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Jinn

A jinn is a supernatural being. According to Holy Quran and Hadith, God created jinn from smokeless fire, as He created human beings from clay and angels from light. Like humans, jinn possess free will and thus are capable of both sin and submission to God: “There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary: We follow divergent paths.” (Quran chapter 72, verse 11)

Jinn occupy a parallel universe hidden from human eyes—though they can see us, and may choose or be compelled to reveal themselves. Evil jinn may be enslaved by human masters, while good jinn may volunteer their service. The nature and magnitude of their powers is disputed, but they can do nothing contrary to the will of God . . .

JINN IN WESTERN MYTHOLOGY

In Christian Europe and the Americas, jinn are referred to as genies. The Western conception of the creatures comes primarily from adaptations of stories from One Thousand and One Nights, combined with elements of non-Arabic folklore such as the Greek myth of King Midas.

Western tales typically strip jinn of their moral agency, turning them into anthropomorphized wish-granting machines. The wishes invariably go wrong, resulting in tragedy or lasting humiliation for the wish-makers. Although commonly read as parables about the dangers of hubris, literary theorist Edward Said has argued that such genie stories also serve as propaganda reinforcing Western authoritarianism: “This message, that the natural order mustn’t be tampered with, encourages blind deference to one’s leaders—even as those same leaders show no compunction about imposing their own magical thinking on the world.”

The flight home left Andrews Air Force Base in the early evening. After takeoff, Mustafa rested his head against the window and watched America drop away over the horizon.

Amal was in the cargo bay, interviewing the prisoner. By default this should have been Mustafa’s job, but in his extreme annoyance at being apprehended, Donald Rumsfeld had revealed something he might better have kept secret: He spoke Arabic. Not well, and not willingly—but Amal had evinced a knack for goading him into talking and she’d wanted first crack at the interrogation.

The wounded Marine, Salim, was stretched out asleep in the rear of the passenger cabin. His presence on the flight was also Amal’s doing, although Mustafa, who’d been elsewhere when Amal and Umm Husam had spoken to Colonel Yunus, didn’t know the details.

Samir was sleeping too—or pretending to. Upon Mustafa’s return to the Green Zone, Samir had tried to quiz him about his meeting with the CIA director, but Mustafa had put him off, saying he could read about it in the official report. Samir was startled at first by Mustafa’s brusqueness, but then a sad understanding seemed to dawn in him and he nodded, saying, “Yes, perhaps that’s best . . . Perhaps that’s what I deserve.” Since then he’d been withdrawn and uncommunicative, keeping his head bowed during the ride to Andrews, his expression recalling the one he’d worn on the trip into the Red Zone: the look of a condemned man.

When it was too dark to see anything more outside, Mustafa sat up and got out the new reading packet that David Koresh had given him. It contained three artifacts, dispatches from beyond the mirage.

Item number one was a file from the archives of the Jihaz al Mukhabarat al Amma—the General Directorate of Intelligence of the Republic of Iraq—concerning an Iraqi National Police officer named Mustafa al Baghdadi. Mustafa had read it several times already, but now he began again, reviewing the details of his other life: a life recognizable in its broad strokes, yet bound and shaped by a very different set of constraints.

As in this world, he’d been a cop, trying to do good. But “good,” in the Republic of Saddam, was defined more by loyalty and submission to the Baath Party than by any normal measure of virtue. From a promising beginning—top marks in his class at the Baghdad police academy—he’d fallen swiftly. He was reprimanded repeatedly for being soft on suspects, using talk rather than more direct methods to obtain confessions and refusing to pursue cases against people he believed to be innocent. Then, in what should have been the end of his career, he’d attempted to arrest a Party official for the murder of a young girl. Mustafa had himself been arrested and held in Abu Ghraib for several months. Upon his release, he’d gone after the official again, this time turning up evidence not of murder, but of anti-government conspiracy—a much more serious crime. The official had been arrested by the Mukhabarat; Mustafa had received a personal commendation from Uncle Saddam, been restored to his former police rank, and warned to watch his step in the future. But the reprimands and brushes with Party authority continued.

The personal history ended in 2002, but attached to the file folder was a memorandum on United States Army stationery dated July 9, 2003. Written by a Captain Edward Lawrence, the memo requested that Mustafa al Baghdadi be cleared for work as a field translator, citing his strong language skills and “obvious anti-Baathist sentiment.” The memo said nothing about treasure-hunting in the desert, but given the proximity of Al Hillah to Baghdad, it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario where Captain Lawrence and his translator, grown restless perhaps after several years of nation-building, decided to go off-mission. Mustafa also suspected—Koresh had hinted as much—that if he kept this artifact near him, he might start to remember details. He wondered if he really wanted to.

The section of the file marked FAMILY listed only one spouse, Fadwa bint Harith. Mustafa wasn’t surprised by this—he sensed that Saddam’s Iraq didn’t have many Internet IPOs, so an honest cop probably couldn’t afford more than one wife. What he didn’t know was whether that would have made him a kinder and more devoted husband, or a more bitter one. He wished he could believe it was the former.

The reading packet also contained a Mukhabarat file for Samir Nadim, another Baghdad cop who worked in the same precinct as Mustafa. Samir’s police career had been less rocky than Mustafa’s, though it appeared their friendship had gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion.

Like Mustafa, he’d had a second career, but not with the U.S. Army. From 1997 through 2002, Samir had been an informant for the Mudiriyat al Amn al Amma—the General Security Service, which, as best Mustafa could tell, was another arm of Saddam’s secret police force that ranked somewhere below the Mukhabarat but still well above the ordinary street cops.

Samir had not volunteered to be a spy. A report included in the file explained what had happened: After an unnamed source had accused him of meeting in secret with “subversive elements,” Samir had been placed under surveillance and followed on several late-night excursions to see whether the subversives in question were Kurds, Turks, Iranians, or dissident Iraqi Shia.

The answer, as the accompanying photographs showed all too clearly, was none of the above. The report concluded there was no treason here, but recommended that Samir and his fellow “subversives” be conscripted into the Amn’s informant network. “To avoid public exposure of their vice, we expect they will be most obedient.”

We expect they will be most obedient . . . Mustafa looked across the seatbacks to where Samir was once again tossing and turning in his sleep. He considered waking him, asking what his nightmare was about, asking some other questions too. Then he took another look at the photographs and decided that midair over the Atlantic wasn’t the right place to broach this subject.