Stranger to History (12 page)
From there we watched the mob turn their anger on the Danish Embassy’s dull beige façade. A few stray rocks began to fly. In places where the rocks hit their mark, a cement wound opened on the beige façade and a cry of satisfaction went up from the crowd. More rocks began to come. One hit the embassy’s red and gold crest and the crowd screamed with pleasure. A thin line of policemen in helmets, mostly young boys, stood perfectly still and expressionless with their backs to the embassy.
This was not yesterday’s demonstration: preparations had been made, and rocks from some mysterious source were now hitting the embassy in a steady barrage. The crowd danced with excitement and a Danish flag was unfurled, burnt, then stamped on many times. Homemade posters were held high: ‘We are those who are faster than fate. Vikings beware’ and ‘We sacrifice ourself, our mother, father and children for you, O Prophet!’ A new chant rang through the crowd, and to me, an Urdu speaker, many of the words were familiar: ‘Bi ruh, bi dem, rafiki-ya-rasul, With our soul, with our blood, O Prophet, my friend!’ It was another of those strange moments in which the crowd’s rage submerged the meaning of their slogan, in the same way that it was possible to say that Islam was a religion of peace and compassion, then raise a crowd to fury in its name.
A man ran up to Bartle and me. He would have picked us out of the crowd as foreigners or journalists, and this made me nervous. ‘Tell your people in Europe that the freedom of journalists is the freedom of madness. Here, here, write down my name, Muhammad Ghazali, forty-nine.’ He was a rotund, cheerful man, sick with exhilaration. ‘Look and see these ordinary people, not educated people!’ he panted. ‘And I am ready to die,’ he yelled, over the slogans and the cries of the crowd, ‘against those who are saying these bad things against our Prophet.’ He ran back towards the crowd and was swallowed up in seconds. He was of a piece with the rest: rage and violence on the surface; euphoria and release below.
It was a little after four and the embassy had been stoned for nearly twenty-five minutes without intervention from the authorities. The thin line of boy riot police stood exactly where they had been. I was observing their expressionless faces when a roar from the crowd made me look up. A young man in jeans had got into the embassy and now stood on one of its balconies. He gloried in the crowd’s approval for a moment, then reached over the railing and pulled the oval crest off the wall. It came away easily. He held it up like a trophy and threw it into the crowd. Then he took out a green flag with white writing that read, ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet,’ and hung it from one of the embassy’s slanted flagpoles.
‘They’re gonna burn this place,’ Bartle said. ‘This is huge.’
It hadn’t occurred to me that they might; the demonstration had grown so quickly from a few stray rocks to a full-blown attack. The boy policemen continued to do nothing, and watching them, it became clear that the regime had forsaken the small, besieged embassy. More people broke into its compound and a murmur of anticipation went through the crowd.
The black smoke and fire that started appeared at first to come from the compound, not from the actual embassy. But slowly, the embassy building, rather than being consumed by the flames, seemed itself to breathe fire from its ground-floor windows and doors.
Bartle was on the phone to Sunday editors in London. I called Nedal, a Syrian friend who was helping me in Damascus; he said he’d be there in a few minutes. A pinkish dusk hour set in and the flames and smoke, now reaching out of the embassy, mixed with the fading light in a puzzling and primeval close of day. The crowd danced in jubilation. As if re-enacting some ancient rite, they passed round the Danish crest like a holy relic.
The silhouette of a fire engine appeared past the barricades at one end of the street. The other silhouette, its cross and tower framed against the haze of smoke and evening, was that of a next-door church, now threatened by the fire.
A few minutes later Nedal, short, smartly dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard and bright eyes, appeared from among the crowd and we began to make our way out of the crush. I asked him to help me talk to a few people, who were now also moving in the direction of the avenue.
One man shouted, ‘They started it. It will not just burn, but be blown to pieces.’
A young girl in a headscarf, called Heba, said, ‘This is nothing for us. They have insulted our Prophet. What is an embassy?’
A twenty-six-year-old, bespectacled student, called Muhammad, heard us talking and interrupted her, ‘This is wrong. We can protest, we can demonstrate, but we can’t do this. Our Prophet would not like it. It is our fault because we are not good Muslims. If we were good Muslims, no one would dare insult our Prophet and our faith. When we were good Muslims, the language of the world was Arabic, not English.’
When he had finished, Heba was silent and nodded. The pain the student expressed was not uncommon: many felt that the insult of the cartoons could only have been inflicted on a defeated people.
The street emptied quickly. The façade of the embassy was charred and soaked where the firemen had doused the flames. On the avenue, a woman with streaked hair and an elegant blue jacket walked past the embassy with her shopping. ‘Oh, good, good,’ she squealed in English. ‘They’ve burnt it.’
A forty-year-old man, calling himself Jihad, stopped me: ‘If you are aware of the Jewish conspiracy, you will see the stamp of Mossad all over this. This is a trick of the Jewish people because they know the Prophet is a symbol of all Muslims in the world.’
‘If you know it’s a trick, why did you fall for it?’
He wouldn’t answer, but wanted to list the wrongs Israel had done. Nedal was visibly upset. He was worried about how this would damage Syria’s place in the world and its relationship with the Scandinavian countries that, until now, had been allies and supportive of the Arab cause. He kept asking me how it was possible to have a right to insult the Prophet.
On the way home, I noticed that the violence was spreading from the embassies to the neighbourhood round my flat. Mobs of young men ran from street to street, kicking over dustbins and attacking anything they could find. Now real riot police, with faceless helmets, black uniforms and batons, roamed the streets; a water cannon was brought out. News came in that the Norwegian Embassy had also been burnt and it was at this point, with riots spreading through our part of the city, that I became worried about Even. In Damascus, most people knew their neighbours and could easily point out where the Norwegian who had addressed the demonstration the day before lived. Even didn’t have a mobile phone, but I finally got hold of him on Basil’s phone. He sounded frantic. He had been at the Danish Embassy and after that at his own. He said he was coming over to my flat.
He arrived twenty minutes later with Basil. Soon after, the police chased a small mob down the street at the end of ours. We saw them like a screeching flicker in the corner window. After a tense few seconds, an expression of relief passed over our faces. Even could hardly think beyond his nerves and excitement. He told me of his afternoon in broken sentences. Outside the Norwegian Embassy, a man had grabbed him and screamed, ‘Where are you from? Where are you from?’ He had answered, ‘Sweden,’ and some of the others there had pulled the man away. The demonstration was tear-gassed and Even went with the demonstrators to wash their eyes in a mosque, but the detail that impressed itself on him was that the call to prayer had sounded as the demonstration approached the embassy. The demonstrators had stopped, prayed in the street, then risen and charged the embassy. ‘I can’t believe they prayed first!’ he gasped.
That night the Norwegians in Damascus were meant to have had dinner in the old city, but as rioting continued into the night, it was cancelled. News of the burnings had already made its way from the street to the world beyond and Norway announced it was evacuating its citizens. By four a.m. the first planes were leaving.
On Sunday morning, drinking Nescafé on my slim balcony, I looked out on a city in bright sunshine. The neighbourhood was not just calm, it had been cleaned. No trace of the riots remained. There was traffic on the intersection, the shops were open and the baker, just past the traffic-lights, was churning out hot mincemeat pizzas. So much had happened in the last few days, a whole cycle of religious ecstasy, and the final hours of violence had felt almost ritualistic. The mood that morning in Damascus was like the day after a festival in India.
The passions spent, it felt strange to think of their cause: cartoons.
The offensive cartoons could not have been understood Islamically. The democratic rights and interlocking institutions that protected them were outside the faith’s compass. Nedal was right: I couldn’t explain to him how one could have the right to insult the Prophet unless I was to step outside the circle in which it was written that it was wrong to make graven images. Indeed, to explain to Nedal how one had the right to insult the Prophet, I would have to ask him to suspend his faith for a moment and believe in sanctities greater than that of his Prophet and his Book. But the reverse was not true. Europe had lived through an ugly history of religion intruding on the public sphere. It knew about religious injunctions, and also their dangers. It could be said that the systems that protected the cartoons now had been set up in part to protect public life from the excesses of religion. The cartoons came from places that considered it an achievement for religion to be able to take a joke. It had not always been that way.
In coming to Syria, I had hoped to see the rhetoric of Butt and Abdullah put into practice. I got more than I bargained for. Abdullah’s notion of Islamic completeness, a negative concept, possible only as opposition, was already being expressed at Abu Nour before the cartoons had came along. As it was, they provided the ideal grievance: here was an offence from the hostile, alien world, and the faith, for once, knew how to react. But if there hadn’t been cartoons, they would have had to invent them: all that preparation and frustration needed release.
What happened in Damascus can be explained in miniature by a story a Syrian friend told me. Its small domesticity hides the hysteria in the background. It is a story of a man who goes to his priest to ask if his wife is permitted to wear nail polish. Expecting the answer to be no, he is surprised when the priest says that of course she can: why shouldn’t she look beautiful? However, it is written that when she washes for prayer, the water must touch every part of her body, including her nails. ‘The company that invented the polish,’ the priest smiles, ‘also invented a nail-polish remover.’ So, yes, she can wear nail polish as long as she removes it every time she is at prayer: five times a day! And so, the faith deals with the nail polish in its own way but never confronts the real offence: the triumph of the other society, the ‘world system’, of which the appeal of its nail polish is so soft yet potent a symbol.
M
y parents met in March 1980, in Delhi. My father was in India promoting a biography he had written of his political mentor, the Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My mother, a young journalist on a Delhi newspaper, was sent to interview him.
‘Which one of you is Salmaan Taseer?’ she said, as she entered the room my father and his publisher were staying in at the Oberoi Hotel in Delhi.
Their affair began that evening. My father took my mother’s number, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant called the House of Ming, and for a little over a week, my father disappeared with my mother.
My parents met at a point in their lives when they became politically involved in countries that were experiencing political cataclysm. The state of emergency that Mrs Gandhi declared in 1975 – a month after my mother joined the
Statesman
newspaper – jailing the opposition and silencing the press, had come and gone. Mrs Gandhi had returned to power, and the terrorism in Punjab that would take her life was about to erupt.
In Pakistan the year before, the same year as the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to many the great hope of Pakistani democracy, had been hanged. And now General Zia, the military dictator, was settling into the blackest decade Pakistan would know.
My father, who loved Bhutto, could not turn away from these events. He had heard Bhutto speak for the first time as a student in London in the sixties and was moved to his depths. Afterwards, he followed him to the Dorchester and approached him as he sat with a group of friends at the bar. Bhutto invited him to join them for a beer. It was a gesture that meant a great deal to my father. He had lost his own father when he was six – around the same age that I became aware of the absence of mine – and grew up in Lahore with very little money. He was in London studying chartered accountancy, and on most days had little more to eat than a bar of chocolate. Bhutto’s generosity and openness at that time in my father’s life left more than a strong impression: it was the beginning of a lifelong love for the leader and his family, and excited in him the desire to be involved in Pakistani politics.