Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise: A Jihadist's Own Story by Humphrey Davies

Author:Humphrey Davies [Davies, Humphrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Biography, Political Ideologies, Social Science, Political Science, Politics, General
ISBN: 9789774162947
Google: HxMnDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 7097179
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-01-15T10:41:51+00:00

I had started liking medical school, but would that help now? We heard heavy gunfire and panicked and tried to flee the mosque. Chaotic attempts at escape were accompanied by cries from here and there, indistinctly mingled sounds that were more screams than words. The sounds of bullets close by made my body quake. Our escape route to the outside world was narrow, and bodies cannoned into one another in front of it, then pushed and shoved like old pastry under a rusty mincing knife. Things got worse when two brothers ran to the door of the mosque and closed it with an iron bar on the inside while the brothers in charge shouted at us not to flee in this disorganized manner and to listen to their instructions. We all knew that “hearing and obeying” in such circumstances is of the greatest importance and that we had to have military discipline, but we weren’t trained, by which I mean that we hadn’t been trained by being put through rehearsals of the real thing. Our heads contained a certain amount of theoretical information that we had to download in the current circumstances. And all of this was taking place in a mosque I had never been in before, the Great Mosque in the West Town district.

A few weeks after the start of my first academic year, the security forces surrounded the Jam‘iya Shar‘iya mosque and prevented the brothers from praying there. They also carried out a huge campaign of arrests that swept up most of the leaders of the Jama‘a, while those who were not caught went into hiding. We were not allowed to hold our regular meeting after evening prayer on Mondays. It was the most violent and widest campaign by the security forces against the brothers since I had become one of them. Despite this, the Jama‘a insisted on continuing its work and on continuing its Monday meetings, whatever the cost. We would hold the meeting in a different mosque each week, and we changed the time from after the evening prayer to after the sunset prayer. The security of the meeting was guaranteed by the ‘brothers on bikes,’ a band of activists, clean shaven, whose task was to inform the members of the Jama‘a, a little while ahead, where the meeting would be held and then to watch the roads leading to the place and provide an escape route for the brothers should they be forced to flee. More precise still was the security provided for the arrival and departure of the brother who was going to preach at the meeting. Esam was one of these activist brothers. We had a bond in our love of soccer, and he was always careful to watch the matches, in the face of the ultra-puritanism of some of the brothers, who proscribed such things. He had wide eyes with equally pointed eyebrows that gave him a permanently inquiring expression. I would joke with him that he was the only person in the world whom I knew to be cleverer than me.

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