Only ‘believers’ can sell their soul to the devil and expect justice

In his eloquent, awesome account of the destruction of the Isis-held city of Mosul in 2017, the American journalist James Verini finds himself amid the wreckage of the city’s university, talking to an academic outside what had been the English library. When the department had been closed down by Isis, Karim had been working on a paper about Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and had been fascinated by the deal the ambitious doctor made with the devil. “The idea is interesting,” he told Verini. “To see how he suffered. How he gave himself to the devil, for a purpose, and then he lost everything. He wasn’t happy.” Well, I guess that was jihadism for you.

Always apocalyptic. Selling your soul to Lucifer – or to Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the guess-if-you-can prophet-tribal lineaged new leader of Isis – is unlikely to provide you with much knowledge, but if devils don’t take you off to hell, you have at least a reasonably good chance of dying very violently. Verini, in his book They Will Have To Die Now, concludes that above all else, the Islamic State is very boring. It is also all-consuming. Anyone within its orbit – civilians, men and women living within the state – would conform.

With Syrian troops in the spring of 2017 – not long after Verini explored the ruins of Mosul – I entered the village of Deir Hafar, east of Aleppo, only minutes after its Isis masters had fled. A Syrian officer had been killed by mortar fire. But in the basement of what had been the local Isis court (painted black, of course) I discovered piles of documents, the records of hundreds of cases brought to the judges – all of them Egyptian, so the villagers told me – by the people of Deir Hafar.

Their contents proved what I had always suspected: that the locals – shopkeepers, merchants, farmers, angry male cousins and their wives – all turned to the Isis courts to attack and demean and sue their neighbours and relatives for domestic crimes, theft or espionage. As I emerged into the daylight with this trove of papers, a group of village mukhtars arrived. They sought out the most senior surviving Syrian army officer. They wanted “reconciliation”, they said. No one said anything. If they were handing themselves over to the mercy of a ruthless regime, they knew what they had done under the rule of Isis.

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Like Faustus, they had sold their souls to the devil. Under Isis rule, they had accepted the cult’s “justice’’ – even though they knew that a few metres from Deir Hafar’s Islamic court, there stood several grim iron cross-beams, again painted black, upon which the court’s victims were crucified. When I climbed on to the steel execution platform, it made a deep rumbling sound beneath my feet. “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” Dr Faustus cries as he is dragged off to hell, seeking just half a drop to spare him. He even begged mercy from Lucifer. The people of Deir Hafar were Sunni Muslims but they might well understand Marlowe. Dr Faustus could expect no justice from the devil. But they did.

It is not surprising, however, that justice – in that most unjust of worlds we call the Middle East – has an obsessive quality about it. I am always enraged when westerners announce that in the Arab world, “life is cheap’’. This is nonsense. Life is as precious to Muslims – or Christians or Jews – in the region in which I live as it is in Paris, London or New York. It is death which is cheap. Invasion, occupation and dictatorial suppression has made it so. Thus, justice and death – and cruel bargains with the devil – have become part of the narrative of this pitiful, deeply sorrowful place.

After the Israeli army retreated from the Lebanese city of Sidon in 1985, I was driving north to Beirut when a Hezbollah fighter on the side of the coast road waved me down. Could I give him a lift north? Jump in, I said. He put his rifle on the back seat and sat in the passenger seat beside me. After the usual exchanges – where did I come from, which Lebanese town did he come from, his family name, how many brothers and sisters did he have? – he meekly asked me the question which I knew was coming. Did the foreigner – Mr Robert – believe in God

This was a tough one for the liberal, secular, arrogant, western-educated correspondent driving his grey Volkswagen Golf up to Beirut. So, as usual, I ducked the question and asked him if he believed in life after death. Muslims and Christians who are “believers’’ – I still cringe at the word, although it’s a lot better than the happy-clappy faith-based conversation which I sometimes have to endure from British clergymen – share (or rather used to share) a pretty similar view of what happens when you die: the day of judgement, heaven or hell. Muslims, rather attractively, don’t believe in purgatory. They have no court waiting room outside heaven where I have always imagined we sit on plastic chairs while a saint tells us patiently to wait just another five minutes – or another 100 years or a millennium or whatever – before our case is heard.

In any event, the young Hezbollah man, more anxious to indulge in theology, I thought, than military operations against the Israeli army, announced that he could prove that there was an afterlife. “Do you believe in justice?” he asked me. Of course, said Mr Robert. “And do you believe there is justice on earth?” Mr Robert had no trouble with that one, especially here in the Middle East. “Of course not!” I replied, eyebrows suitably furrowed. The Hezbollah man’s face lit up. “Exactly!” he exclaimed. “So if there is justice but justice does not exist on earth, therefore it must exist in heaven – so there is an afterlife…”

I will leave the reader to ponder this ecclesiastical argument, archly delivered by a young man who may in succeeding years have sought martyrdom and discovered the truth, or otherwise, of his argument. As a correspondent who at least once a year – and sometimes many times a year – places himself at risk of sudden and murderous death in Middle East conflicts, I don’t spend much time pondering these matters. Nor I imagine, do those of our profession who are killed in the line of journalistic duty think through eternity before bravely setting off on their last story. A few of them I have known. They risked all to tell of others’ suffering. This was more important to them than the risks. Brave people all. Journalism has its martyrs, too.

But when you know, yes, how cheap death is, you don’t spend a lot of time contemplating heaven or hell. You try to stay alive. That is the one and only all-consuming objective. Every year, when I return to Ireland for Christmas, I say to myself – thanks be to God, I made it through another year, untouched and still in one piece. And always I say how lucky I am. I have survived another 12 months… And thus the great matter of eventual death is not – as it is for others of my age – very pressing.

Occasionally, like so many of my colleagues, I find myself so close to the chap with the scythe that I am almost too frightened to write. Churchill once exclaimed that there is “nothing in life so exhilarating as to be shot at without result”. He was right. After great danger comes the sheer comical, impossible, ridiculous, pitiful delight of meeting old friends, going out to dinner, planning the next day’s adventures. Ed Cody, an American colleague of mine during the early stages of the Lebanese civil war, said that the fun of journalism in the Middle East is that every day you could have a new adventure. The word is well-chosen for it represents, I suspect, a method by which we might offset – degrade in value – the dark and terrible fate which might indeed await us on our next day’s adventure.

Ed was in my car when we drove down to the coastal town of Damour during an Israeli air raid on a neighbouring Palestinian guerrilla base. A jet passed very low, scarcely 500 metres in front of us, and then released its bomb on to the town. A Palestinian anti-aircraft gun, of pitiful Second World War vintage, was being fired from a truck right beside our moving car, its empty cartridge cases bouncing off our windscreen. And I still remember the extraordinary thought that suffused my mind, presumably to stop myself being overcome with fear. Well, I said to myself, the worst that can happen is that we’ll be killed.

Which, of course, is how to get yourself killed. I have banished that kind of conjecture from my mind ever since. But you cannot escape it altogether. I was in Lebanon one winter when a journalist called me from London, told me she had been offered an assignment in Baghdad because it was about to be bombed by the Americans, and asked whether I thought it wise for her to report from Iraq. This was awful. If I said yes and she was killed, I would have a hand in her death. But if I said no, I would be harming her career and her free choice to be a journalist in a war, a spoilsport at the very least. So I said that this question was hers – and hers only – to decide. But I added that she should remember one thing if she set off to Iraq: that she was going there to report, not to die. And off she went to Baghdad and reported brilliantly. And happily survived.

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I once asked the great Lebanese historian and speaker of ancient Hebrew Kamal Salibi, an old and trusted friend, if he believed in life after death. He always delivered his lectures with the frightening articulation of a clergyman, high-pitched voice, precise, unanswerable. “There is nothing,” he replied. “It is the end. We are dust.” He died eight years ago, a devout Protestant and one of the most secular academics I have ever met in the Middle East. Mercifully, he just missed the Satanic birth of Isis. But for some years he exiled himself from Beirut because he feared for his life. Someone had reminded the Lebanese that Salibi was Arabic for crusader.

Oddly, I think it was the advent of the Isis cult which redirected our political narrative back to the subject of death. Not only was Isis cruel and boring but it was based upon the absolute threat of a terrible end to life. Its pornographic film of decapitations, drownings, mass executions and slow immolation by fire represented more than a nightmare – even for those who lived thousands of miles from the Middle East. It was an instrument of death, just like the metal tools the torturer would display before hanging, drawing and quartering his victims in front of grimly fascinated but – I fear – willing crowds in the Middle Ages. It presented us with the intimacy of suffering.

One of the most frightening elements to the Isis psyche of death was that it was also largely unemotional. Even in its house magazine, Isis excused its rape and slavery of Yazidi women with a brief (and utterly irrelevant) Quranic quotation. There was no justification, argument or excuse for these crimes. It was as if Isis was a machine. Its members were, and are, vicious automatons. They have the emotions of an anti-aircraft missile or a drone – and here we touch rather untidily, indeed with deep concern, upon our own technology of death. The more detached we are from the act of killing, the easier it is to kill. When US bomber pilots fire-bombed Tokyo in the Second World War, the only thing that upset them was that – even though they were in the air – they could smell roasting flesh.

That we produced Isis – through the barbarity of our outrageous invasion of Iraq in 2003 – becomes more evident by the month. We created this monstrous deviation from humanity. Before the Anglo-US occupation was a year old, I found piles of cassette tapes on sale outside a mosque in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. I bought several and took them back to my hotel in Baghdad. They showed dozens of scenes – all real, most of them apparently of Russian soldiers captured by Islamist militants in Chechnya. Each soldier was led into a room. A masked or hooded Islamist stood behind him. The man then drew his knife across the soldier’s throat. I realised at once that these were teaching aides: someone had arranged for these edited tapes – nothing was spared the viewer – to teach the fighters of Fallujah to be butchers. Which is what Isis became.

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And this was what Isis was intended to be. It also learned from us; from the massacres we perpetrated, the systematic, routine tortures we inflicted in Abu Ghraib – this, remember, included rape as well as humiliation – and the CIA’s black centres. We like to think that anger or insane fury drive us to murder most foul. But this is not so. It is routine, the sheer dull insensitivity towards pain or death which drives the Isis machine. Or the military machine. We are no longer killed. We are not executed. We are mechanically destroyed because we ceased to be humans to our murderers long before we died.

The most chilling seconds in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comes when the Hal 9000 computer decides to murder the three hibernating crew members of the Jupiter mission spacecraft Discovery One. A computer warns that Hal is turning off their life systems. “LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL” appears on the screen. And a warning klaxon sounds. Then comes the literal killer: “LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED”.

And there lies the most frightening moment. I am against all parallels or comparisons with the Second World War. But if our present-day technology had been available to the mass-murdering Nazis, would there not have been a set of computer terminals outside the gas chambers to tell the SS when it was safe for them to open the doors. There would surely have been screens. Life functions critical. Life functions terminated. Or do these computers already exist in the Middle East’s prisons for those deemed unworthy of life: Tora, Sednaya, Serkadji…?

I guess it’s perfectly reasonable for those living in the Shakespearian world of betrayal, suffering and death, that the people of the Middle East should take the finality of life more seriously than we do in the west. In the Arab world, you do not pass away – or pass, as our most recent vile expression would have it. You die. Or you are martyred. The afterlife is not always accepted without argument. Years ago, I was returning from a story in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, over the snow-covered Sannine Heights back to Beirut. My Sunni driver Abed (now long retired) sat next to me and an old Shiite friend, Imad, was in the back.

The snow was piled high on each side of the highway: we had fitted good old-fashioned chains to the tyres to make sure we did not plunge into the ravines on either side of the road and discover first hand if there was life after death. The sky was a deep, dark blue, the trees all skeletons with a harsh beauty we all understood. It seemed an interesting moment to raise the Big Question. Surely I said to my friends, we could not see this snow and sky and speak in the language of angels just because two gas clouds bumped together five billion years ago? Imad said he did not know the answer. Abed, who always called me “habibi” (mate), gave me a bleak reply. “All I know about our death, habibi, is that we go – and the world goes on without us.”

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Years later, I had completed a lecture in Belfast to a largely Catholic audience of adults and pupils at the Clonard monastery in the Falls Road. A schoolgirl asked me whether the Middle East would be a better place if there was more religion there. No! I shouted out, not without a grimace of disbelief. LESS religion, please. Then I was asked – Hezbollah-like – if I believed in God. Behind me sat a very elderly priest who, so far as I remember, was in his early nineties. So I told my audience of the conversation with Abed and Imad on the mountains of Lebanon. And I repeated my belief that a collision of gas clouds in outer space could not have brought about our lives. And the very old priest tapped me on the back of my shoulder three times. To this day, I do not know whether he was saying Not bad or Good try or You’re getting there.

At school, I learnt to play the violin – and played, alas, badly – but I do have a clear memory of occasions when I managed a very short section of a score quite well. And there was something quite ethereal about playing this music. Not my poor interpretation. But the very notes seemed to have about them something which was quite outside oneself. Who, I asked myself, invented the perfect fifth. Not us humans, surely. And I was much enthralled when I read the words of the American cellist and composer Michael Fitzpatrick, who wrote that when he played music, he felt a “divine presence” and experienced “a direct ‘revelation’ of God ... It is a very mystical experience ... I hear it turn into sound.” When he was 17, Fitzpatrick was playing a cello concerto by the 19th-century French composer Eduard Lalo, and he was to write that this experience – in front of a concert audience – gave him “the sense that I had been touched by God and given a specific gift through music.”

But if God exists – and I remain a journalist rather than a believer – truth should, after all, play a role in both professions; and I guess journalism, for some, for me perhaps, is a kind of religion. But this doesn’t resolve the problems which my Hezbollah travelling companion thought he could answer. On reflection, I’ve always thought that the Muslim afterlife was more pleasurable than the Christian version.

Born an English Protestant, I had the impression from childhood that heaven consisted of vast, well-trimmed lawns over which the dead walked in white robes, all the while entertained by Bach oratorios sung by violin-cradling angels in tall trees. Dull stuff. Whereas the Muslim heaven – the virgins, the rivers of honey – seemed, frankly, a lot more desirable. The virgins and rivers of honey, however literally they may be taken by Isis and its fellow killers, are metaphors, mere symbols of heaven.

On assignment in Northern Ireland to compare the confessionalism of the Middle East with the sectarianism of Belfast – both the direct result of western colonial rule, I might add – I called up the Rev Ian Paisley and told him I wanted to discuss heaven. Paisley and I always got on well. He used to ask me about Christian holy sites in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel and when I rang him, the familiar Paisley roar of laughter came down the line when I revealed what I wanted to talk about. But he met me at Stormont and listened with great concentration when I explained to him that the Muslim afterlife seemed a lot more attractive than the Christian – or the Paisley version – of heaven.

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He shook his head. “Robert, Robert,” Paisley replied with impatience. “You don’t know your scriptures!” And he took from his inside jacket pocket a small, slim volume with a red leather cover, fringed in gold. “Revelations 21:2,” he said, opening the pages. And Paisley quoth to me thus: “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” And that was Paisley on immortality.

When my mother was dying more than a decade ago – she suffered from Parkinson’s – I sat beside her bed and was seized with an idea which I tried to communicate to her. All I can remember now is that I wanted to tell her that we don’t really die, that... and I do not recall now what my explanation was for this conviction. Worse still, I did tell her that we humans did not die but, speaking to her seconds before she died, I could not then remember the end of my sentence. Did my Mum, if she was conscious of my words, say to herself, “well, go on then, give us the reason’’.

When I returned to Beirut, I told this story rather sadly to an old friend, Tarif Khalidi, who is himself the most recent translator of the Quran into English (and a very close friend of the late Kamal Salibi). I spoke to him of my remorse that I never finished my sentence to my mum, that all I could say was that we didn’t really die. And then I stopped. To which Tarif replied: “Well Roberto, what you did manage to say was pretty good!”

Perhaps the Sufi notion that dying is a mere transition, a stage in life rather than the end, a return to where we came from, was what I was somehow trying to explain to my mother. The 13th-century Persian poet and theologian Rumi displays this belief in “On The Day I Die”:

On the day I die, when I’m being carried
toward the grave, don't weep. Don't say,
He's gone! He's gone.
Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets
and the moon sets, but they're not gone.
Death is a coming together. The tomb
looks like a prison, but it's really
release into union...
Your mouth closes here, and immediately
opens with a shout of joy there

This interpretation is by the American poet Coleman Barks (whose reimagining of Rumi – often found on the internet – is in fact taken from others’ translations).

But I fear we must return to Dr Faustus. For most people, I’m sorry to say, one day or another, sell themselves to the devil, whether it be in our prisons, in the Isis cauldron, in the black-painted courthouse of Deir Hafar. And with the arms we – Americans, Russians, British – sell to the murderous dictators who suppress and torture their people, the tyrants of the region maintain their personal ownership of their countrymen’s lives. The Middle East is a place of betrayed souls, of justice sought but unfulfilled, of brutality most vile, often created by us and engendered by us in the people who live in these vast lands. They do not deserve it, the Muslims, Christians and Jews of the Arab world. They have done nothing to earn so terrible a reward.

The mystery to me – your typical western cynic, educated, perhaps, but inexperienced in such oppression – is that almost all these people still believe in God and, for the most part, in an afterlife. They still demand justice, still remain largely fearless in the face of death. That is the kind of courage – or is it faith? – that we in the west still do not recognise. Faustus be damned.