Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

“Big Brother is watching you!”

Qamar ad-Dine repeats this from time to time, mocking Rahal.

“So sorry. I mean Little Brother is watching you!”

The entire cybercafé shakes with laughter.

One must acknowledge that Rahal’s English is below average. As for his knowledge of English literature, it is no more than Amelia’s knowledge of Imam Malik School. In any case, Rahal is a student of Arabic literature, his specialty being ancient poetry — the hanging poetry of the Jahiliyyah, Umayyad, Andalusian, and Moroccan periods. As for novels, he doesn’t read them in Arabic, which he is very good at, so how could he read them in other languages?

And because no one ever explained to him the reference to the famous novel by George Orwell, where Big Brother is watching everybody, he has always wondered why Qamar ad-Dine brags about his brothers, the small and the big, despite the fact that he has only one sister, a graduate student in Rabat.

“Little Brother is watching you!”

Qamar ad-Dine’s innuendos do not bother Rahal. But Qamar ad-Dine often gripes about the way Rahal violates his customers’ privacy, having no shame fixing his mouse-like eyes on their computer screens. In the first stage of Qamar ad-Dine’s virtual life, when he was addicted to porn websites, this bothered him a lot. Even today, he hates it when someone snoops on him. So he began to avoid sites with pictures of churches, icons, and other religious imagery. Most often he copies the text and pastes it on a blank page, then he takes his time reading it in Word. And when he finishes, he moves the file to the trash bin and signs out.

But in Rahal’s kingdom there are no trash bins. As soon as the last customer leaves the cybercafé after midnight, Rahal takes a few minutes, sometimes even an hour, to clean up the computers. He checks them one by one, rummaging through the hard drives and discovering the secrets of the customers’ digital worlds. Many leave their e-mail accounts and forum memberships open. Brother Abu Qatadah, for example, right after he hears the call to prayer, closes the site and leaves, yet the blog remains open, along with any discussions between the brothers. Sometimes it’s about the duty to fight and sacrifice the self if an occupier reaches a Muslim land; other times about using electoral fraud to win government office. Often the discussions are heated — and they almost always involve the topic of elections.

The brothers object to the heresy of the candidates’ self-promotion and to the idea that all members of society have equal voices no matter what their degree of learning and piety is. As for Abd al-Massih’s courses and his chapters of Holy Scripture, Rahal retrieves them from the trash and copies the Arabic versions to his private computer so he can take his time reading them the following day.

Of course, this takes some extra effort on Rahal’s part before closing, but he is the one who signed up the customers in the first place. He records all their usernames, real or pseudonymous, and their passwords as well. No secrets. Rahal knows everything about the subjects of his happy cyberkingdom. Even the Nigerian community in Ashbal al-Atlas Cybercafé — their secrets have been revealed to Rahal since they moved to the electronic sphere. Amelia and Flora are lesbians. Amelia is crazy in love with Flora, but they sell themselves to men while they wait to enter the prominent and growing underground gay community in Marrakech. Yakabo works for them as an escort, bodyguard, and pimp. His relationship with Flora is for cover, silly Qamar ad-Dine. Only for cover, you fool.

Indeed, Rahal. You see them move like puppets in front of your eyes. They do not know how close your hand is to them at all times: their real names and pseudonyms, innocent virtual friendships as well as illicit adventures. You’ve got them, Rahal, but you have to be smart. Be very cautious and conceal these secrets; keep them to yourself, you little weasel. Otherwise, if Abu Qatadah learns that Qamar ad-Dine has deviated from Islam, converted to Christianity, and changed his name, or that the Nigerian girls are sapphic sex workers, he might declare holy war right now in the middle of your cybercafé. And so Rahal enjoys spying on the members of his new family — and at the same time remains devoted to providing everyone with the illusion of safety. Indeed, here they are at home and in the hands of their happy families here in these virtual jungles of Ashbal al-Atlas Cybercafé.

But Rahal made a critical mistake by entrusting Abu Qatadah with Abd al-Massih.

Whenever Rahal has to run an errand, he reminds Abd al-Massih to take great care with Abu Qatadah: “Your brother Mahjoub Didi is a jackass and is easily confused when it comes to computers. Therefore remember, Qamar ad-Dine, that if you leave him alone he’ll become irritated, and then the cybercafé will lose money waiting for me to reconnect him with his brothers in God. So please treat him as a valued customer.”

Abd el-Massih has always volunteered to help Abu Qatadah. The last time, after Didi’s computer crashed, he willingly gave him his favorite PC in the café. He did not know that he had made the mistake of a lifetime.

Abu Qatadah could not betray his brother in God, Shihab ad-Dine al-Sayouti. They go to el-Massira Mosque together and a strong trust and friendship has grown between them. So how could he learn of such a bad secret and not inform his brother? It would be a big betrayal. And Abu Qatadah would never betray Shihab ad-Dine. And so he informed him of exactly what he saw.

“Your son was having a discussion with Gerges the Copt as if they were, God forbid, of the same religion. Qamar ad-Dine was calling him Brother Gerges, and in return the Egyptian called him Brother Abd al-Massih. Then the enemy of God — the Copt — wrote to him a verse, which seems to be from the book they call holy. We know how falsified it is and full of deviations: For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members don’t have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. At this point, my dear friend, the muezzin announced the prayer and I brought the news straight to you. As I ran I repeated the supplication reported by Aisha, God be pleased with her, which the prophet had made: O Controller of the hearts, make my heart steadfast in your religion.”

It happens like this: Shihab ad-Dine does not wait for the prayer, believing he has broken his wudu’, or ablution. He leaves the mosque and hurries toward the cybercafé. Rahal has returned and Abd al-Massih is going over receipts when Shihab ad-Dine enters in a state no one has ever seen him in before: he’s panting and shaking as if he ran all the way there. Abd al-Massih does not understand what is going on when Shihab ad-Dine jumps on him, drops him to the ground, and begins to kick him. No, he is not kicking him — he’s trying to, but he doesn’t know how. Now he’s biting him — tries to bite again, but his teeth fail him. He pulls his son’s hair. He pulls it with both hands, then he lets go of it, drags him violently, and smashes his head on the ground, howling like a wounded wolf, the blood boiling in his veins. He slaps his son’s face, then screams: “A Christian, you dog! A Christian, you apostate! When you finished high school but decided against college, we thought you had a different way of looking at life and the future, and we let you be. When you quit the mosque we said, You are inexperienced but you’ll wise up, and we neglected you. Since you’ve been living in this infected hole, we’ve thought, Let him discover the world , and we did not watch or question you. And the result? Now you are Christian, you dog. If you were gay and the fornicators fiddled around with your ass, we could pray for your protection. If you doubted God, we could say even Abraham became troubled, doubted, questioned, and then his heart became peaceful, so we would pray that you be guided on the right path. But a Christian, you dog, a Nazarene, as if God Almighty did not choose this nation and from it the last prophet!”