Free Where Pigeons Don't Fly by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

teasing them by saying that a gazelle passed on everything they said and so they should never lie to her. It was certainly too embarrassing for his mother to tell him, ‘You’re a liar: they came to ask for my hand in marriage,’ and perhaps it was too embarrassing for him to tell her that as well. His mother was shy and unsure, and it was easy to convince and influence her.
    â€˜But no,’ he muttered to himself as he went to his gloomy bedroom. ‘I will lie, Mother. And as for the gazelle, I killed it when my father died.’

Part 2
    Sandals emerging from the darkness
    Â 
    â€“10 –
    B URAIDA WAS UNFAMILIAR TO young Fahd, despite having lived in the city for months during the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and despite his father’s former life there. Shortly before his death, Suleiman had told Fahd tales from his youth.
    Ali had insisted Suleiman study at the National School and Suleiman had kept resisting, but in the end he had consented because it was an opportunity to escape the village of Muraidasiya.
    For a while he read Ibn Hajjar’s
The Attainment of the Goal
with Sheikh al-Duwaish. The sheikh, he told Fahd, had been an extraordinary man with an astonishing memory: he could listen to more than one student reciting the Qur’an at the same time, correcting their errors of pronunciation and intonation even though they were reading separate verses. Even Sheikh al-Albani, who occasionally returned to the text beside him to prompt him as he talked, sought help from al-Duwaish, consulting his computer-like memory. God have mercy on his soul! He died young, in the prime of life.
    After sunset, Suleiman studied inheritance law with Sheikh al-Kaleeli, the imam of a mosque close by the home of his friend, al-Ulayti. The first time he went to see him, Suleiman sat flustered before the sheikh, who cast a keen and mistrustful eye over him, then said, ‘You studied at a government school?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    He gazed at Suleiman for a moment, closely examining his face as he prepared to hurl his first fatal arrow towards those boyish features. ‘Does the earth revolve?’
    â€˜Yes, sheikh,’ Suleiman replied, confident and candid.
    â€˜There is no power nor strength save in God!’ the sheikh said, then rose to his feet, pulled out a book and handed it to him.
    â€˜Read this book, my boy, and then come back.’
    Suleiman read the title:
Heaven’s Potent Rage Against Followers of the New Age
by Sheikh Hamoud al-Tuwaijri.
    He read it in days and understood that it disputed heathen astronomers who believed in the spherical nature of the earth and its revolution and refuted their claims.
    The sheikh didn’t dismiss Suleiman as he had expected, but showed him sympathy instead, feeling it his duty to take him by the hand and lead him from falsehood and bewilderment on to the path of righteousness and truth. The earth is flat, as the Lord tells us in His Book, and, contrary to the theories of heathens and atheists, does not revolve about itself or circle the sun. No: it is the sun that turns about the earth.
    Suleiman loved these ideas, but quickly moved beyond them. He discovered that the Salafis of Buraida were in fact just doctrinally observant Hanbalis. He felt that he shouldn’t ally himself with any particular doctrinal school, and he found what he was looking for with the Divine Reward Salafist Brothers in Riyadh. He spent hard days of hunger and deprivation with them and suffered through Riyadh’s long winter nights, to the extent that when he accompanied the leader of the group to Buraida and visited his old school, he dropped in to see his family for a day in Quwai then slept for severalnights in a classroom. He felt proud when he saw the looks of envy and jealousy from his peers in Buraida. He had begun to move with a commanding, disciplined air and could finally dream of restoring his ruined self-confidence.
    The trip was the