Posted by OFBJP (OFBJP@OFBJP.Org)
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Posted on Sat, 1 Jul 2000 20:40:27 -0400 (EDT)
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Overseas Friends of the BJP (USA) ........... Voice: (718) 271-0453 54-15, 108th St. ............................ Fax: (718) 271-1906 Corona, NY 11368............................ WWW:http://www.ofbjp.org BJP's Website: http://www.bjp.org and through miles and miles of Afghanistan wasteland. On the approach to Kandahar, near the airport, is one of bin Laden's houses, but the Taliban wouldn't let me anywhere near it. We drove a bit farther, past the market square where wrestling matches are staged each Sunday. If you time it right, you might be able to catch a glimpse of Mullah Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, who will sometimes stop by in his black Pajero S.U.V. with the tinted windows to catch a couple of matches. If he's in a good mood, he'll even send his bodyguards to challenge the local wrestlers. We continued on, past the Chechen Embassy, and soon enough approached the compound of the Shrine of the Respectable Cloak of Muhammad, from which the Taliban derive so much of their legitimacy among Afghan believers. The cloak of Muhammad is kept locked in a marble vault that is housed inside an elegant, one-story shrine in the center of town. The people of Kandahar believe that the Prophet Muhammad wore the cloak, and so they believe that proximity to the cloak will cure the sick and heal the lame. They also believe it lends its current custodians the mantle of Islamic legitimacy. At the Haqqania madrasa, they talked a lot about the cloak. The cloak has only been removed from its vault three times in the 250 or so years since it was brought to Kandahar by followers of the Afghan king Ahmed Shah Durrani. The last time it came out of its vault was in 1994, when Mullah Omar wore it to a rally of his followers. His decision to wear the cloak could have easily been seen as blasphemous, but things broke his way, and it was on that day that he solidified his reputation as the commander of the faithful. It is not easy to get inside the compound that houses the shrine. For one thing, the Taliban minder assigned to me, a mullah named Haji Muhammad, resisted my pleas for help. Mullah Muhammad -- actually, he admitted, he was not yet a mullah, having not yet passed his final examinations -- was a short, taciturn fellow who couldn't for the life of him understand why I wanted to see the Respectable Cloak Shrine. The other problem: the men of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice, who wear black turbans and black eyeliner (to make themselves appear fierce), were patrolling the entrance to the shrine, and they are terrible xenophobes. The first time I tried to see the shrine, I was accompanied by a photographer, Nina Berman. In accordance with local custom, Nina was dressed like Mrs. Khomeini at a wake, but to the men of the Taliban, she might as well have been Jennifer Lopez. We were rudely denied entrance. We did, however, get to touch the toothache tree. When the people of Kandahar feel the beginnings of a toothache, they come to this dead tree outside the shrine and hammer in a nail. Thousands of nailheads cover every inch of tree trunk. The interpreter who accompanied us explained that the tree actually worked as advertised. He once had a toothache and so banged a nail into the tree. One-two-three, his teeth felt fine. I looked inside his mouth. He didn't have any teeth in the Western sense of the word "teeth," just yellow stumps of bone that in poor, superstitious backwaters like Kandahar pass for teeth. After six years in power, the Taliban is good at waging jihad, but not good at all at providing medical care to the people of Afghanistan. Later that same day, I returned with the interpreter in the hope of getting a better look at the shrine. But he wouldn't go with me. "It's better if we sit in the car," he said, and then I realized how frightened he was. He was frightened of the Taliban, and he was frightened by Mullah Muhammad, who only grudgingly accompanied me back to the compound. We made it all the way to the front entrance of the shrine, but standing there were 15 or so young guards, thick wooden sticks in their hands. I turned around to ask Muhammad to intercede on my behalf, but he had made himself disappear. The young guards were angry, and they called me a "kaffir," an infidel. Then they ran me out of the compound. I made it to the car, and we sped off. "It's better to wait in the car," my interpreter said wearily. I asked Mullah Muhammad if we could see Osama bin Laden's house; he said no. What about Mullah Omar's house? No. But I knew he would turn down these requests. I was surprised, however, when he wouldn't allow me near the Jihadi madrasa. The Jihadi madrasa is Muhammad's alma mater, and it is one of the biggest in Kandahar. "Non-Muslims aren't allowed into a madrasa," he said. "It's against the Koran." Which is nonsense, of course. Nothing in the Koran or in the Hadith bars infidels from school buildings, and I said so. He asked me how I knew this. "Because I read the Koran," I answered. "In Arabic?" "No, in English." "The Koran comes in English?" he asked, utterly sincerely. The next day, frustrated to the point of paralysis, I complained to the Taliban foreign minister about Mullah Muhammad and his strange ideas. "This is the fault of the Clinton administration," Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the foreign minister, said. The foreign minister is a man completely lacking in charm, and he has a beard that has crawled up to within an inch of his eyes. He is touted as one of the sophisticates of the Taliban, a new face of moderation. He is not an easy small-talker, and so to thaw him out, I asked him how many children he has. "I have four boys and one girl," he said, and then offered, with no prompting: "The girl is my most beloved of all." Even the Taliban engages in spin. Muttawakil understood my frustration with Muhammad. "The attitude is regrettable," he continued, "but many of our young people feel very badly about America because of the missile attacks and because of these unfair accusations about Osama bin Laden, and so they aren't open to Americans." In other words, Taliban paranoia is an American creation? "Yes. We have done nothing to you, but you insist on treating us as an enemy." Muttawakil is no fan of America. "In America, parents do not show love to their children," he informed me -- but he said the average Afghan doesn't necessarily share his feelings. They may feel warmly about America, because of the help it gave to the mujahedeen during the struggle against the Soviets. Mullah Muhammad feels no such warmth, however. A couple of days after seeing the foreign minister, I asked Muhammad what he thought of America. "America is the place that wants to kill Osama," he said. "Osama is a great hero of the Muslims." Does anything good come out of America? He thought about that one for a while. "Candy," he answered finally. "Candy comes from America. I like candy." Did I mention that Mullah Muhammad is 17 years old? Because he seemed to have a lot in common with madrasa students in Pakistan -- and having no expectation that I would be allowed to plumb the mysteries of Taliban spirituality -- I began to ask Muhammad about his life. He was born in Kandahar, he said, but lived for a while near Quetta, one of the Pakistani cities that absorbed millions of refugees during the Afghan wars. He has attended madrasas all his life. He has never studied math or science or English or computers or history. He had learned the Koran, by heart, by the time he was 9. But he learned it in Arabic, and he speaks Pashto. All he learned were the sounds. I asked him if he has read any books beside the Koran. "Yes," he answered. "A book of Hadith." "Are you interested in reading other books? " "No. Why?" I asked him if he knew any women. His sisters, he responded. Any women not his relatives? No. I learned that he hasn't hugged his mother since he reached puberty. He listens to no music; he has never seen a movie. I asked him what the future held for him. He said he has already fought once with the mujahedeen against the northern alliance, and might do so again. And if you're not martyred in that fight? "I will return to my job." Why do you want to work at the Information Ministry? "This is not my regular job," he said, meaning baby-sitting for me. Where do you work, then? "I'm a teacher." Mullah Muhammad teaches the Koran to 9-year-old boys. This is what Maulana Samiul Haq imparts to his 9-year-old boys, and everyone else enrolled at his madrasa: America, he told me in one of our many conversations, was controlled by the Jews, who were in turn controlled by Satan. His is a worldview shaped by his understanding of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, but it is a worldview moderate Muslims might say is shaped by something else. For Samiul Haq, the world is divided into two separate and mutually hostile domains: the dar-al-harb and the dar-al-Islam. The dar-al-harb is the "abode of war." The dar-al-Islam is the "abode of peace." The dar-al-Islam is the Ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims. The dar-al-harb is everything else. In the 1980's, the Soviet Union epitomized, for fundamentalist-minded Muslims, the abode of war. Today, it is the U.S. that symbolizes the dar-al-harb. How this came to pass, how America, which supported -- created, some would say -- the jihad movement against the Soviets, came to become the No. 1 enemy of hard-core Islamists is one of the more vexing questions facing American policy makers and the leaders of a dozen Muslim countries today. One school of thought, Samiul Haq's school, says it's the Americans' fault: American imperialism and the export of American social and sexual mores are to blame. The other school of thought holds that Islam, by its very nature, is in permanent competition with other civilizations. This is the theory expounded by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who coined the term "Islam's bloody borders" -- a reference to the fact that wherever Islam rubs up against other civilizations -- Jewish, Christian, Hindu -- wars seem to break out. Men like Samiul Haq deride this view, and yet, in their black-and-white world, Islam stands alone against the world's infidels: Christians (or "Crusaders," in the fundamentalist parlance) to be sure, but Jews and Hindus especially. Haq, like many Pakistanis, even some Pakistanis of secular bent, say they believe that America's policy toward Muslims is directed by a Jewish-Hindu conspiracy. (A former chief of Pakistan's intelligence service sympathetic to the Islamists, Gen. Hamid Ghul, told me that Aipac, the pro-Israel lobby, sets America's policy toward Pakistan. "The Jews and the Brahmins have a lot in common," he said, referring to high-caste Hindus. "Like what?" I asked. "Usury," he responded, rubbing his hands together in the Shylockian manner.) In Samiul Haq's view, the West is implacably hostile to the message of Islam, and so the need to prepare for jihad is never-ending. "Jihad" is a concept widely misunderstood in the West. It does not mean only "holy war." It essentially means "struggle," and according to the traditional understanding of Islam, there are two types of jihad: greater and lesser. "Greater Jihad," is the struggle within the soul of a person to be better, more righteous -- the fight against the devil within. "Lesser Jihad" is the fight against the devil without: the military struggle against those who subjugate Muslims. Whenever I meet a Muslim fundamentalist, I ask them the same stupid-sounding question: Which is more important to Islam, greater jihad or lesser jihad? The answer, usually accompanied by an indulgent look, is usually something like, "They don't call it 'greater jihad' for nothing." The struggle against the external oppressor waxes and wanes, but the fight to suppress the evil inclinations within is perpetual. But in my conversations with Haq, and with mullahs across Pakistan and Afghanistan, I kept getting a different answer. "They are of equal importance," Haq said. "Jihad against the oppressor of Muslims is an absolute duty. Islam is a religion that defends itself." Jihad against the devil without has assumed a place of permanent, even overriding importance in the way these mullahs look at the world. This was surprising to me, because not even the leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, ever answered the question this way. (The thinking of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, is in line with Haq's. Mullah Omar has refused to meet face to face with non-Muslims, a policy ungrounded in the Koran or in the Hadith, but when I submitted a written question to him about the nature of jihad, he wrote in response: "Both the jihads have their own importance. In one, one struggles to amend his inner self, and in another he defends his religion.") When I asked Samiul Haq to explain why he placed so much emphasis on lesser jihad, he said: "Islam is a religion of limits. There are four pillars of Islam. Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, you must make once, only if you have the means. There is a limit to how much charity you must give. In prayer, we only pray five times a day. And fasting, we fast for only one month, Ramadan. But for jihad, there are no limits. Jihad must be fought without limits. There is no compromise in jihad." So where is the jihad being fought today? Against India? "Yes. The liberation of Kashmir is a holy struggle." He then said that jihad today should be waged against Serbia and Russia and Israel, and against the northern alliance, the Taliban's foe in Afghanistan. I asked him question after question about the Taliban -- why do they do the things they do? Finally he had enough: "Listen, if you Americans don't stop pestering us about the Taliban, we'll give them the nuclear bomb. How would you like that?" He also said it was necessary to wage jihad against America, for "occupying" Saudi Arabia. This jihad is the particular obsession of the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden: the struggle to evict American troops from Saudi Arabia, who are there at the invitation of the Saudi king. Samiul Haq says he believes that these troops are polluting holy soil. A jihad, then, is compulsory. And in a jihad, he said, these American troops are targets. I asked him if this is what he is teaching his thousands of students. "My students are taught Islam. This isn't a military school." Haq's secret was not that the Haqqania madrasa is a training camp for terrorists. And the secret of the Taliban -- the secret of Talibanism -- is not found inside the Shrine of the Cloak of Muhammad. The secret is embodied in the two 11-year-olds cocking their fingers at me, and in the taunts of the students in the mosque who raised their hands for Osama bin Laden, and in the person of Mullah Haji Muhammad, my 17-year-old minder in Kandahar who has no interest in any book but the Koran, and in the hundreds of thousands of young men like him at madrasas across Pakistan and Afghanistan. These are poor and impressionable boys kept entirely ignorant of the world and, for that matter, largely ignorant of all but one interpretation of Islam. They are the perfect jihad machines.
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