Free Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer

portrayal was vile. I could barely bring myself to look at the green-black slime that spread over his otherwise pleasant face. The film’s garish colours and noise were hard to get away from. A soldier sitting next to me with a crew-cut and severe lacedup boots laughed uproariously at the blighted man’s fate.
    The countryside beyond Aleppo turned to desert, not soft, sandy desert but flat, hard, gravelly desert. The yellowish-brown hills in the distance were bare and gritty. Every now and then we would pass a large mural of Assad père or fils . The older man’s murals were in 1970s socialist style: the grim-faced leader managing a smile as agriculture and industry, combine harvesters and mills, worked in the background. The colours were faded, and in some the paint had flaked off, leaving powdery white patches. The younger Assad had launched a campaign of his own, consisting of a young Syrian man and woman staring patriotically into the distance, with the red, black and white of the Syrian tricolour behind them. This, I was sure, was a response to the wave of international pressure Syria, after so many years in Arab nationalist sleep, was suddenly facing. As it became dark, the bus passed through the towns of Hama and Homs, both ancient, with rich classical histories. In the early 1980s, Hama had been the scene of a crackdown in which the dictator had levelled a good part of the old city and overnight solved the country’s Muslim Brotherhood problem, the Islamist movement that thrived in neighbouring Egypt. People spoke of the crackdown with awe; rumours circulated that the government had chased the Brotherhood into Hama’s sewers and electrocuted them.
    The Kadmus bus dropped us off at a depot some way out of town. It was a bleak spot, open, unprotected and badly lit. There was little of the comfort or wonder of arriving in a new place, just rain, cement block houses and naked bulbs. The city’s skyline was low and indiscernible, green tube-lit minarets and white city lights dotting the gloom. The presence of the minarets in this small, makeshift way, at once shabby and ubiquitous, gave the darkness an unexpected, neon edge. It was Christmas Eve.

    I had first heard of the primacy of Syria as a destination for international Islam from Hassan Butt.
    ‘I do believe I’ve got a bigger role to play,’ Butt said, in the curry house in Manchester, ‘and when that time comes, I will make my preparations to play that role.’
    He’d been hinting at it so I asked, ‘It’s martyrdom, isn’t it?’
    ‘Absolutely,’ he replied. ‘It’s something that makes me really depressed, being stuck in this country, because I know I’m so far away from it. I know that if I was to pass away in my sleep, I would not have the mercy of Allah upon me because I have been such a bad person. And I don’t see myself getting into heaven that easily, except through martyrdom.’
    ‘Where would you go if you got your passport back?’ I asked.
    ‘Probably Yemen and Syria initially, because at the moment I’m wanted in Pakistan for supposed involvement in an assassination plot against Musharraf.’
    ‘And after Yemen and Syria, the enemy you would finally confront is the US, right?’
    ‘Yes, but maybe America will be destroyed in my time, maybe I’ll have something completely different to do.’ Then his face expressed new urgency. ‘But I need to learn Arabic! As an English and Urdu-speaking person, I can see the beauty of Islam from the outside, but I really can’t access it without Arabic. It’s like having a beautiful house and only being able to see through the windows how beautiful it is inside. That is how I view Arabic. I believe the Arabic language will give me the key to the things I don’t have access to at the moment. Once I learn Arabic, inshallah , I will get myself militarily trained. It’s like the Jews in Israel: conscription is incumbent upon every male and female.’
    The presence of international politics