Last week I lived through moments of terror just like everyone who has family and loved ones in Riyadh. I felt powerless, restless and impatient as I tried to contact the people I cared about in the capital. Time moved with agonizing slowness as I waited fruitlessly for an answer from the other end. Not everyone who asked after their loved ones in that wounded city received a healing answer. Death, pain and grief touched many Saudi and expatriate families.
This calamity has uncovered something within and reopened a wound left over from the massacres of Algeria and other similar crimes by people who have no religion but choose to call themselves Muslims.
In 1997, Amnesty International published a report containing detailed accounts from those that survived the barbaric massacres in Algeria. The report lists the number of people killed, cities damaged and villages destroyed. During six years more than 80,000 people were killed. Among them were many women, children and elderly people. Today’s survey records over 100,000 killed — most slaughtered as they lay sleeping in their beds. Entire families were massacred — grandparents, children and grandchildren — for the sake of paradise.
The Algerian author Wassini Al-Araj embodied that tragedy in his novel “The Memory of Water” and exposed the ugly face of those who slew the nation’s mainstay, its intellectuals as well as many ordinary people with varied excuses. The author himself was among those threatened with extermination. He wrote of the living nightmare he endured night and day for many years. His publisher said he was “a man on the verge of insanity, in a feverish race with death.” His soul would age and his heart die a little every time he opened the newspaper and read news of more blood spilt — some were acquaintances, others he knew by name only, many he never knew.
The culture of death became pervasive and imprinted in people’s minds. Wherever Wassini went he found the traces of armed violence: On the streets, in the alleyways, at the university where he worked and even in taxis. He says: “You see people getting into fights over petty things, and it might come to each one pulling out a knife and threatening to kill the other.”
A book by the writer Mahmoud Al-Sabbagh laid bare the slogans of the killers, written on the walls of buildings in the city — things such as: “Oh infidels, the hand of jihad will reach you, even if you hide in fortresses. Say that terrorism is God’s command.” This is the manner and language that the extremist armed organizations used as dialogue.
In his book, Wassini retells the ugliness of a crime committed on one of his colleagues in college. He read the news: “Yesterday the artist and poet Yusuf was killed. He was found cut into pieces on his bed holding in his hand a pencil which seems to have been his only method of resistance.” When one of the perpetrators was caught, a grocer with the features of a butcher, “eyes frozen and empty,” he was asked why he killed Yusuf, and his answer was: “He deserved it — he blasphemed against Muslims.” When he was informed that Yusuf was a defender of Islam, the killer replied: “I didn’t know and it is not my concern. I know that he was an artist, a poet and sculptor and he was preparing statues to be installed in our national cities. He had gone astray.” That answer epitomizes the way in which societies shrouded by ignorance are easily manipulated by self-serving, secretive and immature ideologies.
These are only some of the features of the darkness that envelops the cities and towns of Algeria and has resulted in the death of tens of thousands of its people. Some of that darkness has come to eat away at our society under the pretext of purifying our soil of “infidels.” For years violence between people has lain undercover, to emerge in its ugliest form in a number of incidents the last of which was the tragedy in Riyadh. “We are the only country in the world that has transformed its ideological, cultural and linguistic wealth into a point of discord, dissent and venom.”
Some urgent questions trouble our minds. What is the size of that darkness? How far does it reach? Will our society — both people and leadership — confront it and prevent it from spreading? In our country, too, “ignorance has fused with conviction and become a nuclear bomb in the hands of every man with a blind heart and mind.”
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(Wajeha Al-Huwaider holds an MA in Reading Management from George Washington University. She is based in the Eastern Province.)
Arab News Features 23 May 2003
