Author: Jeffrey Goldberg
Publication: The New York Times
Date: June 25, 2000
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.
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.
It 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.
Strictly 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.
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.
