Travel: Unpublished
Journals: Morocco
An Unintentional Target
March 31, 2007
On a quiet Sunday evening in Sidi Moumen almost three weeks ago,
24-year-old Abdelfettah Raydi walked into an internet bar with explosives
taped to his body and hidden beneath his clothing. His accomplice, a
17-year-old illiterate mint seller named Youssef Khoudri was also present.
Their goal was not to destroy a non-descript internet café situated a
10-minute taxi ride from their homes in Karyan Essakouila: the poorest
slum of Casablanca. Instead, although these are just rumors, Raydi was
trying to access a jihadist website that would inform him of that
evening’s more populated target—a crowded market? a popular hotel? the
police headquarters on Boulevard Zerktouni?—on the third anniversary of
the Madrid train bombings. We’ll never know his final destination because
he never got there.
An eyewitness, with a bandage across his eyes, testified on Moroccan
television about what happened next. Raydi began to pound loudly on the
keyboard of his computer,
possibly frustrated over a forgotten password and/or his inability to
access the site. The owner of the establishment intervened and an argument
ensued. The owner then partially closed the sliding metal garage door of
the café to prevent Raydi from leaving and called the police. Minutes
later, as the two men fought, the explosives on Raydi’s body detonated,
killing him instantly and injuring several others including the owner.
Khoudri fled the building and was later captured by police.
Days after the accidental attack, the newspapers As Sabbah, Al Massae, An
Nass, and La Vie Economique showed either gruesome pictures of Raydi’s
body or Khoudri being transported to—and stitched up—at Ibn Rochd
Hospital. Besides a 200 kg stash of explosives found in nearby Hay Moulay
Rachid, journalists discovered that Raydi had been one of 600 people
arrested in the wake of the May 2003 bombings in Casablanca. He had spent
two insufferable years in jail for his Salafi affiliations—the
fundamentalist Muslim group also blamed for the Madrid train bombings—but
was granted amnesty by the king and released in 2005. The Salafis, much
like the Wahhabists trying to overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia,
advocate a return to the Islam practiced during the time of Muhammed and
the two generations immediately following his death. The sect believes,
according to Wikipedia, that “Islam was perfect and complete during the
days of Muhammad and his companions, but that undesirable innovations were
added afterwards due to materialist and cultural influences over the later
centuries.”
All religions must evolve and adapt according to changing social and
political realities, Karen Armstrong wrote in her book Islam: A Short
History. “Unless a tradition has within it the flexibility to develop and
grow, it will die.” Perhaps. But at what point do these innovations turn
into their own thought system and cease to be Islam? The Salafis provide a
distinct answer, even if a majority of Muslims agree that the group
misinterprets important aspects of Muhammed’s message. And therein lies
the principle problem with religious reformation. “It is never possible to
go back in time,” Armstrong reminds us. “Any ‘reformation,’ however
conservative its intention, is always a new departure, an adaptation of
the faith to the particular challenges of the reformer’s own time.” The
prophet preached predominantly peace and tolerance, but the Salafi sect
advocates violence to achieve its incongruent aims of a more peaceful,
more conservative Islam. Naturally, the Moroccan monarchy, which condones
a comparatively liberal brand of Islam, is a source of Salafi wrath—all of
which complicates the possible motives for Raydi’s potential attack.
Was Raydi seeking revenge for being tortured in prison—commonplace
treatment of Salafi loyalists—at the hands of the Moroccan police? Was he
striking at the heart of what he believed to be a corrupt and illegitimate
monarchy? Was he simply punishing a political ally of the American
government? Once again, we’ll never know. But I decided a stroll through
Sidi Moumen and the Karyan Essakouila neighborhoods might offer some
clues.
Within months of the Casablanca bombings in 2003, the Moroccan government
began to build new apartment complexes and a few more football fields in
and around Sidi Moumen, intending to improve the dismal lives of the
locals or at least channel their energies into recreational activities
instead of political revenge. Nevertheless, a French theorist speculated
that the architecture of tall apartment buildings is socially isolating
and potentially community-destroying and, thus, exacerbated problems in
places like Sidi Moumen. Others wrote that these cosmetic changes could
not compensate for the dearth of opportunities, crushing hopelessness, and
unmitigated anger internalized by the severely impoverished community.
These ideas were revived after Raydi’s attack drew the country’s attention
back to the same neighborhood, prompting me to investigate.
The number 2 bus from the city center dropped me and a Moroccan friend
just two blocks from the internet café where Raydi killed himself 18 days
ago. We walked to the crime scene and immediately noticed that all
physical traces of his attack had been wiped away, almost as though it
never happened. The blood had been cleaned off the sidewalk and the walls
of the cyber café, its damaged brown awning had been removed, and the
exterior of the building had been repainted with an innocuous pink paint.
The employees of a small market next to the café were not interested in
talking to us, so I walked the streets with my Moroccan companion,
speculating as to whether the environment these men grew up in, as alleged
by so many others, contributed in any way to their willingness to
sacrifice themselves for a limited political objective.
We agreed that satellite dishes and cyber cafes are the politically
neutralizing opiates of the Moroccan masses, distractions, albeit not
nearly as debilitating as alcohol, from the poverty and hardship a
substantial proportion of the population experiences on a daily basis. In
hindsight, their proliferation seems proportional to the degree of
poverty—and potential political threat—of a particular neighborhood so
naturally they’re in abundance in Sidi Moumen.
The living conditions in the slum of Karyan Essakouila, as expected, were
a lot more shocking: a river of dirty, trash-filled water flowing were a
road should be; a spider-web of power lines extending to crumbling cement
block; tin-roofed houses; and people filling buckets of water from an
unsanitary public fountain while animals picked through piles of garbage
redolent with the stench of excrement and decay. I also noticed an
imposing, prison-like fence surrounding the entire neighborhood. No one
was starving to death—the situation was not yet as dire as that—but
people’s lives were consumed by numbing, repetitive tasks necessary for
survival with no time left over to think about anything else.
Nevertheless, I noticed a connectedness, a solidarity among the people who
lived there. And the individuals we encountered, for the most part, were
affable and welcoming, answering our questions and unperturbed by my
photographs. Honestly, I was much more self-conscious about taking
pictures then the locals seemed to be about answering questions about
their neighborhood—that is, until one man commented incredulously: “He
enjoys watching us live in such terrible conditions.” “No, no,” his
friends chastised him and explained to my companion, “Your friend is
welcome here.” Upon reflection, I concluded that within that tense
exchange contained the whole neighborhood’s conflicting image of itself:
an overwhelming majority of people bearing their burdens—and the
intolerable conditions they lived in—with equanimity while a few lashed
out at the culpable, and often indifferent, outsiders around them.
Popular Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote that, "We should not
justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must
understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to
liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is
despair." But why must it be one or the other? Clearly despair, ideology,
and a sense of political powerlessness are all responsible otherwise there
would be a lot more people all over the world lining up to kill themselves
over equally legitimate political grievances. Despair over the “dark life”
Darwish describes and that I witnessed in Karyan Essakouila coupled with
inadequate education leaves individuals susceptible to the political
imperatives of radical religious groups. Political awareness fostered in
the individual, for example, from the naked American aggression in Iraq
and Afghanistan, from Israeli savagery in the West Bank and Lebanon (and
every other place where Arab brothers and sisters are being senselessly
murdered) is then easily channeled into a weapon of political
revenge—especially when the reward for one’s sacrifice is an immediate
place in a heavenly afterlife. Allegedly, it took just two weeks to
persuade Youssef Khoudri to participate in the attack. Is it safe to
assume that others will eventually follow his—and Raydi’s—example, albeit
with more destructive results?
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