Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

At two in the afternoon I took Fatima and Layla out to lunch. As we walked through the garden, we crossed paths with the police team investigating the disappearance. They engaged us in a casual conversation that ended with them checking our identities. They pointed out that the investigation would benefit from every piece of information, big or small, we could provide.

Once out in the street, Layla abandoned her unnatural calm and began discussing the disappearance, unconcerned by our search for a nearby restaurant. Her verbosity seemed to be her way of dealing with Fatima’s presence and controlling it. I took her by the arm and told her that I felt like I had not seen her for months. She said that there was no need for me to imagine as it had been ages since I’d last seen her. We entered an Italian restaurant hungry and agitated.

The investigation was going in various directions. Essam and his band were in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, there was their entrenched conflict with various Islamist movements, because their songs poked fun at religious dress, beards and language. The matter had gone all the way to parliament, where the government was asked what it intended to do to put an end to this trivialisation of expressions like ‘in the name of God’, ‘there is no power but in God’ and ‘God suffices’ and their being used as terms of scorn and sarcasm.

There was also pathological hostility between Arthritis and other bands associated with devil worship, not only because Essam and the others had denied the existence of any connection between them and the Satanist trend, but because they had gone so far as to dub themselves an Islamic singing group. This had led a local Muslim leader to invite Arthritis to perform in the city whose municipal council he headed. But the concert turned into a chair-throwing fight when the band gave in to the audience’s demands and sang provocative songs such as ‘Islam isn’t in beards and rags’. Despite all that, the Muslim leader had issued a statement condemning infiltrators at the concert who had provoked the fight and praising Arthritis for respecting the spirit of religion and rejecting its false façades. At the time, Essam thought of changing the name of the group from Arthritis to Lantern, but Mahdi and the rest of the group refused categorically, thus increasing the tensions among them.

Essam had been profoundly shocked by his arrest in the devil worship affair. He and other band members had been accused of belonging to a worldwide Satanist movement, and the prosecutor had read passages from various publications and slogans. Essam was not religious, but he would never have joined a movement that promoted such ideas and spread them recklessly. When the judge asked him whether he was convinced that Satan was a friend of humanity who connived with them and shared their desires, he nearly answered: ‘Who is this new Satan?’ But seeing the stern look in his lawyer’s eyes he had replied very calmly, ‘I believe in God and His Prophet.’ From that moment on Ahmad Majd had turned his defence of Essam and the others into a torrent of sarcastic remarks that shook the court. He had talked about Satan’s relationship with music, young people’s relationship to Satanism, and the phobia of conservatives regarding anything beyond their own tastes. He had referred to the state that feared its own shadow, and about the rap songs that began with praise of the Prophet. People in the know had understood that the presence of Ahmad Majd — a friend of those in high places — in court to defend such a case constituted official support for the young musicians. Ahmad attributed the flyers and posters distributed by the young men to the foolishness and irresponsibility of youth and as a way to undermine the overzealousness of the security agencies. Essam’s acquittal confirmed the intuition of the ‘smart’ ones, whether they were right or wrong.

Nobody knew for sure, but Essam’s extended period of isolation and his inclination for mixed-up, dervish-like practices that combined Sunni Sufi traditions and popular rituals, together with various other religions and spiritual movements, probably went back to the impact of that trial. Among the immediate results of this sudden change in him was the increasing sharpness in the discussions he had with Ibrahim al-Khayati, discussions that were more like severe judgements. He frequently confronted Ibrahim over his relationship with his biological father. According to Mahdi, Essam never missed an opportunity to bring it up. Essam also attacked his mother with a barrage of double entendres that revealed scorn and disdain for her relationship with Ibrahim. This dramatic development appeared to have ended Haniya’s reserved and timid comportment in public, and she unsheathed an unequalled ferocity that she first directed at Essam and Mahdi, and then forcefully at Ibrahim.

During those difficult months following the devil worship trial, things had kept happening, one stranger than the other. Essam had become openly religious, while remaining the main lyricist for Arthritis, which in turn went from success to success. Essam’s newfound religiosity had forced Ibrahim to submit, with a great deal of disguised depression, to a change in his private life, which until then had included enjoying festive dinners and Casablanca’s nightlife. He then crowned this house arrest with a quick umra . Upon his return, I had asked him if he had felt anything special while performing his umra . He had confessed the pilgrimage had not moved him in any way. On the contrary, whenever he tried to concentrate on the experience, it escaped him hopelessly. Haniya found strength in standing up to Essam’s attacks and decided to extend her control over the home. She was pitiful, though, despite her attempts to shout orders at everyone. She who had long lived submissively in the shadow of a tree called Ibrahim al-Khayati now appeared to be breaking the branches, picking the leaves and destroying the buds for no real reason.

Mahdi, on the other hand, had watched his world collapse with a great deal of patience and wisdom. At the time, he wrote his famous song, ‘Enter the Valley’.

If you are caught

And go to and fro

Without finding a way out

Enter the valley

Stay in the middle

And wreck their plan.

After Essam’s trial and new religious fervour, the media had portrayed him as a shining example of repentance. There had been further arrests of young musicians, amid persistent — though false — rumours that Essam had revealed the identity of one of the devil worshippers to the police. All of this had lit the fuse of hostility between Arthritis and most other Casablanca bands. As a result, the investigation into his disappearance veered in that direction, and we endured a whole week of contradictory reports about the arrest of a devil worship group that had kidnapped Essam, followed by the arrest of a terrorist cell that claimed to have abducted and murdered him. Ibrahim al-Khayati meanwhile received a phone call saying Essam was fine and needed some cash and medicine, but since the call was not repeated, all hope of finding a related lead evaporated.

Mahdi, meanwhile, was preparing to travel to Paris to begin his studies. We all thought, without knowing why, that he might find his twin brother there, in the city of miracles. We repeated this possibility so frequently that it almost became a certainty which eased the pain caused by the disappearance. We even began to find remnants of the old ambiance in Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house, a mixture of levity, joy and consolation.

One evening Layla began remembering how much Essam loved her and lamenting bitterly that the investigation had not achieved anything and that oblivion had gradually permeated the case. When I reminded her of the complexity of cases of kidnap, abduction or murder, she grew even more fearful, and admitted that she manically envisioned frightening possibilities.