Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

* * *

Long before Abdullah married Safaa, he and Bakr had become friends with shared memories and ambitions; not many knew that, for a considerable period, Abdullah smuggled money to Syria for Bakr and his brotherhood so they could buy arms and plan what they had dreamed of for a long time. They calculated that the general resentment at the allocation of the principal army posts to supporters of the regime had reached such a degree that people were prepared to die for God. (I used to think: if people die as martyrs for God, how do both the killers and killed enter Paradise?) Bakr used all his wiles to convince traditional community leaders that they needed to fight. But he couldn’t counter their protests as they related the history of their struggles, reminding him that politics couldn’t be conducted on the basis of an unchanging formula, like following a fixed list of ingredients in a recipe. The nights that Bakr spent in discussion with Abdullah in the palace garden in Mecca had made him into a man who believed his own goals were clear, confirming to himself deep down that it was Abdullah who had been betrayed by his comrades in Yemen, because he had believed that words were enough to solve arguments and distribute positions of power. Abdullah directed Bakr’s reading towards Régis Debray and Che Guevara, who had dreamed of liberating an entire continent with a few men, believers in the piercing vision of the Commandante. After reading the works of Trotsky, accounts of revolutions and The Communist Manifesto , Bakr quietly responded, ‘Enemies always have something to teach us.’ Abdullah agreed and in his soft voice, generously endowed with his usual refinement and dignity, outlined everything he had learned from his enemies.

I was in raptures about this man who wasn’t forbidden to me, and called him my uncle. I listened to him ardently and paraded my reading material in front of him. Once, I showed him my drawings. He looked over them quickly and paused at the drawing of Ghada, who appeared as a wounded gazelle surrounded by brindled hunting dogs.

Two months after their marriage, Safaa returned to our house so that she wouldn’t be alone when Abdullah travelled to Mecca again. She was quiet and spoke with the slow deliberation of someone who knew the secrets of Bakr’s meetings with men we hadn’t seen. We felt, from their dawdling and their shouts which occasionally continued until the dawn call to prayer, that real danger was imminent. The assassinations of civil service employees continued unabated, responsibility for which was attributed to the young men whom Bakr, along with another senior member of the organization, Sheikh Abdel Jaber, had taken into the forests by the sea to be trained in marksmanship, judo and karate. We used to see them gathering in front of the Umayyad Mosque as if they were friends going on a trip, looking forward to shouting in meadows and forests.

* * *

Hajja Souad invited me to her house to meet a girl I had never seen before. She greeted me cordially and said, ‘I’m Alya.’ I looked at her and her cold eyes, and almost laughed out loud at her nose which resembled a goose’s beak. She added foolishly that she was to be my mentor and baffled me when she told me, passionately and precisely, that she couldn’t bear any other principles of the Quran than self-discipline and fighting the moral decay which was spreading among the daughters of Islam. I joined her cell without discussion, and she named a contact who would tell me the dates and locations of the meetings I had begun to dream of. She hinted that our group was just one of many across the city, and had links with others in the organization even as far away as Hama.

Summer came, and it was depressing. I spent some of it in my parents’ home, thus avoiding Maryam who complained of imaginary kidney ailments and neglected to drink the cold, thick liquorice Marwa made in large batches and whose taste remained on the tongue for days afterwards. Hossam was engrossed in new secrets which worried my father; I sensed his anxiety when Hossam ignored his questions about his repeated absences from the house, and added that the civil engineering college he was going to attend meant nothing to him. My mother’s dreams for Hossam went unheeded. He spent days at a time with Bakr and the rest of his companions in the Kurd-Dagh forests, where they used the North Star and compasses to orient themselves when lost in the mountains; in this way they were shaken from any monotony. After two weeks, eagerness carried them back, filled with even more ferocity, and ardently desiring the beginning of the battle. Hossam banned me from his room. I felt coldness and loneliness, which didn’t match the usual warmth of his presence; it wasn’t like us to avoid each other.

I thought how painful it was that places can settle in you and you can’t extricate yourself from them: I returned to my grandfather’s house and chose once more to be an occasional and impromptu guest at my parents’. Suddenly, without any preamble, Hossam gave me his textbooks for the baccalaureate. He wanted me to be privy to his dreams. I read his writings and saw his drawings that filled the margins with guns, hand grenades, strange, cold faces with pop-eyes and thin upper lips like Alya’s — to whom I had begun to listen anxiously during her lectures on hatred.

A girl I didn’t know led me to the first meeting of Alya’s group. She waited for me in front of a coffee stand at Bab Al Nasr, and we kissed each other like any friends who were meeting to go to the cinema without permission from their families. She smiled and informed me that the house wasn’t far. We were the last to arrive, and I sat by the door and watched the seven other girls. The only one I knew was Hiba, the daughter of the timid schoolteacher; she soon acted as a sort of secretary at our meetings. The girls listened respectfully to Alya as she urged us to hate all the other Islamic sects and praised ours for being closest to the Prophet, quoting the doctrines of certain imams and from the biographies of sheikhs and mujahideen. In another meeting, she distributed papers to us and asked us to keep them safe. I read them carefully in my room and hid them when Safaa came in to complain about her perpetual headache, and how much she missed Abdullah whose return had been delayed until the end of August. I wished he would come.

I hated the scorching summer heat which drenched me every time I walked outside in my thick black robes. ‘I wish my pores would die,’ I said to myself as beads of sweat gave off that sour smell I hated. I remembered the sunflowers Safaa had brought from a nearby village. She had picked them before sunrise so they would retain their dew. She gave them to Radwan and persuaded him that their extract, when brewed, released a scent no words could describe, adding carelessly, ‘It helps pregnant women with an easy childbirth.’ Radwan was enthusiastic; he always liked Safaa’s strange ideas, particularly when she asked him to keep their conversations to himself. It allowed him the secrecy he needed to make perfumes, which he would insist on whenever we asked him about the vials carefully arranged in rows in the wooden box tucked away in a corner of his room.

By the end of that summer, hatred had taken possession of me. I was enthused by it; I felt that it was saving me. Hatred gave me the feeling of superiority I was searching for. I carefully read the pamphlets distributed at every meeting with the other girls and memorized whole sections of them, particularly the fatwas charging other sects with heresy. I became closer to my seven companions and grew to love them. We exchanged secrets and books describing the horrific agonies of the grave. My integration with them saved me from my desires for Ghada, who had in my mind become wretched; she was still far from the power and severity I possessed when asked my opinion on punishing those who showed contempt for religion’s doctrines. I astonished them by requesting to make a list of such girls at my school and seeking permission to disfigure them with acid for wearing tight shirts that clearly showed their breasts. Alya’s eyes shone as she asked me to be patient, as if she already knew the date we would do it.