A Sinner in Mecca Read online

  “This is not like that,” Aisha said, adding it was just one of the things that made Beirut mysterious and inexplicable. “Look there. It’s a Russian prostitute.” She pointed to a Caucasian woman in a tight-fitting dress and stilettos. “This has now become a popular place to pick them up,” she said. I wondered what treasures lay inside the Horsh’s boundaries that made it so special.

  “Do you know that you are named after the Prophet’s favorite wife?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Of course I know. Though I don’t know if all Muslims would agree with you,” she replied. Aisha’s legacy has not escaped Islamic sectarianism.

  As we drove I learned more about her. She had a girlfriend in Damascus, and it was often hard to visit. Syria’s role in the civil war and the continuing “interference” into Lebanon’s affairs was well-established fact. Aisha was part of the population that had not lived the civil war and probably thought of Syria differently from the way her parents did. Aisha’s father was Syrian Alawite, like Syria’s tenacious dictator Bashar al-Assad, and her mother was Lebanese Shia. The Alawites are considered a sect of Shia Islam. The al-Assad family that ruled Syria would soon face a state of chaos, unprecedented in its history. Aisha seemed to hint about it. She was a frequent blogger and wrote about regional issues. She must have been privy to knowledge I didn’t have as an outsider, even though I prided myself with how hard I worked to be up to date with events in the region.

  “Things are changing very fast here,” she said cryptically. “If you follow all the blogs and news as I do, I think it’s like a time bomb waiting to explode.”

  The latter sentence I had said every single time I had been to Cairo in the past several years. And at this time, the explosion was mere months away. I asked her if she was talking about the more general Middle East.

  “Yes,” she said. “For example, you could make the argument that Bashar al-Assad’s days are numbered.”

  I was surprised. Assad seemed so solid and even a voice of secular pluralism in my mind. I would be proved more than wrong.

  “Nothing here is stable anymore,” she continued. “If you heard the talk on the streets of Damascus like my girlfriend does, you would wonder. She is also deeply thinking about politics all the time, like me. She, too, has a blog. But mark my words—nothing in Syria or anywhere else in this region is ever going to be the same old acceptable way again. And the whole world will be shocked.”

  At my second screening I met Safa, a Christian who was a longtime resident of the place I had been dying to visit: Hassan Nasrallah’s fiefdom, the Shia suburb of Dahieh. In a less surreal city, a Christian woman like her, not dressed with Islamic modesty and living in a deeply conservative neighborhood, would not be possible. But Beirut surprised me at every turn. I told her how everyone seemed afraid to take me.

  “I will take you,” she said. “Just Facebook me and we will make a plan.”

  A day later, Safa and I sat in her Toyota Landcruiser. “Big family,” she explained.

  Dahieh’s sprawl was less posh than either Hamra or Achrafieh. Shabby, bombed-out apartments in various stages of construction and destruction piled atop each other. Clothing hung out in the alleys to dry. We were completely immobilized by the traffic. There was a lot of graffiti and the familiar yellow Hizbullah flags. I recognized the logo. I told Safa what I knew about it, because the Iranian religious police, the Basij, had similar flags that I had seen in my one-and-only trip to Tehran.

  Around twenty-five, I told Safa, while still working briefly as a reporter for a news aggregator, I had been to “Shia-central” Tehran for two nights to do a story about the Fajr Film Festival. It was my first foreign trip ever, and I found Tehran to be a Delhi-like (albeit with mountains), very polluted, and traffic-logged city. Nowhere in the world is there greater reverence for Imam Husayn than in Tehran. The non-pictorially averse Shia made sure his murals abounded. Mayors of the city (Ahmadinejad used to be one) had repeatedly said there never could be enough murals of shaheeds (“martyrs”), Ayatollah Khomeini, and even Islamic events on all possible walls. The Iran-Iraq war was a still recent memory.

  I had passed a cemetery called Behesht e-Zahra and my cab driver allowed us to shoot. Dressed in all black chadors, groups of women stood lamenting around graves unlike any I had ever seen—each had been built with a framed photograph of the dead “martyr” and these huddles of black scarecrows wept. It seemed like they were worshipping them. Is this what made them so undesirable to Sunnis?

  Safa’s voice broke my Iran story. “Where do they all have to go? Have you ever seen traffic like this? This whole country is a fucking prison anyway,” she said while honking loudly at a swerving motorbike that was zipping through the snarl and almost hit us. Nothing but this dude was able to move, it seemed.

  Safa and I started chatting about the Hizbullah logo. It was bright yellow with elegant calligraphy saying Hizb-Allah (“The Party of God”) in Kufi-style script. The first Arabic letter, Alif of the Allah, rose up to hold an AK-47. It was a clever design because it depicted this political party well. Some versions of the logo boasted a sword, a globe, a book, and what looked like a branch of a tree. The text above was from Surah 5 of the Quran, which said, “Surely the party of Allah are they that shall emerge triumphant.” Underneath the logo were the words that identified the movement: “The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.”

  Safa was impressed with my knowledge. “Did you know it comes in other colors, too?” she asked. I said I didn’t, but then we passed a green-on-black version.

  “See those?” she said. I spotted an unusual English green-on-yellow flag that said, “Our Blood Has Won.”

  “I guess that refers to the 2006 Israeli bombings?”

  Safa nodded. She was not wearing a headscarf. “Don’t worry, they don’t bother me,” she’d said. “Hizbullah has eyes everywhere. They know exactly who I am.”

  Her tank top and jeans in Lebanon’s arguably most religious neighborhood seemed like a deliberate act of defiance. I said as much. She said, “I dress like this every day. I live here. Why should I change?”

  Hasty rebuilding was evident in many unpainted brick walls. She said Iranian money had made Dahieh “rise up like a phoenix” virtually overnight after the ceasefire. I already knew that Hizbullah had come to be seen as a viable and necessary resistance even by Christian youth in 2006, which she confirmed. I told her how India’s ultra-Hindu right wing had a similar “organization” called the RSS. They made themselves indispensable after tragedies and natural disasters to gain more followers.

  “Nothing brings the Lebanese together more than our hatred for Israel,” she said.

  I noticed the empty streets. Safa said, “It’s Ramadan. Everyone is sleeping at home. You should see it at night when all the fanoos are lit up and the food stalls fill the streets.”

  I had grown up with a rich Ramadan nightlife. And I had been in Cairo one Ramadan to see the pretty, festooned lanterns called fanoos light up festive alleys and homes. While the daytime rigor of Ramadan was an absolute, the nights of the month were a pan-Muslim version of the American holiday season, building up to Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim Christmas. After a month of abstinence-filled piety, it was the most joyous of festivals. I remembered it fondly as a time of gifts and ice cream. For adults, it importantly meant the return of a sex life. My Ramadan 1431 Beiruti Grindr hookups must surely have assigned me a very special place in hell, reserved for the worst sinners.

  “Oh, I thought that they only have fanoos in Cairo. And how do you eat during the day as a Christian in this part of the city?” I asked.

  “Egypt is not that far, so there are fanoos everywhere. Eating—it’s simple. Just don’t do it in public.”

  Safa pulled up in a corner. “Let’s wait a few minutes and let them all go in to their mosques,” she said. She was not particularly drawn to religious ritual. She had informed me as much when we first met.

  “This reminds me of a slightly cleaner version of Manshiya
t Nasser,” I said, referring to one of Cairo’s largest slums, also known as “garbage city.”

  “That’s totally not fair, Parvez,” she said. “I have been to Cairo. This is heaven compared to that dump!” In hindsight and after visiting Manshiyat several times after, I realize she was right. Hizbullah-land could be compared to typical middle-class suburbs from Delhi to Cairo. A conspicuous difference was the Hizbullah flags and the unctuousness of countless printed odes to “martyrs,” with their prominently placed pictures.

  As everywhere else in the Shia world, and much like the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran, the representation of the face of a shaheed was of extreme importance. We drove past murals of Ayatollah Khomeini, father of the Iranian revolution, and Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah Chief. I refrained from comment. I didn’t know then that I would be in a land of unmarked graves in less than a year. The Shia had no problems with idolatry. The only worship that seemed to be allowed in the land of the Wahhabis, I would soon discover, were visages of the king and other prominent royal family members always waving and smiling benignly at the populace. These murals were accompanied by florid and obsequious Arabic. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Lebanon had no problem displaying countless faces of martyrdom. Beirut felt like a schizophrenic city and that’s why I fell in love with it.

  The call to Zuhr (early afternoon) prayers began from mosques across Dahieh. I was silent.

  “You won’t pray?” Safa asked jokingly. “Everyone in your film is doing it all the time.”

  I paused. “These will all be Shia mosques. I am forbidden in them,” I replied, not knowing at the time how very closely the Shia and I would be aligned in just a few months.

  We were in what looked like an ordinary residential alley. A mangled tangle of power lines and air conditioners perched precariously above most windows. Jumping out of the car, Safa directed my attention to a nondescript two-story building. Its only ornamentation were two more pervasive Hizbullah flags.

  “So that there is the Media Relations Department of Hizbullah,” she said gesturing. I took a photo of the street sign.

  “No way,” she said. “You don’t do that here. Major trouble.”

  She said she had a chatty friend there called Ibrahim Mousawi, who, I learned later, was the head of that department in the well-oiled machine that was Hizbullah. “He is the best gossip ever and knows everything that is going on,” she said. Asking her how and why she knew someone in Hizbullah bureaucracy seemed inappropriate. But I noted down our location on my phone in any case. We were on Bir al-Abed street. (In Dahieh, street signs were mostly in Arabic. In many other parts of Beirut, they were in Arabic and French).

  “If you want to ever pay them a visit, just ask any taxi in Dahieh about the Fawaz Building. They will know immediately,” she said, drawing a smiley face in the air. “Who knows? You might one day want to make a film about the soldiers of the Party of God.” She laughed.

  Safa then brought me to the strangest place I had ever seen: a Hizbullah gift shop! All around us, in every conceivable form, lay what I could only describe as Hizbullah kitsch. “It is a Hizbullah memento store,” laughed Safa. I could have spent an hour or more there.

  Shia icons of the “Made in China” cheap plastic kind were neatly laid out. “Wow, these guys are smart! People in China are actually employed to make coffee mugs with Nasrallah’s mug on them! This could be a global Shia franchise!” I said. I was delighted and couldn’t resist posting a photo of a Nasrallah coffee mug for a Facebook status update. I captioned it, “If you had told me that I would be standing in a Hizbullah souvenir store in Southern Beirut, I would have said you are crazy.” I posted another photo of a T-shirt saying, “I heart [Hizbullah logo].”

  Both Keith and I were eager purveyors of kitsch. Just like graffiti, I feel kitsch offers me some unvarnished insight into a society. I had gathered a significant amount in my travels across Muslim countries, but this beat everything. The yellow T-shirts with the green Hizbullah sign stopped at medium. I should have bought more for my many Jewish friends in New York who shared my dark sense of humor. I bought yellow Hizbullah keychains. I bought two coffee mugs with waving Khomeini and Nasrallah pictures on them. I bought pens and miniature Iran and Hizbullah flags on pedestals. The swag was endless. I got all manner of Hizbullah tchotchkes, even a battery-powered cheap glass knickknack featuring the Hizbullah logo that glowed a lurid green when turned on. I wondered how the shop could remain unshuttered during prayer time, but clearly for this store owner capitalism trumped religion. He did not accept credit cards. Only cash. And then, too, only the almighty US dollar.

  After shopping, I told Safa, “Why don’t I send your buddy Mousawi an email saying I am a freelance journalist doing a story about Beirut and want to write about all the different parts of the city. Harmless, right?”

  Safa gave me his direct email address. Standing there a few feet away from the office itself, I sent him an email, calling myself a freelance journalist from India. I was asking for what was probably the unthinkable—an interview with Hassan Nasrallah. It would stay away from “political matters” and discuss the “reconstruction and modernization of Dahieh,” I said. I did not—this was important—identify myself as a permanent resident of the US. If I got permission, I would probably be blindfolded and an Indian passport would help with the many checkpoints. Where was he living in this sprawling suburb, anyway? Was that a question that perennially remained unanswered for even the most-seasoned Mossad agents surely embedded here in Dahieh?

  Safa and I bid goodbye when she dropped me outside the Le Commodore Hotel, where I was to meet a journalist at the Benihana restaurant. Over sushi and sake, which the flashy Lebanese seem to covet way more than their own delicious and abundant local cuisine, the culture critic of the pro-Hizbullah and leading leftist newspaper Al-Akhbar peppered me with questions about the documentary and why I did not film in Lebanon.

  “You Beirutis are not religious enough,” I laughed as he took notes. He told me why he had to move back to this “troubled land of [his] birth” from London, giving up a high-paying job with the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper. He could no longer stand its pro-Saudi politics. He said as he grew older the “Beirut in [his] heart” called him back. He told me the feeling of the apocalypse I experienced at Fouad’s party was a permanent Beiruti emotion. The civil war and the presence of Hizbullah, which led to the frequent Israeli bombings, were two examples of why the city was “fascinating.” I agreed, telling him I had felt at the edge of some abyss since I arrived. He offered to take me to a well-known bookstore on the main Hamra drag. I said I had just been shopping at the “Hizbullah Store” in Dahieh. I showed him my purchases. He gawked and hurriedly asked me to put them away. Clearly, Beirutis did not want to acknowledge their militant fellow citizens.

  “I know this won’t give me an easy time if US customs decides to examine my checked baggage, but I like danger and thrive on it,” I said. The article that appeared prominently placed my account of my visit to Dahieh. At the time, while I still had several days left in the country, it troubled me.

  Later I met up with two new pals, party host Fouad and Mo the fixer, who helped Western journalists covering this volatile region, at a popular Hamra hangout called Café Younus. They had a symbiotic relationship. Mo gave Fouad story ideas and the latter got him fixer jobs. Fouad was obviously an American, but he was searching for his Palestinian identity. Lebanon was the closest he could ever get to his ancestors’ homeland. Israel would never let him in because of his inflammatory writing.

  Mo was super-connected with all things Beiruti, including the local politics and Hizbullah’s antics within that constantly changing realm. Beirut was competing with Cairo in becoming a haven for reporters on the Mideast beat. In just three months everything would change. Both Fouad and Mo barely made enough to survive in this expensive town. But rents in the areas they lived were still cheap. Writing for Electronic Intifada was not a monetary pursuit, so Fouad had started writing for the
Guardian Online and other paying sites. I had written for them too. I happily shared my other contacts, while telling him how, post-film, I too was unemployed.

  “Maybe you can become a reporter for Al-Manar!” laughed Mo. Al-Manar (The Beacon) was the Hizbullah-run television channel banned in most Western countries. In my hotel room, all it ever seemed to broadcast were Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches. He laughed when I told him they put me to sleep. I reminded Fouad of a promise he had made at the party.

  The next morning, we made a motley crew: Fouad, Mo, and I, with my trusty SLR hanging around my neck, disembarked near the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Sabra, which borders the abjectly poor Shatila, a slum to most of the Beirutis we had hung out with. It felt like a pilgrimage because it might be the closest I would get to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The area was home to the world’s largest concentration of Palestinian refugees. Fouad advised me to put the camera away in my backpack.

  “I don’t want to remember this experience as poverty porn,” I told them. “When we were in Rio, they had guided tours through the favelas and I refused to go. So you are probably right, Fouad.”

  The residents were wary of cameras and journalists. This was a very volatile place where politics and poverty were intertwined. Another ticking time bomb, I thought to myself. The Maronite Christian Phalange party, cheered on by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), had hunted and killed Palestinians in the little alleyways of Shatila in the eighties. The Lebanese civil war was on then and every neighboring country, especially Israel, had taken sides. Fouad first took us past what he called “the wall of death,” where he said men had been lined up and executed in cold blood by the Israel-supported Phalangists.

  “There are many such walls. They killed more than three thousand people here. My people. Yasser Arafat and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) were still alive then. I was just a child, but growing up, my parents and grandparents explained it all to us.” He tried to explain the complicated history of the civil war as we walked. I tuned out because I’d heard it many times before. We entered a slum that seemed a cleaner version of Dharavi in Bombay.