TWO
I WAS BORN IN A POOR neighborhood on the outskirts of Raqqa. My family’s house was the material result of the years my father spent working outside the country as a trucker. He built its three rooms himself with money earned by hauling loads from the port of Aqaba, in Jordan, through Rutba—a town the British built as a rest stop in the unfriendly deserts of Iraq’s Anbar province—and down the highway to Ramadi. The war between Iraq and Iran created chaos outside his windshield—highway gangs and other criminal opportunists—but he drove on anyway to deposit his cargo in Baghdad. His third truck accident left him buried in wreckage at the bottom of a Jordanian valley; he came back home with a broken spine. In the 1990s, after his recovery, he worked as a driver for one of the army’s half-military, half-civil construction companies: Al-Eskan al-Askari, whose main business was taking decades-long contracts and making billions of Syrian pounds disappear. At Al-Eskan al-Askari’s headquarters in Raqqa, my fasting father fought with his boss because my father refused to bring his boss’s visitors lunch during Ramadan. Only a phone call from a well-connected friend saved him from being falsely reported as a Muslim Brotherhood member. He quit the job soon afterward and began growing vegetables in his backyard. My mother learned to sew traditional dresses from her mother-in-law. As a youngster, I apprenticed both professions. My four sisters and my brother and I slept in the same room and lived under my father’s rigid routine of work, study, and prayer. TV, friends, play—all banned. When other students talked about their adventures in amusement parks, I was silent. I nodded when they asked if I knew what had happened in the latest episode of the Viking cartoons—though they soon discovered and mercilessly mocked my lies. If my father found out I’d been beaten in school, he took his turn beating me when I got home. My father hadn’t worked since the age of ten so his sons could turn into bullied, idle wastrels. He wanted better for us, even if this meant imprisoning us in our home.
Nael, whose family lived two blocks away from mine, had an even rougher childhood, though its roughness was more a product of parental neglect than of parental domination. Nael’s father worked for the water filtration station on the Euphrates and had married two wives. His wages weren’t enough for both families and he fought with whichever wife he was with; his cries echoed so loudly that the whole neighborhood knew the intimate details of each of his nightly rants.
I met Nael in elementary school. Our long acquaintance has erased all memories of his child’s face. I try to recall it now, but instead I see him as a miniature version of the man he was at twenty-four, all sharp cheekbones and messed-up hair and edgy, restless skinniness. He cracked jokes and sought mischief, even then—he was smart as sin, filled with a confidence I did not have, born of a freedom for which I would have paid any price.
In accordance with the counsel of religious texts, my father was a regular napper, which provided me with chances to sneak over to Nael’s after school. We played Monopoly and checkers, and on the rare occasions his black-and-white TV was not broken we watched Captain Majid, a dubbed Japanese cartoon—the ultimate treat. During the shifts his father spent with his other wife, Nael and I played soccer with a stuffed plastic bag. In summer, he made a pool out of the pothole in the concrete in his backyard, and we slid into the shallow water. I measured the hours carefully, for if I came back home to find my father’s nap shorter than expected, I would regret it, and so would Nael.
Children are fearless in finding their joy. Each Eid, when the adults were happy and busy with their interminable family visits, we leaped through this perfect window for our recalcitrance. One Eid, we went out to search for a movie theater, but finding those we knew closed or deserted, we instead drifted to the Rawdah Mosque to watch the noon prayers from the doorway. After the prayer ended, we watched as the worshipers closed the yellow curtains, then blocked any remaining light with prayer rugs. They had all sat down together in a big circle when a few of the worshipers saw us gawking from the doorway and one of them commanded us to join. We hesitantly entered the circle and sat down among them. Sacks filled with pebbles appeared, which the imam ordered distributed to the worshipers. He began to chant in the Naqshbandi Sufi fashion, each praise of God uttered to a haunting rhythm, echoed by the rest of us, who, with each repetition, passed a smooth pebble from our right hand to our left, then discarded it on the floor. I watched with fear as the used pebbles piled up, unsure of what would happen when the last pebble dropped. The men, their individuality now subsumed into the chant, rose at the imam’s command and swayed in unison to the beat. The rhythm grew faster. The men began to jump and scream. From some unseen corner two zealots brought out swords. When they started to dance manically, my belly sank. My eyes sought Nael’s. His face, dry with fright, was a perfect mirror of my own. We fled as stealthily as possible.
WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, I thought Hafez al-Assad was the president of the entire world. When I was bored during lectures, I would stare up at the portrait of Our Comrade, the Father and the Leader, looming over us from the front of the classroom. He smiled down gently, his suit sharp, his tie silvery, prayer beads frozen mid-click between his hands. This portrait wasn’t just in the classroom, of course, but everywhere I looked. Hafez al-Assad was our patriarch, the unbeatable general who had delivered our country to safety by seizing control of the government in what he called the Corrective Movement, a beloved father who, every seven years, won a landslide election with no less than 99 percent of our votes. On every possible occasion, we saluted him, marched in his praise, wrote poems in his honor. Sometimes we confused him for God.
Each morning, we queued up in the playground while a teacher led us through the Slogans. Now I understood what it felt like to lose your individuality—I was lost like those men in that Sufi circle. We students in our rows shouted each line of the Slogans until the triumphant finish: “Our leader forever, Comrade Hafez al-Assad.”
My father had other ideas.
“In your heart, replace the last three words with ‘Muhammad, Messenger of God,’ ” my father told me, protesting, when I described our daily pledge. No other man shall be my leader forever, my father thought—least of all a man he deemed an enemy of our religion, for transforming himself into a deity in our godly land.
Two years later, an event happened that defied the logic of our world. Impossibly, Our Father and Comrade died. The country plunged into an ecstasy of mourning. It took me months to absorb that a god could perish. His death birthed thousands of brand-new Hafez al-Assads, his image returned to us in photos, drawings, sculptures, and Baath Party flags affixed to every surface. Syrian flags unfurled unto infinity, their two central stars green and sharp as vipers’ eyes. Another adjective was added to his name, and thus he became the Immortal Comrade Hafez al-Assad.
WHEN I WAS TWELVE, my father decided to send me to live and study at Abu Ubaidah Ibn al-Jarrah Religious School, in the countryside outside of Aleppo. “You will get a better education there,” he said. His own schooling had consisted of a few months spent learning to read and write Quranic verses at the feet of an old man from a nearby village, but his time as a trucker introduced him to the wider, more literate world—one that, through education and achievement, he wanted to prepare his sons to enter.
Ours was a superstitious, conservative community, where many people insisted that before one undertook any important task or made a difficult choice, one needed to go to the tomb of some pious wali and ask for his blessings. He, or rarely she, would then come to you in the dream and offer the perfect advice. One night, in that transitory summer before I entered religious school, my father took me on a ride to the Hama countryside. There the long-dead wali, al-Sayyad, reposed in a pilgrim-packed shrine. As my father recommended, I sought al-Sayyad’s guidance, though I wasn’t sure what I was asking for. Facing his tomb, I raised my hands and prayed to God, in the wali’s presence, that I would succeed in the attainment of knowledge. Green velvet covered al-Sayyad’s coffin. Worshipers jostled behind me, impatient for their turn.
IT WAS THURSDAY NIGHT when the minibus deposited me at the Abu Ubaidah Ibn al-Jarrah Religious School in the tawny minutes before sunset. My father had seen me off at Raqqa’s bus station, where silently I’d kissed his hand.
The long journey had bounced me from bus to Aleppo’s city minibus to a minibus across the North Aleppan countryside into Turkman Bareh, the small village where the school lay, planted in the fertile red soil just a few miles from the Turkish border. The population there was a mix of Arabs and Arabized Turkmen, the opposite of the population on the other side, which was a mix of Turks and Turkified Arabs.
The village was peaceful, but as the minibus pulled up to the gates of the school, my new home struck me as a noisy, scary place, surrounded by high walls of white limestone. Even before I left the bus, I could hear the echoes of the kids’ screams, the instructors’ bellows, the tramps of hundreds of feet going and coming, running and sliding on floors. The noise seized me, and I thought I’d break down completely if I walked into its source. I stumbled out of the minibus and tucked my neck down, close to my shoulders, as if to hide inside myself. The courtyard surged with boys like me, most of them strangers to one another. Some wandered, as lost as I was, though a few older boys strutted like men. Per school policy, we dressed alike, and we each carried bags of the same size, filled with the same two changes of clothing. We merged together, an undifferentiated sea of gallabiyahs and white knit caps. The boys began introducing themselves, but their chatter seemed like a play whose script I had not read. The depth of my aloneness hit me. My stomach fluttered anxiously. I awaited an order, a lead, a voice to guide me as to where I should go, what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to sleep. Oh, and eat! I was already so thin and felt myself shrinking even more. I was invisible by the time the bell rang.
A teacher herded us to the dining hall. Disciplined now, we sat four to a bench. The seats were attached to the table legs—iron bars painted white and covered with thick silver leather. With backup from two assistants, the teacher brought peace to the room. On the wall hung a framed quatrain by the great jurist al-Shafi, founder of one of the four main schools of Sunni law. The blue lines flashed against the ivory background, as graceful as herons on a clouded sky.
My brother, you can’t obtain knowledge except through six means…
I’m going to explain them to you in detail:
Intelligence, determination, hard study, sustenance…
Befriending your teacher, and long time.
I took al-Shafi’s words into my heart. Before he was a jurist, al-Shafi had been a poor kid, sent off with nothing to Mecca, where he dedicated his life to the pursuit, and then the dissemination, of knowledge. Like us, he’d left his home and family and walked a rugged route. Al-Shafi had made his mother proud.
I stole a look around me. I saw my new brothers in myself, and I saw myself in them. We came from different backgrounds, different social classes, different cities and villages, but here we were each other’s shadows. I thought of the times my father had told me that he hated his status and the way he’d been raised, how he wanted to see his sons rise higher. He wanted to be proud of me, for me to be someone I didn’t exactly want to be.
The dish on the table in front of us had a few olives, green and black, and green that had blackened. Cold, stonelike cubes of cheese. A big chromium-steel cup of tea. A dry loaf of bread cut into pizza-shaped quarters. One of the teacher’s assistants gave us tips on how to eat. From now on, he said, every action we made, every breath we took, every thought we contemplated, should be for the grace of Allah. We were created to worship Allah. Allah’s approval was what we must seek. I forced myself to chew the hard, dry bread and then to gulp some tea to smooth its way into my stomach. “You eat to have enough strength to worship God,” the discipliner told us, “and reflect, dazzled and humbled, upon His creations.” In this, we followed the example of the Caliph Omar, who was known for his abstentious habits. His scant meals consisted of milk and a few dates. “We are a people who don’t eat until we are hungry,” he once said. “And when we eat, we don’t get full.” Had he been a student in the Abu Ubaidah Ibn al-Jarrah Religious School, I doubt he would have said this with such pride. His dates and milk were digestible, at least.
After dinner, they led us to our dormitory. It was huge, dark, and stinking of wetness and socks. An assistant distributed keys for lockers, where we left our bags. The lock on my locker was new, made in China; in the week that followed I would learn that it could be opened by half the other boys’ keys. We filed into the main room and slotted ourselves into our fifty small, identical beds. I hid my head beneath the thin, dirty pillow. The lights snapped shut. In the dark, at last, I was alone.
The blanket I pulled over myself was coarse wool, too light to warm my body, but I was terrified and small and needed the meager comfort it gave. I folded it in two but my feet poked out and froze. I unfolded it, but shivered so much I could not sleep. I folded it in two again, then shrank beneath it. Eyes shut, I listened to the snores, the breaths, the sibilant sounds of hundreds of restlessly sleeping strangers, trapped like me in this terrifying estrangement from their old lives. Homesickness lodged like a dagger in my ribs.
FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, each day began like this: At half past four, with the dawn still stretching through the darkness, the loudspeakers in the corridors woke us up. Some mornings the speakers played a nasheed by Noureddine Khourchid, whose chorus—“Love of the prophet, oh father, melted my heart. Through it my sins, oh father, were amended”—lightened my heart, especially compared to the school’s other favorite tape: Yasser al-Dosari’s tragic Quranic recitation “Every soul will taste death.” Then ablutions, followed by the dawn prayer. Breakfast was at half past seven. And after breakfast came the Slogans.
We filed into the school playground to recite the Slogans underneath the Syrian flag, just as I had in elementary school. The military education instructor glowered down at us from the steps. His mustache resembled some swollen jungle caterpillar, and his enormous body, which strained his green camo uniform, was flanked by hands so large I could imagine him encircling two boys’ throats in one palm.
“Ready!” he barked.
We queued up. We snapped our legs shut.
“Eyes on your partner’s neck.”
We complied.
“At ease!”
We spread our legs a few inches apart.
“Ready!”
We snapped them together again.
“At ease.”
We complied.
“One Arab nation…” he screamed.
“Of an eternal message,” we completed.
“Our leader forever…”
“Immortal Comrade Hafez al-Assad,” said my fellow students.
Muhammad, Messenger of God, said I voicelessly, panic-stricken.
At first, I thought I was alone in loathing the Slogans, but as the weeks passed, I realized that other students, and even instructors, hated them as much as I did. Some indeterminate number of the good future graduates of the Abu Ubaidah Ibn al-Jarrah Religious School also rejected this other form of worship. It was not a subject of which we could talk openly, but I could divine it from their eyes. Even those who mouthed the Slogans did so without feeling. To us students, the Slogans were acts of aggression against our pious stronghold, born of the macho, cultic nationalism that their enforcer—the military instructor—embodied with his every strut and shout. In our heads, we mocked the bastard, but for our own good we concealed our detestation from his view and practiced instead my father’s quiet methods of defiance. Ultimately, the military instructor’s own laziness saved us. After a week, he barely bothered to show up, and our instructor Abu Khaled led the Slogans instead.
“Ready!” he barked, as the instructors always did.
We lined up. We snapped our legs shut.
“At ease!”
We spread our legs a few inches wide.
“Ready!”
We snapped our legs together again.
“At ease!”
We complied.
Abu Khaled then called up someone from among us. Usually Muzayyek. The teacher’s pet, the students’ idol, the studious, the devout, his beard already half-grown. Muzayyek who wore a gallabiyah identical to mine but was as good as I was bad. In that voice as sweet as water, Muzayyek recited a few verses from the Quran. Abu Khaled gravely stood aside. Whether it was Muzayyek’s voice or Abu Khaled’s stillness, something about the scene inspired a bit of solemnity inside us, and we stood quietly, as we rarely did.
Eight A.M. We dispersed to our classrooms, and I found the room where I would study religious jurisprudence—fiqh. I slid behind my desk. On the first day, the elderly instructor had asked us to choose which of the four schools of Sunni law we would study. My father had told me to choose Shafi’s school over Hanafi’s, but until that moment, I wasn’t sure what this meant. Over the next few years, I’d get to know these names as two of the four scholars whose interpretations of text became Sunni doctrine, and to understand fiqh itself as a deductive method that turned countless contradictory religious texts and hadiths into rules governing every aspect of life, no matter how petty or large. In fiqh class, I learned that Hanafi claimed that a woman’s period lasts from three to ten days. Shafi said no—it lasts from one to fifteen days. Per Hanafi’s ruling, were one to laugh while he prayed, his prayer and ablutions were both invalid. Shafi said that laughter invalidated the prayer only. One winter, I played a trick I’d learned from an older classmate and cracked a joke while a Hanafi student prayed. The poor fellow had to redo his ablutions with freezing water.
In aqeeda (religious doctrine) class, the teacher told us that Shiism was to be considered a perverted doctrine, because it holds that, in addition to the prophets, twelve other men were unerring, and that the twelfth of them is, as of the date of this writing, hidden in an unfindable place. I remembered how my father loved Shia, because they loved Muhammad’s family. Someone told him it was wrong to hang portraits, but one remained in his sitting room—a Shia man who was none other than Hezbollah’s supreme leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In hadith and tafseer (religious exegesis) classes, I was taught the connotations and the denotations of Quranic and hadith verses. Who decided these? Old deceased scholars, of course—whose words I, as a good disciple, had to memorize. In other classes, I studied math, English, chemistry, geography, history, and philosophy, at the hands of the mixed bag of instructors who were there to teach us.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps they were there for the tiny salary of ten thousand Syrian pounds a month. Either way, a job at a religious school was never profitable. Our Arabic literature instructor had to make ends meet raising and trading goats. No wonder he was such a killjoy. He hadn’t dreamed of goat trading when he studied at Cairo’s famous religious university al-Azhar! Once, when I was fifteen, I made the mistake of asking the goat trader why he didn’t teach us the translated version of The Merchant of Venice, a story that sparkled like a lively spring in the desert of deathly dry Arabic grammar. The goat trader banned it the next day and then had it withdrawn from the school library. In Arabic, it is said: “Whatever is banned is desired.” But instructors inverted the proverb: Whatever was desired was banned.
In every grade, at every level of Syrian education, qawmiya class vied with religion to shackle our identities. Qawmiya is the Arabic word for nationalism, and it refers specifically to the pan-Arabist doctrine of Syria’s Baath Party. The English translation fails to capture its chest-puffing, militaristic cultishness; its saccharine exaltation of sacrifice; its pseudo-scientific pomp. Qawmiya textbooks praised the pluralistic nature of our single-party state. I first learned the values of democracy and socialism from these textbooks, every word of which the teachers demanded we memorize and regurgitate, along with the noble sacrifices of the teen girls—hailed as “brides of the south”—who gallantly blew themselves up so that Syria, and not Israel, could occupy Lebanon. If Shafi was the role model for good religious kids, seventeen-year-old car bomber Sana’a Mehaidli was the qawmiya ideal. Reading—or rather being forced to read—these textbooks, I got lost in the terminology. Whole paragraphs didn’t make sense. Once, the course stated that we, in Syria, enjoyed a “leftist” Baath Party, unlike the “rightist” Baath Party of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. When I asked the teacher the difference, he looked baffled. Instead of answering, he decided to make a joke of it. “Well, you see,” he sneered with a rare blush drawn on his long face, “if you look at the map, you’ll see Iraq to your right and Syria to your left.”
Of all the subjects, only English left me warm. Our English teacher, a weird-natured old man named Hikmet, took a liking to me. He saw how the sounds of English attracted me, how I savored the words like little candies, and he encouraged me as best he could. Fortunately, he never guessed that I was behind the organized humming noise the entire class sometimes made with our mouths closed—our way to protest a dull lesson. Hikmet’s lessons were not always boring, though: Once he assigned a text that described the final match between Tottenpool and Liverham! Tottenpool won two-nil, of course.
When I was fifteen, English cemented its talismanic power on me. During a rare afternoon of freedom, I took the bus into Aleppo and saw an old man in a café in the Armenian quarter. He was wearing tweed, neat but not wealthy, surrounded by his small coffee, the lazy curl of his pipe smoke, with some English book spread open in front of him. Even as I failed to read the words, I knew they contained the secret to the man’s mysterious contentment—his vast, foreign elegance that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the singular ornament of those words. I wanted to be that man, with that same force inside me. English seemed the only way to get there.
Each night, after evening prayer, we got two hours to study in a huge hall beneath the mosque, and connected to that hall was a library. There I spent my sweetest hours. I’d creep, exhausted, past the loathsome librarian and then start my search through the stacks—at first I wasn’t even sure for what. I found what I was looking for by chance. They were three fat volumes, histories of caliphs, colored like sugar, their pages so old I feared they’d crumble in my hands. But inside, I found a world—history, poetry, literature. I read about the Umayyad caliph Walid I, who built the dynasty’s greatest mosque in Damascus, and about the other Umayyad caliphs who drank, who partied, who loved, some of whom even openly blasphemed, but who led two golden ages anyway. Half-asleep, half-dreaming, I stared through the pages into other worlds far beyond the white limestone boundaries of my prison, and when I finished the last volume, I began with the first again.
Days passed, as they always do, whether you want them to or not, and then days piled into years; inch by inch, I slowly grew into myself. I read more books—more history, more love stories, more translated foreign literature. I obsessed over soccer. I smuggled cigarettes into school. During one of those treasured, too-quick summers at home, my father bought us a computer, ostensibly for study, but which I put to use haunting message boards full of poetry and pirated videogames.
We had no TV in school, no radio, no Internet. Geopolitics seldom reached inside our walls. When I was fifteen and finally tall enough to kick the ass of that one teacher who beat me, our instructors announced the American invasion of Iraq. We were terrified, of course, and outraged. It was as if the Mongols were attacking the Abbasid caliphate again—arranging towers of skulls, making the rivers run black with ink—and after Iraq these Mongols would pour across the border, murdering every Muslim they could find. During each of our five daily prayers, Muzayyek and his fellow imams supplicated God. “Don’t let Umm Qasr’s port fall!” “Oh God, repel their attack!” preachers in my school pleaded. “Oh God, if Baghdad falls, you’ll never have a place to be worshiped.”
Iraq fell, but the fact was that He retained 1.5 billion worshipers, who formed the majority in dozens of countries. He repelled nothing and the world kept turning, prayers flying across the globe.