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CHAPTER FOUR

ARABIA

Late Summer 1997–Summer 1998

For a 21-year-old Dane, the searing heat of Sana’a was an assault on the senses. Before I flew into Yemen’s capital in the late summer of 1997 I had no sense of my destination. I had vaguely imagined that Sana’a was actually in Oman, where Western oil companies were established and a moderate Sultan ruled a peaceful kingdom. I could not have been more wrong.

I was shocked by the ramshackle building that passed for Yemen’s welcome to the world. Flies drifted in the arrivals hall as wiry Yemeni men jostled for position at passport control.

Tayyib had organized for me to be picked up. I was greeted by a couple of young men of Somali background (a lot of Somalis had crossed the Gulf of Aden to settle in Yemen). I was overwhelmed by the noise and chaos, the mountains rising above the city.

Sana’a filled the senses: the medieval buildings of mud brick in Sana’a’s old quarter decorated like outsize marzipan confections, the air full of dust but also of the scent of herbs and spices, the shabby appearance of the men, the women shrouded in black, the call of the muezzin and the guttural Arabic. I was taken aback at the sight of men holding hands. Above all I was amazed by the Kalashnikovs; people even carried them while visiting the supermarket.

My first two weeks were spent in a poor district of Sana’a, living in a house without furniture, sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating Somali food. It was a halfway house as well as a half-built house. Tayyib had warned me that it might take some time to reach Dammaj, which was in a valley some 100 miles north from Sana’a. Depending on the political climate, the Yemeni government frequently put up roadblocks to prevent foreigners from travelling there, concerned that it was becoming a magnet for militants.

Within days I realized that Yemen was the destination of choice for a growing number of Western converts to Islam – including several Americans in search of what they imagined was the authentic (and austere) Salafi interpretation of Islam. Among those I encountered in Sana’a was a Vietnam veteran close to the firebrand preacher Louis Farrakhan. There were also British, French and Canadian converts.

Salafism was capturing the imagination of a generation of Muslims and converts. It derived from the Arabic ‘al-salaaf al-salih’ – meaning the pious forefathers, the first three generations of Muslims. As such, it represented a return to the pure and original core of Islam, free of interpretation or revisionism. But Salafism was far from coherent; its adherents derived different messages from those forefathers. Some eschewed politics and loathed the Muslim Brotherhood for its political activism; only God could legislate through the application of Sharia law. Others reviled ‘non-believers’ and non-Salafi Muslims (especially the Shia), and disavowed rulers who allied themselves with the hated West.

I was not prepared for this ferment among Muslims. In my naivety I had imagined a religion whose followers were united in obedience to Allah. The books I had read in Denmark said nothing of the schisms and hatreds that ran through Islam like faultlines. And I was not familiar with the one concept that would come to dominate the next decade of my life: jihad.

Getting to Dammaj would be the first trial of my faith and dedication. I decided to travel with one of the Americans I had met – Rashid Barbi, an African-American convert from North Carolina – and a Tunisian.

After an hour in a battered Peugeot, Rashid, the Tunisian and I – along with a Yemeni guide – had to climb out to avoid a military checkpoint. This was an area of tribal rivalries and frequent clashes between Sunni and Shi’ite groups.

We began walking through the mountains in the blazing sun, but were ill-prepared. We had no water and no protection, either from the heat or later from the cold as night fell. I was wearing cheap sandals and soon my feet were a forest of blisters.

At dusk we stopped to pray at the edge of a cliff, but it was too dark to make any further progress. A burst of monsoon rain further dampened our spirits. I began to feel feverish and more than once I asked myself what on earth I had done. I had left Milton Keynes just two weeks ago, but its bland comforts suddenly seemed very appealing.

It would be a night and half a day before we finally traipsed into the valley of mud houses and date-palm trees, which were overlooked by a massive escarpment. The whitewashed-brick complex of the Dammaj Institute was snuggled into an oasis of greenery. The chugging of diesel water-pumps in the surrounding fields was the only sound in the torpid afternoon heat.

Sheikh Muqbil thought our little group must have been arrested and was relieved to hear of our arrival. He approached us with a whole chicken, exclaiming that the man from ‘Benimark’ had finally made it. He had little sense of European geography. Rashid and I devoured the food while the Sheikh and his bodyguards laughed at our sunburned and bedraggled appearance.

I was taken aback by the Sheikh’s appearance; it was the first time I had seen a man with a long, straggly hennaed beard, a custom among distinguished preachers and tribal figures in Yemen.2

I was entrusted to the care of Abu Bilal, a bookish Swedish-Ghanaian student in his mid-twenties, who gave me a tour of the ­complex. He spoke fluent English as well as Arabic. During my first weeks in Dammaj, he or Rashid was almost always at my side translating for me.

The intensity of the place was difficult to take in. Like a new boy at a big school I felt intimidated by the collective emotion of Dammaj and its size. On the tour Abu Bilal told me the Institute – or Masjid – had started as a small collection of mud-brick buildings, but had expanded as its reputation spread. Now it had a library and a mosque capable of accommodating several hundred worshippers. Loudspeakers blared to announce the start of classes and lectures. The complex was surrounded by intensively cultivated and irrigated plots.

Abu Bilal explained to me the rules: single male students were strictly prohibited from going into areas of the complex reserved for married men. The five daily prayers were compulsory: each student was required to arrive on time and in silence. In between, students were required to attend lessons on the Koran and lessons from the life of the Prophet Mohammed. The mosque was the only one in the Muslim world in which students were required to keep their shoes on. A hadith viewed as authoritative by Sheikh Muqbil stated the Prophet had prayed in this way, and he was not about to let a practice built up over the centuries get in the way of his students following the true path.

Dammaj was a place of religious ferment. There were perhaps 300 young men there when I arrived, almost every one of them bearded, with the ardent expression of those convinced they had found righteousness. They came from many places but were united by a rejection of the modern world.

Despite my lack of Arabic, I soon found out what was driving these young men – and most were under thirty. They felt Muslims – and especially Arab Muslims – had been betrayed by their own leaders and exploited by the West. Dictators had robbed the people in a sea of corruption but done nothing to help the Palestinians. The original religion had been corrupted by Western modes of thinking. And so it was time to return to the purest and most authentic expression of Islam.

Dammaj was a place of few comforts. I was given a bare room made of breeze blocks as my quarters, which I shared with Abu Bilal. We slept on blankets on the concrete floor, which was a luxury because most students were sleeping on mud floors. Food was frequently rice, beans and ginger tea. An egg was an extravagance. The toilet was a hole in the ground in the washroom. I had to learn how to clean myself with water with my left hand. The drainage system had not kept pace with the expansion of the Institute and a whiff of raw sewage would often interrupt our studying. But for all the discomforts, it was a haven of calm, self-discipline and devotion after my biker years.

The great question of the day was when and how Muslims should take up jihad in defence of their religion. Sheikh Muqbil refused to support violence against rulers and most Salafis saw education as the way to restore Islam. But some of his students would later criticize him for not speaking out against the presence of US troops on Saudi soil. This had been a cataclysm for Salafis: how could the infidel be allowed to set foot in the kingdom that protected Islam’s holiest sites?

Under a date-palm one autumn afternoon one student – an ­Egyptian – spoke for most when we discussed the evils that Islam must grapple with.

‘How can it be that the Custodian of the Two Holy Sites allows American troops to defile our lands? How can it be that our governments spend billions on American planes and tanks? They turn their back on Islam, allow alcohol, allow women to dress as prostitutes. Muslims have lost their way and it is up to us to re-educate them in Allah’s way.’

Many of Dammaj’s students had already returned home to set up similar institutes and schools across the Muslim world. Part of the appeal of this radical philosophy was that it bypassed the religious establishment and went directly to the fount of Islam. In that sense it empowered the poor and the persecuted and allowed them to spread the word, even if they had not benefited from decades of religious learning in the schools of Islamic law.

Sheikh Muqbil regarded the Hadith, accounts of the actions and sayings of the Prophet recorded by his early followers, as the core of his teaching. The crisis of Islam, he held, could only be addressed by returning to the original texts and rejecting ‘innovators’ – mere mortals who had the temerity to interpret God’s word: ‘There is no God except God and Mohammed is His messenger.’ The spirit of Dammaj could be summed up by a hadith: ‘The most evil matter is novelty, and every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hellfire.’ It did not leave much room for argument.

It was a bare but liberating message. And for someone like me who hated elites and establishments, it was intoxicating. I was now a witness to the multiple and overlapping struggles within Islam: between Salafis and others, among the Salafis themselves. And I was soon a willing participant in these struggles, soaking up scholarly texts, plunging into debates with other students.

It was in Dammaj that I began to get a sense at first hand of the violent rivalry between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The day I arrived, I saw rows of AK-47 rifles neatly lined against the walls of the Institute; and a number of students were on security duty, with weapons slung over their shoulders. The Institute was in a part of Yemen dominated by a Shia sect known as the Houthis.3 The Sheikh made no attempt to hide his loathing of the Shia, and there were frequent clashes between his tribe and the Houthis.

The students at Dammaj did everything together – learning, eating, praying. Life revolved around the mosque. The day began before dawn with the first prayers of the day, and we received hours of Koranic instruction in the shade of the palms. We would spend long periods memorizing the Koran.

We never received anything amounting to paramilitary training but like many young Yemenis we did learn to fire guns, including AK-47s, at makeshift targets in the hills. A couple of Americans with military backgrounds played a leading part in the training, among them Rashid Barbi, who had been in the US army in Kuwait.

The Sheikh said such training was commanded by a hadith that stressed a strong believer was of greater value than a weak one and that all Muslims had to be prepared for jihad. Several students approached him to ask for permission to travel to Chechnya or Somalia to fight; but he only granted permission to those less than whole-hearted in their studies. It was a way to winnow out the thinkers from the men of action.

I embraced the purity of the lifestyle, the absence of mobile phones or music, drugs and alcohol. I began teaching boxing to some of my fellow students and took them running. In return I sensed their respect. It felt far more satisfying than any knockout I had delivered on the streets of Korsør. By night, as I gazed up at the stars, I felt I belonged.

Occasionally I would write to Samar, but I never mailed any of the letters. As I became submerged in the rituals of Dammaj there seemed less and less point. One day, sorting through the few belongings I had brought, I was surprised to find photographs of our engagement party. Without much feeling I shredded them one by one. When I wanted a wife, she would have to be a good Muslim.

The Sheikh, for all his learning, had a mischievous sense of humour, and for some reason I became one of his favourite students. He would take me by the hand and walk through the oasis, talking to me in Arabic. I would grasp only one word in every ten, but he went on talking.

He would also single me out during his lectures.

‘Beni-marki,’ he would exclaim, grinning broadly, before commanding me to stand up and read hadith. I had begun to learn a few phrases of Yemeni Arabic but was unable to recite hadith, and would mumble apologies. A Libyan student took pity on me and taught me one hadith in Arabic. When I stood and recited it, Sheikh Muqbil was delighted – and began pounding the desk. He told the several hundred assembled students that my diligence showed Islam would spread throughout the world.

‘This is the sign that Allah promised us,’ he said. ‘We must take care of our new Muslim brothers and teach them Islam and be patient with them.’

Despite the best efforts of the Yemeni government, there were plenty of foreign students at Dammaj, among them British Pakistanis from Birmingham and Manchester, Tunisians, Malaysians and Indo­nesians. There was also a second African-American called Khalid Green. A few had been in Bosnia, fighting with its Muslim population against the Serbs and Croats in the mid-1990s. Some would later become prominent militants in their own countries.

To begin with I was the only fair-skinned Caucasian at Dammaj. That made me an object of curiosity for many of the students and the local tribes. Yet I never felt excluded or ostracized because of my ethnicity.

I was later joined by a soft-spoken American convert from Ohio, called Clifford Allen Newman, and his four-year-old son, Abdullah. Newman went by the name Amin. He looked and sounded like what some Americans would call a ‘redneck’, but he spoke Arabic well and had spent time in Pakistan before moving to Yemen. We struck up a friendship. Like me he seemed to be fleeing a bad relationship. US authorities had a warrant for his arrest on international kidnapping charges because he had brought Abdullah with him to Yemen after a judge awarded custody to his ex-wife in their divorce the year before. Newman had wanted his son to have a strict Muslim upbringing.

I spent four months in Dammaj. In early 1998 I left the isolation of the seminary and travelled back to the capital, where I found myself a basic apartment. Newman and his son moved in with me briefly, while they looked for a place of their own.

I was serious about my faith; it was my compass and I planned to return to Dammaj. By the time I travelled back to Sana’a I was a hardcore Salafi. I could argue against the accursed ‘innovators’.

In Sana’a I was introduced to some radical preachers, including one Mohammed al-Hazmi – who three years later would take to the pulpit and welcome the events of 9/11 as ‘justified revenge’ against America. Another was Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, one of the most powerful religious figures in Yemen and prominent in the main opposition party, which he had co-founded. Al-Zindani, who was in his late fifties, had thousands of followers. He ran a university in Sana’a – al-Iman – whose mosque was crammed with several thousand worshippers every Friday.4

When my first experience of Ramadan as a devout Muslim came about, I was invited to break the fast with him one evening. Al-Zindani wanted me to enrol in al-Iman University.

A man of great wealth, he had a fabulous library at his house in Sana’a.

‘What can I do to help you?’ he asked.

He was not expecting my answer.

‘Is it true you are with the Muslim Brotherhood?’ I asked. ‘If that is so, you will lead me to hellfire.’

We had been taught at Dammaj that the Muslim Brotherhood, a political movement that was one of the few sources of dissent in Arab countries, had abandoned true Sharia and were innovators where it suited their political ends, in some countries supporting the concept of democratic elections. This was anathema to true Salafis, because it pretended that mere mortals could make laws.

I did not ask the question with any animosity but al-Zindani looked stunned. Despite his radical profile, the Sheikh was not sufficiently militant for my taste. And as a strident Salafist and no respecter of ­status, I was not afraid to tell him as much.

He was clearly not used to being challenged by a novice but recovered his composure.

‘It seems that if you come to al-Iman, we will have many interesting debates. But you must not believe everything you are told. Even good Muslims are sometimes confused or misguided,’ he said, smiling.

To show he had no hard feelings about my insolence, al-Zindani let me see some of his most precious volumes, and we talked more about the early days of Islam. I was learning fast.

A friend from Dammaj introduced me to a network of young Salafis in the city. Some were veterans of jihad who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and more recently had been in the Balkans. Of the growing pool of militants in Yemen, some were beginning to see the West, and especially America, as the enemy of Islam. There had already been bomb attacks against US interests in Saudi Arabia; and more were being planned. One of this circle was an Egyptian named Hussein al-Masri. Although he did not acknowledge it directly he was very likely a member of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad. Al-Masri was a wanted man in his homeland. In his mid-thirties, he had a diffident manner and soft voice that belied his experience as a militant with extensive contacts. He was also the first person I heard utter the name Osama bin Laden.

At that time – in early 1998 – bin Laden was building al-Qaeda’s presence in south and eastern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and around Jalalabad. Welcomed by the Taliban, his organization was already plotting attacks against Western targets, including a deadly bombing it would carry out months later on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.5 Al-Masri told me of the training camps al-Qaeda had established in Afghanistan and how to travel there via Pakistan. He said he could arrange passage if I ever wanted to go.

I was in two minds: the adventurer in me was tempted, but as a Salafi I had not yet accepted that waging such a jihad was legitimate. Pure Salafis also looked down on groups like the Taliban, whose practices we saw as unorthodox.

To Western eyes, such differences might seem like semantics, but to teachers at Dammaj or in Riyadh, the Taliban’s philosophy bordered on heresy. They encouraged ‘excessive’ praying beyond the five times a day mandated by the Prophet. Sheikh Muqbil had taught that one should not even countenance sitting down with such men. While they might be Muslims, they could lead you to damnation.

In making this point he liked to quote a famous hadith of the Prophet: ‘My Ummah [nation] will break into seventy-three sects – only one will be in paradise and the rest will be in hell.’

For now, my sense of ideological purity won out.

Among my companions in Sana’a was a dark-skinned seventeen-year-old Yemeni with a generous smile and a shy courtesy. Abdul had curly, short-cropped hair and the beginnings of a beard. He can’t have weighed more than seven stone; his legs were like stalks. But even at his age he was well connected with militants in Sana’a – men who had fought the communists in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia. Abdul and I often talked late into the night at his home, fuelled by endless glasses of sugary mint tea. I loved his natural enthusiasm and curiosity. He was full of questions about Europe, amazed and delighted that Islam had gained a foothold in these northern heathen lands. He yearned to travel and enjoyed practising his rudimentary English on me. I was impressed by his deep religious commitment. He was not unusual in knowing the Koran by heart but his voice was so melodic that he was often asked to recite prayers in the mosque.

My time in Yemen had deepened my faith. It had been little more than a year since I had entered a mosque for the first time and mumbled my Declaration of Faith. Now I knew the Koran, could recite hadith and discuss Islamic law. The man who had sent me, Mahmud al-Tayyib, had probably expected I would return home within weeks, unable to cope with the hardships of the poorest country in the Arab world.

But after the best part of a year in Yemen I was ready for a change. I had endured two bouts of dysentery, had no money and was beginning to tire of being stared at in the streets of Sana’a. I dug out my return ticket to London.

2 Sheikh Muqbil bin Haadi was a local preacher from the Wadi’a tribe who had studied for two decades in Saudi Arabia before being imprisoned and then expelled from the country. He had been suspected of links to the jihadist group that had briefly and violently occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Despite his persistent criticism of the relatively secularist government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, Muqbil continued teaching unhindered. This was in part because he taught that rebellion against rulers was only permissible if they acted as disbelievers. Muqbil had rejected the overtures of Osama bin Laden, who was recruiting many of al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers from Yemen, frequently poor and illiterate young men who were easily persuaded to travel for jihad. He had asked Muqbil to provide shelter and guns for his fighters, but Muqbil had refused, wary that too close an embrace of bin Laden could provoke unwelcome consequences. Muqbil wrote polemics against aspects of popular culture such as television and against other Islamic sects. He saw equality of the sexes and democracy as un-Islamic. And the enemies of Islam included both communists and America.

3 Some Houthis in northern Yemen subscribe to a form of Shi’ism that is close to that of Iranian Shia. Others subscribe to a Zaydi Shia revivalist movement that is strongest around Saa’da. Until the 1962 revolution Zaydi imams – who claimed they were directly descended from the Prophet Mohammed – ruled North Yemen. Despite the fact that the Zaydi creed is closer to Sunni Islam than any other branch of Shia Islam, hardline Sunnis in Yemen regarded them as apostates.

4 Al-Zindani would later be described by some as the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen. In 2004 the US designated him as a ‘global terrorist’, noting his long-standing connection to Osama bin Laden. In reality he was his own man, sympathetic to bin Laden’s world-view but jealous of his status – and freedom. For example, in the early 1990s he had refused to support a plan by bin Laden to overthrow the Saleh regime.

5 The near simultaneous 7 August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed over 200, including twelve Americans.