Mauritz ’Come Muhayissa

by A. Human Being (October 2015)

October 14, 2014: Baghdad, Iraq

“One should not mix curses with prayers, lest, as they drift heavenward, one forgets which is which,” the Iraqi police officer told brawny blue-eyed Muhayissa at the Kadhimiyah checkpoint in northern Baghdad.

“Allah akbar,” Muhayissa replied.

*    *    *

Now Muhayissa — born Mauritz — was a tall, strong, and clever young man. Indeed, a budding engineer who thought of himself as thoroughly modern in every way.

He was German in both “race and nation” as he put it, and had studied both physics and engineering for two years in Kassel Junior College in Germany.

So he understood that the power that a turbine engine induced on an airfoil wing affected it with a force called lift. And Mauritz ’come Muhayissa had enjoyed telling his friends at the university in elaborate detail about the function and workings of a turbine engine’s components and how lift and drag currents were affected by the angle and curve of an airfoil . . . but for some reason . . . he simply refused to believe that turbine engines and airfoil wings had any direct effect on a jet’s actual flight.

He understood the physics. He understood the engineering.

But he was unable to be convinced that a plane’s flight was caused by anything other than invisible external forces, which . . . as they were the cosmic workings of Allah . . . were destined to forever remain a mystery to mankind.

To his mind, all subtle things in the world were like this.

As a German convert, he had come to the Brotherhood early, through Nizam, a high school friend, who had invited him to a madrasa after school one day. Compared to the intensity of a German high school where a person actually had to study, the madrasa seemed all nodding heads and chanting. It was meditative and relaxing. In the madrasa he felt that he could just relax and let the stress of his parents’ impending divorce, their hypocritical expectations for him, and the oppression of the German high school curriculum simply disappear into the rhythmic chanting and swaying. He was adrift and floating in an Oceanic Oriental dream. Maybe at some primordial level that was all he wanted. To be adrift in utero again.

He enjoyed rocking back and forth, as on a hobbyhorse, and chanting within the group in his hifz course, even if he had no idea what he was saying. There was a calming effect to it — chanting with his new brothers — and a mischievous sense of being in a secret society or boy’s club. There was a sense of exclusivity, of being special, unique, and superior. As long as he was within this group, Nizam had told him, he was superior, a higher man in God’s eyes, a master over others.

“Do you know what a kafir is?” Hazrat, the bearded old instructor at the madrasa asked Mauritz ’come Muhayissa to test whether Nizam had taught him well. “My mother, father, and brother,” blue-eyed Muhayissa answered, “It means anyone outside the house of the Brotherhood.”

“They’re less than human,” Mauritz ’come Muhayissa interrupted. “craniometry has demonstrated that the Jew’s brain is smaller and less developed than the human brain.”

“Wow!” the German convert’s jaw dropped to the floor.

Then with pride, Hazrat explained, “I’m a hafiz. I’ve memorized the Quran. That’s what you’re learning by chanting in your hifz course. You’re learning to be a reservoir of perfect wisdom such as this.”

Hazrat continued, “Now after Muhammad ordered the killing of Medina’s Jews, an excellent member of the Brotherhood named Muhayissa tested his faith by attacking a Jewish merchant named Ibn Sunayna. Muhayissa sawed off the Jew’s head, shoved it in a sack, and later showed it to his brother who was not yet of the Brotherhood.

“His brother, Huwayissa, was shocked that his own brother should commit such wanton murder. And Huwayissa reproached his brother for this deed. Again . . . that was a test to Muhayissa’s faith. Allah give us strength for such times.

“Thankfully, Muhayissa’s heart was united with the will of the prophet. He was unrepentant! He told his brother as much, saying, ‘Had the man who ordered me to kill him ordered me to kill you, this would be your head in the bag!’

“Huwayissa was amazed by the force that so possessed his brother. ‘By all that is holy, such teachings that can bring you to this are awe-inspiring!’ With those words, Muhayissa’s brother Huwayissa joined the Brotherhood.” Old Hazrat, the teacher at the madrasa, paused, and now looked thoughtfully for a long time at Mauritz ’come Muhayissa. “And your name is Muhayissa too. That’s interesting, isn’t it? A name isn’t just a name, Muhayissa. It’s a destiny. It is Allah’s plan and will for you. You know that, don’t you?”

That week, Muhayissa took his life savings and gave it to old Hazrat, the instructor at the madrasa, so that through the Brotherhood’s local community center, he could send the money to holy warriors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Turkey, Algeria, England, France, Canada, America, Argentina, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, or wherever. It didn’t much matter to him where, just that he could prove himself as capable of supporting Allah’s work. Like his namesake, it didn’t matter whose head he should put in a bag, just that he should demonstrate responsibility by making sure that a head got put in a bag.

Or so his logic went.

America, Muhayissa now rationalized, was the culprit for most of the world’s ills. It had become a target for his rage. For America, obviously, had been the “trigger” of global jihadist terrorism. Western capitalist civil society he now saw as racist, corrupt, decadent, exploitative, and imperialist, seeking always to defend its greedy self-serving interests. The West was hypocritical in its defense of human rights, often denying the Brotherhood’s many cultural enclaves of their right to practice sharia law — Allah’s law!  

The Zionists, the United Nations, the European Union, the Americans, the Illuminati! It couldn’t get more obvious! They were all at fault! “It’s a conspiracy against the Arab,” he’d tell his junior college classmates, and find himself somehow increasingly isolated among members of the Brotherhood whose internal systems of logic worked as his did. “It’s all a big spider web,” he’d tell his brothers who would simply nod and nod and nod, as in a madrasa. “Even immunizations were created by the CIA to infect Arabs and Africans with AIDS.”

Right?

At that time, Muhayissa’s classmates at the junior college had begun to avoid him as a pariah. And that too was part of the plot. It was obvious. These young German kuffar had all been brainwashed by the rightwing media. And as such, they were failing Germany and God! They didn’t have a clue as to what was really going on. It was sad, really. A huge sad conspiracy, a spider that also had a hold of his parents now, who screamed at him for giving his life savings for the cause. They didn’t understand. They were too self-absorbed in their talk of divorce and trapped in the web of their culture’s stupid ideas. And through this all, they put his brother on a pedestal like some ubermensch, while they treated him like the pariah Jew, like Alberich the dwarf. And was that who he was to them? “Scheisse.”

Soon, he told himself, all their weak weepy concern for me will be too late.

“Isn’t this exactly what’s wrong with Germany today?” he told old Hazrat, outside the madrasa that night. “Where is Germany’s warrior ethos today? Hitler understood Germany’s intense need for that. And even he had praised Islam for its veneration of heroes, opening the seventh gate of Heaven only to bold warriors. Hitler knew!”

“Yes,” old Hazrat answered. He agreed a lot with Muhayissa that night. His agreements had a purpose to them. His agreements had a direction. And it seemed strange to Muhayissa that he should have handed old Hazrat the last of his money for a plane ticket that night. Now he had a ticket, travel instructions, a contact name, and information for how to join the mujahideen in Iraq. Of course this was all his own idea and had been his own intention and idea all along. It was just that he didn’t remember when and where he had formed this idea. And how it had happened. It was curious, that’s all — strange — like the flight of an airplane itself.

And how did Muhayissa find Iraq once he arrived? And what did he think of sharia law?

“I wanna go home! I wanna go home!” Muhayissa cried. The IS mujahideen simply laughed at him.

“You’re in the caliphate now,” his handler told him. “Here in Nineveh, we abide by sharia law. This isn’t the West. This isn’t Germany. This isn’t a pampered university life or living with mom and dad. This isn’t a world with the comforts of TV, chocolate, microwaved food, music, air conditioning, a bed, plumbing, a room of your own, or a window with glass in it. This is doing without a shower. This is doing without a roof. This is eating when, where, and what we say. This is living as a soldier and doing what you’re told without question or complaint. This is wiping the shit off your ass with your left hand. And this is prayers with your brothers five times a day.”

It goes without saying that Iraq wasn’t quite what Muhayissa thought it would be. Iraq was so hot in the daytime that he could no longer think functionally. And his logic and fidelity to his senses or even reality simply reduced themselves to aping what he was told: cleaning rifles, cleaning uniforms, stripping uniforms off the dead, which meant twisting and prying the hard sticky uniforms out of burnt and festering flesh.

On some piles of bodies, he was convinced that the uniforms had conjoined with the bodies of the dead. Muhayissa was a scavenger in Iraq. He was a scavenger for the caliphate. “And that should make you proud,” his handler told him. “You’re a Westerner and you’ve got skills and an education. You have no idea how far that goes around here. Most of these mujahideen know how to fight and kill a thousand times better than you, but they still think the world is flat and that airplanes fly by the cosmic workings of Allah.”

And Muhayissa did his best to help in the work. He was a soldier now, or was learning to become one, and knew that it was his duty to perform his tasks without questions. So he didn’t question when he saw large groups of women being raped in the street by mujahideen, or women with price tags on them in the dry dusty Nineveh markets that his platoon marched by. “This is sexual jihad,” his handler had pointed out. “Don’t worry you’ll take your pick from them after you prove yourself a fighter.”

So Muhayissa focused on the thought of the women that would be in his future and he didn’t question when he saw IS mujahideen stoning Christians to death outside of a church that was being demolished. And he didn’t question when he saw them crucifying, beheading, and throwing people from buildings. He simply did his duty, which one day, was to take a group of bound and captured children on a leather leash, and walk them to the religious training camp in a nearby town. When he had delivered them, he was invited to sit down and eat a mashed bean or lentil porridge with the religious teachers. Sitting there amongst the learned men, he listened to the chanting of the children in the religious school. As he closed his eyes, he found himself nodding and nodding and nodding his head just like at his familiar madrasa in Kassel, Germany, in which he had discovered the will of Allah. He smiled, feeling sentimental. A little boy, perhaps only six years old, sat on his lap with a little doll whose head he was sawing off. And the religious teacher adjusted the angle of the blade in the boy’s hand, because it was important not only to feel the emotions and say the words, but to competently do the deeds as well.

Which brings us to Muhayissa’s fainting spells when ordered to guard the Assyrian Christians, Sabean Mandeans, Turkmen Shia, and other peoples who were digging their mass graves in Nineveh in northwestern Iraq. When he awoke from his third faint, his handler told him that his failure was in not looking death in the face. He handed him a small serrated knife just like the child had at the village religious school. His handler brought him over to a Shia prisoner.

“I can’t kill him,” Muhayissa said, “He’s a brother.”

“It’s no longer a matter of opinion. He’s an idolater.”

Still, Muhayissa hesitated. Again, the mujahideen simply laughed at him. That laughter steeled his resolve, and he thought of the scholarly face of the teacher in the religious training camp as he showed the boy how to cut the head off a dirty rag doll. And he took the small blade in his large hand and stabbed the Shia idolater under the ear, and then he sawed and sawed and sawed, right to left, like Arabic script, forward and back, forward and back, down into the man’s voice box and up again through the jugular underneath the man’s other ear.

“Oh God, I need a rest.”

“There is no rest,” his handler told him. “To support the cause, we’re also in the organ trade. You’ve got to keep cutting. I’ll show you where.”

So Muhayissa used his time learning new skills, for he was still a student, as at Kassel Junior College in Germany.

But then . . . there were the values of the city. And there were the values of the terror. And the two were not compatible.

In this new life of his, little-by-little — as in a courtship — he was able to spend more-and-more time with his handler. He appreciated those thoughtful conversations in English where he tried to place his handler’s accent and guess of his foreign origin.

In one such conversation, Muhayissa told his handler that he had come to imagine the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him . . . as like Adolf Hitler and Otto Von Bismark . . . as like Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie . . . as like Jesus and the Buddha all combined in one man! “Tits and all!” he’d say. Over-and-over. “Tits and all!”

His handler simply blinked. “Uh, yeah… Yes! Exactly! You get it! Just like that! I see it now! I’ve never thought of it like that before! The wisdom of what you say seems to come from Paradise itself!”

And Muhayissa beamed with pride. He had a special way with logic. It was gratifying to finally be appreciated for it.

Little-by-little, Muhayissa had begun to earn the trust and admiration of his handler. And his handler, he realized was a clever young man who had wanted to become an engineer, and who thought of himself as thoroughly modern in every way. And little-by-little, he began to confide in Muhayissa. And Muhayissa, it seemed, became his confidant. He told Muhayissa about everything that he had left behind in life, everything that he had rejected. He told Muhayissa about what was real to him, what was eternal, sacred, and worthy of pursuing. One night, as they sat, wrapped in blankets, in front of a burning metal drum, his handler turned to him and said, “This is personal. You won’t laugh at me?”

“I won’t laugh,” Muhayissa replied.

His handler picked up a handful of sand and let it drip through the fingers of his hand, as though it were a phantom reality that could not truly be grasped. “The false world of inconsequence and distractions is for hypocrites and kuffar,” he told Muhayissa. “It’s the world that you live in now. Although it seems physically tangible, it is not real. It’s only Allah’s test for you. And to successfully pass Allah’s test, you must reject it.”

Muhayissa realized that night, that his handler was a deeply philosophical and spiritual man. It impressed Muhayissa powerfully that he trusted and confided in him with the vulnerability of his beliefs.

Step-by-step, Muhayissa was learning new skills and strengthening his resolve. He longed for the day when the mujahideen would no longer laugh at him and when he would be considered truly an equal of those great men. “Tits and all.”

Maybe this is it, he thought as his handler gave him a new job.

“This requires you to use taqiyya, deception. You’re going to pretend to be a Western journalist in order to get though a checkpoint. Or more specifically, you’re going to pretend to be a Western journalist in order to get a large bomb through a checkpoint and into the city of Bagdad. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

So, Muhayissa’s new job was simply to drive a car-bomb through the Kadhimiyah checkpoint north of Bagdad, so that the car-bomb could later be detonated in the city. However, if the explosives in the trunk should be discovered, he was ordered to detonate everything immediately.

Muhayissa was given a fake ID, and a new name, and instructions on what to say and how to behave upon reaching the checkpoint.

Before he headed out, he took a look at the bomb in the trunk. Seeing the stacks and stacks and stacks of explosives wrapped around a black metal box fused with wires that snaked up into the front cab, he thought of it as a caricature of a bomb, so flamboyant in its purposefulness. It wouldn’t be a matter of an Iraqi police officer “discovering the bomb”, he realized, but simply asking him to open the trunk.

He asked if anyone had any gum. No. No one had any gum. So, he simply got into the car, checked the map in the passenger seat one final time, and slowly drove down the pale sandy unpaved road and drove to another pale sandy unpaved road and to another and another and another. He thought of a nation’s infrastructure. And how it takes a modicum of normalcy to create something like a normal functional infrastructure for normal functional human beings. And he thought of the little boy at the religious training camp sawing the head off his doll.

Alone now, for the first time in a long long time, he wondered how sensible this world was that he and his brothers were creating.

Then he thought of the face of his handler and their many conversations on what was real and what was not. He thought of Jannah, wherein the greatest pleasure was Allah’s mercy. And he let that image of Jannah roll through his imagination like a magician’s magic coin through the fingers.

Eventually, he approached the Kadhimiyah checkpoint in northern Baghdad. It was crowded with vehicles. There was a long line of cars and trucks, as the Iraqi police officers were looking under the vehicles with mirrors, taking the drivers and passengers away from their vehicles, and examining the contents. “You’ll be treated with special privileges as a foreigner,” his handler had told him. “They’ll just wave you on.”

Ahead of him in line, truckloads of crates were being pried open and examined. And a van full of women was having its seats pulled out.

Finally, he was at the checkpoint itself where a bearded officer with reflective sunglasses stood at his driver’s side door.

Muhayissa took the initiative and said the pantomime phrases that his handler had given him. The officer waved the phrases off and motioned for Muhayissa to open his car’s front hood and trunk. Other officers in tan uniforms were at the passenger side of the car now and they opened both of the side doors.

“You are an American?” asked a forth officer in English.

“Yes, I’m an American journalist,” Muhayissa said. “I work for the New York Times. Here’s my press badge, security pass, and work papers.”

“You don’t sound like an American,” the officer said, looking at the badge and taking the paperwork. “I’m going to check these,” he said with a polite smile, then with a look of concern he added, “You look terrible by the way. Are you alright? Have you seen some awful things? I’m ashamed of what is going on in my country. We all are. I want you to know that. It’s a surprise to us as much as anyone. My brother was executed in Nineveh for resisting the destruction of the region’s ancient Assyrian history. Do you see the women in that van?” He pointed. “They’re rape survivors who have been ransomed for money. Many of the people who have passed through this checkpoint today are refugees fleeing from those terrorists. But I ask you, how can we distinguish the refugees from the terrorists?” He sighed. “We do the best we can, right? Where are my manners? Come in and have some tea with us.”

Again, the first officer gestured for Muhayissa to open his car’s front hood and trunk.

And with a sigh himself . . . Muhayissa closed his eyes and imagined the face of his handler. “Scheisse,” he said. “Let whoever fights in the way of Allah, who sells this world’s life for that of the hereafter, be he slain or victorious . . . We . . . shall grant him a mighty reward.” 

“One should not mix curses with prayers,” the English-speaking Iraqi police officer told him, “lest, as they drift heavenward, one forgets which is which.”

“Allah akbar,” Muhayissa replied.

*    *    *

And what is the life of a handler?

Imagine now that . . . We . . . are a handler.

And we want to motivate someone. And that’s our only goal . . . to motivate this person. What are we going to use?

We’re going to use the stick and the carrot.

And we’re going to use the stick and the carrot because, quite simply, that’s what motivates people. Now what are the stick and the carrot?

Fear and desire.

Fear and desire, plain and simple, are the stick and the carrot. But the world of experience isn’t so plain and simple. There are lots of dimensions to it . . . lots of distractions for our target. The man we want to motivate might have a job, a wife, a child, a whole family, all sorts of stories that he tells himself, and any number of worries and concerns. Right? So, we want him to focus only on the world we’ve created. He needs to focus all his life energies on the stick and the carrot . . . fear and desire. So, how do we do that?

First, we’ve got to break our target’s mind. Take Muhayissa here, for example.

First, we tell Muhayissa that there are really two worlds, not one. There is a false world of inconsequence and distractions, and then there is the real world. “The false world of inconsequence and distractions is for hypocrites and kuffar,” we tell Muhayissa. “It’s the world that you live in now. Although it seems physically tangible, it is not real. It’s only Allah’s test for you. And to successfully pass Allah’s test, you must reject it.” Ha!

By contrast, the ‘real world’ exists only for our target in the future, after he’s done his suicide attack — Get it? — and that ‘real world’ consists of only two elements, the stick and the carrot. And that might be phrased in all sorts of psychobabble or gobbledygook, but when we come down to it — when we really come down to it — that ‘real world’ consists of only the stick and the carrot. And this, we beat into his head.

So, for our target, Muhayissa, the ‘real world’ is only achievable through martyrdom.

We tell Muhayissa about the ‘real world’ . . . and that the only thing that he should concern himself with is that world of fear and desire. That’s it. The only thing that is real and actual, we tell the target, are those two essential elements of human motivation.

Nothing else is real.

And this isn’t just in his head, we tell the target. This is real! It’s the actual world. It’s ontological reality.

What this world-image is at its most fundamental level then . . . is cosmology.

It is a cosmology that simplifies our target’s concerns. And what is it to harm another person in the false world of inconsequence and distractions?

The value of another in the false world of inconsequence and distractions is nothing.

What is important, what is ontologically real, is Allah’s plan in the ‘real world’ as governed by the two essential elements of human motivation.

For Allah’s plan in this ‘real world’ is for our target to simply . . . obey . . . to do what ‘Allah’ wants.

And who is Allah?

Why the creator of ‘this universe’, of course. Get it, the creator of ‘this universe’?

Let’s pause on that thought for a moment.

So, We . . . the creator of ‘this system’ of human motivation say that the target’s only real concern should be that real world of stick and carrot.

We’ll call the stick of fear ‘Hell’. And we’ll call the carrot of desire ‘Heaven’.

We’ll tell our target that these are the only things that are real. We’ll tell our target that this hallucinated polarity is his only focus for energy and concerns.

So after a while our target will have minimized his association to the physical world around him. And that ‘false world’ has become like a dream. To our now dissociated target, it has become something . . . unreal.

Because our target is now . . . living entirely in the hallucinated cosmology of stick and carrot. We’ve done well!

Now, when our target’s world-experience has been reduced to those two essential elements of human motivation, feelings naturally come up. And these feelings increasingly become more intense.

So in our target’s mind, now, the filters of sense perception begin to go through an experience like a drug-addict’s withdraw. Our target experiences a flood of emotions and even hallucinations in order to compensate for his dissociation from the world of perceptible reality.

So, born out of the intensity and craving for actual sensual experiences, the ‘real world’ appears as hyper-real. It becomes flooded with intense emotional affect.

And because a large part of the mind is a meaning-seeking mechanism, projections of signification and meaning glom onto these overwhelming emotions and begin to build architectural constructs of meaning around that emotional intensity.

And because our system of human motivation is already in place . . . our target’s mind, really, just fills in the little details. It fills in the gaps. Which in practice, is to say, that our target reifies the ‘real world’ of our stick and carrot.

This is called a ‘convincer’, and it’s important, because it means that our target’s critical faculties have shut down around the narratives and beliefs we’ve fed him. Our target is now utterly convinced about the absolute fidelity of our stick and carrot ‘real world’.

Our target now experiences great relief . . . because there is no longer any internal conflict. The real world of stick and carrot has completely overwhelmed the false world of inconsequence and distractions.

Our target is now living, utterly and completely, in a hallucination. A dream world.

But it must be remembered that it is a purposefully contrived dream world. It is created with the strictest strategic intention.

Allah’s plan in this ‘real world’ is for targets to simply . . . obey . . . to do what ‘Allah’ wants. And who is Allah according to this system? Why the ‘creator of this system’, of course.

And does this cosmology sound like brainwashing?

It should.

Our target, now . . . is adrift in a hallucination contrived by its engineer. And our target doesn’t mind. Our target is completely adrift in a world where all experiences and meanings now loop back into the hallucination that he has completely accepted.

So, back to that.

The ‘real world’ — the world of the only concerns that truly matter — is in the future. The future! And our target feels a need to get there! More than anything else. And Hell pushes, while Heaven pulls. And the only certain way to secure the carrot, or Heaven, is through martyrdom in jihad!

And do we find it difficult or easy — as the handler — to convince our targets of this message?

Easy.

Why?

Because this message is, in fact, ‘THE Message’.

It is ‘THE Message’ that our target has had beaten into his head his entire life! It is the central theme of the Quran and the message of every madrasa. And if our target understands the verses pertaining to abrogation, our target will understand that there is little else to the Quran.

The Quran will have already established this system of human motivation into our target. The Quran is, over-and-over, the description of this system.

And so, we — as his handler — What’s really our job then?

Our job isn’t to tell our target anything he hasn’t already heard one thousand and one times.

Our job isn’t to tell our target anything new.

Our job is just to be a handler — as for a little goat — our target. Our job is to help our target turn feelings and speech . . . phantasmal things . . . into real physical action.

Our job is to keep our target so utterly stabilized in that ‘other world’ . . . that he reifies it in this world of flesh.

And that means carrying out his suicide attack, “Tits and all.”

With joy and pride — and no cynicism to be sure — we can wave Auf Wiedersehen and offer a prayer to Mauritz ’come Muhayissa, our target:  “Let whoever fights in the way of Allah, who sells this world’s life for that of the hereafter, be he slain or victorious . . . We . . . shall grant him a mighty reward!”

*    *    *

“One should not mix curses with prayers,” the Iraqi police officer told Muhayissa, “lest, as they drift heavenward, one forgets which is which.”

“Allah akbar,” Muhayissa replied . . . and pressed down on the detonator with his thumb.

 

_____________________________________

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

 

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