Street of Thieves Read Online Free Page A

and when the demonstrations began in Tunisia I’d already been at the Thought over a year. My tranquility was a little upset by these events, I have to say. Sheikh Nureddin and the whole Group were like madmen. They spent all their time in front of the TV. They prayed all day for their Tunisian brothers. Afterward they started up collections for the Egyptian brothers.Then when the list extended to the Libyan and Yemeni brothers, they began organizing actions “for our oppressed Arab brothers.”
    When the uprising started in Morocco on February 20 th , they couldn’t stand still anymore. They took turns in sit-ins, demonstrations. My bookstore had become campaign headquarters: the group saw the Arab revolts as the long-awaited green tide. Finally, genuine Muslim countries would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, they dreamed about them at night. According to what Sheikh Nureddin told me, the idea was to win as many free, democratic elections as possible in order to take power and then, from within, by the conjoined forces of legislature and the street, to Islamize the constitutions and the laws. Their political projects didn’t matter much to me, but the incessant and noisy activism turned my life completely upside-down. They stopped letting me have constant access to the Internet (they needed it all the time), and I could no longer read quietly. There was always some activity, some demonstration to take part in, some broadcast to watch on TV. So I would spend more and more time downtown. I’d go read a detective novel over a cup of tea on the Place de France all afternoon. Sheikh Nureddin blamed me a little for my absences; he’d look at me reprovingly and say, you could take a more active part in our struggle.
    They took some blows. The cops had received orders to disperse the tail end of demonstrations not with tear gas or rubber bullets, but in the old style, by hand and with clubs, and they did pretty well for themselves: you’d see blue uniforms swarming over the bearded men. Since young people had to be in the forefront of the Movement, Bassam had been the first to sustain some injuries near the Place des Nations, late one night, and to return a hero, his chest streaked with bruises, a bandage on his nose, his eyes purple, still chanting “For God, Nation, and Liberation.” The model for all this was Egypt. That was the only thing on their lips, Cairo, Liberation Square. Egypt is an advanced society, said Sheikh Nureddin, the Brotherswill carry the day. He almost cried with emotion. I remember, when we heard a French specialist on Arabic society on the TV saying there are no Muslim Brothers on Tahrir Square, Sheikh Nureddin was incredibly upset at first. Lies, he said. May God destroy these miscreants. What bastards these Frenchmen are, they respect nothing, not even the truth. Ready to do anything to keep their power, those assholes. And then he got hold of himself, saying after all it’s not bad to stay in the shadows, it gave an even more legitimate feeling to the uprising. What’s more, the news from Egypt was excellent: the Brothers were confident of emerging the great victors in the free elections when they took place, and of forming a government. The first one since the Algerian swindle twenty years before.
    It was chaos in Tangier for at least a week, but Sheikh Nureddin could clearly see that it wasn’t taking the Tunisian or Egyptian path, that the Palace was more clever or more legitimate (after all, isn’t the King the Commander of the Faithful?) and that they’d have to form an alliance with a party already in place if the reform of the Constitution were to take place.
    A few weeks later, the King granted amnesty to an entire contingent of political prisoners, among them members of the Group who had been languishing in government jails since the massive roundups after the attacks on Casablanca years before. The Sheikh was euphoric.