I Am Pilgrim(31)

In his opinion, the only reason that infidels would advocate such a thing would be in order to divide and conquer, to hollow out the Arab world and destroy it, pursuing a campaign the Christians had begun with the First Crusade a thousand years ago and had continued ever since.

It would be easy to dismiss the zoologist as an extremist, but in the twilight world of Middle East politics he was in the moderate wing of Saudi public opinion. There was one thing, however, which did set him apart from the mainstream: his views on the royal family.

There are many things you can’t do in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia – preach about Christianity, attend a movie, drive a car if you’re a woman, renounce your faith. But towering above them all is a prohibition on criticizing the House of Saud, the ruling dynasty, made up of the king, two hundred powerful princes and twenty thousand family members.

All through that year, Jeddah was awash with whispers that the king had allowed American troops, the soldiers of an ungodly country, into the Prophet’s sacred land. Equally disturbing was information filtering back from Saudi dissidents in Europe about prominent princes losing fortunes in the casinos of Monte Carlo and showering gold watches on young women from ‘modelling’ agencies in Paris. Like all Saudis, the zoologist had always known about the gilded palaces and profligate lifestyle of the king, but bad taste and extravagance are not haram – forbidden – in Islam. Prostitution, gambling and alcohol certainly are.

Of course, if you live in Saudi Arabia you can express your disgust about the policies of the king and the behaviour of his family, you can call it an offence against God if you want and even advocate their forced removal. Just make sure you do it in the safety of your head. To speak to anyone who isn’t your wife or father about it, even in the most abstract fashion, is reckless. The Mabahith, the Saudi secret police – a law unto itself – and its network of informers hear everything, know everything.

It was late on a spring day when four of its agents, all wearing the white tunics called thobes and the usual red-and-white-check headdress, visited the zoologist at work. They showed their identity cards and led him out of his office, through an area of laboratories and work stations and into the car park.

The twenty other people working in that section of the Red Sea Marine Biology department watched the door slam behind him, nobody saying a word, not even his three closest friends – one of whom was almost certainly the informer.

We will never know exactly what the zoologist was accused of, or what defence he offered, because Saudi judicial proceedings, conducted in secret, aren’t concerned with time-consuming niceties like witnesses, lawyers, juries or even evidence.

The system relies entirely on signed confessions obtained by the police. It’s strange how methods of torture are one of the few things which cross all racial, religious and cultural boundaries – poor militia in Rwanda who worship ghosts use pretty much the same methods as rich Catholics supervising state security in Colombia. As a result, the Muslim cops who took the zoologist into a cell in a Jeddah prison had nothing new to offer – just a heavy-duty truck battery with special clips for the genitals and nipples.

The first the zoologist’s family knew of the catastrophe engulfing them was when he failed to arrive home from work. After evening prayers they made a series of phone calls to his colleagues, which either went unanswered or were met by contrived ignorance – from grim experience, people knew that those listening in would target anyone trying to help a criminal’s family. Increasingly desperate, the zoologist’s wife finally agreed to her fourteen-year-old son heading out to try to find him. She couldn’t do it herself because Saudi law forbids a woman to be in public unless she is accompanied by her brother, father or husband.

The teenager left his mother and two sisters and set off on his dirt bike, a gift for his last birthday from his dad. Keeping to the backstreets, he drove fast to a group of seaside office blocks, where he found his father’s car alone in the parking lot. Only in a police state does a child pray for nothing more serious than a crippling accident to have befallen their parent. Beseeching Allah that the zoologist was lying injured in the darkened building that housed his office, the boy approached the entrance.

A Pakistani security guard stationed in an alcove in the gloomy interior was startled when he saw a boy’s face peering through the glass doors. Yelling in bad Arabic, he motioned the kid away, grabbing a billy club, ready to unlock the doors and use it if he had to.

But the boy didn’t flinch – calling back desperately in Arabic, imploring the help of the Prophet, saying something about a missing father. It was only then that the guard realized the visit was connected to the event that had caused a tidal wave of whispered gossip all afternoon. He stared at the child’s drowning face – he was far too young to be clinging to such tiny hopes – and lowered the club. Maybe it was because he had kids of his own, but the tectonic plates of the guard’s universe shifted, and he did something totally out of character – he took a chance.