Sleeping With The Devil (19 page)

    So, Major ‘Ali had been half right about taking care of the Brothers.
Turning Hama into a landfill had blunted the Brothers’ terror campaign. But it was Middle
Eastern politics that did the trick: promising revenge; placing family, allies, and pawns in
positions of power and influence; and above all, never compromising.

    IF ONLY EGYPT, which spawned the Brotherhood, had done the same.
Instead, it let things drift and paid the price. Even after Nasser banned the Brothers in 1954,
al-Azhar University continued to crank out fundamentalist preachers. Modest neighborhoods in
Cairo, such as Abdin - where Muhammad Atta, the presumed team leader of September 11, grew up -
were heavily under the influence of the Brothers, as were parts of Alexandria and Assyut.

    The world witnessed the bloody consequences on October 6, 1981, when
Egypt’s Islamic Jihad - another name for the militant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood -
assassinated Anwar Sadat. I’ll never forget watching the TV clips played over and over the next
day. The brazenness of the attack, in broad daylight, in front of the world’s press, in the
middle of a military parade, oblivious of Sadat’s bodyguards, suggested a group that would stop
at nothing. They all knew they would die in the attack or be executed at the end of a show
trial. But death wasn’t a threat, and Sadat wasn’t the end of it. In 1993 the Muslim Brothers,
again under the name of the Islamic Jihad, tried to kill the interior minister and later the
prime minister. In 1995 they tried to kill Hosni Mubarak while he was visiting Ethiopia. Two
years later, the Brothers attacked the temple at Luxor, killing fifty-eight foreign tourists
and four Egyptians.

    And, of course, they attacked once more on September 11, 2001, in New
York City and suburban Washington, D.C. I’ll never forget watching those TV clips over and
over, either. The press kept calling the attackers al Qaeda, thanks to Osama bin Laden’s
relentless publicity machine, but it was the Muslim Brothers through and through - the same
crew we had used to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan, and plenty of other places. Only
now
we
had become their dirty work, and Saudi Arabia their home.

    

    

    

    AFTER THE SADAT ASSASSINATION, I was determined to talk with a real
live Muslim Brother. How else was I going to learn what made the Brothers tick? And if we
didn’t know what made them tick, how would we ever stop them? I didn’t know it at the time, but
I would get my chance two months later, in December 1981, less than twenty blocks from the
White House.

    One morning I was walking out of my Georgetown apartment building to go
to Arabic class when I noticed that the new desk clerk - a very tall, slim black man in his
early thirties - was reading a book in Arabic. I walked over and introduced myself. Khalid, as
I will call him, was a Sudanese, a graduate student in comparative law. We talked for a long
time, then struck a deal for him to tutor me in Arabic. I needed the practice, and he needed
the money. He had brought his wife and children from the Sudan and was barely surviving.

    For the next six months, we gave it our best, but I’ve got to admit
that Khalid did my Arabic more harm than good. The problem was that he had a classical
education in the language. Worse, he’d taken a degree in Islamic law. Even by the end, I
couldn’t hold a conversation with Khalid without his reminding me not to forget the complicated
vowel endings that the man in the street never used. It was like Chaucer trying to teach modern
English.

    Lessons aside, we became friends. I helped edit Khalid’s dissertation,
taught him how to drive, and even gave him my clunker when I was assigned to Tunis for my
second year of Arabic. It was the first car he had ever owned. At least once a week, I joined
Khalid and his family for dinner in their apartment in Adams-Morgan, a racial mixing bowl north
of Dupont Circle.

    After I left for Tunis, Khalid and I lost track of each other. I had no
idea what became of him until I was assigned to Khartoum in January 1985 and saw his picture in
a local newspaper. The caption said he had been appointed as a judge to one of Sudan’s new
Islamic courts. I put down the paper and headed straight to his court. Nothing like running
into an old friend in a sandbox like Khartoum.

    The two religious policemen blocking the court’s front door looked at
me slack-jawed when I asked for Judge Khalid, explaining that he was a friend. It was rare to
see a Westerner in Khartoum, much less have one show up at one of its notorious Islamic halls
of justice. Inside, the anteroom was packed. The electricity was off. The place was hot and
dark and reeked of sweat. I would have turned around and left if I hadn’t heard a voice booming
inside the courtroom. It sounded like Khalid, but I couldn’t be sure. I’d never heard him raise
his voice. He’d always come across as gentle, soft-spoken, and polite. Now he sounded downright
possessed.

    Abruptly, the yelling stopped. A second later, the crowd parted like
the Red Sea, and out came Khalid with one of the policemen by his side, his
jalabiyah
sweeping the filthy floor. He came running over to me, straight-arming some innocent who
wandered into his way, and gave me a hug.

    “Let me finish up here,” he said. “And then you come to my house for
lunch.” He changed his mind almost as soon as he’d finished speaking. “No, Mr. Bob, you stay,
and we will start working on your Arabic again. You need it.” He put his arm around me and
pulled me into the courtroom with him. Mind you, I’d spent three years unlearning everything he
had taught me, but I was curious to see who or what had made Khalid so mad.

    He shooed away an old man sitting on the front bench so I could sit
down, then went around and stood on his dais, winked at me, and resumed yelling as if nothing
had happened. The audience stopped staring at me and listened raptly to Khalid.

    The object of his fury was a small man dressed in dirty denims, a shirt
that might have once been white, and a pair of cracked leather sandals. He had a rope for a
belt and was standing inside a waist-high battered wooden enclosure that reminded me of a
hockey penalty box.

    The man never said a word. He wouldn’t even look up at Khalid. It
looked as though he didn’t have a lawyer, and there was no jury, either. If the man’s family
was there, they weren’t saying a thing. As Khalid went on, I understood that the man had been
caught stealing a pot from an open-air market that morning.

    Without warning, Khalid lowered his voice and handed down the man’s
sentence. “In the name of the merciful and compassionate, I find you guilty of theft. I
sentence you to twenty lashes.” With a nod from Khalid, the two policemen pushed their way back
through the crowd, grabbed the man by both arms, and led him out of the courtroom.

    As soon as they were gone, pandemonium broke out in the court. About
half the audience was shouting that it had been a fair call. The other half was screaming and
crying. Some of the latter must have been the man’s relatives and friends. Everyone was trying
to leave at the same time.

    When I managed to get outside, I saw the condemned man tied to a tree,
face flattened sideways against the bark. Someone had removed his shirt, and the two policemen,
now cradling automatic weapons, stood on either side, making sure no one attempted to
interfere. Khalid stood directly behind the man, the sleeves of his
jalabiyah
rolled up.
His right hand, gripping a leather whip, was raised. He paused for maybe ten seconds. As he was
about to strike, he intoned,
“Bismi ar-rahman, ar-rahim”
- “In the name of the merciful
and the compassionate” - and brought the whip down with a force only a man of his size could
attain. At every lash, the penitent spit out “God is great!” between his clenched teeth.

    On the drive to Khalid’s house, we didn’t say anything for a long time.
Khalid could tell I was uneasy. The entire spectacle went against everything he had learned
about the law in America.

    “You know, Bob, there is no choice in Sudan,” he said at last in
English. “We are a very poor, troubled country. If we ever let go of control, it’s over for us
- we will live like wild animals. The one thing people will ever understand and accept is the
Qur’an. We will never enjoy the luxuries of your legal system. Please don’t look at this as an
American.”

    “How do you know what they want, the people?” I asked. It was a
question any American would want the answer to.

    “Please understand that the Sudanese are backward. They’re just
starting to understand what the Holy Qur’an is. Do you know what the ignorant do when they’re
sick? They rip out a page of the Holy Qur’an that they think has to do with their illness. They
boil it in a pot of water until the ink bleeds away, and then they drink it, believing it will
cure them. These people need a firm hand.”

    I let it drop. “How did you know that guy stole the pot?”

    “My police saw him” - the judicial police assigned to his court.
Great,
I thought, Khalid was judge, prosecutor, defense, jury, and executor, all wrapped
into one.

    Although he had never said anything, I was starting to suspect Khalid
was a Muslim Brother. He had studied under Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood guide Hassan al-Turabi
when Turabi was dean of the law faculty at the University of Khartoum, a prime recruiting
ground.

    I never went back to Khalid’s court, but I continued to see him as
often as I could. I usually drove out to his one-story whitewashed house south of Khartoum. The
house was testament to how poor even a judge was in the Sudan. We sat on synthetic Korean-made
carpets; there was almost no other furniture. The glass in some of the windows was missing, and
gusts of sand blew through. The kitchen sink never seemed to have running water, and Khalid’s
wife had to prepare dinner outside, drawing water from plastic buckets. It didn’t seem to
bother anyone, though.

    I pressed Khalid to tell me about the Muslim Brotherhood. General
Nimeri’s regime had started to wobble in early 1985. It looked as if Khalid’s old law dean
might make a grab for power. The Muslim Brothers supposedly had a strong following in the army.

    One evening I got tired of beating around the bush - elicitation
obviously wasn’t working - and I asked Khalid if he was a Muslim Brother.

    Khalid had this endearing habit of smiling with his eyes. He flashed me
a smile now. “I’m a Sufi, Bob,” he said. “I really don’t know anything about them.”

    What Khalid wanted me to believe was that a Sufi, an Islamic mystic,
held a set of beliefs so diametrically opposed to a Brother’s that he couldn’t possibly be a
Brother. Maybe, I thought, but I also noted that Khalid hadn’t exactly denied it.

    I got my answer late one night in March when there was a pounding on my
door. It was after midnight, and I was asleep. When I opened the door, I found Khalid’s wife. A
scarf covered most of her face, but I could see she had been crying. “Khalid’s been arrested,”
she said. “Please help me get him out. The children won’t stop crying.” Earlier that night, she
said, the police had come and taken him away. She had no idea where he was being held.

    I did what I could to reassure her and then drove her home. But that
was all I could do. The next morning the news was splashed all over the newspapers: Nimeri had
arrested the Muslim Brother leadership. Khalid must have been among them. Unless the Sudanese
had made a highly unlikely mistake, he was a Brother after all.

    When General Nimeri was forced from power in April 1985, the new
government released Turabi and the Brothers, including Khalid. Turabi would come to share power
with a pro-Islamic military government, partially realizing his dream of establishing an
Islamic government in the Sudan. As for Khalid, he’d had all the excitement he needed and found
himself a professorship at a Saudi-financed university.

    I would never see him again. By the time he was released, I had already
been pulled back to Washington thanks to the Libyan hit team that showed up in town to hunt CIA
officers. I thought a lot about him, though. Here was a guy I’d spent the better part of a year
with, a friend, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell me he was a Brother. I was starting to
sympathize with the CIA. The Brotherhood was a nut almost impossible to crack. But damned if I
was going to give up.