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

occasion of the final meeting between the Brothers in Buraida and the Salafist Group that would continue on the path to the Grand Mosque. There was affection and dialogue between the two parties before it turned into hostility and mutual loathing, the conversation gradually metamorphosing into a call to actively bring about a radical change, to do away with corruption, sin and doctrinal constraints. The inhabitants of Buraida followed the Hanbali rite, and the Hanbalis’ severest defeat had come when a group of them debated a Zaharite sheikh in Mecca, who brought them to a standstill with his proofs and logic. Suleiman had witnessed this event and it was then he realised that life and ideas might exist elsewhere, in places other than Buraida. Adventures, fraught with dangers, followed one after the other until he found himself behind bars in Mecca where, one day, he was joined in his cell by the young Mushabbab.
    Mushabbab told his friend some of what had taken place the day of the Grand Mosque’s occupation. He didn’t see it as a takeover, but as the only proper way to acclaim the Mahdi, and the most appropriate place to do so.
    Their arrival with their weapons had been a somewhat bizarre affair. It began just before dawn when their men carried in the bodies of four women inside coffins. In the Grand Mosque the body of a deceased woman wasn’t simply covered with an
abaya
(lest her body be visible to the worshippers) but was placed in a coffin with an arched wooden lid. The Prophet’s wife Aisha had been the first to buried in thisdomed coffin and now it was being used by the Brothers to smuggle guns.
    The first dawn of the new century crawled slowly by, the group hefting the coffins with cool detachment while the weapons, hidden with their ammunition, almost seemed to come alive with longing for the bodies that surrounded them. By the Imam and the cloth coverings of the Kaaba the four coffins were laid in a row. Imam al-Subayil gave his usual calm and reassuring recitation, ushering in the dawn and stupefying the Meccan pigeons that strutted happily over the white marble.
    No sooner had he performed the two dawn
rakaas
than ten men rose to their feet behind him, some wearing brown
mashlahs
beneath which they hid their pistols, and one took hold of the microphone that linked the prayers to a live radio broadcast. The Imam snatched it back to perform the prayer over the coffins, but the man drew his dagger and brandished it in the face of al-Subayil who cried, ‘Fear God!’ and backed away.
    When the prayers were completed the Imam crept away to his room by Safa hill as the lids were lifted from the coffins and the Belgian-made automatic rifles distributed amongst the members of the group, some of whom spread out to the mosque’s gates, locking them one after another. By one small door a guard in civilian clothes objected: ‘Why are you locking the gates?’
    â€˜None of your business!’ Muhsin shouted in his face.
    They argued and Muhsin pulled out his revolver and took aim. The bullet flew out, a messenger of death intent on its victim, but not towards its intended target: cleaving the cold dawn air with a penetrating, vicious whine it struck the domedbronze head of a nail sunk in the metal plating that covered the wooden door. The wayward bullet gave a violent clang, ricocheting back towards the breast of the bearded young man and striking him dead: the battle’s first martyr. That is how they thought of their dead: martyrs.
    The sound of the shot reached the ears of the worshippers and the other members of the group, and the first spark of the conflict flared.
    Muhsin fell, twitching a little before his corpse lay still. The last gate hadn’t been closed and so those who could fled before the members of the group could shut it, while two lorries reversed towards the moat by the outer entrance to the underground cells. One carried weapons and ammunition, the other boxes