The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 9
It was these Islamic rulings I had wanted to talk to him about. I had scoured the Koran and could not find anything that suggested kite-flying or chess should be banned, while on women’s rights the holy text seemed positively progressive2, stating, ‘to every man what he earns and to every woman what she earns’. During the early years of Islam, women played an important and full role in society, leading armies and ruling countries, and the Prophet’s wife Khadijah had been his greatest influence. Older and richer than him, it was she who initiated the marriage proposal and who always encouraged him in his great mission.
Sami-ul Haq smiled patiently as if pained that I could not understand the Prophet’s real meaning. ‘Islam doesn’t ban anything which is beneficial to mankind. If kite-flying was simply a pleasure it would be alright but unfortunately there can be gambling on kites and it can be harmful because people fly them from the rooftops and may fall off and get hurt.’
‘Chess is also notorious for gambling,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘And these things have no purpose, time is better spent reading the Koran.’ Seeing I was about to interject, he added, ‘Purposeful games which do not involve any gambling are allowed, for example the Taliban have not banned golf. The Taliban also have a cricket team but no one except Pakistan will play them. You English play Zimbabwe but you will not play the Taliban.’
I would clearly never understand why golf and cricket were purposeful but not chess so I asked on what basis girls had been banned from going to school. ‘It’s just a question of having things ready. Until their separate education system is evolved the girls must sit in their houses. So far the Taliban have not even managed to set up an education system for men so how could they for females?’
‘Why should women be beaten if they do not wear burqas?’ As I spoke, I suddenly remembered where we had met. It was at an interminable party of politicians in Islamabad where the Johnny Walker and Russian vodka had flowed from gallon bottles with only 7-Up to mix, the men had danced with PIA airhostesses, and no food had been served until midnight by which time everyone was barely capable of standing. But Sami-ul Haq did not miss a beat. ‘In Islam women must wear a certain type of dress where there is no vulgarity and no body parts are projected or remain naked,’ he replied.
Sami-ul Haq’s influence in Afghanistan did not start with the Taliban. It was from Haqqania in 1979 that the call for jihad against the Russians first went out, and his graduates included two of the seven mujaheddin leaders, Mohammed Nabbi Mohammedi and the late Yunus Khalis, the two whose fighters went on to become Taliban. Haqqania was said to be the most popular madrassa in Pakistan and for budding Islamic warriors a place there was as valued as getting into Oxford or Cambridge for a British schoolchild.
‘More and more boys are applying because they are so fed up with the injustices of the West,’ he said, ‘last year we had more than 5000 applications for 400 places.’ He currently had 3000 students aged from five to thirty-five, though he said there was no upper age limit. They were mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as some from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Chechnya, and Haqqania had affiliated madrassas in the British towns of Sheffield, Birmingham and Bury.
The Haqqania prospectus.
Was it true that the founder members of the Taliban were all his graduates, I asked? ‘Yes,’ he nodded, a proud smile cushioning out his spongy features. ‘After the withdrawal of the Soviet Union there was no central administration in Afghanistan and lots of infighting between warring factions. In Kandahar there was so much lawlessness and moral degeneration that a commander married a boy and took him out on his tank and showed him to the people saying this is my bride. They had debased the jihad. In those circumstances my students had no choice but to react.’
‘There were only about thirty of them in the beginning and they had no idea of forming a government. They didn’t even have a name. They were just taliban – religious students who came out on the streets to overpower gangsters. They didn’t even have vehicles, just motorbikes. Ninety percent of the areas they captured were not by force but because Afghans were so fed up with the moral degeneration that wherever they went people welcomed them and handed over their guns.’
He personally, along with other ulema, or religious scholars, had toured madrassas all over Pakistan in 1994 encouraging students to join the movement. In the early days when the Taliban were fighting to capture the border town of Spin Boldak, many of their recruits came from the madrassa of Abdul Ghani in Chaman, just the other side of the border. Abdul Ghani was deputy leader of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islami (JUI), one of Pakistan’s leading religious parties, which had been a coalition partner in the government of Benazir Bhutto at the time of the creation of the Taliban and wanted to introduce Shariat or Islamic law in Pakistan. The JUI leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who at the time was chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, was a graduate of Haqqania, though there was little love lost between him and Sami-ul Haq who ran his own breakaway faction of the JUI known as JUI(S).
Subsequently any time the Taliban had been in trouble, such as after their defeat in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997, one phone-call from Mullah Omar to Sami-ul Haq and he would close his madrassa and send his students to help.
Yet he insisted, ‘Madrassas don’t teach fighting. Islam is a religion of peace. You will not find anyone carrying a gun at Haqqania. My students have been forced to fight by circumstances, because of being occupied by foreign powers. It’s like when the Americans went to Vietnam and the Vietnamese struggled against them. They had no religious madrassas so why did they fight? If you go through history it’s the same, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution. People revolted against the tyranny of rulers. What would be the British reaction if some part of Britain were occupied by a foreign power? You would fight. We call it a jihad, you call it a fight for freedom.’
Maulana Sami-ul Haq in Islamabad, 2001.
We argued for a while about the war, and he questioned whether his friend Osama bin Laden really had the technology and resources to have carried out the World Trade Center attack. ‘Where is the evidence?’ he asked, and I knew with a sinking feeling he was going to proffer the same theory that had been repeated to me several times a day ever since I had arrived back in Pakistan. ‘The real criminals are still sitting in the State Department and the Pentagon. This has been done by the Jews to blacken the name of Muslims and so the Americans can get a foothold in this region.’ Almost everyone I met, from rickshaw drivers to university professors, had categorically insisted to me that 4000 Jews had failed to turn up for work at the World Trade Center the day of the attack and claimed the whole thing had been masterminded by Ariel Sharon and the Israelis because they were worried that the Bush administration was not offering them enough support.
Sami-ul Haq’s view was slightly different however. ‘The Americans want to set up a puppet government in Afghanistan to counter China,’ he said. ‘I met General Musharraf a couple of weeks ago and I could see he was under great pressure both from Bush but also his own greed in wanting to continue in power. He told me, “We cannot afford to have America as our enemy.’’ I replied, “We cannot afford to have them as our friend.’’ Our history is a history of betrayals by the Americans. As for the British, we Pashtuns have not let you set foot on Afghan soil for almost 300 years and now you want to avenge these defeats.’
I laughed, not wanting to be drawn into an argument, as I needed to broach the subject of visiting his school. ‘Women are not allowed on the campus and I’m afraid my students don’t like Westerners,’ he said apologetically as if he personally couldn’t understand this, ‘and there’s a lot of rage at the moment. You’ll be stoned or maybe killed.’
I replied that I would wear a burqa to make sure ‘no body parts protruded’ and was willing to take the risk. Laughing, he agreed that we could come to his house on campus in two days’ time, and, if the mood was ‘calm’ and we promised not to destroy any of the architecture, his son Rashid would show us arou
nd the madrassa.
On the appointed day, Justin and I set off with a driver at dawn on the Grand Trunk Road, which goes from Islamabad to Peshawar and is part of the Delhi to Kabul route along which so many invading armies had marched over the centuries. The morning light was pearly pink, dust trapped in fingers of sunlight spreading across the fields where a small boy in a red cap was leading some buffalo towards a rice paddy as if painted in by an artist to complete the scene. Either side of the road, not far out from the capital, were hundreds of small brick kilns where children as young as seven worked fourteen-hour days making bricks for a few rupees, or in many cases for nothing because they had been sold by their families to the kiln owners, and would never go to school.
I felt a familiar wave of excitement as the road curved around a rocky outcrop and in front of us I saw the old arch leading to Attock Bridge over the green waters of the Indus River. On the other side was an archway between two stone towers on which was written Welcome to NWFP – Gateway to the Frontier. At this point Afghans would always say ‘from here starts Afghanistan’ for they do not recognise the border marked by the Durand Line drawn by the British in 1893 which for the first time split the Pashtuns, one of the world’s largest tribal societies.
The line was named after Sir Mortimer Durand, Foreign Secretary of British India who supervised the arbitrary division. It was agreed to by the then ruler of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, after a combination of arm-twisting and a substantial increase in his annual purse from Britain, but according to the Afghans it was never meant to be an international boundary, simply an agreement of delineating zones. Running about 1000km from one mountaintop to another, cutting through dozens of Pashtun tribes from the Afridi to the Waziri (though they have always remained free to cross back and forth), it was described by Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British Governor of Frontier Province, as ‘a line beyond which neither side would exercise interference’.
For the British, finding themselves unable to subjugate the Pathans, as they called the Pashtuns, the idea was to create a buffer zone between the Raj and Afghanistan as part of their ‘Forward Policy’ to block the Russians in their attempts to gain access to the warm-water ports of India. Shortly after drawing the Durand Line, the British established the so-called Tribal Areas in which the Pashtuns were left to govern themselves under the eye of a Political Agent, a policy Pakistan continued after Independence. While on the map this Pashtun belt south of the Durand Line is officially part of Pakistan territory, in practice the Tribal Areas are a no-go land of mud-baked forts and feuds in narrow valleys and mountains where the word for stranger is the same as enemy, only these days the Pashtuns are armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers rather than Lee Enfields.
Many times I had heard Pashtuns say, ‘I have been a Pashtun for five thousand years, a Muslim for one thousand four hundred and Pakistani for only fifty.’ In fact almost all of them seemed to consider themselves Afghans and openly advocated the concept of Pashtunistan – a greater Afghanistan reaching to Attock as it once had. The hundred-year agreement on the Durand Line expired in 1993 which was one of the reasons that Pakistan was so desperate to have a government of its choosing in Kabul that would recognize this border.
Back in 1989, I had once driven over Attock Bridge with Homayoun Assefy, cousin and brother-in-law of the former king Zahir Shah, who was working as a lawyer in Paris with an office just off the Champs Elysées. A sophisticated man whose manicured nails stick in my memory, he and fellow émigré Dr Shams, the kindly former managing director of the Afghan National Bank, were on their way to visit Jalalabad so that they could see their homeland before returning to Europe, and I was accompanying them. We did not make it all the way to Jalalabad because of fighting, and the Jalalabad oranges Dr Shams bought over the border to take home to his family turned out to be sour. But as we crossed the Indus early that morning when we were still full of hope about the trip, Homayoun had said, ‘This is really Afghanistan. One day we’ll take it back.’ I turned to smile, then saw that he was deadly serious.
I recalled this conversation with sudden clarity as we stopped by the riverside under some willows and tamarisks, noisy with the chatter of green parakeets, and stared out over the emerald waters of the Indus. Conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Moghul Emperor Akbar had crossed this river using a bridge of made of small boats placed end to end, and a village of boatmen still lived on the riverside. Not far upstream was the confluence with the Kabul River, its muddy waters having travelled 250 miles from its source in the Hindu Kush just west of the Afghan capital, and for a while the two rivers run side by side without mixing. Just visible in the other direction were the impressive crenellated walls of Attock Fort, which was built between 1581 and 1586 by Akbar when he made Attock his base for military campaigns against Kabul. These days it was used by the Pakistan army, mostly it seemed to imprison politicians arrested in military takeovers and had recently been the location for part of the ongoing corruption trial of Asif Zardari, the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as well as the treason trial of Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister ousted in General Musharraf’s coup.
Not far after Attock, as the tented expanses of the first refugee camps started to appear, we came to the dusty town of Akora Khattak. The sprawling campus of Haqqania was easy to spot just right of the road, with the white tower of its minaret, elegant as a swan’s neck. It was a blustery day and behind an iron gate, I could see a few figures wrapped in shawls over their thin cotton shalwar kamiz scurrying across the courtyard and disappearing into an archway, the wind catching a blue plastic bag and a discarded paper which it whisked up and down behind them in an angrily spiralling dust-wizard.
Scrabbling in the bottom of my bag for my burqa and not finding it in time, only my hair was covered as we swung into the driveway of the rector’s house. Fortunately there were no signs of angry mobs. The maulana was sitting in the driveway in a folding chair, wearing a long dark brown wool coat over his shoulders and listening to a radio, surrounded by a circle of men in turbans, and he was looking crotchety. He waved a bored hand to greet us then called, ‘Osama, go and fetch tea and Pepsi for the foreign terrorists.’ Seeing our expressions, he laughed, explaining, ‘Osama is my fifteen-year-old son. I love asking him to get soft drinks for foreigners to shock them, particularly Americans as they have become O-sa-ma-phobic.’ He pronounced the word with great satisfaction, emphasising every syllable. Then he turned back to his radio. The maulana was clearly not in the mood for chitchat, so after sipping our drinks and nibbling a sawdust biscuit, we asked Rashid if we could see the madrassa.
He led us first behind the house to a white marble grave in a small iron-railed enclosure overlooking fields strewn with weeds. ‘This is the burial-place of my grandfather Shaikh ul Hadith Maulana Abdul Haq, the founder of Haqqania,’ said Rashid, who was twenty-seven and one of Sami-ul Haq’s eight children by two wives. ‘He was a great activist against you Britishers.’ I remembered what Sami-ul Haq had said the previous day about jihad being a freedom struggle. Maulana Abdul Haq so hated the British that he refused to let his son learn English and on founding the school had stated, ‘We do not have the money, resources or ammunition to face the British. However we can raise an entire generation of youth that can become our strength and force the British out of our land.’
Near the grave was a small white mosque. This was the original school back in 1947 at the time of the creation of Pakistan, with just twelve students. Maulana Abdul Haq named it after Darul Uloom where he had studied in the northern Indian town of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh. The first madrassa of what came to be known as the deobandi movement, Darul Uloom Deoband was established in 1867 by Islamic scholars who had participated in the Indian Mutiny – the anti-colonial uprising that had been brutally crushed by the British a decade earlier.
Although Hindus and Sikhs had also participated in the uprising, the British blamed the Muslims and began dismantling institutions associated with the former Moghul Em
pire, particularly anything educational, and requisitioning mosques including Delhi’s famous Jama Masjid for use as military barracks. Under siege and seeing education as the key to unifying Muslims and reviving threatened Islamic values, India’s Islamic scholars divided into two camps. One group founded the Aligarh Muslim university, a progressive institution which was based on the Oxbridge colleges and where students debated in Urdu but also in English, wore fez but also ties, and played cricket. The other group created the deobandi school to train a new generation in a pure, some would say narrow, form of Islam, purged of all western and Hindu influences such as praying at the graves of saints, and viewing the Koran as a blueprint for everything.
In the last thirty years deobandism and the madrassas have become the fastest growing education system in South Asia, particularly in Pakistan. This may have been motivated less by parents wanting children to imbibe such strict Islamic values but more because of the complete collapse of the state system. Pakistan has one of the world’s highest illiteracy rates with only one in four being able to read, a result of spending only two percent of the gross national product on education – one of the lowest levels in the world – compared to thirty percent on defence. Militant Islamic groups displayed much more foresight than the West in coming forward to fill that gap and as a result the number of madrassas in Pakistan rose from 900 in 1971 to 8000 by 2001 with perhaps as many again unregistered.
As Rashid led us somewhat nervously onto the main campus, we saw another reason for their popularity. ‘These are the hotels,’ he said, an odd word to choose for the four-storey dormitories with washing hanging on the terraces. For a poor family struggling to feed their children, particularly in a refugee camp, the free board and lodging offered by madrassas constituted a huge incentive to hand over their boys as wards. The dormitories were unheated and looked basic and dirty with just thin mattresses on the ground, but were positively palatial compared to life in a refugee tent. Moreover the school offered the chance one day to become a mullah or even a mufti – someone with the authority to issue fatwas or Islamic rulings. In a country where children are sold into slave labour, sewing footballs or making bricks, it was easy to see the attraction. All of this was paid for by donations from rich Muslims, often Arabs, though Sami-ul Haq insisted he had never received any money from bin Laden. Only the day before our visit General Musharraf had given an interview praising the madrassas as ‘the biggest welfare organization anywhere in the world’ which provided free education, food and accommodation for around one million children.