Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise

A Jihadist's Own Story

Khaled al-Berry, Humphrey Davies

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781617970511
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

In 1986, when this autobiography opens, the author is a typical fourteen-year-old boy in Asyut in Upper Egypt. Attracted at first by the image of a radical Islamist group as "strong Muslims, " his involvement develops until he finds himself deeply committed to its beliefs and implicated in its activities. This ends when, as he leaves the university following a demonstration, he is arrested. Prison, a return to life on the outside, and attending Cairo University all lead to Khaled al-Berry's eventual alienation from radical Islam.This book opens a window onto the mind of an extremist who turns out to be disarmingly like many other clever adolescents, and bears witness to a history with whose reverberations we continue to live. It also serves as an intelligent and critical guide for the reader to the movement's unfamiliar debates and preoccupations, motives and intentions.Fluently written, intellectually gripping, exciting, and often funny, Life Is More Beautiful than Paradise provides a vital key to the understanding of a world that is both a source of fear and a magnet of curiosity for the west.

1

Paradise

It was just a poke in my shoulder. Sure, he followed it up by pushing his face up close to mine, but the beginning was just a poke in the shoulder. It made my brain stop working. What could I do against him? Should I poke him back? If I did so, he’d beat me ignominiously for sure. Should I walk away? That would be an unforgivable sign of weakness and my friends would never let me live it down.

It was broad daylight, and there was nowhere to hide from the ordeal, or the scrutiny. My other friends were standing round but no one intervened to hold him back – which would, at least, have been a way for me to get out of it with dignity. None of them said a word as they stood there, waiting to see what I’d do. He stuck his nose against mine and kept up his threats. I raised one hand but he struck it down hard. He wanted me to stand as stiff as a solider at attention while he spoke to me. I raised my other hand and he hit that hard too. I had to do something. I ran away and picked up a rock and came back toward him, looking mad and threatening. He didn’t move. He just looked me steadily in the eye; all I could think of as an excuse was to pretend that my knees had given way and to fall to the ground at some distance from him. It was obvious, laughable, pitiful cowardice, no doubt, but I had no other option when faced by this youth who was older than us. Unlike the rest of my childhood friends, he’d appeared only about three years ago. He’d gone out into the big world before us, and was ahead of us in his experience of sex and of teenage life; he smoked and drank alcohol and told us about the major fights he got into along with his friends, or his gang, against anyone who got in their way in that world of which we knew nothing. He and his friends were capable of tracking down their rivals to a café or hashish den, giving them a good thrashing, and pulling the place down over their heads. Or so he said. It wasn’t to be expected of me that that I’d stand up to the youth, even if the price was that I’d have to avoid going out to play with my friends so that I wouldn’t have to put up with his mockery of me. I stayed at home for several days, for this hardened veteran of the streets beat up on the guard of our building, who was two years my senior but much shorter than I. This guard used to say that those whom God had created dwarves built up stronger muscles to make up for what they’d been denied by way of height. The well-known Egyptian proverb, “I’ll thrash you and I’ll thrash anyone who dares to defend you,” had come true.

I was almost fourteen. My voice had begun to change, becoming deeper. I had outgrown the embrace of childhood that permitted weakness and indulged crying. It was impossible, for me as much as for my friends who’d witnessed the scene, to forget about the knee pain that I’d faked. My sense of myself and of my relationship to the world could no longer ignore the society in which I lived. I was now like that society. It too was a society with a rough voice, and a mustache. It too was a society that had no time for weak knees. That same year, it became apparent that I wasn’t the only one to reach that conclusion.

That year, the events known in Egypt as the Central Security Incidents took place. We were in school that day and were surprised to hear the administration asking us to return directly to our homes. The area in front of the school gate filled with the cars of hundreds of families waiting for their children. My family wasn’t waiting for me, however. The Opel ’68 that was all that had been left of the estate of my grandfather, who had died when I was two, had been sold the year before, and I was forced to go home on foot, totally unaware of what was going on. On my journey back to the house, I was accompanied by a youth whom I knew through a distant family connection. He told me that what had happened might be a repetition of what had taken place in Asyut five years before, when, two days after the killing of Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, the Jama‘a Islamiya had attacked and tried to take over the city’s police headquarters. Those were events I’d lived through myself, when I was nine, and they had ruined the Feast of the Sacrifice for me, for which I criticized the Jama‘a bitterly. When I got home, however, I discovered that what had occurred this time was simply a mutiny by police recruits throughout Egypt, and that the sole point of resemblance between it and the earlier events was that anger had been translated into violence, shooting, and the burning of cars, nothing more. The Central Security Incidents were not the doing of an organization that aimed to overthrow the regime or possessed ideological goals. It was anger, pure and simple. What was important was that this event opened the way for me to a closer acquaintance with the youth who kept me company on my way home, because we met again a few months later and he reminded me of what I’d said about the Jama‘a Islamiya when I’d thought it was behind the violent incidents. I repeated my opinion to him, in a few words that I’d memorized from my father: “Abdel Nasser understood them and imprisoned them. If he’d let them alone, they’d have killed him the way they did Sadat.” We had some friends with us. Some agreed and some didn’t.

The gathering broke up and I was left alone with the boy I’d gone home with. He asked me if I knew any members of the Jama‘a Islamiya and I said no, even though a few years before I had known one – one whose name, in fact, had a very special place in the history of the Jama‘a Islamiya. My friend condemned me for expressing such harsh opinions when I didn’t know them and gave a different account of them. He was dazzled by their acts, by their ‘heroism,’ and by the ‘glory’ they’d earned by their commitment to their religion, for glory belongs unto God, and unto His Messenger and the believers as it says in the Qur’an (8:63). Then he promised to make me a gift of a bicycle chain that could be used to hit people during fights. He himself had been taught how to use it by the Jama‘a and possessed a number of such chains that had been made into weapons by disconnecting one of the links of the chain to make it straight, not circular, and by wrapping one of its ends in adhesive plastic.

A few years before, I’d got to know Antar. He worked in a small restaurant that sold beans and falafel close to our house, and during the vacations I’d see him every morning. He’d joke with me and my sister and ask me about the soccer league match results. “Watch!” he used to say, challengingly, and set about rapidly chopping tomatoes, or squeezing out from the ring formed by his thumb and index finger a ball of bean paste ready to drop into the oil; if he noticed me in the midst of the throng, he’d serve me quickly so that I didn’t have to wait. One night in 1979, I was doing homework with one of the neighbor boys in his apartment upstairs, and the sound of demonstrations against the Camp David Accords came to us from the outside, though we couldn’t see anything. The grownups talked of the Accords as treason; this was the indisputable consensus in both my neighbors’ households and my own, and it was not to be questioned. What the grownups said was not open to debate: they knew things we didn’t and they listened to the news and could recall events we had neither lived through nor could find in the history books. That wasn’t all, though, for the following day we learned that Antar had been killed in the demonstrations. So it definitely was treason. The day Sadat was killed was one of the happiest of my childhood, along with the day when Ahli football club – fielding only youth players and substitutes – beat Zamalek’s first team by three to two, and the day when my parents bought me a bicycle as a reward for getting a score of 97.5 percent in the Elementary Certificate exam. I asked my uncle on my mother’s side, who was a recent graduate of the Police College, if the police really had gone into a mosque without taking off their shoes during these demonstrations, and he smiled and didn’t answer. I asked him about Antar too. He was talking to my mother and his sister, and to him my queries were just “kid’s talk.” I was very fond of that uncle, but I didn’t like the police, because they were “unjust people.”

Antar was in the Jama‘a Islamiya and against the regime, but “Uncle” Ahmad, the newspaper seller, was different. Ever since we were little, waking to his cries of “Akhbar! Ahram! Gumhuriya!” had been one of the characteristic markers of a vacation. He would cut a bit off a cigarette packet to form a ring, which he’d wrap around the paper before throwing it up onto our balcony. If I woke up before he came, I’d wait for his arrival and go out onto the balcony and throw him a clothespin to use in place of the paper ring, especially during cigarette shortages. Sometimes I’d go down to the street and ask him if I could throw the paper up onto the balcony. Either way, doing so guaranteed that I’d be the first to read the sports page, and to find out the name of the Arabic film that would be on TV in the afternoon. I’d also discover whether an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man would be on the We Have Chosen for You program that evening. If it was a Thursday or a Sunday, I’d make sure he didn’t forget to deliver the Mickey Mouse and Samir comics with the paper. If I was lucky, I’d run into Uncle Ahmad on his donkey cart, either very early in the morning or after he’d finished his rounds, and be given a ride. Once this cart, or rather the donkey that pulled it, didn’t stop when a police car was crossing an intersection in front of it, as cars did when they had the bad luck to happen on a passing police car. The officer got out of the car and, violating every rule of Upper Egyptian manners, slapped the man, who was old enough to be his father, on the face. From then on I was too embarrassed to joke around with Uncle Ahmad. I felt that I ought to make myself look sad whenever I saw him, out of respect for his feelings.

I spent the night dreaming of the bicycle chain, just the way I used to dream that I was Bruce Lee, after seeing a movie of his, or Muhammad Ali Clay, after seeing a movie about him. The next day went by, and the day after, and the boy with the chain didn’t come back. In such small towns, however, people’s fates walk hand in hand. We owned two buildings in Asyut that stood opposite one another and rented out the basements to students. In one of these lived two bearded students whom I’d met at the soccer pitch. Once, I’d gone down to say hello to them and found one of them trying to remove the nail of his abscessed big toe with a switch blade, during which operation he went on talking to me and laughing as though it were nothing. His capacity to withstand pain was amazing. I mentioned him to my friend who’d gone home with me that day and whom I shall refer to from now on as ‘the Chain Boy,’ and he confirmed what I’d said, describing the student I was talking about as a “first-rate brother.” He followed this with tales of his bravery, which he employed in the defense of religion and the disciplining of wrongdoers, and which, as a result, was unsullied by pride or arrogance – and which was, indeed, part of his kindly and modest nature. Such were the things that distinguished the observant, courageous brother from the lowlife tough who used force to lord it over God’s creatures.

It is difficult for a person to comprehend why he loves what he loves, or even to know what it is he loves. Till then, I’d been a boy of weak physique, outstanding at his studies. I differed from the friends I mixed with on the street in that I went to a private school, that of the Soeurs Franciscaines, which meant, as far as I was concerned, that I had to wear a shirt and pants while they wore government-school smocks, and that I could challenge them to spell the name of my school, which they couldn’t. My general interests were reading and the cinema, which I started going to regularly on my own every week from the age of ten. I was a ‘patriotic’ adolescent who, as was natural for his age, knew little of the Great, or Small, Powers, or the balances and calculations of politics. I parroted such common expressions of the day as “the One Arab People” and “the Arabs are a people known for their glory, pride, and generosity,” and blah blah blah-de-blah. I listened often to the speeches of Abdel Nasser and the patriotic songs of Abd el-Halim Hafez and I hated Sadat, ‘Camp David,’ and Israel, without bothering myself with the details. At the start of the previous school year, new maps had turned up in our classroom showing ‘Israel’ where ‘Palestine’ had once been. We protested to the school administration and refused to hang up the maps, and in the end the administration gave in and took them away. The same year, I fell behind while marching to the classroom in the morning lineup to the rhythmic strains of the school band, and an angry teacher stopped me and slapped my face. That day I decided this was no place for me and that the noblest thing I could do in life would be to leave school and join a group training fedayeen for operations against Israel. I didn’t know any such groups, assuming that they in fact existed, but the idea obsessed me for two whole days and I spent much time teaching my younger brother, who was six, to repeat the sentence “We must fight Israel to the last man.”

Naturally, I forgot all about it when I stopped being angry.

My small family, consisting of a father, a mother, a sister four years older than me and a brother eight years younger, lived in a quiet neighborhood of Asyut called Qulta Company. Traditionally, this neighborhood had been the well-off part of that southern city. Other parts of town had now, however, overtaken it in terms of property prices and, like any other older neighborhood, the nature of its residents was changing as time passed and social paralysis set in. Despite this, its streets remained busy because of its proximity to the university, whose presence when in session caused the number of Asyut’s inhabitants to more or less double. For older buildings, such as the two that belonged to us, renting out to students brought in a reasonable income that compensated for the meager yield from the apartments. In the basements of both our buildings, and on the roof of one of them, in cheap, badly ventilated, poorly appointed rooms, lived students from the countryside who were unable to pay the rent of a furnished apartment. From time to time, the students from the basement apartments would come to my father to complain that the drains had flooded their rooms and soaked their books and bedding, while the students from the roof would come during the rare rains to complain that their rooms had been turned into pools of water by the rain coming in through the wooden ceilings. It was from students such as these, and those in the other buildings near the university, that the majority of the younger members of the Jama‘a Islamiya was drawn.

Some of these students shared my love of soccer. Soccer lovers among the Jama‘a Islamiya were careful to include others in this team sport that was impossible to play properly when there were only one or two, or even three, players in a corner of a big pitch. I took to playing regularly with them in spite of the inconvenient time that they had chosen – after the dawn prayer on Fridays. I knew many of them by name and from time to time would run into them when they went down our street on leaving the university and would go with them to the mosque to pray. From chatting with them, I came to learn much about their personal lives. Brother Ashraf, the handsome one, had once loved to gamble and used to walk around the Imbaba quarter of Cairo with a pack of cards poking out of his shirt pocket as an invitation to others who might want to play; now, however, he was one the Jama‘a’s most promising preachers. Ala’, an engineering student, had been unable to enter university for the past year and had abandoned his hopes of a degree because the security forces were after him. Tal‘at’s parents were big-time merchants in Minya, but he had sacrificed their wealth and his life of ease with them to engage in Islamist activity. And there was Mahmud, whose father was supposed to enter the prosecutor general’s office but who died in a motorcycle accident the very day he was appointed.

One month after I had got to know these “virtuous people” and become a regular attendant at prayer with them, I went to Cairo, where my uncles on my mother’s side lived and which, for me, bore no resemblance to the city in which I lived. Before leaving for Cairo, I informed one of the brothers that I was going there because it was the only place where you could get training in kung fu. He advised me not to go. Up to that point, the Jama‘a had been associated above all else in my mind with the image of the strong Muslim, of the fedayeen band made up of strong people who prayed and fasted. I asked the same brother why he didn’t want me to go to Cairo to get trained when he himself was very good at kung fu and had been trained in it. He told me that if I went to Cairo I would lose my commitment to the brothers and that, “To be a committed brother and not good at kung fu is much better than to be good at kung fu and not a committed brother.” All the same, I wanted to learn kung fu, and also to work during the summer vacation so that I could be more independent. I went to Cairo.

I didn’t get kung-fu training there because I was too lazy to look for a place where I could get it. There was the ESCO Club, close to Shubra el-Mazallat where the uncle I was staying with lived but I was … just plain lazy. I didn’t have any real motivation. Soccer aside, I was always like that with sports. I’d get training in a sport for two weeks, then abandon it. That was how it had been with swimming, table tennis, handball, and even weightlifting.

As far as the other side of things – work – was concerned, my uncle took me to a cheap café and introduced me to the owner, telling him that I wanted to work for him, “even though his father owns two apartment buildings in Asyut.” Of course, this wasn’t exactly true; it would have been more accurate to say that my father and his fifteen brothers owned those two buildings. All the same, I liked his way of putting it because I felt it would be useful in determining the kind of work the café owner chose for me. In fact, at the time, I loved to hear others refer to my family as a family of distinction, which it was, though only by certain standards. My paternal grandfather was a rich countryman. My father had often told me of the telephone directory that bore his father’s name at a time, in the fifties, when few people owned telephones, and of the electricity generator that provided light for his father’s houses and those of the rest of my family at a time when the villages of Egypt were without electricity. My father was himself only the second person in the village to obtain a university degree. All this was true. However, when my grandfather died in 1974, the notinsignificant amount of money that he left was quickly spent and all that remained to us were some buildings and land that couldn’t be sold because of the shame attached to the sale of property – that, and the memories related to us by the generation that had witnessed and had had the pleasure of enjoying these things. We too committed these stories to memory as they were told to us and believed in them faithfully. Only two years previously, my best friend had been a boy named Ahmad, whose father was dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Asyut. Ahmad lived in the classy housing set aside for the university professors, where the buildings were surrounded by greenery and playgrounds, and where there was a swimming pool. I used to go every week and play with him in this faculty housing area, and I continued doing so for three months or more. One Thursday evening in summer when I was there, a youth some years older than me came over and told me that he’d seen me often at ‘the Housing’ and didn’t want to see me there again. Ahmad wasn’t far away, and he must have known what the youth was going to tell me, but he didn’t interfere or do anything to stop him. Indeed, he didn’t even ask me, as I left the place in tears, why I was leaving and not waiting so that we could play together as we usually did. From that day until I joined the Jama‘a Islamiya, I didn’t exchange with him more than such passing words as were necessitated by our being in the same class. The sole acknowledgment of distinction I received was from the nuns at my elementary school when they collected contributions every Thursday and would ask me to pay more. I never enjoyed any of the special treatment that some of my colleagues, especially those who were sons of police officers, university teachers, or doctors, received. On one occasion, I obtained the highest marks in Arabic Language in the monthly schoolwide exam, and the teacher reduced my score because it wasn’t right that I should get better marks than the student who was both best in the class (in everything except Arabic Language) and the so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Paradise
• 2 God is mine alone
• 3 The message revealed
• 4 Temptation
• 5 Life
• Glossary