The Dawn Prayer (Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison)

hobble around, and I managed to get a broom back to our cell and kept it hidden by leaning it against the part of the wall covered by the door when it was open. Once we unscrewed the handle we had a bat, and once I made a more solid ball we had a game. The batter would stand by the door so he could hide the stick if a guard approached, and the pitcher stood on the far side of the cell. If the batter hit the lower part of the wall it was a single, the middle was a double, and the top was a triple. To get a home run you had to knock it into the window. We had fun and killed a lot of time this way, and even got some laughs whenever a foul tip hit the door and one of the guards came to see what we were knocking for. But the best way to kill time, the activity that became crucial to our way of life, would not be discovered until I was pacing the room one day and asked the Moroccan a seemingly arbitrary question about a seemingly random movie.

“Yo, you ever see The Beach?”

The Moroccan said he had.

“Yeah, I keep thinking of that place. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. I gotta go there one day if I get outta this alive.”

And then the Moroccan and I were off, talking about the movie in such detail that before I knew it I was spinning the whole thing out from the beginning by memory. Theo, of course, crawled under the covers immediately, as if the sound of my voice was toxic to his ears. I don’t think he ever blazed up in his life so he probably wouldn’t have appreciated it anyway.

And from that moment until the day we were transferred, we would “watch movies” like this every night after the sun went down. I would retell everything from A Clockwork Orange to Platoon, The Big Lebowski to The Goonies. My fondest memory of this activity was made one night when we were watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and I got a little too into character while describing the fight between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched over the World Series.

“I want that television set turned on!” I screamed, standing over the Moroccan, red in the face. “Right now!”

“SHUT UP!” a guard yelled suddenly from the hallway, smashing the door in a rage.

I leapt into the air, legs kicking like a cartoon character, and sat my ass down beside Abdelatif. We all stared at the door in silence, waiting to see if it was going to open, and then the Moroccan turned to look at me.

“Man, I’d give anything for a fuckin’ wiener right now!” I said, breaking into a huge smile.

Once we realized nobody was coming, I was back on my feet, reciting the rest of the movie.

It was cathartic, having to rely on my memory to entertain us like that, and it always reminded me of when I was a little kid, and my dad heard me recite the entire first twenty minutes of Spaceballs.

“You can remember all this, but you can’t remember your school-work?” he’d asked, shaking his head in disappointment.

We would do this for hours every night and it always seemed to relieve whatever tensions had built up during the day between the Moroccan and me. Honestly, “watching movies” was probably the one thing that kept us from killing each other; it helped preserve the little friendship that still remained between us. Sometimes when reciting I would have to speak up, louder and louder, to drown out the screams of men being tortured a few doors down. Other nights, the screams would force me to stop.

It didn’t take long for word of my conversion to spread. I’d worried that some of the guards might give me a hard time, but they all dug the fact that I’d become a Muslim, and while I can’t say that it made my treatment any better right away, I can say that it definitely made Theo’s worse.

“You good,” the guards would say to me. Then they’d turn to Theo. “You not good. You dog!” Once, Thug Life even spit on the floor after his insult and then slammed the door.

When it came time to choose my Muslim name, I’d taken Nassir, although the guards still called me Jumu’ah. The Moroccan explained that this was a serious part of the conversion, so when he grilled me as to why I’d picked that name I said it was after a great man I stayed with in Aleppo, but that was bullshit. I picked it because I’m a huge Nas fan, and I figured it was a great way to mock my captors and the entire ritual. I remember strutting down the hallway once, right after I became Nassir, hat pulled down, hearing one guard call out, “Jumu’ah Muslim!” as I high-fived another, all while kickin’ track three of Illmatic in my head with a big smile on my face:

Life’s a bitch and then you die; that’s why we get high

’Cause you never know when you’re gonna go

I had to mumble a few of the lines in the second verse, because it had been a while, but I had the important ones down cold—“Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”

Now that I was a Muslim I had to play the part, and I have to admit I was a little touched when they brought me my Koran. A kid of about fourteen and another jihadi with a black scarf wrapped around his face entered our room holding the massive book.

“Is that for me?” I asked, confused.

“Nam,” said the one in the scarf, handing it over.

After I’d shaken their hands and thanked them, they left. The Moroccan was very pleased with this addition to our room—all he had was a tiny pocket-sized version that was falling apart. Now we