[sacw] Pakistan: Education of a Holy Warrior

[aiindex@mnet.fr]

The New York Times,
June 25, 2000
[http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000625mag-taliban.html]

INSIDE JIHAD U.
The Education of a Holy Warrior

In a Pakistani religious school called the Haqqania madrasa, Osama bin
Laden is a hero, the Taliban's leaders are famous alums and the next
generation of mujahedeen is being militantly groomed.

By JEFFREY GOLDBERG Photographs By Laurent Van Der Stockt

About two hours east of the Khyber Pass, in the North-West
Frontier Province of Pakistan, alongside the Grand Trunk Road, sits a
school called the Haqqania madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim religious
seminary, and Haqqania is one of the bigger madrasas in Pakistan: its
mosques and classrooms and dormitories are spread over eight weed-covered
acres, and the school currently enrolls more than 2,800 students. Tuition,
room and board are free; the students are, in the main, drawn from the dire
poor, and the madrasa raises its funds from wealthy Pakistanis, as well as
from devout, and politically minded, Muslims in the countries of the
Persian Gulf.
The students range in age from 8 and 9 to 30, sometimes to 35. The
youngest boys spend much of their days seated cross-legged on the floors of
airless classrooms, memorizing the Koran. This is a process that takes
between six months and three years, and it is made even more difficult than
it sounds by the fact that the Koran they study is in the original Arabic.
These boys tend to know only Pashto, the language of the Pathan ethnic
group that dominates this region of Pakistan, as well as much of nearby
Afghanistan. In a typical class, the teachers sit on the floor with the
boys, reading to them in Arabic, and the boys repeat what the teachers say.
This can go on between four and eight hours each day.
What Westerners would think of as high-school-age and college-age students
are enrolled in an eight-year course of study that focuses on
interpretation of the Koran and of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet
Muhammad. These students also study Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic
history. The oldest of those attending Haqqania -- the postgraduates, if
you will -- are enrolled in the "mufti course." A mufti, in Islam, is a
cleric who is allowed to issue fatwas, or religious rulings, on matters
ranging from family law to the rules governing the waging of jihad, or
"holy war." (One room in the school's administration building houses upward
of 100,000 fatwas issued by the madrasa over the years.) There are about
600 students in the mufti course.
Very few of the students at the Haqqania madrasa study anything but
Islamic subjects. There are no world history courses, or math courses, or
computer rooms or science labs at the madrasa.
The Haqqania madrasa is, in fact, a jihad
factory.
This does not make it unique in Pakistan.
There are one million students studying in
the country's 10,000 or so madrasas, and
militant Islam is at the core of most of
these schools. Many madrasas are village affairs, with student bodies of 25
or 50. Some of the madrasas are sponsored by Pakistan's religious parties,
and some are affiliated with the mujahedeen groups waging jihad against
India in the disputed province of Kashmir.
Haqqania is notable not only because of its size, but also because it has
graduated more leaders of the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling faction, than
any other school in the world, including any school in Afghanistan. The
Taliban is today known the world over for its harsh interpretation of
Islamic law, its cruelty to women and its kindness to terrorists -- the
most notable one being Osama bin Laden, the 42-year-old Saudi exile who the
American government believes was behind the bombings two years ago of the
United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Taliban also seems to
harbor a deep belief in the notion of a never-ending jihad, which makes the
Haqqania madrasa a focus of intense interest in such capitals as Washington
and Moscow and New Delhi and Jerusalem, where the experts are trying to
understand just what it is the Taliban and its sympathizers want.
At any given time, there are several hundred Afghan students at the
madrasa, along with dozens from such former Soviet republics as Kazakhstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and a handful from Chechnya too. To those who
see wars like the one in Chechnya as expressions not only of nationalist
aspirations but of pan-Islamic ones as well -- to those who see a new
Islamic revolution on the horizon, a Sunni revolution a generation after
the Shia revolution that shook the world -- the foreign presence at
Haqqania is not comforting.
The majority of Haqqania students come from Pakistan itself, a fact that
also worries officials in Washington and Moscow and New Delhi and
Jerusalem. Pakistan's Islamists are becoming more and more radicalized --
Talibanized," some call it -- thanks in part to madrasas like Haqqania, and
Pakistan is showing early signs of coming apart at the seams. Pakistan also
happens to be in possession of nuclear weapons. Many Muslim radicals say
they believe these weapons should become part of the arsenal of jihad. It
turns out that many of the Haqqania students, under careful tutelage, now
believe it, too.
t is for all these reasons that on a hazy morning in March, I presented
myself at the office of the chancellor of the madrasa, a mullah named
Samiul Haq, in order to enroll myself in his school. My goal was simple:
I wanted to see from the inside just what this jihad factory was producing.
Maulana Haq -- maulana means "our master" -- is a well-known Islamist with
pronounced anti-American views. He is a Deobandist, a follower of an
Islamic movement born in India in the days of the British Raj; it was a
movement devoted to anticolonialism, and its outlook is not dissimilar to
that of Wahhabism, the austere, antimodernist Saudi variant of Islamic
fundamentalism embraced by Osama bin Laden. The chancellor is a friend and
supporter of bin Laden, and he has granted an honorary degree -- the first
and only in his school's history -- to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.
Samiul Haq is also a politician, a former senator who today leads a faction
of the Jamiat-Ulema-Islami, the J.U.I., a radical Islamic party seeking to
impose Shariah, or Islamic law, in Pakistan. The maulana, it is said, would
like to see Pakistan become more like the Afghanistan of his Taliban
disciples.
Because of his views -- and because he is said
to have endorsed a 1998 fatwa issued by bin Laden
that called on Muslims to kill Americans wherever
they may be found -- I was not sure how well we
would get along.
I was made to wait outside his office for 20
minutes. Students would pass by, shooting me
looks ranging from the quizzical to the hostile.
Eventually, I was invited in by two of the
maulana's sons, Hamed, who is 31, and Rashid, who
is 27 and in charge of designing the madrasa's
Web page. We were joined by several of the
madrasa's teachers and students, and we made small talk
while we waited. One student, surprisingly, mentioned that
my last name is the same as that of a star of World
Championship Wrestling.
The maulana came into the room in a rush, and sat down right beside me. He
is a man of 65. He was barefoot, and his toenails looked as if they were
covered with rust. He had a long beard dyed a kind of fluorescent brown,
and a loosely wrapped turban sat on his head. He has two wives and eight
children, he told me, and he seemed, right from the start, a very happy
man. He dispensed with small talk almost immediately, in order to let me
know that I should feel at home.
"The problem," he told me, through an interpreter, "is not between us
Muslims and Christians."
I knew where this was going, but stayed silent.
"The only enemy Islam and Christianity have is the Jews," he said. "It was
the Jews who crucified Christ, you know. The Jews are using America to
fight Islam. Clinton is a good man, but he's surrounded by Jews. Madeleine
Albright's father was the founder of Zionism."
"I'm Jewish," I told him.
There was a moment's pause.
"Well, you are most welcome here," he said.
And so I was.
The maulana made me an offer: I could spend as much time as I wanted at
the madrasa, go wherever I wanted, talk to anybody I chose, even study the
Koran with him. He had a point he wanted to make, of course: his madrasa
might be Taliban U., but it was not a training camp for terrorists.
trictly speaking, Haq was right: I never saw a weapon at the
Haqqania madrasa. The closest guns could be found across the Grand
Trunk Road, at the Khyber Pass Armaments Company, a gun store that
sells shotguns for $40 and AK-47's for $70. And I never heard a lecture
about bomb making or marksmanship.
On the other hand, when the Taliban was faring badly not long ago in
battle against the northern alliance -- the holdout foe of the Taliban in
Afghanistan's seemingly endless civil war -- Haq closed down his school and
sent the students to the front. (He would not tell me how many never came
back from the front.) Classrooms were full when I visited Haqqania this
spring. For a cramped campus housing so many students, it was, most of the
time, unusually quiet. The hustle and energy of town life never seemed to
intrude, and what noise there was mostly came from the Grand Trunk Road,
just outside the gates of the school, where the horn and not the brake is
the driver's primary defense against accident, and buses and trucks compete
for space with donkey carts and the occasional camel train.
There were no TV's, no radios that I could see. The students woke up
before dawn, to pray in the madrasa's mosque. The dormitories were
threadbare and filthy, and there was no cafeteria, per se: students lined
up at the kitchen with their plates and spoons and were fed rice and
curries and nan, the flat Afghan bread. Suffice it to say, the students at
the madrasa almost never see women. There were no female teachers, no
female cafeteria workers, no female presence whatsoever at the madrasa.
There is no such thing as parents' day, or family day, when mothers and
fathers and sisters and brothers come to visit. To be sure, I did see, on
occasion, a facsimile of what we in the West call student life: like all
Pakistanis, the young students are cricket fanatics, and in the late
afternoon, they would play on a dirt field across the road from the school.
There was a dusty patch and a net for volleyball too. But most of the day
was devoted to Islam.
The youngest students interested me particularly. They had not yet been
armored in the hard-casing of jihadist ideology, and yet they seemed to
incorporate the politics of the madrasa into their play. Two 11-year-old
boys, both Afghan refugees who came to the school from Peshawar, would
follow me around wherever I went. They wore pots on their heads, and their
version of hide-and-seek was to jump out from behind a tree or some other
hiding place, scream "Osama!" and pretend to shoot me.
They were also fascinated by my shoes. Shoes weren't worn in class; they
were left outside the rooms. So for reasons of poverty as well as
convenience, most students owned a single pair of slippers. My Timberlands,
then, were a source of conversation, and I once caught my two 11-year-old
pursuers trying on my shoes. I tried to learn what I could about these
boys, but they were reticent. And my minders -- there was usually someone
from Samiul Haq's office with me, listening in on my conversations --
didn't want me probing too deeply into how boys came to be students at the
madrasa.
The youngest boys were kept under lock and key, in a three-story dormitory
guarded by older students, and I wasn't allowed to see how they lived. The
two 11-year-olds were refugees, I eventually learned. One of them lost his
father in Afghanistan. Their mothers spend their days gathering firewood.
They are as poor as poor can be. Compared to a refugee camp, the madrasa is
a palace, and they are blessed to be here, where they eat food every single
day. No one else -- certainly not the government of Pakistan -- would
provide them with an education, room and board.
During the school day, I would make a special point of auditing classes in
which the Hadith was studied, because so much of Islamic thought is found
in the Hadith, and also because the Hadith has traditionally been
understood to be a text open to interpretation, argument and rigorous
intellectual inquiry. But such is not the case at the Haqqania madrasa. In
the classes I attended, even the high-level classes of the mufti course,
the pattern was generally the same: a teacher, generally an ancient,
white-bearded mullah, would read straight from a text, and the students
would listen. There was no back and forth. It seemed as if rote learning
was the madrasa's only style of learning. During one particularly dreary
class, I abandoned my interpreter and left the room. In the hallway
outside, a poster was stapled to the wall. On it was a picture of a
split-open watermelon whose flesh was veined in an unusual way. The caption
read: "A miracle of Allah: this watermelon contains the name of Almighty
Allah."
After a time, I began to be asked questions during classes, questions
about America and about my views. One day, in a class devoted to passages
in the Hadith concerning zakat, or charity, I was asked my views about
Osama bin Laden. Why did America have it in for him? It is unsettling, to
say the least, to be seated in a class being held in a mosque, led by a
mullah, and attended by some 200 barefoot and turbaned students, and be
asked such a question.
I began by saying that bin Laden's program violates a basic tenet of
Islam, which holds that even in a jihad the lives of innocent people must
be spared. A jihad is a war against combatants, not women and children. I
read to them an appropriate saying of the Prophet Muhammad (I came armed
with the Hadith): "It is narrated by Ibn Umar that a woman was found killed
in one of these battles, so the Messenger of Allah, may peace be upon him,
forbade the killing of women and children."
They did not like the idea of me quoting the Prophet to them, and they
began chanting, "Osama, Osama, Osama."
When they calmed down, they took turns defending bin Laden.
"Osama bin Laden is a great Muslim," a student named Wali said. "The West
is afraid of strong Muslims, so they made him their enemy."
I was curious to know how Wali came to admire Osama bin Laden so ardently.
After all, there was no course at the madrasa -- at least so far as I could
tell -- titled "The Sayings of the Great Muslim Osama bin Laden."
"Osama wants to keep Islam pure from the pollution of the infidels," he
said. "He believes Islam is the way for all the world. He wants to bring
Islam to all the world."
I answered that the Koran states that "there is no compulsion in
religion." This is the Koranic saying frequently quoted by those who
believe that, at its core, Islam is moderate and tolerant of others.
Wali: "There is no compulsion. But the West compels Muslims to live under
the control of infidels, like in Chechnya."
Since the students had turned this day's class into a political seminar of
sorts, I decided to ask a question of my own. I brought up the subject of
Pakistan's nuclear bomb. The Islamists in Pakistan have been the most
vociferous proponents of Pakistan's nuclear program. The leading religious
party, the Jamiat Islami, has in fact led the campaign to persuade the
government not to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I asked the
students if they thought it would be permissible, by the law of Islam, to
use a nuclear bomb during the prosecution of a jihad.
"All things come from Allah," one student said.
"The atomic bomb comes from Allah, so it should
be used."
I then asked: Who wants to see Osama bin Laden
armed with nuclear weapons? Every hand in the
room shot up. The students laughed, and some
applauded.
But, I said, innocent people would inevitably
die if the bomb was used. Even if the West, or
Russia, is subjugating Muslims, does that give
bin Laden and his supporters the right to kill
innocent people?
"Osama has never killed anybody innocent," one
student, whose name was Ghazi, answered.
"What if you were shown proof that he did?"
"The Americans say they have proof, but they don't give it to the Taliban."
I then presented a hypothetical scenario. "What if," I asked, "you were
shown a video in which Osama bin Laden was actually seen murdering a woman.
What then?"
There was a pause. A student named Fazlur Razaq stood up: "The Americans
have all the tricks of the media. They can put Osama's head on the body of
someone else, and make it seem like he's killing when he's not doing it."
I then took from my notebook my secret weapon: the 1998 fatwa issued by
bin Laden's organization -- the International Islamic Front for Jihad
Against Jews and Crusaders -- concerning the presence of American troops in
Saudi Arabia. I read them a passage, the English translation of which reads
as follows: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians
and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any
country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al Aksa
Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies
to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any
Muslim."
Here it is, I said, in black and white: bin Laden calling for the death of
all Americans, civilian and military.
"Osama didn't write that," one student yelled, and the others cheered.
"That's a forgery of the Americans."
I asked one final question, more out of self-interest than anything else:
What would you do if you learned that the C.I.A. had captured bin Laden and
was taking him to America to stand trial?
A student who gave his name as Muhammad stood up: "We would sacrifice our
lives for Osama. We would kill Americans."
What kind of Americans?
"All Americans."
As I left the mosque, Muhammad and a group of his friends approached me.
"We'd like you to embrace Islam," he said. "We love you. We want you to
have Islam."
Later that day, I met with a small group of students I had grown to like,
hoping that, away from their teachers, they would talk a different talk.
Meeting students out of class had already made for a number of interesting
moments: I had, for example, been asked for sex, as had Laurent Van Der
Stockt, the photographer with me. Sometimes the propositions were
intimated; sometimes they were unusually blunt, especially given the
Taliban's official position on homosexuals, which is that they should be
killed. Those few students who knew a bit of English seemed most interested
in talking about sex. Many of them were convinced that all Americans are
bisexual, and that Westerners engage in sex with anything, anywhere, all
the time. I was asked to describe the dominant masturbation style of
Americans, and whether American men were allowed by law to keep boyfriends
and girlfriends at the same time.
Among the young men I spoke with after the Osama colloquy there was no
talk of sex. One, a bright and personable student from a village near
Kabul, had told me his name was Sayid. His brother, a Taliban judge, had
also attended the madrasa. When I had asked Sayid for his last name, he'd
said he would be known as Sayid Haqqani upon graduation. Many of the
students take Haqqani as their last name when they leave the madrasa.
I asked him on this afternoon how his parents felt to have him at the
madrasa, knowing that there is a chance he would choose to be a mujahed --
against the northern alliance, or perhaps against India, in Kashmir.
"They support the jihad," he said.
"How would they feel if you were killed?"
"They would be very happy," he said. "They would be so proud. Any father
would want his son to die as shaheed," or martyr.
If you fought against the northern alliance, you would be killing Muslims,
I said.
"They're Muslims, but they're crazy," Sayid replied.
A couple of days later, I saw the maulana, and I told him I thought some
of his students believed that terrorism, under certain circumstances, was
Koranically acceptable. "Then you don't understand what we are teaching,"
he said, frowning just for a moment. "There is a great difference between
jihad and terrorism." He invited me to eat with him, to discuss my
inability to comprehend the distinction, but I begged off. I was due in
Islamabad, the capital, for a birthday party, and I had promised I would
go.

It was quite a party. a big cake, lots of speeches, lots of
dignitaries, including Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the "chief executive" of
Pakistan, which is the title he took when the Pakistani Army overthrew
the elected government in October and installed him as maximum leader.
The cake was actually quite good. It was a vanilla sheet cake, and written
in lemon frosting across the length of it were the words, "Second
Anniversary Celebrations of Youm-e-Takbeer." Youm-e-Takbeer can be
translated as "the day of God's greatness," and in Pakistan it refers to
May 28, 1998, the day Pakistan first exploded a nuclear bomb. The birthday
party, under the auspices of Pakistan's military leader, was a birthday
party for the bomb.
"We bow our heads to Allah almighty for restoring greatness to Pakistan on
May 28, 1998," proclaimed the science minister of Pakistan, Atta-ur-Rahman,
at the outset of the official program.
Pakistan has fetishized the bomb. In the traffic circles of every sizable
city in the country, a full-scale model of the country's home-grown
long-range missile stands proud. In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani
Kashmir, a model of a missile is aimed at India. In three cities in
Pakistan I visited there stand 30-foot-high models of the Chagai Hills, the
site where Pakistan exploded its test bombs, and in Islamabad, the monument
lights up from the inside at night -- all fiery orange -- to simulate the
effect of a nuclear explosion. Parents dress up their children and
photograph them standing before it.
A couple of days after the party, I went to Rawalpindi, next door to
Islamabad, because I'd been given the chance to talk with General
Musharraf. We met one morning at Army House, the residence of the Pakistani
Army's chief of staff. (General Musharraf has chosen not to take up
residence in the prime minister's house, even though he has functioned as
prime minister since October.) During our conversation, I asked General
Musharraf if the West should worry that fundamentalist Muslims, in or out
of the army, might get hold of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. (In Pentagon
exercises, American war-gamers have mapped out a scenario in which
Taliban-like extremists gain control of Pakistan's atomic arsenal during a
violent break-up of the country.)
"Absolutely implausible," General Musharaff said. "There is no question of
that happening. There is no question of nuclear material falling into the
hands of irresponsible people at all."
I made mention of the religious overtones of the Youm-e-Takbeer
celebration, particularly the science minister's remarks, saying that
Westerners are discomforted by the belief that God is the founder of
Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
"Yes, we do use the term 'Allah's will,' "he said. "We do consider God to
be the supreme sovereign, and we do consider ourselves to be his
representatives on earth. We being his representatives on earth, whatever
has to be done is according to the teaching of Allah. But when we say 'the
will of God,' that doesn't mean we aren't using our brains, that we are
trigger-happy fundamentalists."
General Musharraf is not thought of as an Islamic fundamentalist. He is
known to have progressive views on the rights of women, for example. And
yet he can sound very much like an Islamic fundamentalist at times, like
when he began parsing the words "jihad" and "terrorism" for me.
"There is no question that terrorism and jihad are absolutely different,"
he told me. "You in the West are allergic to the term 'jihad,' but jihad is
a tolerant concept."
I asked the general if he believed bin Laden to be a terrorist.
"If at all he's involved in planning or conducting bombings or hijackings,
he's a terrorist."
I then asked him if he doubted American claims that bin Laden is a terrorist.
"The Taliban has a stand on this subject. They say they need proof, which
has not been given to them. We have asked for proof from the U.S. and we
are in the process of getting this. From the legal point of view, I haven't
seen the proof."
General Musharraf says he needs the pro-Taliban Pathans on his side. The
religious parties, though never terribly successful at the polls, have
street power, and when it comes to Kashmir, broad sympathy. Kashmir used to
be spoken of in secular terms, as a national liberation struggle against a
neocolonial oppressor. But today, that same fight is spoken of
matter-of-factly as a jihad. It is almost as if the end of the jihad
against the Soviets in Afghanistan forced the professional jihadists in the
region to find a new cause to adopt.
General Musharraf himself calls the struggle against India a jihad, and
the English-language newspapers in Pakistan use the language of jihad when
talking about the fight: one otherwise dry-as-bones news story I read
stated that seven "mujahedeen" had "embraced shahadat" in a fight against
the Indian Army. Shahadat is martyrdom, and "embraced shahadat" means that
they were killed.
The jihad in Kashmir is of great political help to General Musharraf. In a
fractious country like Pakistan, the jihad in Kashmir unifies people the
way no other issue does. And so the military junta has given wide berth to
the jihad groups training on Pakistani soil. Two weeks after we met in
Rawalpindi, General Musharraf's government announced that it would curb the
power of militant groups within Pakistan, and bring the madrasa network
into conformity with national educational standards, two steps the
Americans have been asking him to take nearly from the moment the army
seized power. But in our pleasant, early-morning conversation at Army
House, the general did not seem overly concerned about the power of the
madrasas. "Very few of these schools are engaged in any kind of militancy,"
he said. "Most of them are very humanitarian. They give food and lodging to
these poor boys."
He also defended the activities of groups the State Department has labeled
terrorist, particularly the Harkat ul-mujahedeen of Fazlur Rahman Khalil,
which is waging a violent jihad against India; it is believed to be behind
the hijacking last December of an Indian airliner. The State Department has
labeled the HUM, as it is known, a terrorist organization. The group keeps
training bases in Afghanistan, but Khalil, its leader, has an office in
Rawalpindi, not far from General Musharraf's house, and he moves freely
through Pakistan. "These people are not terrorists," General Musharraf
said. "They are fighting a jihad."
Two days after my interview with the general, I talked to Khalil in
Rawalpindi. We met late at night, in a dingy office near a bus station, and
sat shoeless on the floor under a poster depicting the word "Allah" spelled
out in bullets. Khalil, bearded and preternaturally calm, told me he is
sorry his group is thought as of terrorists. "We feel very bad about this,"
he said. He denied his group was behind the hijacking of the Indian
airliner -- a "breakaway faction" was to blame, he said -- and he denied
that his group has ever killed civilians in its war in Kashmir.
"No one should worry about us," he said. "Only the oppressors of Islam."
I asked Khalil: Would you use nuclear weapons against your enemies if you
could?
"We don't have nuclear weapons," he said, smiling. "We wish we had nuclear
weapons. If we had them, we would use them as necessary. But they're very
expensive."
Khalil, I was told, would be going to Afghanistan the following day, to
Jalalabad, for a meeting with leaders of the other Islamic extremist groups
given shelter by the Taliban. Pakistani news reports the day before our
meeting stated that Osama bin Laden was replacing his bodyguards with men
from Khalil's group; they were true believers, the report said, who would
keep bin Laden safe.

One day, i drove across the border of Pakistan to the Afghan city of
Kandahar, in the Taliban heartland, where many of the students at the
Haqqania madrasa will end up.
The Taliban burst out of Kandahar in 1994 on their quick march to Kabul.
Along the way, they closed down girls' schools and fired female doctors and
murdered homosexuals and staged public amputations and generally gave a bad
name to the Prophet in whose name they claimed to act.
It was a long drive, through the Baluchistan desert, over the Khojak Pass
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.
his 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.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company