Ali Wheatley’s Party Story

by A. Human Being (January 2016)

December 20, 2013: Arkham, Massachusetts, USA

What if you had a day when everything…went…wrong? And it was simply this . . . all the problems, the insidious fear, and everything falling apart around you . . . that saved your soul?

I had a day like that.

You might as well know that I was born in Saudi Arabia where I had grown up the third son in a liberal and educated family in Riyadh. My father had a mid-level government job. My mother took care of the needs of the family.

The elders in my family would have described me as a bright kid, scatterbrained, head into everything. My father was an eclectic man and made sure that all of his sons had excellent foreign tutors, so that, in the welfare society of Saudi, we would emerge as the egalitarian elite. Saudization was hardly a consideration, so father took it as his responsibility to groom my brothers and I into our roles as businessmen and bureaucrats working above the fat diabetic herd below. He instilled in us an interest in the international world and tested us at dinner on the newspaper.

However, despite the active role he undertook for our betterment, for which I am still grateful . . . I felt a sense of indefinite betrayal. I felt betrayed by the Saudi government and Western civilization. I felt betrayed, resentful, and projected this all upon my father. The man had all the wrong ideas, as I saw it. ‘American troops shouldn’t be on Saudi soil,’ I would proclaim. My uncle and I debated with my father constantly. As a mid-level bureaucrat, he was compromising and acquiescing on essential values. I wasn’t overly religious for a Wahhabi, but I felt that the status quo was wrong.

As for academic interests, one day I planned to study medicine, next day physics. Though eventually I decided, or rather, my father decided that I should study business and international law.

And so, after I graduated from high school, I was sent to college overseas in London to get my degree. And that was it, settled.

I was 19 years old in December 1992, when I went to the UK, ostensibly where I would study business and law. However, the real reason I urged my father to choose ‘Londonistan’ was because I wanted to connect with the ‘Afghan Arabs’, global jihadist soldiers who had fought against the Russians in Afghanistan. They were now thoroughly entrenched in London’s ghettos. In the wake of this war that ended in 1989 with glory for the Afghanis, a subsequent civil war produced many mujahideen with military training overflowing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iran, and the rest of the world. But the UK was where the command issued from. My uncle was keenly aware of this and, unbeknownst to my father, suggested a community in central North London where I could easily find my way into the inner circles.

Backing up for a moment, it’s important to understand that Afghanistan’s war against the Russians had unified the Brotherhood globally in the cause of jihad. Westerners cannot imagine the emotional pull of growing up in a Middle Eastern country listening to the daily broadcasts eulogizing the mujahideen as religious heroes for ten years. Young men, regardless of nationality, came from all over the Middle East to join the fight against the Russians. It’s essential to understand that jihad united the chronic tribalism of the entire Middle East! In Saudi, in school and at home, we prayed, as a collective, for the victory of the mujahideen. Across the Middle East, friends from Turkey to Pakistan experienced the same. Feel the weight of that? From 1979 to 1989, the Brotherhood united as a global community in prayers for jihad. It still unites them today.

So there I was, a Saudi student in London during the Christmas of 1992, an entitled idiot still struggling with the local language, and working through my uncle’s connections into jihadist ghettos around Finnegan Park in central North London. I was completely infatuated with the mujahideen, and was increasingly groomed, trained, and isolated in a community teaching me how to be a ‘proper’ English brother. They encouraged English training and, to my surprise at the time, a college education. They also encouraged, at my uncle’s suggestion, engineering, and were not predisposed about which specialty, mechanical, electrical, or chemical, as long as it had its application for jihad.

In my apartment complex, my flat mates were other Middle Eastern students — Pakistanis, an Iraqi, and a pair of Palestinians. In the daytime, I studied English as a Second Language and undergraduate courses at City College. In the evenings, I returned to the ghettos to chant ‘praise songs’ for jihad: ‘We are the lions of war who do not scare. We are the soldiers who sleep on the backs of horses and if someone calls for jihad, we will answer that call.’

I confess it’s more catchy in Arabic.

I was training with other young student recruits in a warehouse down the street from the Finnegan Park Mosque. It was a wonderful time for me. I had never been so in shape as I was then. I was learning about myself: physically, How much could I bench press?How far could I run without stopping?How quickly could I climb a rope, ladder, or fence? And mentally: How much pain could I endure?How long could I stay awake without hallucinating?How many passwords, security protocols, or aliases, could I memorize?

In America, the popular understanding seems to be that jihadist organizations are isolated from each other, as if Al-Qaida was, in absolute terms, separate from Boko Haram. Ridiculous! Back in the 90s, the jihadist media we were listening to, reading, watching, and disseminating at City College was from everywhere. Saudi, Libyan, Algerian, Bosnian, and Palestinian magazines published the writings of global propagandists of jihad. Jihadism was, and is, an international effort! Its responsiveness is also increased through an international network. What Ansar Al Jihad tests . . . Hamas and Hezbollah replicate. Jihadism is a beast with over 100 heads . . . each head being another terrorist organization.

But I’m sorry. You can’t have lived in that type of crucible without developing some obsessive qualities.

So, there I was in London, living what I was convinced, in my segregation, was a normal life — a college student by day, a jihadist by night — singing chants of death to infidels and watching martyrdom videos.

Many of you have immigrant parents or grandparents, so you know the value of cultural identity and how language, festivals, rituals, and even habits are repeated from generation to generation and define a group. You are truly an international group working together here. You’re the melting pot. A pluralistic society, the very thing I had been trained to reject as a jihadist. I’m actually a little scared to talk to you, and that’s one of the reasons why I went into teaching: to talk to people about ideas, but deeper than that, to face my fears. To affirm that I am not an ideologue, a soldier, an appendage to Muhammad’s ambition, but a person — a human being — and to be OK with that.

As a Saudi in London, I was immediately recognized as a member of the ummah, the global Brotherhood. And I achieved an even greater level of prestige, as I was from the country that everybody in my social circle needed to visit for their hajj. It was gratifying to give people regional advice, and to tell them they could stay with my family in Saudi. I enjoyed being the center of attention. The community I was in was unconsciously insular; its skin being defined by Quranic verses such as, ‘Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are only friends to one another. He who takes them for friends is one of them.’

This aspect of the global community, the ummah, is like the first layer of an onion. And beneath that first layer is the local community, where the exhortations of the resident imam, spying, gossip, and punishment define the second layer of the onion — the community centered around the Finnegan Park Mosque.

However, as I was quickly taken in by the jihadist community, I lived in the third layer of the onion, which held its secrets from both the kuffar, or outsiders, and the ummah at large.

I was in the first layer of jihadism . . . an onion within an onion . . . and, believe me, there are many layers in that hierarchical onion. In the first layer, you’re like a recruit in basic training and your job is simply to study, train, and above all . . . do what you’re told. And if you graduate, you pass on to the next layer, which is to be a foot soldier. Next you’re usually sent abroad for further training in terrorist military camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In north Pakistan in the 90s, training camps were built on a franchise model like McDonalds. And when soldiers passed that level of training, they went off to fight in Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya, Algeria, Palestine, or wherever. Or they came back to London and built the infrastructure.

At the time, this sequence was my vision . . . for my career path! It’s atypical, I know. But I didn’t really know anything about the world except the net of conspiracy theories that makes up the jihadist worldview. For example, did you know that Zionist Jews instigated the Nazi regime to bring about the Holocaust, and thus the formation of Israel? And did you know that the World Health Organization’s tuberculosis and polio vaccinations in Africa and the Middle East are part of a Western plot to infect the Brotherhood with HIV? Conspiracy theories, the belief that medieval caravan raids from Medina marked the high point in human culture, and a fairytale belief in ghosts, giants, and jinn make a fair image of jihadist cosmology.

So that, ladies and gentlemen, was the insular cosmos of my early college days!

Thankfully however, in that first year of studying abroad, I routinely came in contact with realities that tasked the flat world of my cosmology. Girls, for example, would talk to me! Imagine that! And despite foot-in-mouth disease, it was OK to have conversations with girls! Allah didn’t strike me dead! And these girls were curious about me, just as they were curious about everything. They didn’t need their father’s permission to choose their major, drive a car, go to a party, have a boyfriend, or catch a flight to Europe. They simply did as they chose. It was, in a way, absolutely terrifying for me! It was like watching shadows on the wall come alive in Technicolor reality. And they were happy living like this! And fathers didn’t beat the hell out of them — or cut their throats — for all their transgressions! Didn’t these girls know Allah’s plan for them? What on earth was Allah thinking in making their lifestyle seem so sensible, normal, and so fun? Why wasn’t the need for prayer and reaffirmation of Allah’s community ever-pressing on their minds at every moment? I felt an incendiary pain for them. Hellfire was torturing them through me, lighting my genitals on fire, and urging unrelenting bathroom wank sessions. But most painful of all was recognizing that these were all sensible educated girls, many of whom were smarter than me!

That was a truth I couldn’t deny.

So I started reading some of the books that interested them. And it opened up whole worlds for me. As did even basic texts on parliamentary politics or civil liberties! I mean, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of social expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech! They all meant freedom of self-definition and self-determination in a way that was utterly frightening in its responsibility. And reading new books on these matters had to be done furtively, hidden from the eyes of my jihadist brothers and the wider jihadist community, lest word get back to the Finnegan Park cell. The unencumbered study of civil liberties and cosmopolitan values had become a prohibited pleasure, an outlawed enjoyment, a banned bliss of unthinkable and even inviolable delight! It was exotic to me, and even sexualized. Reading about the development of the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights was as erotic and terrifying to me as the possibility of popping a girl’s cherry.

Though I didn’t comprehend it at the time, my fascination with intellectual girls in tight jeans had chipped a hole in the wall of the Finnegan Park cave. And that hole became my window to a world of greater illumination beyond the undemanding thought processes of my jihadist cell and the surrounding community that protected its inviolable integrity.

One day, three young ladies who were fellow students in my ethics class were excited about attending a lecture on the Gnostic Gospels by a famous scholar from Princeton. Two of those ladies, both blonde, had their arms around my shoulders as we walked into the back of the auditorium. And that was the most physically profound experience of my life up to that point. I had never felt like such a rock star! I was converting to the religion of blondes!

And while I was experiencing that most elevating gratification of simple physical contact with the opposite sex, the religious studies lecturer began to say some things that conflicted strikingly with everything I knew about the prophet Jesus. Her descriptions of Jesus from early Christian texts were far from the judge and warner of jihadist tradition. This was deeply disturbing to me.

In the professor’s readings from both canonical and non-canonical gospels, Jesus emerged as a character — a self-respecting and individualized personality — who’s secret to success, if you will, was non-judgment. ‘You see the mote in your brother’s eye,’ Jesus said, ‘but you fail to see the beam in your own eye. When you cast out the beam in your own eye, then you will see clearly.’

Imagine the personal discipline of non-judgment as being the essence of what makes Christianity so unique. What if Christianity isn’t so much a continuity from the Hebrew prophets or a step on the path toward Muhammad, but a message uniquely its own?  

For me, this was my annunciation, you might say. To quote Angelus Silesius, ‘Of what use, Gabriel, your message to Marie. Unless you can now bring the same message to me?’

To put it mildly . . . I was in the midst of a theological crisis.

Now, during this time, my jihadist brothers and I smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, went to parties and strip bars, and a few of us, to a degree, experimented with drugs . . . all the while bitterly abusing the inequity of the British government, the duplicity of Western democracy, the decadence of European civilization, and the contagion of rock and roll. One evening, while getting high with some of my brothers, while we sat on a black leather couch watching combat recruitment videos of the mujahideen . . . it had begun to appear to me . . . and understand that this thread of inquiry was utterly forbidden in my insulated community . . . that all my brothers’ comments on London’s decadence were a secondary layer of thought. Their perception of London was, at the very least, one layer removed from it. And therefore, their fidelity to reality was fundamentally flawed.

Marijuana philosophy, right?

So continuing to smoke hash that night, while my brothers cheered on the mujahideen, the whole world started telescoping in and out. And I started crying at this perceptual curse that these, my brothers, could never allow themselves the freedom to enjoy a sunset or sunrise . . . because they were encumbered by the thought that this was a decadent Western sunset or kafir British sunrise. Their senses had become deformed. Judgment, prejudice, and ultimately hatred had so infected what they believed to be their primary experiences that they had come to feel themselves persecuted. And I mean persecuted as a noun . . . as a personal identity or being statement.

And of course there was a truth to their experience.

They were persecuted! But they were persecuted by their own nervous systems. They were persecuted by an ideology that had so entangled itself in their sense experiences that they had no hope but to act out fairytale hallucinations where the slogans of infidel, decadent, and moral pollution were grafted into, and had become indistinct from, their most basic perceptions.

At this moment, while my jihadist brothers hugged me for being so moved by the sacred duty of the holy warriors . . . I experienced the greatest shock of my life! I realized, of course, that I was doing the same thing!

And this realization was more uncomfortable than anything I had experienced. It was the fires of Hell. In the Quran, there are hundreds — hundreds! — of verses where Allah lambasts hypocrites. And I realized that I had, through some imperiling allegiance, become a hypocrite to the fidelity of my own experience.

So, with tears of agony streaming from my eyes, I hugged my brothers, as if this was our last hour, as we watched the mujahideen machine gun their way into glory. The whole night long, I silently prayed, and prayed hard, for the wisdom to recognize my own fallibility.

By this point, more than a year had passed for me in England. My father had expressed his disappointment that I was leaning towards engineering as a major, but surely he’d have more grievous disappointments to come.

I was deeply involved, at the foot soldier level, in the Finnegan Park cell in July, 1994. And in a radical surprise shift of priorities, the strategists within a deeper layer of the onion had ordered us to turn our attention from financially supporting, supplying, and even manning the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese in their fight against the Zionist dogs . . . as we called them . . . in Israel. But we were now instructed to make preparations for a local response to the peace agreements being proposed between Israel and Jordan in Washington, DC.

We saw Jordan’s capitulation to the West as an intolerable setback in our long-term goal of Israel’s ultimate disappearance from the region. ‘Yet another capitulation to the West,’ my brothers and I grumbled. It was exactly my father’s support of many similar Western capitulations that had agitated my earliest sense of jihadist activism, so this was a deep trigger for me. And the cell leaders saw my resentment at my father’s capitulations, leveraged it, and gave me a pivotal role in their plan.

And yet . . . I was still deeply conflicted! For when I looked with true discernment at this thing that the global jihadist movement was fighting — though they latch onto Western civilization as a symbolic enemy — it was culture itself that they were at war with. And why? Because jihadism is impatient with any humane legal and political process of any kind. Its radicalism, I came to discern, was simply uncivilized impatience toward due process. And here we jihadists were . . . living in England and under the protective wing of the British government that asked for nothing in return but the most basic observance of common-sense civility.

For most of my life, in Saudi, I had grown up under an ideology’s continual exhortation to pledge my blind unthinking loyalty to it five times a day . . . and so when I contrasted that with the luxury of England’s lack of demands on us I was utterly flabbergasted.

All at once, it occurred to me . . . none of Londonistan’s conscripted jihobbyists really wanted sharia law. None of them would have been able to handle the style of life that I had taken as normal while growing up in Saudi. This was just a violent Oriental enigma that they had started worshiping out of exoticism and their own impatience with the due process of civil law!  

The day I found that out . . . I barged into City College’s Student Services building and questioned the university’s career advisor for three hours about the path to becoming a lawyer!

I laugh now, though it was goddamn painful at the time. As I became more aware of English law, I increasingly developed an appreciation for how sensible it was. If England is anything, it’s sensible! And imagine going home from that and hearing embittered jihadists and clown jihobbyists condemn this elegant system as a whole in favor of beheadings, the amputation of limbs, and the stoning of adulterers to death! I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear my face off, like the split mask I knew it had become. Every waking moment, I felt so violently torn in two that I literally wanted to die.

And what should happen next?

Our cell leader said that of all of us . . . it should be me who drives the car-bomb we were tailoring for our Israeli target here in London. And wasn’t this why I had come to London in the first place? To follow in the footsteps of the mujahideen? Wasn’t this my duty as a brother? ‘Give me a deed of equal merit to jihad,’ one of Muhammad’s disciples once asked the prophet. ‘I can not find such a deed,’ he had replied.

Because our cell had compartmentalized all the necessary tasks, I discovered that plans had already been drawn up and explosives had been gathered. Two of my college brothers had stolen the car the night before. And two walky-talkies had been rewired to serve as remote detonators. If one failed, the other would detonate the car at the prescribed time.

Thankfully, I thought, the men behind the men who were our cell’s leaders had set the date for disaster: three simultaneous attacks planned for the day after the Jordanian president and Israeli prime minister would meet in Washington. An end to my war, my struggle. Quick and easy.

Now, ostensibly, they had set up the whole system so that I didn’t even have to be there. I was supposed to park my car in front of the target location . . . I won’t say where that was . . . and I was supposed to get out, to leave it there, and to detonate it from a distance. But I kept asking them, ‘What if it goes wrong? What if something unexpected happens?’ I had, in my mind, a million and one adverse scenarios where my self-detonation in the car would be absolutely necessary. And all I could think about as we prepared was . . . that moment . . . the bliss of that single-minded self-annihilating simplicity.

With the help of my brothers, I wrote, memorized, and recorded my martyr video. My ESL teacher at the time would have been proud. Masked in front of a black flag, I proclaimed, ‘I, and a thousand like me, have forsaken everything we have for what we believe. Our driving motivation is not from the capitalist commodities that your world has to offer. Our religion is the Brotherhood — obedience to Allah, and His final prophet and messenger Muhammad. Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support for them makes every one of you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my jihadist brothers and sisters. Until we feel secure, you will be our targets. We will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier.’

A little Pepto-Bismol had prevented me from throwing up while saying that.

Again, they affirmed that it wasn’t supposed to come to that, for the cause would need me as a chemical or structural engineer once I graduated. So the cause needed me . . . and this was the full value of my life.

How different our jihadist values were from the values of the rest of the world. How different our worldview from life outside the sandbox.

And so on July 26, 1994, the day after Jordan’s king and Israel’s prime minister met in Washington, DC, I was given my final prep for my self-conflicted holy struggle. All of this had been fated, I was reassured. Our victory was inevitable.

I got into the car and looked over at the electronic receiver in the passenger seat. It had two wires extending out its back and running into the backseat and trunk. ‘It looks like an expensive home stereo,’ one of my brothers said, ‘but wait till you crank up the volume!’ 

Indeed, that was all I could think of, actually, cranking up the volume . . . briefly . . . and then resting forever in the dove-cooing embrace of houri reassurances. How I needed those reassurances. I would hear forever-and-ever-and-ever that the voice of conscience was as false as a rabbi hiding a harsh verse with his thumb and that the murder of others was as beloved of Allah as a hail of stones on adulterers.

Of course, these seemed strange preoccupations for the Creator of the universe. I mean, didn’t He ever think of cricket, comparative religious study, or . . . for Christ’s sake . . . anything other than judgment and retaliation?

‘Allah akbar,’ my brothers said to me, this final time. ‘Allah akbar,’ I repeated, as I backed the car out of the warehouse garage, turned it around, and drove off toward my target in central London.

As I drove, I looked at, and began admiring, London’s architecture and the cosmopolitanism of the city. Here was a Pakistani kabob restaurant next to a Chinese laundry. Here was a Christian church on the same street as a Hindu sweet shop. Here were children playing in the street. Here were people who . . . fuck, almighty . . . got along.

I imagined how, when I was a child, my father had hovered over me. What would he think of all this? What would my mother think? And what would my old man say to console her?

I thought of my uncle, and how our mutual sympathies had ultimately brought me to this . . . this choice . . . of being here in a vehicular bomb driving off to murder other human beings. And I knew . . . that deep down . . . I had already determined to die with my victims . . . because I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I did otherwise. To look at my face in the mirror . . . like the rear view mirror in that car . . . and forever see the faces of the 10 or 20 people I had slaughtered. I wouldn’t have had only one face after that moment, but I would have carried many murdered faces under this outward mask of basic human civility.

Taqiyya, deception. That was what I had been reduced to. And in an increasingly idiotic Paradise, houris would comfort me in this.

However, I doubted their ability to do so.

And what if . . . at my target . . . the college girls I knew were to be there, outside . . . standing at the dreaded location? Or their sisters or parents? What if the visiting religious studies professor stood there? Or her Jesus?

Driving toward my target, I heard the sound of my own voice, as clear as a bell, from deep within — filling my chest, filling my life — ‘This isn’t your war.’ And I knew that everything else be damned, this was the truth. This was my truth!

I would not pantomime and praise brutality out of any desire for houris or fear of hellfire. That was the work of men with deformed souls.

For me . . . I would diffuse the bomb.

Not that I knew how.

A thousand and one unthinkable doubts, problems, thoughts, and errors to jihadist cosmology had visited my mind. Given the context of my cell’s plan and our ultimate aim of greater jihad, everything had gone wrong! And to the sublime vastness of that error . . . I owe my very soul.

I felt a relief as freeing as anything I have known. It felt like iron band after iron band was breaking from around my heart.

I parked the car in an isolated area, took a deep breath, then pulled the wires out of the back of the receiver. Then pulled the wires from the receiver to the large battery in the passenger seat. Then I walked to one of those Dr. Who police call boxes and phoned the police telling them where they could find the car-bomb.

Jesus talks about being born again. Since I’ve filmed my martyr video, I know I’ve already been dead.

Have you ever heard the story of one of those near-death experiences? Like the Mississippi farmer who was struck by lightning? Or the woman in the operating room who saw a tunnel of light after she had been pronounced dead? I know what it’s like to die. I have died. And I have been born again, yes, most certainly as a Christian, but also in a way that is more elusive. And it is this way that I hope to impress upon you. I have been born, I hope, as a freethinking individual . . . and as an individual who has the capacity for individuation, for a complete sense of self-wholeness as a person.

Now this whole journey . . . in a way . . . wasn’t a religious one for me. It was something more primal. And at times I have to ask myself, ‘Was it all completely reactionary? Am I now individuated? Am I now free of an adolescent’s sense of the world’s betrayal? Am I free from fear of a father’s judgment?’

So, that’s my party story. And I’m very glad to know you all this Christmas. And glad to know that my wife works with such fine people. God bless you all.

 

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The above short story is a chapter from the forthcoming novel War Verses: A Jihadist Fairytale by A. Human Being.

 

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