The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 10

  But for impressionable young boys, cut off from their families or perhaps even orphaned in the war, it was a strange hermetic life, getting up at 4 a.m. for the first of five daily prayers. Apart from a poster printed with a saying of the Prophet, and the inevitable one of a white-clad Osama bin Laden clutching a huge Kalashnikov, the dormitories were bare, none of the usual posters of pop-stars or stereo systems blasting loud music one would expect from 3000 mainly teenage students.

  There did not seem many students about and Rashid explained that normally the classrooms would be full of boys in white prayer caps reciting the Koran, but the previous day had been graduation, 700 students each stepping up to a podium decorated with posters of bin Laden and receiving a certificate and a white turban from Sami-ul Haq. The highest commendations went to those who had memorized the entire 114 chapters of the Koran in Arabic. Now the pupils were either on holiday or had gone to fight in Afghanistan, it wasn’t quite clear. ‘You will think what you want to,’ said Rashid.

  As we turned a corner, two boys jumped out cocking their fingers at us as if they were guns and shouting ‘Osama!’ They stopped, embarrassed, and put their hands behind their backs when they saw Rashid and were about to flee, but I asked him if I could talk to them. They were wearing thin shalwar kamiz and plastic sandals like the ones issued to refugees and looked about eleven.

  ‘Why do you like Osama?’ I asked.

  ‘He stands up for Islam against the West,’ said the taller one.

  ‘And he kills Americans,’ added his friend.

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

  ‘Holy warriors,’ they both replied. They did not use the word mujaheddin and I wondered if it was no longer a heroic word after the many years of infighting.

  ‘Can you use a gun?’ I asked.

  ‘It cannot be difficult.’

  ‘How will your mothers feel if you were to get killed fighting?’

  ‘They would be honoured that we had embraced shahadat,’ said the smallest one solemnly. Shahadat means martyrdom.

  An older boy walked up, about eighteen, his bloodshot eyes rimmed with kohl and the pupils black with hatred. His name was Sultan Mohammed and he was from Jalalabad. ‘We will not spare the Americans, we will rip them apart like old clothes,’ he said angrily, almost spitting the words as he held up the hem of his kamiz and mimicked tearing it. Rashid was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, obviously anxious to go, and I wondered if he thought they were going to stone me. Here, as in the streets of Quetta, I had become an enemy just for being white and western, and hated above all for being female. It was an uneasy feeling to be hated by strangers so nakedly, particularly in a country I had once felt at home in. I was finding the front-line of this war in more and more places.

  ‘Let’s move on,’ urged Rashid. But I could not see any stones around, only dusty weeds and I was intrigued by these young boys who rather than wanting to be pilots, engine drivers or astronauts, longed to die in combat, so I asked him what subjects they studied.

  ‘Islamic ideology, Shariat, Islamic economics,’ he replied. The only literature was the Koran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, and the form of teaching was rote learning. The most respect was given to those who could remember the most hadith, no easy task as there are said to be hundreds of thousands of them.

  ‘And are there class discussions?’

  ‘What is there to discuss?’ asked Rashid. ‘What is written is written.’ No foreign languages were taught apart from Arabic, nor any science, and there were no signs of any computers though Rashid told me that he was in charge of Haqqania’s website.

  I asked the boys some basic sums, and they looked at me blankly, giggling. They had never heard of dinosaurs though they were keen to boast of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, and though they told me they learnt astronomy they did not believe that man had walked on the moon, shaking with laughter at the idea.

  ‘How could that be?’ said one. ‘He would fall off.’

  It was like going back in time and hard to associate with the teachings of the Koran in which ilm, the Arabic word for knowledge, is the second most used word after God. I remembered a friend who worked for the UN in Afghanistan, telling me about going to a talk at a school in Herat given by the mullah who was the Taliban’s Minister of Education. The minister told the boys, ‘If you want to be an engineer then go and work three months in a garage. If you want to be a doctor, go and work in a butcher’s.’ He ended by deriding Western education, saying, ‘I went into the classroom of a foreign school once and it was written on the board that the sun is so many thousands of miles from the earth. Tell me this, who had the ruler long enough to measure it?’

  Travelling with mujaheddin in the late 1980s, such village mullahs had often been the butt of their jokes. Community servants who earned a living through bonesetting and selling religious amulets to protect against the evil eye, they were not particularly respected, living off zakat, a percentage of the local crops, in return for their services at the mosque and funerals. Yet these were the kind of people now ruling Afghanistan. I was thinking about this as Rashid led us into a building and up a flight of stairs to see the auditorium where the call for jihad against the Russians first went up. The surrounding walls were covered in framed calligraphed scrolls bearing lists of graduates. The names were in Arabic but Rashid pointed out Mullah Kabir Haqqani, the Prime Minister; Noor Mohammed Saleih, the Chief Justice; Jalaluddin Haqqani, the commander-in-chief of the Taliban forces; Maulana Hasan Rahman, Governor of Kandahar and Maulana Sadar Azim, Governor of Jalalabad, as well as Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islami (JUI), and Nabi Mohammedi and Yunus Khalis, the two mujaheddin leaders. ‘Look,’ he pointed out, ‘there’s Mullah Omar.’

  Next he took us to the Library of Fatwas, a long basement room of shelves full of heavy bound volumes with gold lettering on the spines. ‘Many of the fatwas have been issued here at Haqqania,’ said Rashid proudly, ‘more than a hundred thousand.’ The deobandi form of Islam as preached by the Taliban seemed far more puritanical than even the Wahhabi sect, the austere Saudi Arabian faith that was the inspiration of bin Laden and which fiercely opposes anything seen as bida, the Arabic word for any modernization or deviation from the Koran. Wahhabis ban movie theatres and women from driving but deobandis seem to regulate every aspect of personal behaviour, issuing a quarter of a million fatwas over the last century.

  My friend Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington DC and former Pakistan ambassador to London, has made it his life’s mission to increase understanding between the Muslim world and the West, even producing a movie on Jinnah in which the founder of Pakistan was played by British actor and horror-film veteran Christopher Lee, much to the fury of his countrymen. He explained it to me the following way: ‘While bin Laden’s kind of thinking is coloured by his own exposure to the West and reaction against it, deobandism is a kind of scholarship of exclusion, an attempt to draw boundaries around Islam which the Taliban have taken to extremes. The Taliban have no contact with the West, they haven’t travelled and it’s not part of their thinking. But running over televisions with tanks and hanging spools of tape from lampposts is their attempt to keep out this corrupting influence and within that system of exclusion it makes sense.’

  There was another factor. While the madrassas in India had always preached non-violence, those in Pakistan were mostly concentrated in rural areas and refugee camps in the Pashtun belt of Frontier Province and Baluchistan as well as among the Pashtun community in Karachi. Consequently they have been heavily influenced by Pashtunwali, the violent and highly conservative Pashtun code of behaviour where every insult must be revenged with interest and girls are locked away in purdah from the age of seven. The result was the very crude form of deobandi teaching as preached by the Taliban.

  It made for a frightening combination, particularly as the Pashtun way of life seems to have changed little since 1898 when Wins
ton Churchill wrote in The Story of the Malakand Field Force: ‘The Pathan tribes are always engaged in public or private war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress, made it is true only of sun-baked clay, but with battlements, turrets, loopholes, flanking towers, drawbridges etc. Every village has its defence … Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan its feud. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.’

  To try and understand more about Pashtunwali I went to see Iftikhar Gilani, a silver-haired lawyer and politician whom I had first known as a close friend of Benazir Bhutto. Appointed Law Minister in her first government of 1988–90, he had become disillusioned by the corruption and switched sides to the Muslim League where it was just as bad so had switched back again. For the time being there was no parliament at all as General Musharraf had dissolved it; so he was seated on his lawn, wrapped in a warm shawl, reading an airport thriller and enjoying the late afternoon sun at his house in the countryside outside Islamabad. I joined him there for hot tea and samosas which melted in the mouth in a spicy mix of meat, chopped leeks and potato, watched by curious grey herons that tiptoed delicately round the lawn. It was a bucolic scene overlooking a green valley, yet just the other side of the road was the highly guarded entrance to Pinstech, Pakistan’s nuclear development programme, the world’s first Islamic bomb.

  In the brief democratic periods between military regimes, Iftikhar had been member of parliament and senator for his hometown of Kohat, an old British garrison town surrounded by the tribal agencies of Kurram, Orakzai and Darra Adam Khel, the arms factory of the Frontier where numerous small forges turn out painstaking copies of guns, right down to the serial numbers. He was also a Pashtun and one of the most eloquent people I knew. If anyone could explain Pashtunwali to a westerner, it was him.

  ‘First and foremost a guest is a guest,’ he said. ‘If my guest is harmed even if he has committed a crime then it is my responsibility to harm that person even if he is my relative.’

  There was a Baluch story that illustrated this. A man arrived at a house and threw himself at the feet of the khan saying he was being pursued by a band of horsemen. The old khan granted him asylum, invited him to join them for dinner and sent a servant to lead him to the guest room.

  The khan’s son went to his father and said, ‘Father, that is the man who killed my brother and your son just two months ago.’

  ‘Yes my son, but now he is a guest in our house. He has asked for asylum and I have granted it.’

  The son was furious so grabbed his brother’s dagger, crept to the guest’s room and stabbed him in the chest, as he had stabbed his brother.

  The next morning the guest’s body was found amid shouts and lamenting.

  ‘Who could have done this?’ cried the Khan. ‘Who could have brought such dishonour on our family?’

  The boy threw himself at his father’s feet, admitting what he had done.

  The old khan took the dagger and plunged it into the heart of his son.

  This sounded unbelievable to me but Iftikhar insisted, ‘Every day this happens. A person kills someone in Kohat then goes into the tribal agency for protection. The only difference these days is that the maliks often charge money for giving asylum.’

  So if Osama bin Laden was going to take refuge anywhere this was surely the perfect place?3

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I asked him what he thought of the Taliban and why they preached such an extreme form of Islam. ‘Talibs used to be figures of fun,’ he said. ‘Pashtun is a very egalitarian society with no caste or class system. It’s not like Sindh with its waderas or Punjab with its feudal lords. In my sixty-one years of life, the only class that I can say we have always looked down on in Pashtun society is the Talib. When I was a child the Talibs were used for begging. They would come round the houses with begging bowls and cry out “I’m a Talib,” and we’d say “poor darling” and give them bread.’

  Referring to the Taliban as ‘poor darlings’ was not just a recognition of their straitened circumstances. There was a more sinister side. The madrassa boys were not only separated from their mothers and all females at an early age but were taught to stigmatise women and that the mere sight of an ankle or a varnished fingernail would lead to damnation. In Pashto, women are referred to as tor sari which means black-heads until their hair turns grey and they become spin sari or white-heads, and they are seen as something to be covered, locked away and beaten.

  ‘We’re talking about a society where in my village a boy and girl kissing is an unpardonable crime seen as worse than murder,’ said Iftikhar. ‘The inevitable result is sodomy. It’s the done thing in Pashtun society because of women being shut away in houses. A good-looking boy would have dozens of attempts made on him. I was a very handsome youth and had lots of problems but fortunately our family name and standing protected me. These Talibs have no such protection and it starts with the kind of people who run these seminaries. We used to say, “Oh my God, he’s a Talib,” and that meant he’s a sissy or he’s available.

  ‘Over a period of time they must become very angry people. And very frustrated, mostly against women, coupled with the hurt of a childhood trauma you can never get rid of and never, never talk about. It must leave a permanent scar.’

  Kabul, October 24, 2001

  Salam Christina

  I do not think there will be a way of getting this letter to you because it is too much danger but I am happy to write. I do it secretly, my father would be angry if he knew as already we are in trouble.

  We had to move this week from Microrayon to a small house the other side of town, near the mountains behind which are the Shomali Plains. Maybe you have heard of them, terrible things happened there, the Taliban abducted many women. I heard of one young girl they found crying in a mosque, all her family had been killed and she was left without clothes.

  We moved in a rush, some of our neighbours told us the Taliban were coming to raid our flat because they know of our support of the king and our friendship with Karzai. My heart was thumping with fright. We hid two nights in a relative’s house then we heard of this place and moved. It is better for my mother’s nerves because we are not so near the bombing though of course we still hear the B52s, they are flying in the day now, not just at night. In Microrayon it was like 1992 again when we were on the first line and there was so much rocketing we could not go to school. The Americans say they are trying to help us but some of the bombs are hitting innocent people. My brother told us today of a family he knew where the mother and baby were asleep in the bedroom and a bomb fell and killed them leaving just the father and thirteen-year old daughter and small children. The father is in shock and the girl Haziza is looking after everything.

  There is fear now, what will happen here in Kabul? More people are leaving the city, every day we see families putting all their things on top of taxis and leaving to Pakistan or to villages. They say the Pakistani border officials are charging lots of money – 500 rupees each person. Our family is in Loghar province, it is not so far from here but they have little.

  We could not bring everything when we moved but today our neighbours sent some boxes and inside were black and white photographs of myself and my sister and brothers when we were young. It seemed so long ago. There was one in a garden, full of flowers. Christina, can you think it is so long since we had flowers in Kabul! When I was a girl the air smelled of flowers. And another picture at the zoo. We used to go to the zoo at weekends, there were big elephants and lions and monkeys and snakes. Now all the animals are dead, I think there is just one lion left. I do not know what he eats. There is no food for the people. My brother says in the streets he sees children searching the rubbish.

  The new house is better but the rent is very expensive – thirty lakh afghanis a month – and I do not know how we will pay it and I have lost all my pupils as it is too far for them to come. Now we must spread the word here so we can start classe
s again but slowly as no one knows who they can trust.

  On Radio Shariat they said the Taliban has brought in 6000 soldiers to protect Kabul but no one has seen them. My mother cries that they will take my brothers but no one wants to fight. We heard some Arabs were murdered, one near Pul-i-Khishti mosque. Can it be true? What will happen to us? Will the Americans come?

  Marri

  1 He was also killed in 1997 in the fighting for Mazar-i-Sharif.

  2 See for example in The Koran, Chapter (Surah) 16, verse 97 or Chapter 33, verse 35.

  3 In August 2002, the bodies of three Pakistani tribesmen were found near the border, their hands, noses and ears chopped off and US dollars stuffed in their mouths to show what happens to informants in tribal areas.

  4

  The Royal Court in Exile

  ‘We have not come here in pomp and show;

  we have taken refuge in this place from unfortunate events.’

  HAFIZ

  IT WAS A STICKY JULY NIGHT, the eve of Princess Homaira Wali’s wedding and she was wandering restlessly in the moonlit garden of her father’s palace in Kabul when she heard the rumbling of tanks. The pale twenty-year old with dark glossy hair and the spirited ranginess of the wild horses she loved to tame, was King Zahir Shah’s eldest grandchild, and her wedding was to be the society event of the summer. The scent of roses hung heavy on the night air and the princess had been thinking about how her life was about to change for as a married woman she would no longer be able to sneak off from her bodyguards to go alone to the movies or drive her car around town playing The Beatles.