This Life or the Next

by Demian Vitanza

Actually, there wasn’t anything really wrong with my life then, but it’s always the little things. For example, at the end of junior high I wanted to go on to high school, but the counselor advised me to apply for a vocational school instead. She said there was no point in high school because my GPA was too low. But afterward I found out that people with lower GPAs than me had gotten into high school. I’m not saying it was her fault or anything that I ended up as a jihadist in Syria. I’m not blaming anyone. But still, when I look back, you know, things could have been different if I had gotten into a good school. One plus one plus one. In the end, I had nothing to lose.

You always need to legitimize your shit even if it’s the worst excuse ever. You need to believe that what you’re doing is right. That you’re an OK guy. That’s what I thought of myself—that I was an OK guy. I don’t know.

On the way home I felt empty. That’s not me, I thought. What am I doing? The power that had made me feel good earlier was starting to make me feel sick. I didn’t go straight home but wandered around by the river, behind the Tista Mall. Walked up and down. I’d been to all the parties, I’d tried all the drugs, my wad of money was too thick for my wallet, I could get all the girls I wanted, but everything was empty. Twenty years old, part-time job at Maxi Food, small-time crook, on his way to nothing. Well done, Tariq. I’d tried pouring on more drugs, more drinks, but the emptiness just got bigger and bigger. And in that emptiness, the seed began to grow. Totally unexpected.

I realized I was getting tired of sitting, so I started dhikr, when you repeat something over and over again. Praise God. I said the words aloud. All the names of God I could remember. And that’s when I felt it. That the seed had grown, pushed its way through the soil, and that the bud was opening. Yes, I think I’d say it was the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had. Better than any drug. This is what I want, I thought. I want Islam. When you experience something so strong, something so beautiful, of course you want to repeat the experience. You could say I was hooked. I tried to reproduce the feeling I’d had, go back to the same kind of inner peace, the same deep spirituality, but it was never as strong again.

Arbi and I opened up to each other, talked about how we could get on in life, cut out the bad habits, the parties. We even went and talked with the imam about it, wanted to talk away all our sins. But the imam didn’t want to hear about every single mistake we’d ever made. He told a story, that one about the father who takes his unruly son to a wise man who then asks the boy to pull up a small plant. All right. The boy grabs it and pulls it up. Then the wise man asks him to pull up a slightly larger plant. OK, a bit harder, but fine. And in the end, he asks the boy to pull up a tree. “Don’t give your vices deep roots,” the imam said.

I listened to debates and the news instead. Nearly everything was Islam, Islam, Islam, right—cartoons here, terror there, and in the middle of it all there was one of the many debates about freedom of speech. Again and again, it’s their problem if they feel offended and so on. That really bothered me. I wondered why. Where does the urge to offend come from? While I was thinking of those things, I realized something. Why is this being discussed really? I thought it had to be because society wanted to get rid of us. Weed us out. Do you know that feeling, when you realize you’re a weed?

The day after there was almost nothing about us in the papers. All of the press had been outside the American embassy where the hard-core Islamists had their demonstration. At that time, I knew almost nothing about them. I hadn’t even realized they were arranging their own demonstration. They got all the attention, even though they had only about one hundred people and we had six thousand. There was just a short article about us in one paper, y’know. In one way I thought the people who’d gone to the embassy had more of an impact than we did. And that gave them more credibility, because their opinions were much clearer than the sellouts at Youngstorget. And the media’s clever; they don’t publish things that don’t fit into their picture of the world. They’re really happy if they can portray Muslims as violent extremists. Who listens to a peaceful demonstration anyway?

They threw Muslim jokes around. When Arbi told us about it, he wasn’t really complaining, he just said, “They probably don’t mean anything bad by it.” But I noticed it stressed him out. And he got zero support from the union reps; they mostly just kept needling each other. “But you don’t complain about your landlord,” Arbi said. He’d come to Norway as a refugee; he figured he’d move to a Muslim country if it all got too bad. Actually, it was only Islamic rules that kept him from laying into them at work.

he was killed by the CIA in Yemen. The first American citizen to be killed in a drone attack. And then you get extra curious. From Awlaki it’s only a short step to sympathizing with Al Qaeda. Or the Taliban. Yes, y’know, for us they represented resistance to Western oppression. It felt good to hear that the Taliban had shot American soldiers. It healed wounds in our psyche. Sure, you could call it hate. Turn it upside down. Take the Bataclan terrorists in Paris. Remember two of them escaped but were shot by the police a few days later? Don’t you think it healed the wounds of the French people, deep down in the darkness of their hearts? It was like that for us as well.

To be totally honest, I think there are plenty of examples of injustice against Muslims in this world. Pick up a history book or just spin the globe a little. If you want to eat from that tree, the fruit isn’t hanging too high, so to speak.

Actually, I think the conversation with Peter and Paul was mostly about me having to change. Change my opinions. I asked if it was wrong to be against Norway’s involvement in Afghanistan, for example. They said it was no problem at all to have different political opinions, that their concerns were only about security. But I don’t really know where to draw the line. Some things were obviously not OK about my opinions, and that made me nervous. They made me feel like I’d done something wrong, stepped over the line. Now they’re going to put me in prison, I thought.

We forgot everything. We forgot we had a family. We forgot we had a future. We forgot we had dreams. We forgot ourselves, who we were. Forgot everything. That was the only way we could keep to the path we’d set for ourselves. What we were about to do couldn’t be wrong. That was what we told ourselves. That Assad was the face of evil.

To be honest I have reservations about democracy over there. Here in Norway, sure, but I don’t know if it would work in Syria. Just look at what happened in Egypt. While Arbi and I were looking into what the different Syrian rebel groups stood for, we found out that the democratically elected president of Egypt, Morsi, had been overthrown by the military because he wanted to move his country more toward Islam. OK, so democracy only works as long as those who are elected think just like the West. You get it? That made things clear. Democracy has become a dirty word in the Middle East.

I’d gone there to become a martyr in the fight against Assad, not get killed in a traffic accident.

I’d seen videos of these things online. That was why I’d come, after all. But it’s different when you’re standing in the middle of it all with your own body, your pulse and your head not working, and hands you don’t know what to do with. And you want to do something, anything, but you just don’t know what. Your soul gets diluted; you feel like a nobody. I’d lost sight of Abu Saad. I stood there feeling useless. I’d traveled the whole way to Syria to help people, but when I was actually needed, I had nothing to give. I felt dizzy, sat down on the curb, clenched my teeth, and cried.

I could hear my uncle was struggling not to get worked up. He said it wasn’t our job to get mixed up in this. The Syrians had to sort it out themselves, in their own way. Then the line was cut, and his words were left hanging in the air around me. I’d already experienced how useless you can feel. What if it was wrong for those of us from outside to interfere? But at the same time, I felt a responsibility. Not just toward Syria, but toward God, you understand?

What’s sick is how the violence creeps into you. You know what you’ve seen is wrong, but you accept it because everyone around you accepts it. Or at least on the surface they do. Morals are a vulnerable thing. Your sense of justice is influenced by how other people act. Maybe it’s cowardly not to say anything in such a situation, but there’s a real chance you’d get in trouble if you opened your mouth. And when everyone thinks like that, there’s an agreement that it’s OK. It’s how it should be.

I never hated Norway, y’know—you don’t complain about your host—but at that particular point in time, I was fed up with all the lies and immorality. All the facades. All the loneliness hiding behind the high-tech systems. I didn’t want to wake up one morning in a synthetic chaos. I wanted to wake up to the call for prayer and roosters crowing. Go to the mosque early and live a simple life in a place where you could practice Islam without people thinking you were weird. A place where you had a close relationship to your neighbor. For me that’s a healthy society. Actually, I just wanted a stable life. A structure that brings peace to your heart.

That thing about groups—I can tell you straight up I never swore allegiance to any group. Here I am, sentenced for being in a terrorist organization, so it wouldn’t make any difference for me to admit it now, y’know? The PSS would probably pat me on the back and be happy my version was finally similar to theirs. But I won’t pretend that I swore allegiance to any group because it seems most plausible for the plot of the book. Or because I’ve been sentenced for it. If I did that, then the story would be too neat. That’s just how it is. Life isn’t believable sometimes.

The thing is, I hadn’t gone to Syria to fight against the PKK. But they were sneaky. They used the rebellion as a way to take control of more territory. Opportunists. So we had to hold them back. The question was how many different fronts the rebellion could handle.

He was wearing a black cap and dirty clothes. A little bit too big for him, likely donated. I still remember his eyes; he had strong, light-brown eyes. His face was completely covered in dust, but his eyes were clear. I went over to him and dug in my pockets, but I only had large bills. Then he put his fingers to his mouth. “Khobz,” he said. I knew that word. “Bread.” I made a sign for him to wait and went in to see Masri in the kitchen. Asked if there was any bread I could give away. He gave me a bagful. “Here,” he said. “Take it.” But when I came out again, the boy was gone. I went out of the gate to look for him, but he’d disappeared. It might sound strange, but that was the worst thing I think I experienced in Syria. Not bombs exploding or people bleeding but being too late to give bread to that boy. He must’ve thought I’d rejected him. That I just didn’t care.

But actually what really made a difference was the suicide belt Abu Hajer had started wearing. It’s like a VIP pass down there. OK, if you shoot me, I’ll blow everyone up, go ahead. It’s strange to say it, but that belt actually made me feel safe. Before, I thought those things were horrible, but now it was our guarantee of safety. The guards let you through faster; they wouldn’t bother people wearing suicide belts.

It wouldn’t be difficult to recruit people if that’s what you wanted. Because they hate. They hate the police. They hate their parents. They hate the state. They hate Western society. But first and foremost, they hate themselves. They feel like they’re never good enough. So they want to do something good, but they don’t know how.

One day I came out to the common area to see the guys gathered in front of the TV. Before I saw what was on, I noticed that the guard was staring nervously at me, like he was watching what I’d do. One of the guys explained, “Three bombs went off in Brussels.” They didn’t say more than that. The guys were silent. They thought maybe I was happy about what had happened or something. Positive? No. It’s wrong to attack civilians. But I can understand it. I know where it comes from. Someone should have made a list of how many civilians the West has blown to pieces. By the way, do you know how many people the Norwegian military has killed in the last ten or twenty years? No, me neither. Isn’t it sick that we don’t know that?

I try to separate religion and politics now. I try not to hate. You know, hate is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die. I think that was from some game on PlayStation or something. In the middle of the game, one of the characters said it. I like that idea. You can really understand the meaning of that sentence. Much clearer than when someone says you have to forgive, period. You forgive other people for your own benefit as well, or maybe even mostly for your own benefit. There’s a hadith, I think, that says that you should forgive every night before you go to bed because it could always be your last night, and you don’t want to take any hate from this life to the next.

I feel totally mixed up. Like, I want to keep my beliefs, but at the same time I miss the old life. Not the crime, the drugs, or anything, but the feelings. Music, for instance. One day I heard some Indian music from one of the cells in the section. I thought I recognized it. “Is that Kishore Kumar?” You know, the music my father put on in the car after he came out of prison. Then I asked if I could see the CD and found the song that my dad liked so much, “Aane Wala Pal.” Whenever I hear it, I’m right back in the car with Dad, stretching my neck to look over the dashboard at the road in front of us.