When Professor Brock called a break, I rushed outside. The messages on my phone confirmed my fears: “Souad, where are you?” “Souad, you must come home.” “Souad, come home now!”
Yes, something was definitely wrong at home. I ran back into the lecture hall and spoke with Dr. Brock. “Go home,” he said. “I hope everything is okay. You’ll let me know, won’t you?”
I ran for the bus, for the twenty-minute ride to my family’s apartment. When I burst through the doorway, everyone but my father, still at work, was seated around the television.
Wordlessly, I sat down and stared at the scenes of carnage from New York City. My thoughts immediately turned to my visit six months earlier. I had gone to lower Manhattan specifically to see the World Trade Center, the towers that stood so heroically, icons of American money and power.
Now they were gone. And all those lives.
“Maybe it was the Russians,” my mother said hopefully. And unconvincingly.
I glanced at Hannan, who was staring at me. “I hope no Arabs were involved,” she said. “If so, the backlash is going to be huge.”
But she and I already knew. Here in Germany, Muslims would suffer. We stared with horror and incomprehension at the televised scenes coming now not just from New York, but also from Washington, DC, and a small town in the state of Pennsylvania. How did this happen? What could drive men to such violence, such hatred, such extremism?
Very quickly, a German angle emerged. We learned that the plot’s ringleader, Mohamed Atta, two other hijackers, and several other key players in the attacks had lived and plotted in Hamburg, making up what would become known as the Hamburg cell.
I told my professors I had to go there to find out more. I called my former landlady, and it turned out my room was still empty. I took the next train to Hamburg and moved back in.
I had no newspaper to work for, so I started freelancing. The German papers were filled with reports about possible connections between Mohamed Atta’s group and the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg. A Moroccan student who had known Atta told me that he was brilliant but intense when it came to Islam. “If you want to know more, go to Steindamm,” the student told me, referring to a busy street in Hamburg’s red-light district. Atta and his friends used to eat at a chicken shop there, he said, and gave me the address.
So I put on my standard student uniform of jeans and a sweater, along with some lipstick and kohl, the thick black eyeliner favored by Moroccan women, and went to Steindamm. In this neighborhood, which I’d never visited during my time in Hamburg, sex shops, sex cinemas, and hookers coexist with small Turkish, Arab, and Persian groceries and informal mosques. I hadn’t anticipated the scene and felt a bit out of place. I noticed people on the street looking at me.
I went into a little restaurant the student had told me about and sat down near a window, just watching the activity on the street. I ordered bread with honey and listened as people at nearby tables talked in Arabic. They were saying that they were afraid their businesses would suffer, and they were warning one another not to talk to reporters.
“How is life, brother?” I heard one man ask, and I thought he and his companion must be relatives. Later, I came to understand that something like brotherhood and sisterhood knitted Muslims together, no matter where in the world they were.
The other man answered that he knew some of the men on the planes. “Oh, God, these journalists. They are asking a lot of questions. They think we are all terrorists.”
I sat there for a bit, drinking tea. The restaurant had a separate room for families and children, but I had chosen the main dining room, where the men sat. The people at nearby tables must have thought me strange, sitting there all alone.
A group of men sat at an adjacent table. One was obviously a respected personality. The others listened intently when he talked, and nodded in agreement. He spoke a Moroccan dialect of Arabic. “How should we have known that?” he said. “They used to be such nice guys.”
I knew that if I listened quietly I might learn something. I found that these men were affiliated with the al-Quds mosque. I discovered that the man to whom the others deferred was called al Hajj and was the head of the Mosque Council. Sometimes a reporter is simply lucky enough to pick the right restaurant for tea.
I went back to my apartment and looked for the number of the mosque. It was not in the phone book, and there was no Internet connection, so I went to an Internet café to get the number and called.
“As’salam alaikum,” a man’s voice said. Peace be upon you.
In my excitement I didn’t say “wa’alaikum as’salam,” the traditional response. After hearing the complaints about reporters, I didn’t identify the purpose of my call. I just asked for al Hajj.
“Just tell him it’s Souad,” I said.
“There’s someone called Souad who wants to talk with you,” the man called out.
When al Hajj came to the phone, I said, “My name is Souad. I’m Moroccan. I’m just trying to find out the truth about what is going on.”
He was a clever man. “I don’t want to talk with journalists,” he said. “They don’t honor and respect our rules in the mosque. Who are you working for?”
“I’m Muslim. I will respect the rules. Could we just have a cup of tea?”
He agreed to meet me for tea at a shop near the mosque the following afternoon, provided I did not tape the conversation. I was about to take the first tentative steps into a world I haven’t left since.
I had so many questions, not least how I was going to talk to him. Again, I wore the typical clothes of a German university student: jeans, sneakers, a shirt, and a jacket. He arrived wearing Arab trousers and a tunic. He had a long beard and looked solemn.
“Are you Souad?” he asked before sitting down. “We didn’t do anything. We had nothing to do with this. We cannot prevent people from going to the mosque. They came sometimes, they prayed, they ate.”
I showed al Hajj photographs of the men who had participated in the attacks. He studied them carefully. “That’s el-Amir,” he said, pointing to Atta, whose full given name was Mohamed el-Amir Atta. Al Hajj said he knew that people were going to say it was our religion that inspired the attacks.
We talked pleasantly for a while, and somehow he took a liking to me. He told me about a place nearby, a bookstore, where Atta and his group sometimes met.