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profession, he must not give in to personal anger. He must concentrate on boning up on everything Somali as speedily as possible, so that he can start writing about the place knowledgeably and without prejudice.
    Jammed up against the side of the car, as far away from Jeebleh as he can get in the confined space, Malik looks past Jeebleh at the ravaged streets of the metropolis. Something in the shape of anger-as-madness sticks in Malik’s gullet every time he visits a country in the throes of civil strife; but what makes this time unbearably hard to take is that this is his father’s country, a land of which his father has seldom spoken with affection.
    Both his parents were children of the British Empire, an offshoot of what Lawrence of Arabia had in mind to put together. His paternal grandfather, a Somali, worked as an interpreter and an accountant with his maternal grandfather, a Malay Chinese who’d been recruited toserve in Aden. Their children were schooled together, fell in love with each other, and married. Malik is of the view that perhaps an empire of a different thrust is now at work in Somalia. The Muslim world, from what he can tell, is at a crossroads, where several competing tendencies meet. One path is a burgeoning
umma,
a community of the faithful as conceived in the minds of Islamists who see themselves in deadly rivalry with both moderate or secularist Muslims and people of other faiths. The way Malik sees it, Somali religionists of radical persuasion are provoking a confrontation with the Ethiopian empire in hopes of pitting the Muslim world against Christian-led Ethiopia, even though Ethiopia, being militarily stronger and an ally of the United States, is very likely to gain the upper hand in the face-off. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, two nations with nuclear potential, are locking horns. With Afghanistan turned into a theater and Chechnya haplessly caught in the fray, several countries’ political and territorial concerns converge at oblique angles. And of course there is the never-ending conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, which puts a large segment of the Muslim world in opposition to the Jewish state and the United States. Empires are no longer won by the musket, as that old imperialist Kipling argued Britain had done. An empire is won by those with the wherewithal to hold it, to subjugate it. Malik doubts very much that Shabaab can win a war, let alone, having won it, hold on to the conquered territories.
    By now, Malik’s dejection has spread inside the vehicle, like a contagion for which no one has a cure. Dajaal drives on; the car moves as though on autopilot. Gumaad appears troubled as he tries to get in touch with “someone” big in the Courts hierarchy to intercede with BigBeard. Each time, the line is busy (with optimism he lets everyone know), or it rings and rings and no one picks up (which he does not bother to tell them).
    Jeebleh notes the absence of youths with weapons roaming thestreets, or armed clan-based militiamen high on drugs, intent on threatening the lives of those who refuse to do their bidding. Since his 1996 visit, most of the youths have grown beards and donned those white robes, save for the odd youth in military fatigues or an ill-matched uniform assembled from various post-collapse loyalties. The general collapse is still the same, though; houses with their insides caved in, with a Lego-like look to them, the floor below or the one above entirely missing.
    The great tragedy about civil wars, famines, and other disasters in the world’s poor regions, he thinks, is that the rubble seldom divulges the secret sorrows it contains. The technology, the forensics to determine what is what, scientifically, is not available; the dead are rarely identified or exhumed. Often no one knows how many have perished in the mudslide or the tsunami. One never gets to hear the last words that passed their lips, or what, in the end, caused their death: a