The Fox Hunt: four strangers, thirteen days, and one man’s amazing journey to safety

by Mohammed Al Samawi

A breathtaking escape story that reveals the power of technology to connect people across cultures with life-saving results.

Growing up in Yemen, Mohammed Al Samawi was smart, bookish, and committed to his faith. He had little interest in the non-Muslim world, beyond an intense hostility to Islam’s enemies.

All that changed when a teacher lent him a copy of the Bible, sparking his interest in other faiths. Venturing online, he began to connect with people of different cultures from all around the world, and started the improbable journey from dreaming of taking vengeance on the ‘infidels’ to devoting his life to inter-faith dialogue.

But then Yemen crumbled into war. Trapped and alone under bombardment, he managed to get online and put his life in the hands of a rag-tag group of Facebook friends he barely knew. Near-strangers to each another, with zero experience in military strategy, the team of four, spanning New York, San Francisco, and Tel Aviv, achieved the seemingly impossible. They crowd-sourced escape routes and activated their networks to help save Mohammed from certain death.

The Fox Hunt is an exhilarating real-life survival story of faith, curiosity, and the power of human connection in the face of conflict.

• ISBN10: 1911344986
• ISBN13: 9781911344988
• Publish Date: 12 April 2018 (first published 10 April 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 March 2022
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Scribe Publications
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[Heather]

I didn't know much about the causes of the war in Yemen until I read this book.  It still doesn't make much sense to me because it boils down to "Those people look different than us and think differently than us."  It is that kind of mindset that Mohammed Al Samawi was working against prior to the war. 

The stars of this story of the activists around the world who play a high stakes game of Six Degrees of Separation.  Who do you know?  Who do they know?  Can you get one man from Aden to Africa?

What struck me while reading this is the problems that are caused by Yemen's patriarchy/toxic combination of masculinity and religion:

1. The whole conflict could be put down to this


2. He was unable to shelter with his uncle's family because his uncle wouldn't let him in the house where his unmarried female cousins lived.  How messed up is that?  Your nephew is alone in an apartment in a war zone but you won't take him in because you assume he wouldn't be able to sexually control himself around his female relatives?


3. Because he was male he was completely unprepared to live on his own without women to care for him.  He moved to Aden and was living alone.  He ate out daily since he didn't cook so he had minimal food and supplies in the house when all the shops closed down.


4. After he was out of Yemen due to the help of a group of interfaith activists he was still too afraid to tell him mother (still living in a war zone) that he had been talking to Jews.

 

I found the beginning of this book with his entry into interfaith dialogue more interesting than the story of his escape from Yemen.  I think that is partially because the writing is very plain.  It reads like "This happened and then this happened and then this happened..."  Secondly, I mostly just wanted to shake the guy.  This is not a heroic memoir.  Mohammed Al Samawi isn't brave.  He isn't very good at planning.  He moves from Sanaa to Aden but neglects to bring his passport even though he travels for work.  These things all make trying to flee the country harder.  He uses the distraction of a Northern man like himself being publicly tortured to death in the street by Al Qaeda to escape from his apartment while wondering why no one tries to help that man.  He even refers to himself occasionally as a man-child.  He was in his late 20s in 2015 when this happened.


In the end there were so many different lobbying efforts going on that it is not clear who succeeded in getting the order given to let him on the ship from Aden to Djibouti.  I wish this had been investigated.  It seems to be a very strange thing not to know who allowed his transport in a book about arranging his transport.  

In the absence of facts, he falls back on the idea that God arranged his rescue.  While comforting for religious people, this makes nonreligious people want to pull their hair out.  Basically he saying that his God ignored everyone else stuck in a war (about religion and power) to concentrate on giving him special attention.  It also diminishes all the hard work that people did on his behalf.


 



 This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story