Pier 22: "When an armed militia arrested me in Libya"

This is a browser translation of an article in an Arabic periodical I follow via Twitter, Pier 22. The gender pronouns seem wrong and the punctuation is strange, but the painful power of his prose shines through. Libya qualifies as a "failed state" still in the grips of civil conflict, another sad remnant of US foreign policy gone awry. 

Salah Ali Anqab is a Libyan writer, journalist, human rights activist and founding member of the Libyan Liberal Party. Resident in Germany after being kidnapped, threatened and stalked. An activist on the issue of secularism, linguistic and religious rights in Libya. 

Then I was the piece of meat that had nothing in his or her pocket ...

Because I am a writer who does not belong to a militia of the rebel militias, I was arrested by an armed militia, whose members did not read a line that I wrote for more than ten years. I knew this through two routes: first, they did not know my name, they kicked me with their feet, The second is that I saw their ignorance as I say, and they ask me about answers none of them really cared about. We spoke the same language, but they were lost in translation.

I felt sad, not myself. It was my birthday, the tenth of October 2014, and because I believe that God does not like playing with numbers, I knew it was not fair to die on my birthday, it was a good coincidence I simply did not deserve it.

I knew that day that everything I thought was true, yes, we had become a pathetic people, a people who had lost faith because of the meaning of goodness, truth and beauty. After they removed the bag from my head, I saw young men with half- One idea is that each of them holds God in his pocket, and I was the one who was in front of them because, as they said, twice the enemy of God and ten times the enemy of the people and the revolution, they spoke sometimes as if they were the people, I saw the restraints in their hands and tongues, I knew and I saw pistols and knives If you threaten me Bearer slaughter I did not admit something did not tell me what it is, you know that most of whom will die before me, from carrying a gun must be played once a bullet to pass through it.

This insert carries a subtle difference
from the text: the word compassion
is translated love despite both being
translated by an algorithm. 

My country has turned into a Wahhabist colony, a country inhabited by evil people, and few people to supplement the population list, above a large desert where everyone sleeps when they feel thirsty, to forget their thirst through a wet dream. It's worse than a natural disaster, like an earthquake that turns the planet upside down, or a flood that fills the Sahara with salty water and dead fish. I saw this picture ten years ago, but on the day I was abducted it turned into a living reality. The law of God can be summed up in the ability to kill those who do not repeat his words, but the one who raised my compassion is a young man who did not exceed the age of half my age only years without the number of fingers of one hand, it was his name Abdullah, all their name was Abdullah.

All the servants of God have denied everything that one can see through the beauty of the universe, the music, the handshaking of women, even their mothers. They were all pathetic as they lined up as pieces of flesh to pray, and behind them my body lay alive until someone decided otherwise. One is not worth anything, so their number is not as real, as important as that of the teenager who holds a pistol in his hand and in the other hand a piece of meat he threw a shot approached, trembling, from the dinner dish.

It was all about the piece of meat, the one the cat made of it, those scattered in the far room, or those praying to God in her pocket.

I saw in my eyes this angry young man who slaps me, a whole people driven by the hatred that leads to delirium. I saw in Abdullah the fighter everything worth the pity. People are more selfish than tired themselves in searching for the cause of their mistakes. Abdullah was a mistake committed by his parents. And the whole society, what is happening in my country is a flood that brings death, shame and bad luck as well, and whoever survives the first must be in the second and the third together.

All the charges were raised by the group of the believers in God and the revolution over my head, and I answer them with confidence I did not know the reason, through the question: Is life possible is lived by a person looking only for enemies ?!

But the look of sadism from Abdullah's eyes was something else, something that was not as frightening as something of concern and pity. I saw this view in the eyes of all those who justify their crimes as not falling within the circle of halal and Haram.

Some good intentions reach hell, they justify hatred and violence with fatwas that are full of mosques filled with worshipers who wear their heads every Friday, curses against all others, until they themselves, silent those who believe they exercise patience, after they blocked the road of the mosque in the previous Friday prayers.

After he kicked me on the stomach with his foot, he picked up a knife and started waving it. It was a simple experience when compared to the stories of the disappeared in the heavily armed charity cells. I know a friend who spent a whole year in a closed room. He was sure of his faith after he tried to measure him with the ruler and failed to do so.This is an experience I have lived and I think I have not misunderstood, the experience of unjustified war, and turning a whole generation of children into active members of militias fighting each other for no reason to justify killing is a fatwa. Yes, murder can never be justified. A Wahhabi colony in which the people are transformed into a flock of looted spearmen, a herd of individual wolves, where murder leads to the beginning of life. It is an upside-down world, the ascent of the slope leading down.

Abdullah was the victim of ignorance, but the worst is to be the victim of the holy ignorance, where all the crimes committed by him, is the virtue of particular, he accuses me of infidelity, although he did not enter my skull to know the space of the conscience of the good, and my crimes, The neighbors to masturbation for the purpose of sleep tired, but he was firm that the sky outside his skull is too small to contain anything else, contrary to what the body of a grandfather does not know the place of his grave.

He saw the world as a dead, open-eyed rabbit, filling his heart with faith caused by the coincidence of the place of birth, and the place was just a dark well filled with teenagers who continued to do the mistakes they thought would make the world aware of their existence as men who could change this world into paradise , Tomorrow.

And tomorrow never comes ...