Brussels

Brussels was a short stop on Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s January 2000 journey from Canada toward Mauritania, but it became a point at which another future briefly seemed possible. At the airport, he found a place to sleep and pray, considered seeking asylum in Belgium, and then continued to Dakar, a cheaper route home that his family had arranged to meet.

Arrival and a possible new home

After living overseas for twelve years, Slahi was returning to Mauritania. He flew overnight from Montreal to Brussels and arrived in the morning, tired enough to sleep for an hour or two on an airport bench with his luggage as a pillow. He was due to continue to Dakar the following afternoon.

The airport struck him as small, orderly, and clean. Its facilities included restaurants, duty-free shops, telephone booths, internet computers, a mosque, a church, a synagogue, and a counseling office for atheists. Seeing these different religious and secular spaces together made a strong impression. Slahi considered whether he might seek asylum in Belgium: he spoke the language, believed his qualifications could help him find work, and remembered liking Brussels for its multicultural life when he had visited before.

Rest, prayer, and company in transit

Rather than pursue that possibility, Slahi went to the airport mosque. He performed the ritual washing, prayed, read the Koran, and fell asleep there. The quiet offered a pause in a journey shaped by fatigue and connections; another traveler arriving to pray eventually woke him.

The two greeted one another and discovered that they were waiting for the same flight. The man described himself as a Senegalese merchant who traveled between Senegal and the Emirates. He invited Slahi to rest at a club, whose name Slahi could not recall. Inside were a television, coffee, tea, cookies, newspapers, and a comfortable couch. Slahi spent much of his time sleeping there.

When his companion woke him for lunch, Slahi worried that he might not be allowed back into the club because he had no membership card. He had been admitted when his companion showed his own card. Slahi nevertheless went out to find food, obtained a meal card from the Sabena counter, and chose a vegetarian meal because most of the available food contained pork. He later returned to the club, where the two waited until their flight was called.

The road to Dakar

Slahi had chosen Dakar because flying there cost substantially less than traveling directly to Nouakchott. Dakar was about 300 miles from Nouakchott, and his family had arranged to collect him there. The stop in Brussels therefore belonged to a practical route home, even as its airport presented an alternative he briefly weighed.

After resting in the airport, Slahi felt energetic during the flight to Dakar. Before boarding, he had worried that his brothers might not arrive in time to meet him, which could leave him needing a hotel. A young woman seated beside him, who lived in Dakar and was studying medicine in Brussels, told him about local prices and warned that visitors, particularly taxi passengers, might be overcharged.

A threshold in retrospect

Slahi later connected his departure from Canada with the attention of U.S. security services: he said he had been watched but not arrested, and reflected that he had not understood the danger he believed he faced. Against that background, Brussels represents more than a transit stop. He recalled that the border seemed within inches and imagined that crossing it would have meant he never wrote his book. The narrative does not say that he sought asylum; instead, after praying and resting, he continued toward Dakar. The contrast between the life he could imagine in Brussels and the journey he actually took gives this brief airport interlude its retrospective weight.