Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

The loudspeakers carried an explosion of anger from inside the mosque. “That’s the voice of Satan himself speaking!”

“The kid’s crazy, look at his eyes …”

The speakers had drawn an audience. A cloud of dust rose in the alley as people poured in from the fringes of the Lane of Many Heads, rushing to see the spectacle. Even those who didn’t usually get up early enough for dawn prayers couldn’t miss the appearance of the devil himself in their neighborhood mosque.

Some of the young men came forward warily, hoping to wrest the microphone from Yusuf’s trembling hands. At the other end of the Lane of Many Heads, Azza burst out of nowhere and ran down the length of the alley in her abaya to the door of the mosque, where she hesitated. She wanted — no, yearned — to push past the men and get to Yusuf, to calm him down, but some fear, like the fluttering of a dove’s wings, stopped her.

“What kind of believers are you? What are you doing here, bowing and kneeling like robots, when true religion is out there, in the streets and in people’s homes, in the good deeds you do, whether great or small!” A cloud of heat settled over the mosque and the neat lines of prayer rugs began to sway and overlap; sweat trickled between men’s shoulders, daubing wet patches onto their shirts, sliding into the scene. A group of young men had Yusuf surrounded. Yusuf sent his first assailant flying through the rest of the circle with a forceful shove.

“God give you strength! Don’t be frightened by the devil. Don’t let him weaken your faith!” shouted a voice somewhere in the back, cheering the attackers on. Raising his voice, Yusuf answered him, “Have faith in life, in the breath of life His spirit gave us! Don’t fight the breath which brought us into this world. Know its many blessings. Heaven begins in the street and ends at the threshold of the mosque!”

“Muslim brothers, block your ears to Satan’s blasphemy! Repeat God’s name and attack him. This is the devil himself speaking to you through Yusuf, an angel of hell!”

That morning Halima woke from a deep sleep to the sound of her son’s rage booming out through the mosque’s loudspeakers. She leapt up, grabbed her abaya, and raced out into the alley. The air exploded as Yusuf, now cornered by the men, screamed at the top of his lungs, “Look at the deal you’ve made!” Amplified by the loudspeaker, his shriek tore through every breast in the Lane of Many Heads. “A prison in life and a paradise in death!” he yelled, as fists pounded him and feet smashed into his face and his ribs, not even sparing his broken knee. They were beating Satan himself. They beat Yusuf until he collapsed, crushed under the weight of their rage, until even his breath fell silent.

Halima broke through the ring of bodies to find her son had been tied up with cables and his head wrapped in a red scarf so as to hide the face of the devil.

“Move, woman. Stand back or Satan will get you!” Halima paid no attention to the warning and pushed her way through the crowd of men to her son’s unconscious body. Her abaya slipped as she knelt down to cradle Yusuf’s crumpled frame in her lap and the men retreated at the sight of her bare chest. As soon as the ambulance appeared at the end of the alley, they surged around her again and shoved her aside. She found herself stumbling feebly into Azza’s arms outside the mosque. Meanwhile, Sheikh Muzahim and his bright orange beard stepped forward to fan the men’s rage:

“Fear for your religion! The devil has taken over the body of this cursed boy. Cast him into hell! Show him no mercy!” His hand trembled as he grasped his black prayer beads, urging the paramedics and policemen to expunge the satanic presence.

“He is an angel of hell,” echoed Imam Dawoud. “Who is more wicked than he who seeks to destroy God’s mosques and prevent worshippers mentioning His name therein? Only disgrace awaits such people …” His son Mu’az went to turn on the air conditioner to end the disgrace Yusuf had caused.

Yusuf was taken to Ta’if and booked into Shihar psychiatric hospital. He was strapped to the bed in a crowded ward where six patients lay immersed in their own feces, spraying everything around them with putrid froth every time they shrieked at the orderlies or at Yusuf when he tried to escape. He was unimaginably furious: to end up in Shihar hospital was a fate worse than death. Shihar … The name alone was considered an insult back in the Lane of Many Heads in Mecca; it was where disturbed girls, who were virgins, suddenly gave birth, where the healthy dropped dead by morning, where sanity trickled away down drainpipes and heads were emptied slowly of their identities, where a person’s human qualities would be washed away by the surging onset of idiocy and stupefaction.

“My mind’s never been in such a shockingly pure state before! Please, you must listen to me. You can’t just run away from me! We’re all hypocrites and liars!” It was Yusuf’s eyes, not his words, that gripped the nurses and doctors. Two popping eyes that shot sparks and never clouded over, not even when he was pumped full of enough tranquilizers to floor a camel. His body would go limp and his tongue would become tied, but his eyes still pierced the faces around him with burning rays, all day and all night.

The technician fixed wires to Yusuf’s head, while avoiding that gaze, which streaked through the heads gathered around him like a shooting star. The first charge tore through the whorls of Yusuf’s brain and lifted his convulsed body several centimeters into the air, but it didn’t succeed in forcing those eyelids shut. The technician doubled the voltage. He could almost smell the unblinking eyes burning.

The sessions continued for a week, but they couldn’t put Yusuf to sleep. His memory exploded into fragments that caused wounds, which looked like dove’s footprints, to appear across different parts of his body. They placed him in isolation, in a cell resembling a metal box, to monitor these symptoms. The shocks increased, but they did nothing to crack open the store of rage that was pumping poison straight into his bloodstream, turning his skin a dark purple.

Just when Yusuf had finally managed to subdue the poison and pull a mask of calm over his features, it was time for him to be examined by the chief consultant supervising his case. Yusuf mustered every mask he had and pleaded to be allowed to make one phone call.

On Yusuf’s seventh day in Shihar, al-Ashi appeared, accompanying Yusuf’s mother on her visit. “I’m no less crazy than any of you,” said Yusuf. Al-Ashi contemplated Yusuf, who was sitting strapped to a bare white chair — patches of untrimmed beard, features contorted from inhuman pain, pleading with an incandescent glow — in the starkness of the visiting room and the chill of the air-conditioning, which iced their faces. Despite the cold, sweat ran in little rivulets from Halima’s temples down to her chin and dripped onto her great chest. Something about that sweat made Yusuf’s gaze even glassier; his blackened body seemed dried-out and wide-awake, burning with some internal fire. The voice hissing out of his chest sprayed them with coarse splinters:

“You’re my only hope of escaping this wretchedness. I’m strapped to the bed, I lie in my own shit like an animal, in a paddock with other animals pissing and shitting in their sleep.” Al-Ashi turned to look at Halima questioningly.

“Crazy or not, this place isn’t fit for human beings,” Halima answered, and for the first time in her life there was a bitter edge to her words.

“Just take me to the Sanctuary and leave me there,” Yusuf begged.

“The electrical activity in his brain has reached ninety-five microvolts. Five more and this young man loses any chance of getting his mind back,” the doctor said, attempting to convey the gravity of Yusuf’s condition to Halima and al-Ashi. “Usually, when the mind is active, the frequency of beta waves should be between fifteen and forty waves per second. But your relative’s mind”—the doctor scrutinized al-Ashi carefully for any indication that he understood this bombardment of medical information—“is registering a constant rate of thirty-two hertz, sometimes even more than forty. The mind needs deep, dreamless sleep in order to produce the delta waves that help the body recuperate and regain its natural internal balance, but not even the strongest tranquillizers we’ve got have managed to put your son to sleep. He’s hanging on to his sanity by a single thread, and I can assure you if he leaves the hospital now, it will be severed.” The only thing al-Ashi and Halima got out of all the jargon was that Yusuf needed to be taken to the house of God to be rid of his beta, delta, and satanic waves. His attempt to intimidate them having failed, the doctor could do nothing but sign the discharge papers and order that Yusuf be tightly bound and strapped into Khalil’s waiting car.