Dogs Rising From The Manger
(This is something I wrote well over a year ago, which a number of people have enjoyed. No doubt some of it was not well informed, but other parts still stand up even though knowing what I know now it would be written a little differently.)
Thick smoke swirled in the dark chamber but no one flinched. This was a place to revel in the strangeness of difference- people willingly sacrificing comfort for the thrill of atmosphere. You couldn't see from one side of the room to the other; who was talking in another part of the chamber only inferred by familiarity with the sound of a voice, if you possessed it. Several Hookahs were currently in use- no cigarettes or spliffs- but the air was as full of talk as it was of smoke. None of these men regarded this as a strange setting although throughout the world it would have been a curiosity. Here with common hallmarks -long beards and assorted hats- they felt strong enough to set a new norm, and their warmth and friendliness arose from this matrix of commonality. Talk was animated and supplemented by hand gestures, while the presence of a thick document by the side of each group seemed to fill them with the pride of amateur scholars, an unassailable trinity of book, beard and amity.
The nearest equivalent to such a place would have been one of the all male London clubs where matters of the empire used to be decided, where to be included meant a vista of unbroken power opened up in an extremely pleasant, well fed, well watered and well heeled environment. But those were the pleasures of the flesh, not that the members, who were often religious to some degree, had considered them that way as they had talked of one third of the world like a magnanimously shared fiefdom. These bearded men knew themselves to be different to that example, and delighted in it. These dark surroundings and swirling smoke were symbolic of a mysterious empire, the wisdom of a kingdom without boundaries- yet with a heartland, and these men would die for it and for each other when necessary. No wonder they were happy. In the recesses of the room were wooden frames like hat stands, although in this case slung on the hooks were well-oiled AK47 rifles, several to each hook.
An empire is as strong and as big as the length of the effectual reach of those who run it. Discuss. It could have been an examination question but in fact it was one thread among the many that they pulled out in their groups. If the Americans could not defend their interests in Somalia, then they were not an empire there- ha! It was still a matter for smiling and joking, as well as serious thought that a group of Muslim tribal warlords, Africans for that matter, could have seen off the trained US troops- ha ha! Even funnier was the American tendency to make films celebrating their mistakes, to feed to what surely must be their docile chattel of a people. The opportunity of travel had really opened their eyes to the weakness of empires that had dominated them simply because they had been ignorant of their true nature (this was a view they reveled in). Of course the Somalis had got away with their rebelliousness because they were too much trouble to swat for the gains on offer, but the propaganda victory had had almost a mini-Vietnam effect. The Somalis had demonstrated their savage and jealous territorial nature, the like of which no westerner outside arguably the Balkans (and the Balkans would argue- ha!) could ever show. Then the cowering Americans had been sitting dumbstruck in front of CNN wondering if there really was something genetically different about some parts of the world that they would be foolish, even morally wrong, to interfere with.
Thus the chatter meandered as it attempted to interpret the meandering flow of history, which to them had shown signs recently that it must flow back in their direction. They had had spectacular success, and were recruiting lots more potential martyrs. The roll-call of their achievements was impressive, seen from a certain perspective. The Pakistani members, of which there were many, had laughingly likened them to the British cricketing tradition of Gentlemen versus players, where the Gentlemen's victory is achieved without the sacrifice of form and etiquette. The victories gained by the Islamists over the Americans had been a spectacular demonstration of the hollowness of the Western way of life. Defeat for the Americans would be followed not by the genuine mourning of relatives but by interviews on chat shows, by 'evenings with the stars' ostensibly to compensate the relatives with money but ultimately to further the careers of the stars themselves as they developed their 'profile' by an act of charity that would be remembered long after the individual victims had been forgotten. All this meanwhile achieved by the weapons offered up by that society itself, not weapons of mass destruction except those that could be developed by a few clever men working in tandem: the mass destruction opportunities in fact afforded by the west's own beloved money spinning systems.
Oh yes they were having fun all right. This was really living. The discussion they were enjoying now and the warrior's lifestyle that implacable enmity to the USA entailed had a thrill about it that could not be got from working in markets or on the land. All the men there had known active fighting and had slept on mountainsides exposed to the elements. Their brown skins were marked with hardening induced by the night frosts and daytime scorching suns. Their gazes were intense from straining to pick out danger or anticipate the future as soldiers need to, to anticipate possibilities good and ill. Meantime there was no one with a large belly amongst them, no-one who was not grateful for a meal and a rewarder of generosity on an individual level. There was a coolness and a cleanness about those involved in this Jihad; the equivalent of the Americans who while cursing Osama Bin Laden would be planning their latest trip to the Rockies to hunt, shoot and fish. Just like the young man learning from the grandeur of the mountains to humble himself and to serve the greater causes in life than himself, so these young men had been learning all their life from a kind of exposure greater than any father-son trip to the Rockies could experience. They had felt true loneliness as profound as the morning silence that reigned in the Afghan hills, as profound as the stillness of a mountain lake. In a real sense they were orphans, in many cases literally so, banding together against an abandoning yet overbearing, smiling yet hopelessly vain absent father. And this abandoning father was the Infidel, the great Satan, obviously.
Of course this was just a social gathering, but it was the social centrepiece of their lives. It had the intensity of a poem by contrast to the prolixity of prose. Nothing here was wasted, nothing was less than sense enlightening or nutritious. The smoke that they smoked was heady and spicy, a musky bitter flavour to it that had to be endured initially to be enjoyed later. The drinks that they drank were also inhospitable, like the mountain conditions from which they had come to this place, except in an opposite way, hot and thick like the atmosphere of an impenetrable jungle. They too were laced with spices, and contained creams and coconuts, ground almonds and nuts, the juice of dates and other fruit, and were termed teas though they were nearest to being a grown-up version of the milkshakes that were conquering the globe under the Trojan horse cover of Macdonalds. They were drinks to be sipped and savored, drinks that made one compare the richness of conversation to the richness of the drink, and mend the former to match the latter. Not made in the likeness of milkshakes I suppose, more the original and pristine version of something that had been attempted elsewhere in a debased form.
There were so many topics of conversation, or rather those that there were like a rich and deep soil on which any kind of crop could thrive. Meditations were undertaken very widely among them, and passages from the Koran could be used to support these, on the justice of the war against America for example, and the injustices that were perpetrated against the Islamic world. At one point in the discussion a man stood up from the cross legged position he had been in and thumbed pages of the Koran to indicate he had a contribution to make. His legs were a little shaky after so long sitting and his fingers ran excitedly over the pages, as a person desperate to unburden himself of something on his heart, a passion to expunge, or perhaps the cynical might say a crowd to impress. He spoke in a musical, deep voice quite unlike his thin frame, and the Arabic tumbled from his lips in a curious way as if he were not actually talking to anyone, even himself, but as if he were declaiming to the mountains. There were murmurs of approval like a backing accompaniment as he spoke: 'Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight against you, but do not transgress limits: for Allah loveth not transgressors. And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from wherever they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward for those who suppress faith'. On completion of this there was a large prolonged murmur of assent, one rising and falling note which no-one wanted to end. Distinguishable words included Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan, that seemed to belong to this choral discussion of tumult and oppression.
This was the way they liked purposefulness to arise. It was their idea of planning a life's work. They knew how suchlike things happened in the west; how you get paid well and you buy a house, get married and start a family, in that order or in a variation of it, it hardly seemed to matter. They knew the routine of education and self-esteem wrapped up in the cultural achievements of the past that created the lazy ways, the land garrisoned by consumers who would defend the dominance that allowed self indulgence. They knew that there this was how decisions got made, once such people hopped greedily into the board room and from there to the legislative chambers of their countries, and back again, and that the technology of the west was being developed to facilitate and justify those decisions. They also knew men in their own countries who made decisions that way. Well this was their answer, their way of making decisions, based on what they felt was the rising tide of what they couldn’t express but felt to be a collaborative moral discussion. To them it made democracy appear enfeebled, the wanderings of a manipulated and gullible electorate (they had words for these), not so much an ideal as a tool of self-aggrandizing politicians. If anyone cared about this it was they, the so-called terrorists, not the populations of the west who suffered it like dupes.
Yet here they were away from it all, hidden like a nest of chicks in a cave far from satellite or any other observation. A group with eyes so fiercely focused on an enemy, yet so carefully concealed from it that it would easily be possible to forget the implacability of the hatred and imagine that things had calmed down and that some kind of peace might prevail. Before long one or two of this gang who were unknown to the western powers might find their way once again into their enemy's welcoming capital cities, to plot a new reminder of ongoing enmity. There was no hope that reason would prevail, but rather the fear that it would proceed along two alien and mutually hostile tracks. When the meeting broke up at around four in the morning all felt fortified to return to their various degrees of hardship, their minds and hearts hardened like a clenched fist inside them. There was no hope at this time of disunity ruining their conviction. They were prepared for and satisfied by conflict of all kinds, and thus ready to maintain the uprising by matching hubris with hatred.
Labels: short story
