Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

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I thought of Abdullah, covered by the dust of Afghanistan’s mountain paths as he transported supplies on mangy mules and donkeys, moving steadily over the rugged terrain. For many years now he had been taking medicine, food and money to be distributed among the mujahideen fighting to topple the Communist government, which the Soviets kept supplied with soldiers for its defence. Abdullah had found a new project to keep him awake at nights: devising ingenious new strategies with the ‘Arab-Afghans’ who had flooded into the dusty and windswept city of Peshawar. Its people were poor, content to exist outside time, and happy with a lifestyle that allowed them to lounge around enjoying endless cups of strong tea, while the dusty tape recorder in the corner played the same tape for the thousandth time.

Everything in Peshawar had indicated that it was an ideal place to put to use the donations from Muslims who considered the Afghan issue to be their own. The words of Sheikh Nadim Al Salaty during the Hajj shook them, and the Afghan pilgrims would never in their lives forget the sight of their brothers in Mecca scrambling towards them to bless their jihad. The pilgrims threw millions of dollars into the green wooden collecting boxes. Sheikh Nadim kept back for his good causes several millions, as the fee for his influential presence at the councils of various princes — they would give him the seat of honour and accede to all his requests so that he would bless them. The money was immediately transferred to his accountants who distributed it wherever he ordered.

One autumn day some years earlier, Abdullah arrived in Peshawar from Islamabad, exhausted from the journey and a long night spent in discussions with his friend Philip Anderson. They had both quickly left off the small-talk and their conversation began to exhibit clear signs of mutual mistrust, due to the nature of their mission. This didn’t, however, prevent them from exchanging some small luxury gifts. That night was long. They had so much to discuss that they didn’t find time to eat until after the morning prayer; Abdullah performed it with great humility, which caught the notice of Anderson. He had found it difficult to answer his superiors’ questions about whether Abdullah — whose past was tainted with Marxist and Guevaran episodes and who was currently obsessed by expelling his former comrades from Kabul — was a mercenary or a special sort of Soviet agent. He was very impressive as he raised his finger to say the shahada ; then he got up quickly, speaking in a playful tone and fluent English. He used it only rarely with Anderson, whenever he invited him to convert to Islam. They finally ate their breakfast after agreeing on the routes for the transfer of weapons to the Afghan mujahideen in the Kandahar mountains. Abdullah had bought them from American arms dealers who wandered through hotel bars in holiday wear, asking about the carpet souk and transport to Kashmir just like any other tourists. Anderson had arranged for them to complete the deals and benefit from the sizable commissions.

After their meeting, Abdullah had wandered through the markets of Islamabad before taking a taxi to Peshawar. Next to him on the back seat was a bearded young local who tried to sell him a blackbird he claimed sang in Arabic. The Yemeni liked the gestures of the cheerful young man. He inspected the blackbird, and haggled over the price — the man wanted three dollars and wouldn’t budge. Abdullah bought the blackbird and immediately released it out of the car window as it sped along the pot-holed road, much to the astonishment of the young Pakistani who told him it would die after a few metres. He told Abdullah of other blackbirds born in captivity that died as soon as tourists bought them and set them free.

Sheikh Nadim Al Salaty was waiting for Abdullah in his Peshawar hostel, which was crammed with volunteers who had arrived that afternoon from Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Among them was a young man of no more than seventeen; Abdullah scrutinized him as he reached politely for the simple food in front of him. He wasn’t surprised at the presence of a young man who wore jeans and long hair, just like the friends he had left to their fun in faraway tea houses. Sheikh Nadim Al Salaty proudly introduced the newcomer as ‘the famous Wasim Al Halawany, son of the famous neurogurgeon Samir Al Halawany’. Abdullah nodded and smiled, warmly shook the boy’s hand and encouraged him to join in the fight. ‘I know you well, my son.’ He left the boy suddenly and continued to his room. The following morning, Sheikh Nadim didn’t even wait for Abdullah to finish drinking his coffee (prepared with heavy cardamom to treat the bad headache he had suffered from all night) before voicing his fears and his irritation at Abdullah’s modus operandi; he criticized him for handing donated money over to arms dealers, and distributing the rest unevenly among the various Afghan factions.

Years later, Abdullah would lean on the arm of Wasim Al Halawany (whose beard, to his own great satisfaction, had by now grown long and thick, rather increasing his charm) as they walked at Sheikh Nadim Al Salaty’s funeral, recalling that distant morning in Peshawar, and the emotion of Sheikh Nadim who had come to offer his assistance to the poverty-stricken Afghan orphans and widows, not to fight alongside them. His voice had rumbled through the Grand Mosque, asking for funds to buy food for the starving children and wool for the destitute women whose husbands had gone to the mountains, or had been sent by the Afghan secret police to detention camps in Kabul and Moscow: the funds were not intended to arm the warring factions.

That morning, Abdullah did not listen very closely to the man who loved and respected him, and who had once laughed heartily at Abdullah’s tales of the eccentricities of the Russian women he had known. Zeina, Abdullah’s first wife, had even named their young son Nadim, whom the sheikh blessed as he sat on his knee. He took Nadim on a pilgrimage to the Kaaba, causing the sons of princes and princesses to cast jealous glances at Zeina; she didn’t hide her happiness that day, just as she didn’t hide her grief at the recent death of that majestic man. She recited a lament for him, a Nabataean ode, without declaring her identity — she dreaded being forced to sing laments at the almost daily princely funerals, now so frequent because the royal family had become so hugely extended that the palaces had become too small to contain all its members. She recited the ode in the salons of princesses who tried to convince her to write it down, or at least allow it to be recorded so their husbands could listen to it; the princes were desperately curious to hear the lines that ‘made even stones weep’, as the wives said when they attempted to remember some of them. Eventually a royal decree was issued to Zeina. She wrote the ode down in plain ruq’a script, added some decoration, signed it in small letters and then presented it to the king. He granted her the horse she had requested from the royal stable; she had fallen in love with him when she saw him in the annual race through the Najd Desert.

When Safaa came to Aleppo, she described the stallion to Omar in great detail and awoke his longing for horses, only for this to lose itself in the forgetfulness which then clung to him for three months, after Safaa went to Afghanistan to join her husband, and the Arab fighters transformed themselves from saviours of the poor and messengers of love into just one more faction in the conflict. They carried weapons and dreamed of the Islamic caliphate that would shine again amidst the vast plains planted with poppies, whose petals gleamed beneath the spring sunshine in an omen of imminent destruction.

During her only visit to me in prison, Safaa hadn’t told me she was travelling to Afghanistan. When I found out some time later, I started to recall the words of Abdullah’s letter. For long nights, I was besieged by Abdullah and his ever-cheerful face; he was secure in the certainty he had been granted, and which he had grasped with both hands, like a child who doesn’t want to give up a bar of chocolate and continues squeezing it until it melts and is wasted. When Abdullah took Safaa to Riyadh Airport for her flight to Syria, he told her to wait for a letter which would give her the details of where they would next live. He handed her that letter for me, kissed Amir as if for the last time, and gave her enough money to live like a princess anywhere in the world. Our family was worried at Safaa’s sudden arrival alone in Aleppo. She wasn’t expecting anyone to meet her at Damascus Airport, so hired a car and driver; she thought that she needed a stretch of road to think about her future and the future of her son; Zeina had refused to leave the small palace she had shared for so long with Safaa like a close friend.