During my interrogation by State Security in the UAE, after telling the full story of events, the interrogator leaned forward and asked me in a hushed, confidential tone, “Shahid, tell me, just between us….are you an agent?”
My arrest was a very theatrical event. I was hiding in a free-standing room within a villa compound. They came at around 6 a.m. I heard their voices before they got to the door, and looked out the little window to see what looked like an army battalion positioned with rifles at various corners of the compound, and at the gate, as two detectives in white thobes approached the door of my room. They were prepared for a full military assault.
Once they entered and handcuffed me, I tried to deny my identity. A plainclothes officer held up a photo, saying, “this isn’t you?” And then I understood the massively exaggerated approach they took to arrest me.
It was a picture of me, taken in the US, and which had only been on my home personal computer. It was, in other words, a picture of me provided to the Dubai police by the US, most likely by the FBI, which they had acquired from my PC by electronic surveillance. The Dubai police, therefore, believed they were arresting some kind of high value target. And they refused to believe otherwise.
They vacillated between thinking I worked for Al-Qaeda and that I worked for Western intelligence. When I refused to confess to either of these charges, they actually threatened to accuse me of being an undercover Jew and an Israeli spy. “You will be hanged as a traitor, and everyone will believe you were a Jewish agent, your family will hate you and spit on your grave.”
During the course of my imprisonment I heard so many rumors about my identity, including of course, the horrendous slanders written in the local media, it just became laughable.
According to the various speculations, I apparently fought with the Mujahideen in Fallujah during the US assault, I am an Al-Qaeda assassin who has killed dozens of men, taking orders directly from Ayman al-Zawahiri, I am also a CIA agent, an FBI agent, I am actually Chechen, and a pimp who funds terrorist operations through prostitution.
Truly people’s imagination becomes dizzying when it is mixed with suspicion, paranoia, and ignorance.
My writing on Egypt has now added new theories about my identity, invented both by the regime and by certain fraudulent “Islamist” leaders. They reiterate the conventional suspicion that I am an agent, but they can’t decide for whom. Perhaps CIA, perhaps Mossad, perhaps Turkey.
Because i am interested in the situation of Muslims in Egypt, Palestine and North Africa, but I am not Egyptian, Palestinian, or North African, I must therefore be some kind of new Lawrence of Arabia. It is apparently unthinkable that a Muslim should be interested in the suffering of Muslims who carry passports different from his own.
May Allah Guide us.