Osama and Me

Me first. February, U.S.A. Smack dab in the middle, the heartland, the center of the country, equally far from the west and the east, the north and the south, the very site of the splitting of all differences. The year of my birth: the same as his, although I can claim a slight headstart on the road to wisdom, however crooked it may turn out to be.

Rather than name the town, or give it a new name that only confirms its identity, in a roundabout if still obvious sort of way, I’ll simply note its features: plain, neither prosperous nor impoverished, lower middle class. Built around a lead mine soon to be abandoned completely, but even now, as I am born, expanding beyond the visible signs of its origin (but not to escape the invisible legacy, below almost every street and alleyway the blasted-out shafts, most of them flooded into manmade streams, their metallic wash audible enough to those who know to listen), to become a town of the usual kind. Not anyplace or everyplace, just a Place.

Few people from outside come to this Place. Not that its inhabitants are hostile to outsiders, but who has reason to visit such a pale and unexceptional Place? A highway runs nearby, but except for the occasional traveler in need of gasoline seldom does anyone take the exit announcing to the world the name of the place. There’s a bigger place farther down the highway. They even have a restaurant. (Truth be told, at the time few people visited that place, either.) The travelers passing by would be able to locate the town on a roadmap, but its name would be printed in the very tiniest of type. All in all, I am forced to concede that for most such passersby this place where I was born is only dimly perceptible as a Place at all.

The scenery is nice, once you get outside the city limits. Green, rolling hills, large tracts of uncut forest full of wild game, creeks and rivers and lakes. Although even out here the lushness seems diminished, ragged, hardly more than ground cover, the trees in midsummer curiously lackluster, as if confessing their impermanence and already anticipating the time when their leaves will forsake them altogether, giving them the same bare, unadorned aspect as the town they encompass. But perhaps this is merely the way all of this is preserved in memory, an infamously unreliable source of accurate information about what things were really like.

Nevertheless, there would seem to be no alternative if I am to succeed in relating my side of the story.

Twenty-five days later. 1377. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The capital of the Kingdom, the heart of the Arab homeland, center of royal power, the house of Sa’ud, guardians of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. The seventeenth son.

You try to find your way to the busy den—there are many cousins, many aunts, if no other sons (and the father only infrequently)—but you are often led astray by the city’s confusing streets, unmarked, zigging and zagging past landmarks familiar to those who must use these streets but otherwise obviously made for travelers not greatly concerned to get from here to there. In your many false turns and constant backtracking you are, at least, able to take note of the local scenery: not much. A few olive and date trees, a lot of hard, bare ground, sand and stones. Short, squat houses, almost uniformly built of the native red mud, some spreading out more than others, apparently a sign—from your perspective the only sign—that their occupants can claim a higher place in the Kingdom’s social order.

Some of these more well-off residents of the growing city have found themselves in such relatively comfortable circumstances because of the increasing flow of crude oil now emerging from the desert sands of the eastern province. Great lakes of oil, so large it is said that when merely standing above them on the desert floor one can feel the dense liquid rolling heavily about beneath one’s feet. Many not directly involved in the extraction of this national resource have profited from its fortuitous discovery (coinciding as it did with the final forging of the modern Saudi state), among them the boy’s father, Mohammed, favored of the royal family itself: chosen to construct their kingdom’s new roads, build their new palace in the city of Jeddah, refurbish the holy mosque itself.

You are fortunate to be here in search of the family compound at all. Not many outsiders are allowed to visit this desert kingdom, even though many would like to. There is much curiosity about these native Arabs occupying the peninsula with its harsh environment, but to tell the truth they are not just suspicious of foreigners, they feel themselves inarguably superior to all non-Arabs, know that they are the products of a glorious civilization and the followers of the one true religion. Mohammed, of humble origins in the southern mountains but now a man of wealth and influence, by the grace of Allah, is an especially proud and pious believer, and his example is sure to loom large as his son, Osama, finds his own way in the world of Islam.

The formative years. I am a troublesome baby, refusing all foods and formulas presented to me, hungry nevertheless and keeping my parents up at night with my incessant bawling for something good to eat. Eventually it all proves too much for my mother, who has what in those days is called a “nervous breakdown” and checks herself in as an outpatient at the State Hospital nearby. After searching high and low for the food that will satisfy me, the family doctor finally stumbles upon something that seems to work—paradoxically, it is some atrocious concoction of soybean and God only knows what else, but it brings an end to our shared tribulation. No one is ever really sure what caused my infant eating disorder in the first place.

My first actual memory: I am three years old and am riding in my father’s bread delivery truck, which has been enlisted in the effort to move the family belongings from the house we have been renting (located, as I will realize only much later, on one of the seedier streets in town) to the one we have recently bought. (Although in the process of recalling this image, I now recall a somewhat earlier one: inside the house itself, not yet ours, the current owner rising from a chair to greet us as we enter to look it over one last time before deciding finally to buy it. The expression on her face suggests she is relieved to be on the verge of disburdening herself of the place, but again my memory may be playing tricks on me. I believe she and her husband subsequently moved away from the area altogether, never to return.)

It’s not really a bad house. Just small. Four rooms (including the kitchen), in which my parents will ultimately need to keep both themselves and four children. There is a garage, which over the years is filled with all of the surplus possessions—broken appliances, worn-out furniture, old clothes, cast-off linens, abandoned toys, in addition to all of my father’s many tools—that can’t simply be stuffed into the two bedroom closets the house itself provides. As well a carport, the only one on the street, whose shelter makes it possible to use the garage for storage rather than to protect the family car from the frequent heavy rains, the scorching summer sun, the occasional bursts of accumulating winter snow that characterize the climate of the lower Midwest. The best feature of the whole place is the large back and side yards, which will often be the favored locations for neighborhood games of football, whiffle ball, and croquet. My fondest childhood memories are probably those in which these clamorous activities form the primary element.

My most unpleasant memories? They are few (surprisingly few, now that I consider it), and of the sort one would expect of an American childhood during this time: my parents fighting, a broken arm, the mean old man up the street, making a fool of myself at the carnival when I don’t know how to operate the bumper cars.

“He was a very good boy. Very shy, soft-spoken. Never a bother to me or to his aunts. Or even to the servants, for that matter. The most cooperative and eager to please child you could ever want.”

“He rarely went outside the family domicile. Not many friends, as I recall. It was a big house, as you know, and he liked to roam around and amuse himself. When the men were there, he could go where they were and leave us womenfolk behind. But he always came back. He was not his father’s favorite, and his brothers were remote, sons of other women. With us he was the center of attention, and he knew it.”

“We knew right away he was going to be tall. Almost a giant. By the time he was twelve years old you could easily mistake him for an adult, if it weren’t for that baby face of his. And that beatific smile! He never really lost them. Even now when his image appears, so larger than life, to those of us who still think of him as a boy we can’t help but see the same innocent features that worked their magic on us all those years ago.”

“He was studious, all right. There’s no doubt about it. Living in the holy cities, of course, he was drawn even more powerfully to know the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet. Although there are those who claim that such close proximity to the places associated with the Prophet himself, and such early immersion in the book of his Revelation, turned the boy away from the straight path—temporarily, to be sure—and that he did not find his way back until many years later. The time he spent in Jeddah could only have encouraged him to try out a different path. We all know that that city is a den of iniquity, a place where the infidels congregate. He began to study their ways, the ways of raising people up in great stacks, one upon the other, great dunes of concrete, of making roads to go from this point to that one without ever passing by the human beings who might need it for their journey.”

In grade school, I actually did quite well. My grades were very high, and each year my teachers informed my parents I was a “gifted” student, even if I did talk too much—“he visits with his neighbors” is the way it was frequently phrased. I was even reasonably popular. This was probably due to the convergence of three factors: I was large for my age, and therefore not an appropriate subject for harassment; I was also interested in, and proficient enough at, sports; most of the other popular boys were themselves both athletic and “smart,” and thus I seemed to belong to this group implicitly.

These were my grade school teachers: Mrs. Huff, Mrs. David, Mrs. Sutton, Mrs. Aubuchon, Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. McFarland, Mr. Evanko.

These were among my better friends in grade school: Donnie Eaton, Dave Tiefanauer, Paul Govreau, Rodney Sloan, Tommy Vines, Charlie Zobrisky, Jimmy McGee.

I knew plenty of girls too, but I wasn’t as popular with them. I described myself as being “large” at this time: actually I was fat. Not grotesquely so, but not pleasantly proportioned, either. And I wore glasses. Big thick ones. Also I didn’t maintain the most immaculate personal hygiene in the world. It is for these reasons, I assume, that the girls kept their distance.

This was grade school, however, where it is not unusual that boys and girls (some boys and some girls) do not yet interact comfortably. Only if this lack of interest shown by the local representatives of the opposite sex were to persist, say, into high school, might one have reason to fear they may never show much interest.

In the meantime, I play little league baseball, win arithmetic matches, explore a dilapidated entranceway into the abandoned lead mines, climb the great chat dump that is one of the still noticeable reminders of those mines, watch new streets being laid down and new houses built in entirely new neighborhoods so that the town of my birth begins the process of changing just enough that now it seems both stubbornly the same and altogether alien, myself a foreigner in an unwelcoming land.

When Osama was nine years old, his father died in a plane crash. This is an ascertainable fact. There are other ascertainable facts—where he lived, what he studied in college—but very little is really known about Osama’s life before he became perhaps one of the most recognizable figures in the world. Anything else we might want to know about his formative years we must literally seek out in a figurative way, through indirection, embellishment, addition and subtraction, occasional contrivance, and, yes, even rank speculation. But one could say that the person now presented to us as Osama is himself, indeed, merely a figure, an image to be deciphered, open to interpretation, a character in everyone’s chosen story.

No doubt the boy grieved deeply for his father, but as we know the loss came supplied with countervailing gain: great wealth, inherited before he might otherwise have expected to acquire it and thus available for purposes not ordinarily to be realized by the seventeenth son.

Some say the money was at first a great temptation to young Osama. At one point he was reportedly seen living it up in Beirut, the most worldly and diverse of all Arab cities, no doubt especially to one from Saudi Arabia, even if many of his brothers had already adapted themselves to Western ways: the eldest brother, Salim, now the head of the family, would even marry a Western woman. One tries to picture a scene in which a dissipated Osama stands puking over a toilet after a night spent doused in alcohol, or goes dashing from whore to whore in a Beirut brothel, but somehow it never quite comes into focus.

Not that he had no interest in women. He was married at the age of seventeen, and she would be only the first of four wives, the number properly allowed a man according to one interpretation of Islamic law. This, of course, suggests a young man not at all intent on living the life of the privileged hedonist but instead one preparing to fulfill his responsibilities as an Arab man, the inheritor of an ancient and preeminent culture and allegiant member of the umma, the worldwide Muslim nation that transcends the artificial borders the inhabitants of the faithless world need to define their own identities. And even as one of the youngest sons of the illustrious Mohammed bin Laden (may Allah bless his sacred memory), he can boast of advantages few others in the Saudi kingdom have at their disposal in the endeavor to bear witness to the glory of God.

As the family’s eldest child, much was expected of me—or at least I so assume—in my progress through junior high to high school and beyond. There was reason to believe I would continue to be a straight A student, perhaps even valedictorian, certainly no less than the exceptional student my parents were told I ought to be, a recipient of a scholarship to some prestigious college.

But when I was ready to begin the 7th grade a terrible misfortune had struck: my little town pooled its resources with a neighboring town and created a brand new school system. In short, I was bussed off to this neighboring town, where I was confronted with fellow pupils I did not know and thrust into an unsettling environment in which I felt, for the first time, an outsider. A strange and exotic lot they were: many of them ragtag ruffians of a sort this neighboring town seemed to produce in surprising numbers, others simply hostile to us interlopers (some of us) for reasons I could not understand. In some ways I never did adjust to these altered circumstances, and few of those from this town whom I first met in junior high school ever really became my friends.

Some of those with whom I did become friendly: Gordon Jones, Eddie Kekec, Dale Douglas, Greg Ajemian, David How.

The upshot of these disquieting developments was that my grades began to suffer. By the time I entered high school no one would have identified me as a top student destined to further scholastic success and eventual distinction in a chosen profession—a significant number of my high school acquaintances had the particular ambition of becoming physicians, as I recall. Certainly I became no more popular with the girls, since my plummeting grade-point-average removed any right to status I might have still claimed. I played football, but not that well, joined the band, but quit, resolved to buckle down again to my school work and clean myself up a bit, but failed. I didn’t go to my high school prom.

Once I was driving around town—it was the neighboring town, as it happened—with two of my friends. This was, I suppose, what has become known as “cruising,” although I’m not sure we called it that. It was rather unusual that I would be participating in such an activity; I was firmly settled into the adolescent torpor I have described and mostly lay around on my bed watching television in the evenings. We picked up two girls, both of them nice enough in their way, but both also, to be blunt about it, not very attractive, considerably overweight, in fact. Perhaps this helps explain their behavior, their transparently obvious signals they were “available.” Although not to me. Shortly after the girls had gotten into the car, my friends requested I get out—unless, they added with a distinctly teenage sort of waggishness, I knew of another girl nearby we might bring along. My friends and their cargo drove off to wherever was the currently favored location for the act they had in mind. After wandering around for a while in the vague hope I might run into someone else I knew, I walked the three miles back home.

At the University, Osama intends to study economics, business management, to prepare himself to become an effective force in the bin Laden family’s by now expansive business empire. It is the oil boom, and as fast as the royal family can collect the cash it sends it back out to the Saudi people, but especially to the businessmen and the dealmakers who are charged with bringing the kingdom into the modern world with all its improvements and life-enhancing inventions. And does this strategy not have the additional advantage of guaranteeing the loyalty of these useful subjects?

But other events are conspiring to undermine the royal family’s plans and to set Osama off on a different path. King Faisal is assassinated; the Muslims in Lebanon are assailed by infidels of every sort; the Shah of Iran is overthrown and the Shi’a clerics create an Islamic republic. This latter development is in many ways the royal family’s worst nightmare: not only might this uprising incite the Kingdom’s own Shi’a in the eastern province—who after all do much of the hard labor in the Saudi oil industry—but the last thing the government needs is a religious autocracy right next door. This can only encourage the religious authorities in Saudi Arabia itself—and a severe and zealous lot they are—to dream of erecting their own Islamic state, despite the royal family’s long history of seeking to appease their claims to power.

In this bracing atmosphere, Osama feels the turbulence of unrest and agitation blowing like a freshening desert wind. Along with many of his classmates he is drawn to the clerics and the scholars preaching Muslim revival, to the lectures and the classes pointing out both the greatness of Islam and the way the Arab world’s so-called “leaders” have betrayed that greatness, to the student groups calling for solidarity among all Muslims from every Islamic country and defiance of the West.

And for the first time Osama begins to question some of the actions of his own government, even to wonder about its very legitimacy, despite the manifest rewards it has bestowed upon his family. The House of Sa’ud came to power through conquest, but this has long been the way of the Arab world, indeed including the Prophet himself and all of his followers who helped build the great Muslim nation. But these descendants of Mohammed ibn Saud made a deal with the clerics to insure observance of Islamic law, to keep Saudi Arabia and its people in strict accord with the demands of the one true religion. Saudi history since then, Osama increasingly believes, has shown this to have been an entirely cynical act, as the royal family has used it to keep itself in power and to help disguise the shameful behavior of many of the members of that family. If the current rulers and their hangers-on don’t take due note of the surging tide of Islamic revival that to Osama for one is as palpable on the horizon as one of the huge ships bearing down on the Jeddah port, they might just get drowned in it.

A vice in which Osama freely indulges himself during his University years: American movies. Especially Westerns, John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda. And gangster films: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart.

Movie theaters are banned in Saudi Arabia, but numerous people—fellow students, teachers, local entrepreneurs—have created miniature cinemas in their homes, in abandoned buildings, that are quite popular indeed. Suffice it to say that after his graduation Osama will have little opportunity to indulge this vice again, and although only those closest to him are aware of his former enthusiasm, they have reported that he still occasionally manages to acquire one of these films on videotape and still enjoys them immensely.

On my way to the university, I had to stop for two years and attend a community college instead. Although at this time it was still mostly referred to as a “junior college.” It was located just outside yet another neighboring town, although the main reason I went there was because the tuition was very cheap. (Even so, I was forced to secure a “student loan” in order to pay the whole bill.) The buildings were relatively new, however, and it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this interlude—aside from the greater interest I began to take in academic work and the subsequent improvement in my grades—was my attempt to participate in the more expansive life of the campus by trying my hand at what in an earlier day might have been called “college dramatics”—although in our case the production values were quite modest: one full-length play each semester, performed in a very small, badly equipped theater to usually underwhelming crowds. My contribution was equally modest (small roles, a few lines) and its quality easily described: I was very bad. I read the lines well enough, but my gestures were wooden, my movements clumsy and constrained. I would be no actor.

Nevertheless, if college was not to be the initial phase in my realization of the most ubiquitous of American aspirations, to be the center of attention, celebrated, a performer of parts so skilled one’s audience is compelled to mistake the role for the real, I did begin in my own way to project myself into scenes and scenarios of which I had not previously taken much note. Not just “careers” that might be available, not simply the various possibilities for “making a living” that might be necessary to consider, but potential ways of organizing a life that could give it dignity beyond the ordinary portion available to those more willing simply to settle for the small roles one might be assigned. The first distant flashes of the notion I could be a writer are no doubt traceable to this time, but I initially fancied I would like to become a film director—movies kindled my interest before books, although when I was led to read some of the novels upon which several admired movies had been based I quickly enough concluded that fiction worked in more complex and intriguing ways.

Nothing of the sort was going to be possible, however, by remaining at this junior college, and I set my sights on the State University as the next best hope for furthering my newly developed if still rather inchoate ambitions. Unfortunately, reality again intervened. After two years my parents were still in no better position to support my attendance at such a school than they were before, and I was forced to wait at least a year, at which point my sister would be ready for college as well and perhaps the burden of sending the two of us along would make my parents eligible for the requisite kind of “financial aid.”

Among the things I did during this year: Sat in my room.

The Iranian Revolution. Western hostages held in Lebanon. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The intifada.

Who can hold back and do nothing when such epoch-making events as these are occurring?

Certainly not Osama. While the Iranian mullahs are heretics, the inheritors of the Persian assent to the great schism that continues to lead so many along its infernal way, the people of Iran do speak the name of the one true God and are helping to spread word of His prophet all around the globe even through the ever-expanding media of the infidels themselves. What’s needed is for the true believers of Islam—the Sunni, and especially the most faithful of the faithful, those who have spread the teachings of Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab—to find their own voice and begin their own struggle to protect their lands and their religion.

The invasion by the Communist infidels might just provide such an opportunity. Word of the heroic resistance being put up by the Afghans spreads rapidly through the already roiling quarters of the Muslim world, and many are inspired to go and help them wage holy war against the pagan invaders. Osama is one of them.

The strategy works and finally I am at the University. I stand in front of the dormitory and watch as my parents and my youngest sister drive away after helping me move in. The home and the life to which they are returning will never again really be mine. I am surprisingly saddened at the thought, when the deed is finally done.

One of my first acts as a college student—a real college student—is to attend a meeting of what I take to be an “activist” grounp. It is called, or at least I remember it so, the Student Coalition Against Racism and Political Repression (SCARPR).

I am not entirely sure why I have come to this meeting, except that it seems the kind of thing a self-respecting college student (at least one who has through force of circumstance spent a great deal of time romanticizing the lot of the college student) ought to do.

The meeting is mostly uneventful, even dull. I sign up to participate in some kind of protest over some university policy the nature of which I no longer recall. When the appointed day arrives I back out, having concluded I am not cut out to be a campus radical.

This proves to be wholly typical of my experience as an undergraduate college student, which unfolds as the process by which I learn all the things I am not: a compatible roommate, a party animal, an early riser, a fraternity brother, an intramural enthusiast, a pre-professional, a future engineer, a likely husband, an improbable success, scientifically inclined, psychologically complex, biologically determined, philosophically opposed, a do-gooder, an evil genius, eager to move on, afraid to take chances, spontaneous, chatty, indifferent, or repressed.

My grades were pretty good, enough to make the Dean’s List. More importantly, I discovered I enjoyed acquiring a “higher education.” There was no way this could turn out well.

Sources put subject in Pakistan as early as 1980. Our best information suggests that at this time subject focused efforts primarily on putting considerable financial resources at the service of fighters from Arab countries who wished to acquire training for assistance to Afghan resistance. There is no indication that subject during this early period himself participated in resistance actions or sought to become a leader of military organization. Well-placed sources say subject’s greatest contribution in early phases of resistance was in the area of materiel and equipment, the latter coming mostly from subject’s own resources in family construction business and used to build support facilities for mujaha’deen operations.

Deeply planted sources in Saudi Arabia report that upon returning to that country in 1981-82 subject devoted most of his time to recruiting Saudi fighters for what was now being called the holy war in Afghanistan. It is also believed, although it has not been reliably confirmed, that subject met with certain members of royal family, who pledged their support to the effort to help the Afghan people rid themselves of the foreign oppressors. We know of course that the government of Saudi Arabia stood with the United States in opposition to the Soviet invasion, but we are not prepared for now to attest to any official connection between the Saudi government and the subject of this report, even at this initial stage of subject’s activities.

Most sources agree that when subject returned to Afghanistan he began to assert himself into resistance movement more vigorously. Some indicate that subject came under the influence at this time of more militant advocates of jihad on behalf of Muslim peoples. A few go further and suggest subject all too willing to listen to the words of substitute father figures, that subject’s own growing militancy an attempt to live up to the legacy of long-dead father and live down the effects of subject’s childhood spent largely among women of the family. Well beyond this writer’s ken, to be sure. Will say, however, that this idea, were it true, does provide explanation of subject’s continuing commitment to violent confrontation after the retreat from Afghanistan of the Soviet military. (See below.)

No sources claim that subject commanded many followers beyond the small band in Peshawar working to muster up the Afghan Arabs or venture to predict he will come to play any significant part in regional affairs in the years to follow.

I believe I can say with all due modesty that I have been consistently underestimated by those who have known me. My high school friend, with almost all of whom I lost contact after graduation, have during subsequent reunions expressed clear surprise that I possess a Ph.D and have been a college professor. Such surprise has been manifest as well among various former teachers and some of the parents of childhood friends who might have assumed it would be their son or daughter who would choose such a path. No doubt many of my college friends as well would not have supposed that I would pursue the scholarly life by moving on to graduate school. Even many of my fellow graduate students must have found it curious that I persevered through the entire obstacle course of papers and exams and actually completed my dissertation while most of them, one by one, abandoned the whole ordeal at the nearest available opportunity.

I must also say further that during this time (1980-1989) spent accumulating advanced degrees I accomplished in fact a number of worthwhile objects: read many good books, saw many good films, attended plays, concerts, and lectures, thought through any number of important issues and ideas, met people from walks of life I could not in other ways have encountered, in general widened my horizons broadly and irreversibly.

Yet by the time I was finished undeniably I was much farther from actual contact with the real world most people inhabit, the world of commotion and conflict but also of commitment and a certain kind of courage (the world one’s education presumably better prepares one to confront) than I was when I started my long excursion as a professional student.

As the President of my department’s Graduate Student Association I once participated in a campus-wide effort to improve the situation of the university’s lowly teaching assistants. We even threatened to mount a strike if our requests for a higher stipend, or a lighter teaching load (or something or other) were not granted. Ultimately we were granted a meeting with a board or committee of some sort, where all of our concerns were dismissed out of hand. Afterwards, we discussed the possibility of going through with our strike, but nothing ever came of it. Having failed at this one attempt to fashion ourselves as working people, I for one was never again able to seriously entertain such an action, or anything like it.

1987. Jaji, Afghanistan. A heroic band of Arab fighters commanded by the Saudi warrior Osama bin Laden held out for more than a week here against an assault by Soviet helicopters and Communist soldiers. High in these rugged and wind-beaten mountains the Arab fighters inflicted great damage on the marauding infidels, showing supreme skill and courage, before making a final and strategic withdrawal back into Pakistani territory.

Osama in particular demonstrated the kind of fierceness under fire that showed him well able to live up to the expectations of one with such a name. “The Arab fighters,” said Osama, “ a group not exceeding more than thirty-five, held their ground during two weeks of fighting.” What his modesty will not allow him to say is that this man, once a privileged son of leisure in decadent Saudi Arabia, has become a devoted guardian of the greatness of Islam and will undoubtedly lead his men to victory in the battles still to be fought. Bearing wounds from the engagement at Jaji, Osama now recuperates and waits for the next glorious opportunity to beckon.

The infidels will surely think twice about again doing battle with Osama the lion and his Arab warriors.

1988. New Orleans. I enter the hotel room for my first real job interview. I am thirty-one years old.

I am among hundreds, if not thousands, of other aspirants to the few jobs available to those who, like me, believe they wish to pursue the life of the mind rather than some more conventional occupation. Or perhaps, unlike me, they merely wish to make their own claim on a title—“Professor”—they assume to hold no ordinary authority in our society and thus to assert their proper place in that society after all. I am afraid that with me no such recognizable motive applies. Not that I am beyond the natural imperatives of self-interest or would be immune to the effects of reputation and esteem: it just would not have occurred to me that these were the objectives to be met. I actually accepted the idea one could live an intellectual life in America and would be rewarded, however moderately, for seeking it out.

The interview itself is disappointing. As are most of the few others that follow in the next several years. I feel from the start I will “not be right” for the position at hand, that my “considerable talents nevertheless do not quite fit the needs” of the institution in question. I nonetheless rehearse all of the stock answers, try sincerely to tell them what it appears to me they want to hear.

In the meantime, in lieu of a permanent position, final confirmation I had been accepted as one destined to receive tenure, I manage to secure a series of temporary jobs in a variety of states: Iowa, Oregon, Kansas, Maine. Not very rewarding positions, I assure you, either in financial or professional terms, the academic equivalent of minimum wage to bring literary awareness to the entirely uninterested, critical reading skills to the mostly illiterate.

At this time I also get married, to someone I met while in graduate school. (Where else?) Together we will travel the length and breadth of America, looking for that one ideal community that will have us.

Afghanistan. Pakistan. The Sudan. Back to Afghanistan. Giving battle, liberating the oppressed, spreading the word of Allah. Learning to hate the West, even though their help was no doubt useful in driving out the Communist unbelievers. But the Americans are even worse than the Communists. They profess to believe in their God with great volume and fanfare, while their corporations and their government encourage profligacy and spread disorder. Their slavish minions mistreat the true believers in Palestine, the Philippines, Indonesia, even in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

He forms The Base, not an actual place but a solid structure nevertheless, able to support in money and inspiration the many devoted Muslims around the world who seek to drive the Westerners and the heathen out of the Arab homelands and off of Muslim sacred ground, to show the Western idol-worshippers that Muslims are strong and will defend their religion and their traditions against the onslaughts of faithlessness and vice. He joins forces with other determined defenders of Islam, religious teachers and military strategists, and they begin to plan the operations that will put the infidels on notice they will no longer be able to denigrate the Muslim people with impunity.

There are those who say that the violence of these operations cannot be justified, that it is against the very principles of Islam, a peaceful and benevolent religion. They should consider the example of the Prophet himself: In the name of Allah the all-loving and all-merciful he fought the unbelievers who resisted the dominion of God and he did not shrink from using the methods necessary to enforce the submission of those would stand in the way of expanding His dominion.

At one point in my season as an academic nomad (consecutive seasons, actually), I wrote a story about a college teacher who furtively begins to act against his own students. It begins in a minor enough way, as in his frustration at a student who habitually submits his work late, each time with a different but equally unconvincing excuse, he pretends not to have received the one paper the student did manage to turn it on time and winds up forcing him to rewrite it. From there he begins to spread scuttlebutt about disruptive students along the faculty grapevine, some of it completely untrue (as far as he knows) and all of it designed to create an impression that the students in question are inveterate “attitude” problems.

Eventually his actions become more overt: altering records, sending in deficiency reports even on students who are passing, filing incomplete grades or misreporting them, just to give the students a few anxious moments over the holidays. Finally he resorts to out and out harassment, even crime, breaking into dorm rooms to disable computers or just to create a mess, leaving threatening phone calls, stealing backpacks or textbooks. In the end he makes no distinctions between “good” students and their more annoying counterparts. They are all bad students, not at all what he had been led to expect. They exist solely to make his own life miserable, and they deserve what they get.

Our conviction is that America is much weaker than Russia. According to what we have heard from our brothers who fought in Somalia, American soldiers are weak and cowardly. After only eighty of their soldiers died, they ran away, regardless of everything they said about the new world order.

The walls of oppression and humiliation can be torn down only by a hail of bullets.

I have great respect for the people who destroyed the Khobar Towers. What they did is a big honor that I missed participating in. We are confident that Muslims will be victorious in the Arabian peninsula and that God’s religion, praise and glory be to him, will prevail in this peninsula.

Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance and haughtiness of the U.S. regime has reached to the extent that they occupied Arabia. For this and other acts of aggression, we have declared jihad against the U.S., because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad so that God’s word is the one exalted to the heights and so that we drive the Americans away from all Muslim countries.

The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist. It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us and wants us to agree to all these. If we refuse to do so, it will say, “You are terrorists.”

I gave no order for the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, but I am very happy about what happened to the Americans there. If the Americans kill little children in Pakistan and innocents in Iraq, and if the majority of Americans support that perverted president Clinton, that means that the American people are at war with us and that we have the right to take them as targets.

As to that American war vessel, I give you this poem:

A destroyer even the brave might fear.
It inspires horror in the harbor
and the open sea.
She goes into the waves
flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and fake might.
To her doom she progresses slowly,
clothed in huge illusion.
Awaiting her is a dinghy,
bobbing in the waves.

I became aware we were the same age—born less than a month apart—the very next day. I’d known who he was, what he was, before then, but it was only after it was clear his name would forever be linked to this traumatizing event that I began to consider how together we had shared almost exactly the same time on earth, experienced the same parallel history in our respective countries and cultures, and how we’d ended up in such distinct and disparate places. How inescapable the connection and how stark the contrast between our two lives!

By this time I had given up on the idea of scaling the academic heights (I had never even gotten myself onto the most obvious and well-trod path), but hadn’t really come up with any compelling alternative. I was thus able to track the events of that day and those that followed in great televisual detail since I didn’t really have a job—although I had begun to call myself a writer. Which is not the same thing as really being one, of course.

I’m still married, but I can’t say its been a marriage without conflict. Not least over the fact that the wife has a career and I have none. Or more precisely: she makes most of the money and I make none. (Not quite none.) Also that we live in a quite terrible place and I am insistent that we find a way to leave it.

I tried to get a job at my old community college back home, but they weren’t interested. The prodigal son enjoined not to return.

We have no children. I drive a Geo Metro. In the middle of winter, there is often four feet of snow outside my door.

I am in very good health. We withstand the cold of these mountains and the heat of summer. As for the rumors, they could be aimed at weakening the morale of Muslims or at pacifying Americans by insinuating that Osama can’t do very much any more. But this cause is not tied to Osama. This umma of 1.2 billion Muslims will never leave the ancient house of God in the hands of Jews and criminal Christians. This umma survives and we are certain that they will not give up the jihad.

Comments

[Alice]

WOW! The ending hits hard. Well done.

[Frances Madeson]

Morally courageous. Intellectually incisive. Emotionally telling. Simply sublime. Personally inspiring. If I am a squirrel, and of course I am, then these stories, all of them together, are my store of acorns for the long, cold winter just ahead. Deep gratitude to you for the sustenance so liberally given. My spring coat will be the thicker and shinier for it, my eyes wonderfully re-opened.