Qamar ad-Dine is disappointed. His discovery of Christianity is new. He had started with porn sites. And because this son of a bitch who runs the cybercafé was whipping him with his obtrusive looks, Qamar ad-Dine changed gears toward emigration sites. Then he switched to random groups on the Net. Then one day he found himself on the other side following Jesus Christ: I will follow you wherever you go, and Jesus said to him, the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
You’re right, teacher, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
Qamar ad-Dine was shocked to receive Amelia’s cold answer. He is in dire need of someone to support him in these sensitive times of his Internet searches for the truth. Amelia is his angel, his mother in the cybercafé. His mother. His sister. No difference. He finds in her smile the good-heartedness of the saints. But she has disappointed him and that hurts him a lot. Imagine: she doesn’t read the holy book and does not know the Sermon on the Mount!
As for Amelia, she was quite shocked as well. Flora and Yakabo had pointed out to her that Qamar ad-Dine is fond of her. Or at least he is very interested in her. Since then she has been watching him too. She finds him handsome and she likes his teasing, joyfulness, and politeness; his good English; his polite way of speaking. Why not? A sweet young man who deserves her attention. Amelia was ready for anything with Qamar ad-Dine. From fervid passion to passing adventure. When he invited her to the café, she joined him without hesitation, happy and enthusiastic. But the silly man had dragged her into a heavy conversation about the Holy Trinity and the Sermon on the Mount. Amelia knows about Qamar ad-Dine’s obsession with emigration, but she could not have imagined his craziness would lead him to choose Christianity as an excuse to leave the country.
Besides, her family has been Christian for generations, from grandfathers to fathers and grandmothers to mothers. If following Christ made it possible to emigrate to Europe, she would have done it from Lagos, honored and revered, and would not have had to do it the hard way through the Sahara before she and her companions found themselves stuck in Morocco.
They have succeeded neither in crossing to Spain nor in going back home to face family and friends with their failures after spending their money on a strenuous, long, and senseless journey.
Qamar ad-Dine seems to enjoy playing the role of everybody’s friend in the cybercafé. Moving from computer to computer like an e-butterfly: one time with Salim, helping him complete a school report; another time with Fadoua and Samira, translating an e-mail in English they had just received on Hotmail as Marrakech Star. Sometimes he replaces Rahal when he goes out. Other times he whispers with Yakabo after discovering that the Nigerian is more religious than his two friends.
The opposite of Abd al-Massih was Abu Qatadah.
He doesn’t speak to anyone. He enters the cybercafé with his right foot, reciting al-Mu’awwidhatayn, the verses of the Koran about refuge. Of course, greeting Muslims is imperative. But Abu Qatadah finds it hard to say assalamu alaikum whenever he enters the cybercafé and finds the two half-naked girls Fadoua and Samira there, and between them that procurer unjustly and falsely named Qamar ad-Dine, the moon of faith.
“What Qamar ad-Dine? Qamar of shit, indeed. Qamar of grief, not Qamar ad-Dine. God curse his birth.”
As for the Africans, Abu Qatadah is keen on staying away from them.
It is true that there is no preference for Arabs over non-Arabs. Neither is there preference for white people over black people. Preference is only through righteousness. Yet to Abu Qatadah, the faces of the Africans do not convey any prudence or righteousness. Not because they are black, God forbid! Bilal, the prophet’s muezzin, was a black man of Ethiopian origin who had been endowed by Islam with a respected status to a point where the Prophet Muhammad called him a man of paradise and said about him: The muezzins will have the longest necks of the people on the Day of Resurrection. Abu Qatadah noticed Yakabo’s neck is long and thin like that of a giraffe. But his dark face is a long way from emanating the light of Islam, and the same is true for the two ugly girls who barely leave his side. They look like a pair of goats. Curse all three of them!
His name is actually Mahjoub Didi. He’s an employee at RADEEMA, the electricity and water authority, and married with two children. What disturbs him more is a burdensome colleague singing to him, “Didi didi didi didi didi.” His rudeness caused his friends to avoid humming Cheb Khaled’s famous song in front of him, but they still joke about it in his absence. As for the nickname Abu Qatadah, it was coined by one of the brothers, God bless him, in a fragrant dhikr ceremony. Since then, his name in divine gatherings and on luminous websites has been Abu Qatadah, as a good omen of the sublime sahabi (a companion of the prophet) Abu Qatadah al-Ansari al-Khazraji, may God be pleased with him.
“Big Brother is watching you!”
Qamar ad-Dine repeats this from time to time, mocking Rahal.
“So sorry. I mean Little Brother is watching you!”
The entire cybercafé shakes with laughter.
One must acknowledge that Rahal’s English is below average. As for his knowledge of English literature, it is no more than Amelia’s knowledge of Imam Malik School. In any case, Rahal is a student of Arabic literature, his specialty being ancient poetry — the hanging poetry of the Jahiliyyah, Umayyad, Andalusian, and Moroccan periods. As for novels, he doesn’t read them in Arabic, which he is very good at, so how could he read them in other languages?
And because no one ever explained to him the reference to the famous novel by George Orwell, where Big Brother is watching everybody, he has always wondered why Qamar ad-Dine brags about his brothers, the small and the big, despite the fact that he has only one sister, a graduate student in Rabat.
“Little Brother is watching you!”
Qamar ad-Dine’s innuendos do not bother Rahal. But Qamar ad-Dine often gripes about the way Rahal violates his customers’ privacy, having no shame fixing his mouse-like eyes on their computer screens. In the first stage of Qamar ad-Dine’s virtual life, when he was addicted to porn websites, this bothered him a lot. Even today, he hates it when someone snoops on him. So he began to avoid sites with pictures of churches, icons, and other religious imagery. Most often he copies the text and pastes it on a blank page, then he takes his time reading it in Word. And when he finishes, he moves the file to the trash bin and signs out.
But in Rahal’s kingdom there are no trash bins. As soon as the last customer leaves the cybercafé after midnight, Rahal takes a few minutes, sometimes even an hour, to clean up the computers. He checks them one by one, rummaging through the hard drives and discovering the secrets of the customers’ digital worlds. Many leave their e-mail accounts and forum memberships open. Brother Abu Qatadah, for example, right after he hears the call to prayer, closes the site and leaves, yet the blog remains open, along with any discussions between the brothers. Sometimes it’s about the duty to fight and sacrifice the self if an occupier reaches a Muslim land; other times about using electoral fraud to win government office. Often the discussions are heated — and they almost always involve the topic of elections.