Somebody Lied.

February 12, 2012

Somebody Lied.

Dear Brother,

Somebody lied. We graduated from Harvard law; magna cum laude. We married wives that made mother proud. Father made sure we were true to the faith. We had private tutors to help us understand as children. I was faithful brother. You of all should know how faithful I was.

But I got stupid along the way. I remember the sad look on your face the last time I saw you. Somehow, you knew what I was getting into. Do you remember the question you asked? You said “Nizzar, why?” I couldn’t answer. You called me a crazy fanatic, holding on to a doctrine outside what our faith teaches.

I’ll tell you why now. Amidst this torture, this eternal heat, this pain and terror… this nightmare that intensifies every second, I’ll tell you why.

I was desperate for something outside myself, so desperate in trying to find it, that I lost it all.

They lied to us brother. I wish I were as wise as you are. I wish you would even get wiser now and know the whole truth before you find yourself in this place where I languish.

You see, I fell in love with a boy, he was a young boy brother, he was just 12, and then I fell in love with another boy, and then there was another and another. I fell in love with the taste of good scotch in my mouth… I fell in love with the very things our religion speaks against. There were wild parties and orgies with beautiful women and beautiful young boys, I had them all. I fell in love with the vices and got covered with shame, especially when I looked at the portrait of father in the office foyer. It was everything outside what he wanted us to be. My path to redemption was the path I thought I followed.

Most of us took the fanaticism route, because we had fallen so out of ourselves in our sin that we felt going the extreme in our faith was redemption for our weakness. A weakness we fell into every night. Because we hated it in us, we tortured those who dared to get caught. We acted as the keepers of the faith, punishing them in such harsh ways; we meted out our frustration on them because they were covered in the dirt of what we were on the inside. I was said to be one of the extremely religious ones.

Those virgins? Somebody lied brother. You see, I felt I’d rather redeem myself and get to that place of endless orgies with the virgins, the comfort, exotic food and the peace, than keep torturing myself on earth.

Ali came in yesterday. I don’t know what his driving force was. He certainly wasn’t one of the frauds that paraded themselves for the faith; he strangely truly believed his cause. His mission was to take out a commercial airplane. He must have been proud of his mission. It was comical, his reaction when he found himself here. I would have laughed if little demons weren’t poking me every second.

I walked into a church brother. They looked so happy singing and dancing, I know you would have walked out at that point, but I was desperate, I couldn’t get myself to leave. I needed redemption badly, that’s why I pressed the trigger, the one that sent a signal to the explosives wrapped around my body. The last thing I remember seeing was a smiling baby crawling towards me, and his mother chasing after him. We estimated two hundred deaths. The moment the explosion went off, I knew somebody lied.

I am in a place like no other brother.

I regret the day we met Zubayr… I wish I walked away like you did, I wish I headed out to the airport with you, back home to my wife like I planned. But I hadn't seen him in years and I needed to catch up. And so I stayed back and got sucked into his words. He knows how to convince a fish that air is really water and make it want to stay on the beach all day. I, with my Harvard degree got sucked in. I once thought that the crazy extremism of fundamentalism was something the uneducated people who didn’t know better embraced. Obviously I was wrong. You knew better. You’ve always been more like father.

I am in pain brother. I hurt. I can’t describe what it feels like. But I can tell you this because I love you, please don’t come here. I have no hope in this place, but I write this all the same, using any second I can spare from the torture, to imagine it would get to you. I need you to tell cousin Aminu that it’s all lies. He's searching for redemption too; I hear he’ll be carrying out an assignment next month. Tell him brother. Work harder at convincing him than you did with me.

I know some do it for the money promised to their families, but we are wealthy brother, I did it for redemption. One thing I have understood from this is, we cannot redeem ourselves from whatever vices we’ve fallen into. We cannot redeem ourselves brother. Even with doing all the good we can muster. I learned this lesson too late. There’s something deeper, a truth we don’t understand, one we haven’t been taught. My self-redemption has sucked me deeper into a helpless and hopeless place of no return filled with torture.

Somebody lied brother. I don’t know where the lie started from, but it’s sipped through generations and made itself a whole river flowing in the minds of many in this age, in both the educated and the illiterate, the elites and the poor. Somebody lied so good that we are willing to give ourselves up for promises that are none existent.