I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  A man stuck his head in the driver’s side window: “What did you do in Tahrir Square?” he asked our driver.

  Z said we hadn’t been there.

  “So you’re a traitor to your country.”

  “He is just a driver we hired, and we did not go to Tahrir Square,” I said in Arabic.

  I saw that Z was getting very nervous and had begun to cry. He said he couldn’t take it anymore. He was hanging over the steering wheel, saying the shahada. “That’s it, they’re going to kill us,” he said.

  I didn’t want to upset the men by talking, so I made small noises, trying to soothe Z. As I sat there with my head bowed, I switched on my phone and posted a message on Facebook to let people know that we were still being held. I asked my friends to contact whoever they could to help us.

  The interrogator came around to my window, followed by two men who pointed handguns at my head. He repeatedly asked me if I was Moroccan. I insisted that I was a German citizen and kept telling them that we were journalists for the New York Times. The interrogator was holding a phone to his mouth, saying about Nick, “He’s American. Did you hear it? Did you get it all?”

  “You came here to make this country look bad,” the interrogator told me.

  “We came here to tell the truth,” I answered. “We are professional journalists for the New York Times, and we have everything we need to prove that.”

  I remembered the names on the wall and was sorry that I had not left mine behind. The driver and Nick told me later that my voice was calm but strong during that interrogation in the car. Though the interrogator was screaming from time to time, I somehow appeared in control of my emotions. “Listen, even if you kill us, there are many others who will tell the story,” I told him. “Even if we disappear, you cannot silence all the voices.”

  The interrogator was clearly relaying my answers to somebody else. He would lean down and speak to me, then step away and speak on a walkie-talkie, then come back and ask another question. “Why did you come when you did, right before all this trouble?” he asked.

  I began to hear my inner voice. It was time to say good-bye to this world, time to say the words my parents and grandmother in Morocco had taught me as a child: There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. I heard myself whispering those words. This was the end. I felt oddly placid. I saw moments from my childhood and with friends and family playing in front of my eyes like scenes from a movie. What are you leaving behind? I asked myself. The answer made me sad. I had done some work I was proud of, but I wasn’t leaving anything personal behind: no children, no partner. Who’s going to cry for you? I thought.

  One of the back doors opened and a man got in and sat next to Nick. Then a voice boomed into the car: “We will take you to another place now. Driver, you can look up and follow this other car. You two, don’t look up and don’t move. Mr. Muhammad will drive with you.”

  Z stared at the car ahead of us and drove. “They will dump us in the desert,” he whispered.

  Mr. Muhammad spoke into a walkie-talkie. Then he started to question me again. My throat was very dry and I could barely speak, but I answered his questions one after the other. This went on for about twenty minutes but it felt much longer.

  Finally, Mr. Muhammad asked the driver to stop and wait. He got out of the car. My head was still bowed. “This is the end,” I heard Z whispering in Arabic. Just then, Mr. Muhammad spoke to us through the driver’s window. “You are free to leave. May Allah be with you.”

  I looked up and into Mr. Muhammad’s face. He had green eyes and something friendly in his look. “What?” I asked him. “What did you say?”

  “You can go. Go in peace.” He walked away.

  We were somewhere in Cairo, on a street lined with houses and shops. It was late afternoon. We parked the car, got out, and took a taxi to the hotel. In the cab the three of us hugged. The driver glanced at us in the rearview mirror, looking perplexed. I told him we were family who had just reunited after a long time apart.

  I called my parents and told them I was okay, but I wasn’t. We were all acting normal, but nothing was normal. We booked a hotel room for the driver and gave him some money. We hadn’t eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours except the small package of Oreos we’d been given in detention, so we went to the hotel restaurant. I had just ordered spaghetti when my phone rang.

  “Souad, listen, don’t tell me where you are,” said the voice of a journalist colleague in Cairo. “You should know the intelligence service is apparently calling hotels in Cairo and asking if you and your colleague are staying there. If I were you guys, I’d leave as soon as you can and go to a safe place.”

  We left our food untouched and called the German embassy. They sent a car to get us.

  Nick and I left Egypt the next day, but only after we’d made sure Z was safe. The Times and German TV took care of him and his family, checking them into a hotel under a fake name.

  Back in Germany, about three days later, I received an email from an address I didn’t recognize.

  “This is Marwan; we met in Egypt. I wanted to know if you are okay and let you know, I was impressed by you. Can we become friends on Facebook? I want to get to know you better.”

  It was Marwan, my jailer.

  * * *

  IT TOOK ME some time to get over the stress and trauma. I would often wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming. I had to admit that while I was fine physically, my soul was not in a good place. I was afraid and didn’t want to be afraid. If I felt fear, our jailers would win.

  I took some time off from work and spent a week in Morocco. A friend had told me about a small hotel on top of a mountain outside Marrakech. It sounded like the right place for me. I needed to be alone; I needed to heal.

  When my regular Moroccan driver, Abdelilah, picked me up from the airport in Casablanca to drive me to Imlil, I sat in silence in the backseat. Usually we chatted and laughed on the road, but this time we were both quiet. I wore my sunglasses and looked out the window.

  As we drove, I thought about what had happened and what was coming next. Nick had been a great source of support. We both had to deal with what we had endured, and we hadn’t finished the research for our book. Should we go back to Egypt? Was it worth it?

  I thought about what might happen to the Middle East, and even Morocco. All these protests all of a sudden; all these protesters who wanted so many different things and had such high expectations. In Egypt, some asked for more rights; others said they wanted better jobs; others, better health care. I also met a group who said they wanted someone like Libya’s president, Muammar Gaddafi, or former longtime Eygptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in charge because they were “strong leaders.”

  I also wondered why the uprisings had come to be called the “Arab Spring.” Who had chosen that optimistic name? My thoughts went back to the Copts in Alexandria, and how one of our sources had whispered his fears that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over. He told us that we didn’t understand how dangerous the Muslim Brotherhood was, especially for minorities like the Egyptian Christians. We were never able to write that story because we were detained.

  I knew that sometimes democracy wasn’t good for minorities. From my history lessons in school and in my research for the Nazi book, I’d read about how Hitler and his party had won power through elections and coalition politics. Why did people think that a voting system was protection against totalitarianism?

  The hotel at the top of the mountain was reachable only on foot or on the back of a mule. I was too tired to walk and chose the mule. It was strange that although I didn’t have much faith in people at that moment, I trusted this animal to carry me safely over the loose stones to the summit.

  The people who ran the hotel asked what I wanted for lunch and dinner. Aside from me, the only other guests were a French couple. My room had a chair, a small table, and a bed with a couple of blankets—it was very cold in the mountains at night. There was an at
tached bathroom and a balcony with a dazzling view. A far-off mountain was covered in snow and ice, while the nearby peaks were brown and rocky. You could see people’s houses in the village below. The air was clear and smelled of wood smoke. I heard a rooster crowing, but no cars.

  For two days I left my room only to spend time alone on the hotel terrace, which also had a magnificent view of the region. I stared into the sky while drinking cups of sweet Moroccan mint tea.

  Though I’d brought my Kindle with me, I hadn’t switched it on since we’d been released from our detention in Egypt. Now I wanted to read one of the many books I’d downloaded. I charged the battery and turned it on. Then I noticed something odd. The Kindle said that I had made it to the end of Why Men Love Bitches, the book I’d mentioned to Nick, even though I had just started reading it when the intelligence service took my belongings.

  There on the terrace, I burst out laughing so hard I cried. I pictured our interrogators going through the book all night, maybe expecting some juicy stories, only to find out that it was a book of advice for single women.

  Nick and I returned to Cairo later that spring, two months after President Mubarak stepped down. Immigration took a long time checking my passport, but I was finally let in.

  When I reached the friends’ home where I was staying, I saw that I’d received an email from Marwan: “Hi. How are you? I’m also in Cairo.” Was he tracking my movements? Was he trying to intimidate me? Did he think I would leave?

  I didn’t want to spend the rest of my trip wondering. I decided to take a drastic step.

  A European source had given me the name of the coordinator for security and intelligence services at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. He was one of the people who supposedly had connections to all the security services there. I decided to visit him.

  In his office, I told him that, as he surely already knew, my colleague and I had been through a hellish experience in his country. “We came back because we need to finish the research for our book,” I said. “We are not hiding anything. Everybody knows we are journalists, and everybody knew this last time we were here, too.”

  He nodded and asked if I wanted to smoke. I declined, but told him to go ahead. He lit a cigarette. I told him that I had received a message from my former jailer and wanted his guidance about what this could mean. He looked at me and smiled. “Maybe he just wanted to let you know that he and his friends are making sure you are safe,” he said.

  “Am I safe here? Are my colleague and I safe here, or will we be targeted by your services again?”

  He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray. “I don’t know many people who would have the guts to come here to me after an experience like the one you had.”

  He stood up and excused himself, saying he had to make a phone call.

  After a few minutes, he reappeared. “You are most welcome in Egypt, Miss Souad. Here is my mobile number. If you ever have any problems, call me.”

  Nick and I spent the next few weeks working. We finished our book research without any interference from the security services. I never heard from Marwan again.

  10

  This Is Not an Arab Spring

  Germany and Tunisia, 2011

  Along with the rest of the world, I spent the first half of 2011 watching the Middle East erupt. In January, a month after the Tunisian fruit seller, Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire, triggering nationwide protests, Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali resigned after twenty-three years in office. In February, shortly after Nick and I left Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak was deposed after thirty years in power. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was battling a vigorous armed opposition in a conflict that would engulf that country. And in Syria a movement to overthrow Bashar al-Assad was beginning. The international community pledged support to the rebel groups, and the whole region was flooded with weapons.

  At the beginning, I’d shared in the general optimism I’d felt among the demonstrators, whose message was, “We want a change in our country, and this is why we are protesting.” I understood their anger and their feeling that they needed to mobilize more people so that their voices and their message could be heard. For decades, the leaders of some of these countries had spoken out against monarchies, claiming to be republics or democracies. But while they might have technically been so, in reality small elites held all the power. Friends of the presidential family grew richer while others stayed poor. They might as well have been kingdoms. Moreover, some Arab leaders had underestimated the influence of social media in their countries. They did whatever they could to control the local press, but the growing availability of the Internet had given their people other sources of information and new ways to communicate.

  As the revolutions unfolded, however, I grew increasingly troubled by the way the “Arab Spring” was being covered in the international press and what Western leaders were saying about it. People seemed to believe that the countries of the Middle East would now transform themselves overnight into open, Western-style democracies. In many cases, this was what the protesters said they wanted. But putting it into practice would be an immensely complicated decades-long project, which no one seemed to be talking about. I sensed that many in the West—and some in the Arab world as well—had given themselves over to magical thinking.

  Sometime in late winter or early spring, I got an urgent-sounding text message from an imam in Berlin whom I’d known for a couple of years: “Salam Souad, can you call me? It’s important.”

  “I see more and more young people inside my community who say they will go and fight jihad,” he told me when I reached him.

  “So what’s new?” I responded. For more than a decade there had been a steady stream of young Muslim men seeking to fight in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, following the path of the September 11 attackers.

  “They are not planning to go to Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he answered. “They are talking about Libya or Syria.”

  “But who do they want to fight?” I asked him. “What jihad?”

  “I don’t know, but there is someone here you should meet. We call him Abu Maleeq. I think his real name is Denis, but people know him as the rapper Deso Dogg.”

  * * *

  MY FIRST MEETING with Abu Maleeq was in a mosque outside the center of Berlin. The cabdriver pulled up in front of an old gray building that had once been a factory. Like most mosques in Europe, it didn’t look impressive from the outside. In these places, Muslims would get together and establish an association, called a Verein in German. The building they rented or bought was officially the group’s headquarters, and they would then convert part of it into prayer rooms. These buildings were called Hinterhofmoscheen in German, which can be translated to “backyard mosques.” They were usually not in the best neighborhoods, as had been the case in Hamburg, where the al-Quds mosque was in the red-light district. Some Muslims, especially younger ones, had told me they felt that the only place for mosques in Europe was in neighborhoods where no one else wanted to be. This did not bode well for long-term relationships between Muslim communities and the rest of European society.

  The system of allowing anyone to establish an association to rent or buy property that could then be turned into a mosque was also potentially risky. I had met “imams” in some of these establishments who talked more about politics than religion. In fact, when I asked where they had received their Islamic training, some would stumble around and explain that they’d taken a course in Saudi Arabia or somewhere else, or that they were the oldest in their community, or that they were the only ones who spoke classical Arabic. Some of these imams had been brought in from other countries and were supervised from afar. In Germany’s Turkish community, many mosques belong to an organization called the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs. The Turkish ruling political party, the AKP, works through the union to influence what is taught in these mosques, from religion to political preferences.

  It was differ
ent with the imam I knew in Berlin, who was young but had studied Islamic teachings in Europe and the Middle East. He had grown up in Germany, and he knew what he was talking about.

  “He is in the office,” the imam told me when I arrived. “He might not tell you immediately what he has on his mind, but maybe when he trusts you he will.”

  The man in the office stood up when I came in. “As’salam alaikum,” he said.

  My eyes went immediately to his hands, which were covered with tattoos. He noticed me looking and explained that they were from the days when he’d lived the life of an unbeliever.

  “You mean when you were a rapper?”

  He nodded.

  The tattoo on his right hand said “STR8,” and the one on his left, “Thug.” He smiled and his white teeth showed. “You could say I was what people called a ‘bad boy,’” he said. He looked at the tattoos and added, “Allah will erase them from me.”

  I asked how he had become Muslim.

  “I was Muslim from the beginning,” he replied. “But I had lost the right path until Allah brought me back.”

  Though he now went by Abu Maleeq, his birth name was Denis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert. He told me that he’d been born in Berlin. His mother, a German, had raised him there with his stepfather, a former U.S. Army soldier. “My real father was from Ghana,” he explained. “He dumped us when I was a baby. I had no idea that the American was in fact my stepfather until much later, when my grandmother told me.”

  His stepfather was strict with Denis and his brother. “We were constantly fighting, he and I, and I also began to do a lot of shit,” he told me.

  “What kind of shit?”

  He smiled, again showing his teeth. “Well, the kind of shit you do when you end up in gangs in Berlin, street fights, drugs here and there, and some other stuff.”

  His mother and stepfather finally decided to send him to a facility for children with behavioral problems who had been part of gangs or had had trouble with the law. “That was kind of funny. I was already bad, and then they send me to a place where I met kids who were worse than me.” He laughed. “So I learned some other things.”