As he dug away and smoothed the ground behind the car her phone suddenly rang. It was her brother and she didn’t answer. Fahd tried to shift the car again, opening the door and watching the wheels as he repeated, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ over and over. The car moved a further two metres and sank again. This time, he felt despair take hold.
Her phone rang and she answered, smiling.
‘Listen, I’m in this place miles away. Get your driver to take Qaseem Road to Quwa al-Amn Bridge. He takes a right at the flyover then goes straight until he sees lights from a car.’
She fell silent and listened. ‘I’ll tell you later. Now’s not the time.’
Nada must have asked her what she was doing there.
By his efforts he had succeeded in moving the car backwards a total of seven metres.
‘I’m going to try going forwards,’ he said to Tarfah. ‘If the car gets free I’ll turn right and drive off.’
He put the car into first gear then stepped on the accelerator, wrenching the wheel left and right and screaming in English, action-movie style, ‘Come on! Come on!’ It moved slowly, then surged and he pulled the wheel to the right, straightening out and rocketing towards the highway like a lunatic until he reached the field of harvested alfalfa, where he proceeded calmly along the firm ground at its edge, unable to believe that they had escaped.
‘O wholesome harvest girls!’ he bellowed. ‘How great thy charity, harvesting this crop that I might proceed along the path to deliverance …’
And Tarfah, aping his pomposity with magnificent derision, cried, ‘What ails thee, Abu Jahl?’
— 33 —
THE WHITE PICK-UP TRUCK, stuck in the sand a quarter of a century before, on 30 July 1979, was nothing like the sea-blue Hyundai that Fahd drove with Tarfah beside him. In this vehicle sat a man, his shimagh wrapped into a filthy red-and-white checked turban around his head, driving like a lunatic through the dark of the night to escape the border guards, now dousing the headlights and proceeding on instinct, now guided by the light of his passenger’s small flashlight that prevented the guards tracking their Datsun. They were waiting for gunshots to catch them from the rear but the onslaught of the demented sand was swifter than any bullet; it held them firm, the pick-up’s lights suddenly froze and they fled in opposite directions, each man panting as he laboured to pluck his feet from the sand’s snare.
The passenger got furthest and when he heard the sound of the border guards’ pursuing vehicles and the powerful lamps begin sweeping the desert in search of them, he ran for the cover of a small and straggling ramth bush and lay still, his heart straining. He was like a bird grazed by a rifle, that flees flapping its one good wing, bleeding and hopping as it hunts for the shade of a tree or rock to hide from the hunter’s gaze.
The guards stopped their vehicle by the pick-up in the soft, paste-like sands. Their voices were strident in the night and the searchlights’ beams wandered about like cudgels cocked over bare flesh. They fanned out in three directions, away from the route they had come, and like swords drawn for the kill, four beams of light circled the desert.
The passenger trembled, hiding his head between the branches to appear like a tarpaulin abandoned in the scorching midday heat, but the light fell suddenly into his gleaming eyes and one of the guards cried out to his companions: ‘It’s him.’
Pointing a pistol at him, the guard shouted for him to get up with his hands behind his neck. Exhausted, his face filthy and holding his hands behind his neck, he rose to his feet. One of the guards came up behind him, patted his pockets, and securing handcuffs around his left wrist first, then his right, he steered the man away. A few minutes later they had found the other man and they took them both back, together with their truck, to the Ruqai Centre on the border with Kuwait.
The pick-up was impounded with seven other trucks, their loads concealed beneath green tarpaulins held in place with ropes wound round the brackets on the vehicles’ sides. After stepping forward with two other officers and cautiously uncovering one of the trucks, the border centre’s commander ordered the detention of the drivers and their passengers.
They were carrying stacked bundles of small pink pamphlets, on their covers the title: An Address on the Subject of the Emirate and the Swearing of Fealty and Obedience, and a Judgment on the Duplicity of the Rulers towards the Scholars and the Common People, and the Proper Position with regards to the Rulers in Particular, and People in General.
The duty commander at the border post sat at his desk, a copy of the pamphlet in his hand. He leafed through it rapidly, reading some of the Qur’anic verses and hadith, the first of which was Ibada Bin al-Samit’s report of their pledge of allegiance to the Prophet on the grounds that ‘… we must speak the truth wheresoever we be, for we are with God and so fear not the censure of critics.’ Flipping the pages with his thumb he read out loud to the two officers:
Know that some of those who fawn over kings and rulers excuse themselves by pointing to the hadith recorded in the Sahih Muslim, when a man addressed the Prophet, saying, ‘O Prophet of God have you not perceived that when princes are set over us they look to their own rights and deny us ours? What do you command us to do?’
To which the Prophet replied, ‘Hearken: they must bear their burden and you, yours.’
But this furnishes them with no excuse, for the hadith is concerned with rights of the individuaclass="underline" the rulers’ monopolisation of booty and plunder and the like. Religion is not one of the rights of an individual, where forbearance in the face of preferential treatment is urged. In the hadith the man says, ‘… and they deny us our rights,’ but when the right is that of God, then no: the duty then is to reject the legitimacy of those who fail to implement God’s law.
The commander tossed the pamphlet to one end of the table.
‘God preserve us!’ said one of the officers. ‘That’s outright sedition!’
The commander nodded his head in agreement. ‘Planning a coup, it seems.’
The third officer remained silent, averting his eyes from the others. Then he excused himself and left the office.
Seven impounded vehicles in a military post on the Kuwait border, were laden with vast quantities of pamphlets churned out by the Vanguard printing presses in Kuwait and destined for remote villages and farms around Riyadh and Mecca, where they would be handed out to members of the group who, with precisely coordinated and pre-arranged timing, would distribute them through major urban centres such as Mecca, Riyadh, Qaseem and Ha’il.
Suleiman led his own small group, delegating tasks with the spirit of a practised leader of men, his abundant vigour sometimes beguiling other worshippers into helping his companions and himself distribute the booklets, blissfully unaware of the incitement they contained against the government and what they termed jahili society.
Seven years later, by a strange twist of fate, Suleiman al-Safeelawi was transformed from a distributor of clandestine literature into a distributor of newspapers for a major company.
He had descended ravenously on newspapers after being denied them during his first period of incarceration. He had often thought of writing his memoirs in prison, believing his time as a member of the Salafist Group had been far superior to the childhood memories recorded by Taha Hussein in The Days. Yet despite his love of reading, his writing and his powers of description, metaphor and composition were no match for the great wordsmith. It was as though the Alfiyya marked the division between reading for pleasure and enforced study.