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Authors: Steve Hendricks
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welter of Indo-Aryan and Semitic languages spoken by men socializing on the hoof outside kebab shops where not long ago pizzerias had been. Politicians saw opportunity in such changes, and mean, small-minded parties of the Right rose to power in Lombardy on “the immigrant threat.” Their hysterics about the contamination of the culture, the language, and the race were exactly those of such parties everywhere. By the end of the 1990s, residents of foreign extraction made up just ten percent of Milan—chicken scratch by the standards of major American or British cities—but to hear the xenophobes, one would have thought it was forty-nine percent and counting. For immigrants, the result was hostility, discrimination in housing and jobs, and stops by police on the street to check their identification—dark skin being cause enough for suspicion.
These affronts came to be symbolized in a homeless Moroccan named Driss Moussafir, who in 1993 was killed, along with four policemen and firemen, by a Mafia car bomb that exploded near a park in which he was sleeping. From the reaction of many Milanesi, one would hardly have known Moussafir was among the dead. The mayor’s eulogy of the victims omitted him, high officials paid their respects at the coffins of the Italians but ignored his, and police and news reports listed him last, when mentioning him at all, and usually referred to the others by name but to him only as “an immigrant.” There were protests of this neglect, and the city grudgingly agreed to name a school for him where immigrants were taught Italian. The sign on the school misspelled his name “Woussafir.” Moussafir meant “traveler.”
To the devout Muslim, Milan presented additional trials, not least of which was a constant assault by the human, particularly the female, form. In Milan one inhaled sex as in Alexandria one inhaled sea air. The prevailing advertising strategy—for clothes and perfumes, cars and stereos, dishwashers and paper clips—could be summarized in the word “cleavage,” if cleavage were no longer associated with the naturally occurring breast. The breast of advertisual Milan was watermelonious, demanding, and seemed to spring from every other billboard and shop window. There were buttocks to match, their display meant to give a dromedary assurance that in this desert of life a man could mount such as those and ride a long time before reaching the next oasis (where, apparently, he bought paper clips). Ten minutes’ residence in mammarian, gluteal Milan could prove a trial for the devout Muslim. The city made manifest what came of a people who deadened themselves to God, and the newly arrived Islamist was not surprised to learn that the country’s great cathedrals were filled only when a Nobel laureate or a foreign philharmonic visited. Many a pious Muslim dove for cover in Milan’s mosques.
ABU OMAR CHOSE Italy partly because he knew a few Islamists who had settled there and partly because Italy, notwithstanding the growing hostility to immigrants, was still relatively liberal with grants of political asylum. Italy was also easy to get to. The refugee center outside Munich was not much policed, nor were voyages by train, so he simply bought a ticket on the express to Rome and one day in May of 1997 was off. On arrival, he requested asylum from his persecutors in Egypt. Apparently he did not mention his fraternization with the mujahidin of Peshawar or his arrest by the SHIK of Albania. He was given temporary quarters and help with his petition by the Jesuit Center of Rome, which abutted Vignola’s Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, not far from the Vatican—an irony for an Islamist with, as would later be discovered, a growing distaste for infidels.
It would take the Italian government years to weigh Abu Omar’s petition, during which time he was free to move about. He settled in the town of Latina, south of Rome, where friends helped him find work of an unknown kind in
These affronts came to be symbolized in a homeless Moroccan named Driss Moussafir, who in 1993 was killed, along with four policemen and firemen, by a Mafia car bomb that exploded near a park in which he was sleeping. From the reaction of many Milanesi, one would hardly have known Moussafir was among the dead. The mayor’s eulogy of the victims omitted him, high officials paid their respects at the coffins of the Italians but ignored his, and police and news reports listed him last, when mentioning him at all, and usually referred to the others by name but to him only as “an immigrant.” There were protests of this neglect, and the city grudgingly agreed to name a school for him where immigrants were taught Italian. The sign on the school misspelled his name “Woussafir.” Moussafir meant “traveler.”
To the devout Muslim, Milan presented additional trials, not least of which was a constant assault by the human, particularly the female, form. In Milan one inhaled sex as in Alexandria one inhaled sea air. The prevailing advertising strategy—for clothes and perfumes, cars and stereos, dishwashers and paper clips—could be summarized in the word “cleavage,” if cleavage were no longer associated with the naturally occurring breast. The breast of advertisual Milan was watermelonious, demanding, and seemed to spring from every other billboard and shop window. There were buttocks to match, their display meant to give a dromedary assurance that in this desert of life a man could mount such as those and ride a long time before reaching the next oasis (where, apparently, he bought paper clips). Ten minutes’ residence in mammarian, gluteal Milan could prove a trial for the devout Muslim. The city made manifest what came of a people who deadened themselves to God, and the newly arrived Islamist was not surprised to learn that the country’s great cathedrals were filled only when a Nobel laureate or a foreign philharmonic visited. Many a pious Muslim dove for cover in Milan’s mosques.
ABU OMAR CHOSE Italy partly because he knew a few Islamists who had settled there and partly because Italy, notwithstanding the growing hostility to immigrants, was still relatively liberal with grants of political asylum. Italy was also easy to get to. The refugee center outside Munich was not much policed, nor were voyages by train, so he simply bought a ticket on the express to Rome and one day in May of 1997 was off. On arrival, he requested asylum from his persecutors in Egypt. Apparently he did not mention his fraternization with the mujahidin of Peshawar or his arrest by the SHIK of Albania. He was given temporary quarters and help with his petition by the Jesuit Center of Rome, which abutted Vignola’s Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, not far from the Vatican—an irony for an Islamist with, as would later be discovered, a growing distaste for infidels.
It would take the Italian government years to weigh Abu Omar’s petition, during which time he was free to move about. He settled in the town of Latina, south of Rome, where friends helped him find work of an unknown kind in
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