Introduction

The Mahdi is a techno-national security thriller. It presents Islam to the West from the perspective of the liberal Muslim and the liberal Jew, seen through the lens of a Bedouin-American badass. It is about Israel and the Middle East and is a tale of the liberal Jewish community and world legal opinion in a struggle against Israel’s Orthodox right wing. The role of Artificial Intelligence in warfare and education is fundamental to the story. Fiction brings a quantum computer in a cell phone and a chatbot named Emilie who vastly outshines the ChatGPT of today. The Mahdi was completed in June of 2023, so the recent Gaza combat give it color and immediacy, with a solution more realistic than we are seeing today in Gaza.

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Excerpt

Tangier

Friday

The Moroccan desert south of Tangier was hot and dry, as was usual at this time of year, with a wind stirring fine sand from the Sahara to the east and south. Shadows cast by the northern hills inched across a rock-encrusted sandscape toward a tented encampment, where a large group of men were seated in a circle between two large, ornate tents. Camels were tethered just beyond the circle, and an assortment of trucks were parked nearby. On the far side of the tents, women worked around several cooking fires, watching the men.

The man named Kufdani sat cross-legged in the circle’s center, atop a mound of dirt and sand. His eyes were closed.

A calloused open hand drove a slap toward Kufdani’s left cheek. His head jerked back enough to cause a miss, except for one ragged fingernail that caught his forehead near the hairline, bringing a thin line of blood to the surface. It matched several other bleeding scratches that mingled among a cluster of small, half-moon scars, similar but long healed. The slap from the opposite side followed immediately, but Kufdani dropped his head and lifted his right forearm to bump the slapping hand away from its target. The right-hand slap came again, part of an unceasing pattern, and again ended with a miss.

The breeze picked up another waft of sand, and another and another as the day grew into late afternoon. The watchful Bedouin crowd grew more still with each attempted slap, mesmerized, as blow after blow from a series of assailants failed to make direct contact.

“Time!” a male voice shouted at last, in Arabic.

A spontaneous shout erupted from the sitting crowd. “Kufdani, Kufdani!” They leapt to their feet and ran to help him from his perch, attempting to congratulate him by collectively pounding on his back. Several men hoisted him on their shoulders.

The Bedouin ritual was over. Kufdani had prevailed once more: no one had been able to slap him from the center spot, even though his eyes were closed. Nineteen Bedouin men from various tribes across the Middle East had entered the contest along with him. Even though their eyes remained open, each had been dislodged from his perch within the allotted three minutes of blows suffered per contestant.

Kufdani jumped from the shoulders of the men, who staggered under his shifting weight and slapped his back yet again. The others surrounded him still, waving their hands, reaching for him.

As he fought through the crowd, Kufdani decided it was time to figure out what all the excitement was about. An eager tension filled the desert encampment, and the chieftains clearly wanted something from him. The Bedouin rumor mill—active as ever—said it was about the West Bank.

It was always about the West Bank.

Pushing through the swarming crowd to the trough past the big tent, Kufdani dipped his head in the water, letting it run over his blood-spattered, sweat-soaked shirt as another tribesman pumped the handle on the aging well. Then he peeled the shirt over his head and rinsed again, until the water flowed from his thick black hair and down across his naked chest. He was tall—not quite six feet, four inches—with the muscularity of a gymnast, but thicker in the chest and stomach. A random series of ragged lines and puckered, half-inch circles appeared randomly across his torso and arms, healed masses of white flesh against his dark skin tone. Among the special ops community, where he had spent eight years, these scars were called “zippers” and “assholes,” depending on the shape and the cause: shrapnel and knife wounds versus bullet holes. A single, long scar ran down the side of his face too, beginning in the wrinkles beside his left eye.

Someone handed Kufdani a towel, and he wiped his face before accepting a dry shirt from one of his former assailants, who was grinning at him and squinting through a swelling, newly blackened eye from his own time on the contestant perch. Pulling the shirt over his head, Kufdani moved through the crowd, grinning and slapping the impatient hands that swayed in the air, toward the largest tent in the complex. A flap was pulled back, and he eased through the crowd, stepped inside the tent, and looked for a seat.

“Here, Kufdani!” a grizzled man in traditional garb shouted in heavily Bedouin-accented Arabic. “You are next to me. We have business.”

Slipping through the last of the admirers, Kufdani stood beside a colorful cushion woven from goat’s hair where the man sat. When he shook the man’s hand, applause broke out among the throng assembled in the tent. These were tribal leaders from the large Bedouin tribes—desert people who live traditionally by tending cattle or camels inland across the Middle East. They represented more than a million Bedouin Arabs who recognize no central government or authority. Kufdani waved to them and sat down.

The tent flap was dropped, and air circulated from the skirt as it was raised waist-level around the tent’s base. In a ring just outside the flap, other men gathered in the dust, legs crossed, to listen to the elders. Body odor was prevalent both inside and outside the tent.

Mint tea was served. The aging man in the traditional honor seat was named Badawi, and he had recently been elected the leader of all Bedouin tribes—by a substantial voting margin. A successful trader in livestock, he owned a prize-winning herd of camels and kept Arabian horses in several locations, all tended by his fellow Bedouins.

Badawi wore a scarf looped around his neck and a loose cotton shirt that fell around his waist. His face was a map formed by his life’s history in the bright desert, his skin a deep mahogany, built layer by layer from decades of exposure to the Saharan sun. Wrinkles pulled at his face and puddled near his chin and under his eyes, and hair grew densely from his ears and nose. His hands were dry and mottled with prominent purple bruises.

“Congratulations, Kufdani,” the old man continued. His speech was modulated by breath whistling past a missing incisor. “You are again victorious in our traditional game of slaps. Welcome back to the contest and to our gathering of Bedouin peers.”

“It is my honor to be here,” Kufdani replied, bowing his head slightly. “Thank you for allowing me to sit beside you during this meeting.”

“Yet something is more critical now than your honor alone,” Badawi said loudly, his voice quivering with emotion. “I have been elected spokesman for the tribes’ leadership. We need your winning skills, your leadership, in preserving the honor of the Bedouin nation.”

As he looked around the room, expectant faces peered back. “Honor is a vital component of our people’s being,” Kufdani replied in a strong voice audible to all seated in the tent. “How may I help preserve it?”

“It is the Israelis. They treat us as animals. They have stolen our land. We get no respect.”

Badawi’s voice rose.

“The Israeli government has bent our Israeli Bedouins over! The Orthodox Jews, the Haredim, are raping our Bedouin tribesmen. Their government moves our Bedouin people—Israeli citizens—from lands on the West Bank of the Jordan that we have occupied for two hundred years and then settles us by their garbage dumps. They build homes on our land for Russian Jews who don’t work, don’t serve in the military, and weren’t born in Israel. They attack our children on their way to school. A large percentage of them may not even be Jewish by DNA, though they are certainly Russian—Cossacks, mostly. Strange, no?”

“I know the story,” Kufdani said, his eyes narrowing. Knowing it didn’t make it any easier to stomach.

The Bedouin were a million strong—Sunni by religion, but Semitic by blood and historic language. Their ties to this contested land, and to their neighbors who also lived there, were strong. And yet these cousins were afforded none of the rights or respect due as a result of their history and lineage.

“We have long lived by our code of honor, hospitality and courage, and now we ask that you help us restore Bedouin honor,” Badawi repeated. “Tribes have banded together across the Bedouin nations to discuss the Israeli outrage. After endless discussion, we finally agree: we have little chance of defeating a nation like Israel. But we are Bedouin. Our honor is at stake. We must fight back.”

Kufdani contemplated the old man. “And what do you say is to be done? What would you have me do?”

Badawi waved his arms to the heavens. “We choose you to lead the way! You are an imam and a business leader. You have brought prosperity to Tangier’s Yahia Bedouin.” He paused. “Our honor has been violated, and without it we are nothing. With the new Israeli leader, things will get worse. But we have the courage to fix everything—if we have the right leader.”

“I understand,” Kufdani said, nodding. The Yahia tribe in Morocco had actively fought Israel’s policies on the West Bank, even filing suit in the International Criminal Court and arranging for the Moroccan foreign minister to successfully file a United Nations motion condemning Israel’s actions as a violation of the Geneva Convention. “The United States warned the new Israeli government not to annex the Bedouin land in the West Bank. Pressure is being applied.”

“Bah!” the old Bedouin scoffed. “You talk like a woman. Pressure, indeed. Why not just kiss their tiny, bald members and ask them to treat us nicely?”

Kufdani sighed. “Again, Badawi, what would you have me do? What would the tribes have me do?”

“Do what your grandfather Kufdani would have done!” Badawi cried. “You are now Kufdani. Use your resources to fight to regain Bedouin honor! If we can’t regain our lands by peaceful negotiations, we must make Israel’s actions terribly expensive for them. We will shed Bedouin blood if necessary so our children can live with honor, the Bedouin way.”

Kufdani held Badawi’s gaze. “You speak of shedding Bedouin blood,” he said. “If it is to be shed, it must be shed under the total control of the Bedouin nation. All the tribes. There should be no holdouts, no exceptions. Sacrifices must be made, both in time and in blood. We Bedouins must be in this together.”

Discipline, he knew, was everything. The old man was talking about the loosely organized Bedouin nation making war on a strong, violent sovereign nation—a military that was, person for person, the best in the world. It couldn’t be done in any traditional way. Yet Kufdani was an American, Bedouin through his mother’s side only, and his influence had always been limited.

“Each tribe has committed to doing what is necessary to recover our nation’s honor,” Badawi insisted. “We will depend on you to guide us.”

Kufdani looked around the room at the silent, attentive men. “There is a time for dissent and discussion. If I am to do this, that time is over. To be your leader, I must have both obedience and dedication to my command.”

He sat back on his cushions for a few moments, silent as he considered what was to be done—and whether he was willing to be the one to attempt it. Then he spoke.

“Collectively, you will recruit all tribes—even those not represented here—to our cause, and you will demand that they follow my rules as part of the Bedouin culture, as though our lives depend on it. Because they will.

“This is going to be hard. I require each tribe, depending on size, to devote one or two of its best men to our effort. Not slackers! You will provide leaders—under forty years of age would be best. I may call for assistance, and I expect to get it.”

Kufdani thought for a brief moment and then announced he would send a list of requirements to the tribes, each of which would then supply names and qualifications in response. When these chosen leaders returned home from their efforts, the remainder of their tribe would be influenced by their guidance.

“This is not the time for independent action,” he continued. “The full measure of the Bedouin nation effort is impossible without the involvement and enthusiastic participation of our women too.”

He explained that each tribe would also pick a female leader for its women—one without constraint on her education. She will be chosen for her wisdom and treated with respect as a Bedouin leader, following the guidance of other Bedouin women affiliated with Kufdani Industries, in southern Spain.

Furthermore, education would be provided to all Bedouin children without exception, both girls and boys, with the help of teaching materials provided by Kufdani Industries—the same educational approach that gave rise to the commercial success of the Yahia tribe in Morocco. Together they must create a new model of the Bedouin worker, Kufdani insisted, by educating their people better than others did. Their tribes would need to develop strength going forward if they were to stop the Israelis from violating their honor again and again.

“All tribes must participate!” he said, raising his voice for all to hear. “Those that don’t will answer to Badawi and to the rest of the Bedouin nation.” He turned to the tribes’ spokesman. “I will investigate what can be done, Badawi. You will take a new reading of the tribal leaders, their followers, and their ability to obey instructions, and we will talk again in a few days.”

“No,” Badawi said. “These discussions have taken place at length already.”

Kufdani stood before the crowd of hopeful faces, thinking what an unfamiliar sight it was. “Then gather everyone’s information,” he commanded, looking down at Badawi but addressing all of his people too. “Choose your leaders, and tell me about them in writing. Prepare to send them to me. I will contact you with guidance in a few days and then expect your response within a week.”

The spokesman nodded enthusiastically. “The Bedouin nation is committed to you as our leader in this matter of honor. We await your command, Kufdani.”

Kufdani nodded in return. “I expect obedience if I am to undertake this matter. If I, as your leader, commit fully to this endeavor, I expect each of you to respond in kind.”

Dinner was within sight, and Kufdani longed for a good night’s sleep before his return to Tangier in the morning—the sleep he could find only in the dark emptiness of the desert.

“Now,” he announced as he sat down, “let’s get back to our tea.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions from the Author:

1. How is the path chosen in The Mahdi better for Israel than the path Israel has chosen, post Oct 7, 2023

2. Is the treatment of the orthodox right, the Haredim, unfair or anti-semitic?

3. How much does the fictitious quantum cell phone, the Kphone, add to the story and what would there be without such a device and capability. Would the EMP capability be enough to carry the Mahdi story?

4. Are the sex scenes realistic and within the acceptable bounds of a thriller? How should they be made better?

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