Who Killed Daniel Pearl (12 page)

He also boxes. A little karate. He becomes especially interested in arm wrestling, which, in London, seems to attract an impressive number of enthusiasts who, for the most part, remember him—and remember with the precision of people who haven't been overly interviewed and whose memories remain fresh. Frank Pittal, for example. Big Frank Pittal, an acquaintance of Omar's father, who sells womens' shoes at the Whitechapel market, near Wanstead, but whose real passion is organizing arm wrestling tournaments for money.

I find Pittal in his house in Wanstead, cluttered with cartons and dust, the smell of onions and cooking. He shows me pictures of his young self, tin trophies in imitation gold or silver. Together, we go through an old album full of yellowed press clippings about his big matches. Then, suddenly, in a page from the local Portsmouth newspaper, I recognize the young Omar, in an undershirt, his elbow on the table, his face strained, his opponent taller and larger than him, but whose respect Omar seems to hold.

“That's it—September 1993. I think it's his first tournament. He came to see me. ‘Hey! Frankie! I want to be in it, I want you to take me into your stable, I'm the best in my college, but now I want to do it professionally.” He had seen Sylvester Stallone's movie Over the Top, the story of an arm wrestling champion who, thanks to his arm wrestling skills, succeeds in getting his kid back from a rich, mean father-in-law, and that's what got him started. So I said, ‘You don't say! Stallone's movie got me started, too! What a coincidence, it's incredible!' The next Sunday, I went to his house to pick him up in my van, and we went to this pub in the southern suburbs where he arrives with a carton of milk—what class! And a good wrestler to boot! I made a little money on him, believe me. Sometimes the tournaments are for money, sometimes for humanitarian causes. It lasted a year. We became damned good friends. I never would have thought he could do what he did to such a fine man as Daniel Pearl seemed to be. When I saw his face on the TV and the announcer said, ‘This is Daniel Pearl's killer,' I swear to you, I didn't believe it! We had such good talks, the two of us, in the van, coming home from matches. We talked about everything. Everything. Except maybe one thing. And even there . . . He was Muslim, I'm Jewish, and—”

“Jewish, really? Omar had a Jewish friend?”

“Of course,” Pittal says with an enormous burst of laughter that pulls his head into his shoulders, like a chick. “Jewish or Muslim, it didn't count with him. He didn't see the difference. We were just two good buddies making the rounds of the London pubs. And even on Israel, we could disagree on this or that aspect of the politics, but he never denied Israel's right to exist. Was he religious? Not to my knowledge. He always said, ‘I have a lot of respect for your people because, like us, you are merchants.'”

Chess, and arm wrestling. Strategic intelligence and muscle. The combination is uncommon. The young patricians of the London School of Economics observe this well-rounded young Pakistani with astonishment. They come into the school cafeteria, where on certain evenings the left side of the room is arranged like a stage or theater, to admire this impressive man who nobody can beat in chess or in arm wrestling. And I can't help recalling the excitement my classmates and I felt twenty years earlier in Paris, over the performance of one of our fellows. I can't help recalling a television program called
Head and Legs
where, normally, we played on teams—an intellectual for the head and an athlete for the legs. Until one fine day one of our classmates decided, under the dumbfounded gaze of his comrades, that he would be the first to combine both roles, to form a team all by himself, to play the head, and since he was an equestrian champion, the legs too. Sorry,
petit camarade,
for the comparison. But in the way Omar's old friends evoke his double talent, in the amazed way they tell me about the chess champion and the muscle man, the ace of the Nimzovitch defense and the athlete, the only man in school who can delight you with a replay of a Kasparov pawn finale or a Spielman sacrifice attack, and the only one as well who can floor any bully looking for trouble, I can't keep from feeling the same emotion we felt, crowded around the few televisions at the École Normal Supérieure, waiting to see just how far your performance would take you.

“He'll end up a peer of the realm,” Saeed Sheikh and Omar's mother Quaissia would say in the time of his glory. “Our son is a marvel, he'll end up knighted by the Queen of England, or become a banker in the city.” And it certainly seems as if his teachers and the classmates who remember him did not find such ambition either unreasonable or absurd.

I remember an observation by Olivier Roy, the French specialist in radical Islamism, noting that jihadists who “graduate” from the Saudi or Pakistani
madrasas
are not that numerous. They pass through, granted. That's where they finish their training. Perhaps for these souls, corrupted by their commerce with the west, it's a kind of trial by fire, or an obligatory rite of passage. But Atta comes from Hamburg. The man with the shoe bomb on the Paris-Miami flight, Richard Colvin Reid, is English and started out in Catholic schools in London. Moussaoui is French, born in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and studied at the university level in France. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden's lieutenant, arrested by the Pakistanis in February 2003 in Islamabad, was educated in the United States. Others are trained in Paris or Zurich, Brussels or Milan. All, or nearly all, come from well-to-do families and have done advanced studies in the major capitals of Europe, often brilliantly. And as for Omar . . .

Yes, Olivier Roy was right. At twenty years old, Omar's inner life is English. His friends are English. His frames of reference are English. The books he reads are in English. We can deplore it. We can try to forget it. We can respond as did the headmaster of the London School of Economics, Anthony Giddens (who, according to England's
Daily
Telegraph
on 27 January 2002, has given, in recent years, three of his top students to al-Qaida) to a French writer asking for access to school or library records: “I don't want to see you or speak to you,” said Giddens. “I don't want to know anything about this Omar Sheikh who is ruining my reputation. Let's just forget it happened.”

The facts are there. And as always, they're stubborn. This enemy of the West is a product of the West. This fervent jihadist was formed in the school of enlightenment and progress. This raging Islamist who will shout out at his trial that he kidnapped Daniel Pearl because he couldn't stand anymore to see the heads of Arab prisoners forcibly shaved in Guantánamo, this radical who will go berserk at the very idea of being judged not according to the
sharia
but British law, is a product of the very best English education. This character is both foreign and familiar to us. Here is the radical and banal nature of evil described by Hannah Arendt, which concerns us because it has the unsettling strangeness of mirrors . . . Is terrorism the bastard child of a demonic couple: Islam and Europe?

CHAPTER 3
WHY BOSNIA?

But there is a second, more personal, reason that Omar fascinates me—and this second reason is Bosnia.

We are still in 1992.

Omar has just been accepted to the London School of Economics.

Physically, he's leaner. He's taken on the physique of an athlete and will keep it until the years of his incarceration in India. He looks older than his years. A young woman who knew him at the Forest School and who still sees him from time to time will tell me in all seriousness that his classmates had wondered “ . . . is he older than he says? Maybe it has something to do with the difference between the Christian and Muslim calendars?”

Concerning his personality, all are in accord in praising his kindness, his cheerfulness, the disposition of a scion from a good family, confident, though a bit shy. And polite. There will be no one, among the people I meet in London, who fails to mention in the most glowing terms his modesty, his politeness, and his ability to pacify the tensest situations. “Violent, you say? Warrior? You must be joking! The contrary. Calm incarnate. Peace personified. All his aggression went into his arm wrestling matches. But, apart from that, an angel. The most gentle, the most delicate, the least bitter of young men. That's why we were so surprised when the news hit. We all telephoned each other—Have you seen? Have you heard? Omar? Really Omar? And yes, it was Omar, and we couldn't believe our eyes and ears.”

The angel, too, sometimes has his peculiar side.

Inexplicable mood swings that worry his teachers.

Slightly weird laughter, a little too loud, which one of his friends tells me, seemed like “the laugh of a sleepwalker.”

This same friend remembers the way Omar would say—he's only eighteen years old—that there is something spoiling in him, as if his mother had nursed him with poison instead of milk.

There are also surges of mythomania revolving around either the question of power (“I have friends in high places . . . I am friend to the great of the world . . . One phone call, just one, and I can have you hurt, or disowned, or fired . . . ”) or the question of origins (one time, he explains that his mother is Scottish; another, he pretends that his family has, for many generations, one of the great fortunes of the Commonwealth and that his father, Saeed Sheikh, started the career of Mohammed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrod's; in still another, he fights with a classmate who doesn't believe him when he says he has Jewish blood).

There is the strangely excessive joy he derives from seeing himself, after his heroic act in Leydenstone Station, featured in the neighborhood press. “He danced for joy!” says the same schoolmate. “He said it was the best day of his life. He dreamed of glory, you understand—whatever glory, but glory! He would say—and this seemed bizarre—that nothing in this world seemed more enviable than to live in the limelight! He had one ambition, just one: to be one of the most high-profile figures of his time. And that story . . . he drove us crazy for months with that story of the old lady he saved in the subway . . . ”

But that is all part of youth. He wasn't the first nor will he be the last young man thrilled to have his fifteen minutes of fame. And it would be too easy to play the prophet, with hindsight, and say: the claim of having Jewish blood, for example, this absurd mimetic delirium, the obsession with Jews so common in anti-Semitic genealogies—doesn't the criminal show through there? Isn't this a classic case of the neurotic who dreams of the election of the “chosen people,” and feeling excluded, sinks into the assassin's delirium? Omar, at the time, is still a normal young Englishman. Still a model student. All his classmates vaunt, I repeat, his generosity, his zest for activity, his effort to give meaning to his existence. So, here in November of 1992, in the cushy but casually radical universe of the London School of Economics—was it not the center of London's Trotskyism and Maoism at the end of the sixties?—the Islamic Society, the largest student association present on campus, launches “Bosnia Week”: an occasion, as with others staged by similar organizations throughout Europe, intended to alert public awareness to the fate of wartorn Bosnia.

The Islamic Society, of course, isn't quite like the other organizations.

There is a certain atmosphere around the conferences, debates, the film and slide shows it organizes—an atmosphere which didn't exist in what we were doing in France at the time.

Either because of the particular personalities of its leaders, or because they run the society—and therefore “Bosnia Week”—in the name of inter-Muslim solidarity as much as in defense of human rights, their campaign has an orientation which, had our paths crossed, I imagine would have sparked debate between us.

But their tracts themselves are not so different, at least in their intention, and even sometimes in their words, from those we distributed in France.

They disseminate photographs of ethnic cleansing, portraits of raped women, images of the concentration camps at Omarska and Priedor, similar to photos I had found specimens of and which we had distributed ourselves at the time of the Sarajevo list and during our awareness campaigns.

Above all, they express views that are Muslim but not Islamist—as far as I can tell from the premier issue of
Islamica
, a journal created to mark the occasion and edited by the general secretary of the Islamic Society, Sohail Nakhooda (who has since become a brilliant Muslim theologian, passing through the universities of the Vatican, and now living in Amman).
Islamica
recounts, in detail, the coming together of “Bosnia Week” and the demonstrations that resulted, and shows the preoccupation with blocking the Islam-phobia mounting throughout Europe. However they are not using this banner to sneak in a fundamentalist hatred of the West. They express views which are, from the documents I was able to examine, not contrary to my own in the debate over the two Islams—the fundamentalist and the moderate—in which I was already participating at the time.

Of course, there are other branches of the Islamic Society, in London's universities—at Imperial College, Kings College and University College where the fundamentalist presence is strong and where the Hizb Ut-Tahrir is firmly established, and even in the majority. But that's not the case at the London School of Economics. I can't explain why, but it seems that the London School chapter was a center of opposition to the rise of fundamentalism in London at the time. So, when these other more militant chapters of the Society try to take over “Bosnia Week,” to appropriate the whole project by announcing their intention to show up en masse, with their own speakers, at the London School campus on Saturday—the last day of “Bosnia Week”—the reaction is immediate: the local cell resists; the local cell revolts. On Friday night, Omar is among those who oppose the presence the next day of Omar Bakri and Yakoub Zaki, two fundamentalist preachers that he and his comrades categorically reject.