Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

In a few days, it will be the world that prostrates itself at my feet.

The most important revolutionary mission undertaken since man learned to stiffen his spine! And I’m the one who’s been chosen to accomplish it. What a way of getting even with destiny! The practice of death has never seemed so euphoric, so cosmic.

At night, when I lie on the sofa facing the window, I remember the painful events of my life, and they all reinforce my commitment. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do or what will be the nature of my mission. “Something that’ll make September eleventh seem like a noisy recess in an elementary school,” Sayed said. One thing’s for certain: I won’t shrink from it!

There’s a knock at my door. It’s Dr. Jalal. He’s wearing the same tracksuit he had on yesterday evening, and he still hasn’t bothered to tie his shoelaces.

It’s the first time he’s ever crossed my threshold. His alcoholic breath spreads out like smoke. “I was wasting away in my room,” he says. “Would it disturb you if I came in for a couple of minutes?”

“You’re not disturbing me.”

“Thanks.”

He totters over to the sofa, scratching his butt with a hand thrust down inside his drawers. I’ll bet he hasn’t bathed for a good long time. He casts admiring glances around the room. “Wow!” he says. “Are you some mogul’s son?”

“My father was a well digger.”

“Mine wasn’t anything.”

He realizes he’s said something outlandish and waves it away with one hand. Then, crossing his legs, he leans against the back of the sofa and squints at the ceiling. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” he complains. “These days, I can hardly fall asleep at all.”

“You work too much.”

He waggles his chin. “I have no doubt you’re right. These lecture tours are wearing me out.”

I’d heard talk of Dr. Jalal — none of it good — while I was still in high school. I’d also read two or three of his books, including a treatise on jihadist fundamentalism entitled Why Are Muslims Angry? — a work that aroused a great deal of indignation among the clergy. At the time, he was a very controversial figure in Arab intellectual circles, and many of his adversaries sought to hold him up to public contempt. His theories about the dysfunctions of contemporary Muslim thought were veritable indictments; the imams rejected his writings in toto, even going so far as to predict hellfire for anyone who dared to read them. For the ordinary devout Muslim, Dr. Jalal was nothing but a mountebank, a Western lackey in the pay of factions hostile to Islam in general and to Arabs in particular. I myself detested him; I thought his learning perverted, exhibitionistic, and conventional, and his contempt for his people seemed obvious to me. In my eyes, he offered one of the most repulsive examples of those traitors who proliferated like rats in European media and academic circles, fully prepared to exchange their souls for the privilege of seeing their photographs in a newspaper and hearing themselves talked about. I didn’t disapprove of the fatwas that condemned him to death; the imams hoped to put an end to his incendiary rants, which he published at length in the Western press and delivered with offensive zeal in television studios. I was, therefore, amazed — and also, I must admit, rather relieved — when I learned that he’d made an about-face.

The first time I saw Dr. Jalal in the flesh was the second day after my arrival in Beirut. Sayed had insisted that I attend the doctor’s talk. “He’s magnificent!” Sayed declared.

The event took place in an auditorium not far from the university. There was a huge crowd, hundreds of people standing beside and behind the rows of chairs that had been taken by storm hours before the doctor was scheduled to appear. Students, women, girls, family men, government workers packed the immense room. Their hubbub sounded like a seething volcano. When the doctor appeared on the platform, escorted by militiamen, the shouts of welcome shook the walls and rattled the windows. After the applause died down, he delivered a magisterial lecture on imperialist hegemony and the disinformation campaigns behind the demonization of Muslims.

I adored the man that day. It’s true that his looks are unprepossessing, that he drags his feet and dresses carelessly, that his exhalations are disconcerting and his alcoholic’s laziness incorrigible, but when he starts to speak — my God, when he merely adjusts the microphone and looks at his audience! — he exalts everyone in the hall. Better than anyone, he knows how to express our anguish and the insults we suffer and the necessity of breaking our silence and rising up. “Today, we’re the West’s flunkies; tomorrow, our children will be its slaves !” he cried, stressing the final clause. And the audience erupted, experiencing en masse a kind of delirium. If some plausible joker had sicced the crowd on the enemy at that moment, all the Western embassies in Beirut would have been reduced to ashes. Dr. Jalal has a knack for mobilizing everyone. The accuracy of his analyses and the effectiveness of his arguments are a joy to consider. No imam can match him; no speaker is better at turning a murmur into a cry. He’s hypersensitive and exceptionally intelligent, a mentor of rare charisma.

At the end of his lecture, responding to a student’s remarks, Dr. Jalal said, “The Pentagon is out to catch the devil in his own trap. Those people are convinced they’re several steps ahead of God. They were planning their war on Iraq for years before it started. September eleventh wasn’t the trigger; it was the pretext. The idea of destroying Iraq goes back to the moment when Saddam laid the very first stone for the foundation of his nuclear site. The Pentagon’s target was neither the despot himself nor his country’s oil; it was Iraqi genius. Nevertheless, mixing business with pleasure is perfectly acceptable; you can bring a country to its knees and pump out its lifeblood at the same time. Americans love to kill two birds with one stone. What they were aiming at in Iraq was the perfect crime. But they went that one better: They made their motive for the crime the guarantee of their impunity. Let me explain. Why attack Iraq? Because Iraq is believed to possess weapons of mass destruction. How can you attack Iraq without running too great a risk yourself? By first making sure that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Is this not the height of combinative genius? The rest came of its own accord, like saliva to the mouth. The Americans manipulated the planet by scaring everybody. Then, to be sure their troops wouldn’t be at risk, they obliged the UN experts to do the dirty job for them, and at no cost to themselves. Once they were certain there were no nuclear firecrackers in Iraq, they unleashed their military might upon a population already and deliberately beaten down by embargoes and psychological harassment. And the deal was done.”

I had an offense to wash away in blood; to a Bedouin, that duty was as sacred as prayer to the faithful. And with Dr. Jalal’s words, the offense was grafted onto the Cause.

“Are you sick?” he asks me, gesturing toward the array of medications on my night table.

This catches me off guard. Since I’ve never imagined entertaining him in my suite, I don’t have a cover story ready. I curse myself. Why have I left all those medicine boxes and bottles lying around in plain sight, instead of putting them in the bathroom cabinet, where they belong? Sayed’s instructions were strict: “Don’t leave anything to chance. Distrust everyone.”

Intrigued, Dr. Jalal heaves himself to his feet and walks over to the night table. “Well, well,” he says. “There’s enough stuff here to medicate an entire tribe.”