Aftermath

part about “a foreign country,” he was interrupted by an angry prisoner, who shouted, “Infidel countries, not foreign countries!” The judge looked bored and tapped his pen on the table for silence, asking the prisoner to stop interrupting.

One by one the judge read the prisoners’ names, asking if they pleaded guilty or not. He was interrupted by the same prisoner once more, who shouted, “This is a play. When is it going to end? We know that the verdicts have been decided and written in the files!” The judge tapped his pencil impatiently. “I am not guilty, you are guilty!” snapped some of the prisoners. “Jihad is not guilt!” shouted one prisoner. “Is jihad in the way of God guilt? Fighting the Americans and Jews and infidels is now guilt? We are protecting the honor of our sisters in Iraq. Is that guilt? God is our master and you have no master. Your regime is rotten and it stinks. You and your regime and your ranks, you are all guilty!” The judge tapped his pen and told the prisoners to answer without comments. “He who opens alcoholic bars is guilty!” said one prisoner.

The judge lost his temper and angrily told the guards to take the loudest prisoner out of the cage and back to the van, and the prisoner quieted down. Then, as punishment for the prisoners’ recalcitrance, the judge ordered their families to leave the court. The military prosecutor, also in uniform and sporting a thick mustache, informed the judge that he had no witnesses, and the trial was postponed for one week. “God is our master and you have no master!” the prisoners shouted in unison. “He is the best master and the best supporter. America is your master and you have the worst master. God is great!”

Following the trial I met with Hussein al-Masri, lawyer for the accused ten. Masri, dressed in an ill-fitting brown jacket with green pants, a red shirt, and a brown tie, told me, “Now the law permits accusing people who only think or talk about terrorism. It is not required to commit the act of terrorism; only thinking or speaking is enough. The prosecution accused the defendants of already going to Syria and meeting and arranging terrorist activities, but they didn’t do it.”

The following Friday I drove up to Irbid’s Hnina neighborhood to the Qaqa’a Mosque, hoping to learn more about what might have motivated the young prisoners in their failed and almost comical attempt to join the jihad in Iraq. As I drove up, my taxi driver recounted how his cousin had suddenly picked up and left for Iraq in March 2003. Many young men from his town, Zarqa, who were not even overtly religious, had poured over the border to fight the Americans. An hour and a half later we drove through Irbid’s rolling hills, the elevation making the air cleaner than in Amman. We were a mere thirty kilometers from the Syrian border. Friday is a slow day in the Muslim world, and Irbid’s streets were nearly empty. In the Hnina neighborhood, two boys sat on a curb sharing a bag of potato chips. A small group of men and women lined up in front of the Jowharat al-Zein bakery to purchase piles of large flat bread for lunch, which was always a more important occasion on Fridays. Children played in the street, and the few women walking by were not conservatively dressed.

I sat on a step in front of a closed store eating a sandwich with my friends and watching the trickle of men making their way to the Qaqa’a Mosque for the Friday noon prayer and the khutba (sermon). Men casually strolled by. “Assalamu aleikum” (Peace be upon you), they said as they noticed us, and we responded, “Wa aleikum salam wa rahmat ullah wa barakat” (And peace upon you and the mercy of God and his blessings).

The mosque was an inconspicuous white three-story building with a small dome and a loudspeaker. Down the hill from its narrow gated entrance, and around the back, was a small tiled bathroom for ablutions, the ritual washing of the legs, arms, and face required before prayer. Inside was a long sink lined with many faucets and short benches. Upstairs the trickle of men had reached about six hundred; it seemed as if more men were present than the neighborhood could have produced on its own. Their shoes lined the entrance or were stuffed into pigeonholes. They kneeled, or bowed, or stood in silent prayer in rows along white lines painted on the green carpet, in a “fortified wall” the way tradition stipulated. Many small children played by the door; others prayed by their fathers or leaned against the columns. The mosque was unfinished, and unpainted cinder blocks and plaster were visible on the walls. The sun came in from a skylight around the dome. Men wore tracksuits, jeans, and dishdashas. I noticed one man wearing a salwar kameez, the traditional long shirt and baggy pants worn in Pakistan and Afghanistan but not in the Arab world. It was a statement of support for jihad.

By chance, the mosque’s imam was called Sheikh Jihad Mahdi, though the name itself was of no significance (even Christian Arabs are known to call their sons Jihad). Sheikh Jihad wore a simple white dishdasha and white cap and sat in the front with a microphone. As he waited for the proper time to begin, he lectured the men in the mosque—and, through the loudspeakers, the entire neighborhood —on how to pray properly, using a strong colloquial accent and slang. As the majority of men completed their prayers in a low murmur, Sheikh Jihad stood up and began with a short prayer, as is the custom. “Thanks be to God, supporter of Islam,” he said, “for his victory and his humiliation of infidelity with his power and managing all the matters with his orders and deceiving the infidels with his cleverness, the one who estimates the days going over and over by his justice. Prayer and peace on the one who raises the flag of Islam with his sword.” This was no ordinary prayer and was not normally used, but it was the same prayer used by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the movement led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in every message they put out. It was a code, and supporters of the jihad and Al Qaeda would recognize it.

It would soon be time for the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and throughout the world millions were making their way to Saudi Arabia to fulfill this important pillar of Islam. Sheikh Jihad exhorted his flock to go on the hajj, calling it “the most important act of worship.” He warned that if a man did not go on the hajj he was as bad as a Jew. “Remember that we are now building this mosque,” he told his listeners. “It is not finished, so give any amount of money to help build this house of God.”

Like all sermons, Sheikh Jihad’s ended with a prayer. “God support the Muslims and give them victory everywhere,” he said, as the crowd responded with an “Amin.”

“God support the mujahideen and give them victory everywhere, in Iraq in Palestine.”

“Amin.”

“God give us the power to break the thorns of the Jews and the Americans and the Crusaders.”

“Amin.”

“God give us the opportunity to face them.”

“Amin.”

“Bless us and show us the way to jihad in the path of God.”

“Amin.”

Sheikh Jihad repeated this last prayer for jihad three times. Interestingly, he omitted the prayer for the leader of the nation (in this case, King Abdullah) that is traditionally invoked by clerics after their sermons.

The sheikh lived beneath his mosque with his family, and I waited on the steps in front of his door as he kissed and greeted well-wishers following his sermon. He invited me to his guest room, which was lined with books on Islam. Green pillows covered the floor, and we sat down to drink tea that he brought in from the house, which was closed off to me lest I glimpse his wife. I could hear his children watching cartoons on television. Colorful plastic flowers, which seemed to be required in Jordanian homes, decorated the room. On one wall in his guest room Sheikh Jihad had hung an immense sword, right out of Conan the Barbarian, with a wide sharp blade. On its hilt were two skulls and spikes coming out ominously. It was not a Middle Eastern blade, and I had never heard or seen a cleric with such a decor hanging on his walls. The thirty-five-year-old Sheikh Jihad took his name seriously.

Like many in Irbid, Sheikh Jihad was originally Palestinian; his family’s town had been destroyed by the Israelis in 1967. He had been a cleric for ten years, after receiving a degree in Sharia law from a Sudanese correspondence school. “The khutba is a standard that measures the direction of people,” he said, adding that his sermons had once been much more political, especially at the beginning of the Iraq War. But he had been arrested several times by Jordanian authorities as a result, and was forced to moderate his tone, at least a little. He claimed to have been tortured by them as well. I asked him about the ten young men I had seen in court two days before and who were said to have met to discuss their ideas and plans regularly in his mosque, but he claimed never to have heard of them. He no longer explicitly advocated jihad, in public at least, worrying that the November bombings in three Amman hotels had changed things in Jordan. “People were disgusted by it,” he said, explaining that things in Iraq were confusing.

The war in Iraq had changed everything in the Muslim world, creating new confusion and new certainties. In the late 1990s experts on the Muslim world had spoken about the failure of political Islam, even explaining that the