really?” I say. “Thank you.”
And to think I came down here by chance. Only because I was still awake.
And yet.
Everything happens for a reason.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you so much.”
And she gives me a white hat. A taqiyah.
The hat . . . The hat of the Salafites. The one Mohammed wore. White. Cotton. She looks at me. She says: “Will you go back to Syria, now?
“Take care,” she tells me.
She says: “May God bless you.”