Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

“You’ve killed someone unjustly,” some of them repeated, “and now you’re walking in his funeral procession? May God challenge you and consign you to hell for everlasting!”

When we reached a large space where a number of corridors met, my escort suddenly stopped me.

“How did you come to be in the lunatics’ wing?” he asked.

I told him what I knew, but then he asked me what they all meant by accusing me of killing my neighbor. I told him about the bag and its contents.

“But they’re all saying the same thing,” he said after a pause for thought. “What’s your response?”

“Officer, Sir,” I replied, “I never even entered the dead man’s cell. In law, the consensus of a group of lunatics has no validity.”

He rubbed his neck as he gave the matter some more thought. Consigning the corpse to his assistants with instructions to take it to the gravediggers, he took me over to a door in a dimly lit block. Locking it behind me, he advised me to wait along with the people whom he called “people practicing for Judgment Day.” Meanwhile, he would look into my case and the whole matter of the bag.

The shop where I now found myself consisted of a meeting hall with a high tin roof supported by wooden pillars planted in sandy soil. The whole place was teeming with people, young, middle-aged, and old. Some were standing in line while others — the handicapped and decrepit — were sitting down. I stayed close to the door, waiting for the officer to come back. An old man invited me to sit in his place, but I thanked him and pointed to the crutch I was relying on for support. When I asked him how he was and about this teeming mass of God’s servants, some of them took turns in answering.

“Dear brother in God,” one of them told me, “people here have been just as you see them now. For almost a month the weak ones have been sitting on the ground, and the sick have simply been laid out there. .”

“Once a day,” a second one added, “they throw us down some pieces of bread, dates, and bottled water from the roof. So we eat what we’re given and wait here to be released by the One who is the only victor.”

“Anyone who needs to relieve himself,” a third one continued, “has to plough his way through the ranks and get to that facility with wooden screens and cloth awning around it. There’s no water for ablutions, only stones. The prayers we perform fall far short and only involve fear. Those murderous tyrants make false claims about us: they say we’re all heretical extremists. Their torture methods go so far as to train us for the Day of Judgment — that is, in accordance with their own hateful expression and their sickly imagination. .”

“But we’re all willing to put up with it,” a fourth added. “We’ll either emerge with our lives or else be resurrected as martyrs.”

Just then a voice arose — I could not see who it was — chanting these Qur’anic verses: “You who believe, seek help through patience and prayer; verily God is with the patient. Do not say to those killed in God’s path: ‘They are dead’; rather they are living, but you do not realize it. We will test you with a taste of fear, hunger, and a lack of property, lives, and fruits. Give the good news to the patient, who, when afflicted by misfortune, say: ‘Surely we belong to God, and to Him is the return.’” [Surat al-Baqara 2, The Cow, vv. 153–56]. Other voices responded, my own among them, with further verses. Just then, there was a hail of small bags and plastic bottles, and all of a sudden silence fell. I gathered up my share — bread, dates, and drinking water. The silence continued as everyone ate. Once that was over, a powerful voice was heard:

“Servants of God,” it said, “the tyrants have prevented us doing ablutions and praying, so let’s respond by performing chants and intercessions. That way we can at least remain pure and keep ourselves strong. Our noble Prophet — may God bless and preserve him! — said: ‘God has ninety-nine names, and he who recites them will enter heaven.’ He also said that any servant of God who encounters a problem or who feels sorrowful and then prays to God will have that problem or sorrow removed and replaced by joy and happiness. Servants of God, recite God’s beautiful names with me. He is God, the only God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the King, the Holy, the Peace, the Believing, the Protector, the Mighty, the Powerful. .”

Everyone in the room, whether Arabs or non-Arabs, joined the speaker in his recitation. The very sight of so many necks straining forward, so many throats reciting, was enough to send shivers down the spine and warm the heart.

Once the recitation, in which I participated as best I could, was over, silence fell again — that is, until the next phase:

“Servants of God, the Lord of Mankind has said: ‘He who praises God thirty-three times at the conclusion of each prayer, extols God thirty-three times, and pronounces the takbir thirty-three times, then recites the hundredfold “There is no god but God, He is One alone with no partner; to Him belongs dominion and praise; and He is all-powerful,” that person will have his sins forgiven, even though they be as plentiful as the foaming waves in the sea.’”

No sooner had this voice, that clearly belonged to a remarkable and effective imam, finished its exhortation than voices vied with each other to ask forgiveness, with exultations, shouts of praise, declarations of God’s unity, all in the numbers designated by the imam. Once that was completed, the crowd started chanting texts eulogizing the Prophet, sections from the burda poem of al-Busiri* and extracts from the Dala’il al-Khayrat by the renowned Sufi imam, al-Juzuli.* Some of them went on to recite other Sufi chants and to perform the devotional dance. The whole atmosphere was fraught with an amazing sense of spiritual presence.

The various episodes in this profound and ever accelerating ceremony followed one another in inexorable progression. I joined in with both mind and spirit, although my body was exhausted by the need to lean heavily on the two crutches that by now had become an integral part of me. I was afraid that the officer would come back and not find me where he had left me, so I had to stay put near the door. I could not move away, even though my need to keep moving and my urgent desire to relieve myself were both becoming ever more insistent.

The group closest to me started reciting the famous poem in which the Prophet’s companions welcomed him and his company to the city of Medina the brilliant:

The new moon has risen over us

from the folds of farewell.

We are obliged to give thanks.

Greetings to you, O best of summoners .

The sheer enthusiasm of their chanting spread to other groups, and then to the assembly as a whole.

The event that finally managed to calm their vibrant performance was when cold water started pouring out of gutters in the roof, all accompanied by a detached voice through the loudspeakers that kept repeating this slogan: “Cleanliness is part of faith. Clean yourselves without charge.” No one managed to avoid getting soaked, even if it was only intermittent, and here and there some people started sneezing, coughing, and having runny noses. For my part, I started shivering uncontrollably; my teeth were chattering, and I started hacking so badly that I could not use my asthma spray.

Once the water stopped cascading down, everyone went back to the chants and incantations they were singing before. At this point even more people started dancing, and I presumed that they were trying to get some warmth back into their cold, soaked bodies. All of a sudden, loud techno music started blaring through the loudspeakers, so the chanters and dancers shouted as loudly as they could in order to drown out the music. However, they gradually became more and more exhausted, and little by little a powerful enforced silence began to take over.