by Kim Ghattas
The Shias of Pakistan had been key players in the founding of the country, alongside the father of the nation, Muhammad Jinnah, a Shia himself. Pakistan was not envisioned as a homeland for Sunnis only, but as an inclusive Muslim homeland. And in the first decades of its existence, the sectarian identities of its leaders were of no relevance. Shias were rich landowners in the Punjab, but they also became generals and prominent politicians. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto married an Iranian Shia. He did not shy away from Shia symbolism—his own name, zulfiqar, was the name of Imam Ali’s sword with its split tip.
But Zia was putting an end to inclusive Muslim nationalism with his Nizam-i-Islam. When he imposed the new laws in February 1979, he also promised he would set up a state-run zakat fund before the end of that year. One of the pillars of Islam, zakat is a charitable contribution of 2.5 percent of one’s yearly income, mandated by God but rarely imposed by governments (except for a handful, like Saudi Arabia). With $225 million in seed money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the Pakistani government, Zia was planning to make mandatory deductions from personal and corporate bank accounts of all Muslims in the country. He said this would help alleviate poverty and beggary and turn Pakistan into a more just society. The announcement caused much consternation among Pakistanis. Some began to withdraw their money from banks to evade this extra taxation; others complained about the forced piety, wondering whether the government would next distribute punch cards that people would have to show to prove they’d gone to the mosque to pray five times a day. Pakistanis began to refer to the zakat tax as a “Zia tax,” joking that all the money was going into the pocket of the biggest beggar of them all.
But for Pakistan’s Shias, the plans for mandatory zakat were no joke; they were a sign that Zia wasn’t just Islamizing the country, he was “Sunnifying” it. Sunni and Shia Islamic law differ in certain aspects, and by imposing shari’a as he was doing, Zia was mandating a Sunni reading of Islamic law. For Shias, ever since the partisans of Ali had opted not to pay allegiance or taxes to the first caliph after the prophet, zakat could only ever be a voluntary individual act, it could not be levied by the state. Small differences in the reading of Islamic law, which had never been an issue in decades of communal life, were suddenly causing a major rift in Pakistani society. It’s not clear whether the Saudis or their envoy Dawalibi were oblivious or indifferent to the reaction in a country with such a large Shia population.
On the same day in February 1979 that Zia had made his announcement about Islamic law, Sunni groups in Karachi held protests demanding the immediate enforcement of Sunni Hanafi Islamic law across all of Pakistan and the appointment of Sunni judges to all the shari’a courts. Shia clerics decided to get organized, worried that this was only the beginning of a campaign against them. On April 12 and 13, 1979, thousands of Shias from various organizations flocked to the town of Bhakkar in Punjab province for a convention. They formed the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Jafariya (TNFJ), the Movement for the Implementation of Jaafari (Shia) law. The TNFJ wasn’t demanding to apply Shia law across Pakistan, but wanted, among other things, that it be recognized by courts and that more Shia judges be appointed to the Council of Islamic Ideology. Zia did not impose zakat. Months went by.
Then, on June 20, 1980, Zia finally announced that the zakat ordinance would be officially implemented. The next day, banks across the country were closed for immediate collection of the 2.5 percent tax on all accounts. Enraged by Zia’s disregard for their rights, Shias from across the country descended onto Islamabad in early July. The TNFJ, Shia student organizations, and radical clerics gathered a crowd of a hundred thousand that laid siege to government buildings. Braving a rainstorm, tear gas, and beatings by the police, they stayed put for three days. Never before had Pakistan’s Shias mobilized or needed to mobilize in such a way. Suddenly awake to their street power, Zia had to relent within a few days and exempt them from the mandatory zakat. The Shia activists were exhilarated: they were the first group in Pakistan to successfully defy the dictator and his martial law on any issue. Their protests had also scored a victory specifically for their community. But Sunni clerics and activists were seething: by giving in to Shias, Zia had undermined their vision of Pakistan as a model Islamic state. Lines were being drawn within Pakistani society, between those who paid zakat and those who didn’t, between the Sunnis and the Shias—the “other” Muslims.
With their Islamabad siege, the Shias had committed another first: as a community, they had called on outside support. And Khomeini had answered, warning Zia that if he continued to persecute Pakistan’s Shias, he would meet the same fate as the shah. Modern-day Iran and Pakistan were close friends. As a young country, Pakistan had looked to Iran as a model while writing its constitution, and it had rushed to compose a national anthem for the shah’s visit to Pakistan in 1950. The shah had positioned himself as the benefactor of his younger neighbor, though sometimes lording himself over it, to the resentment of Pakistanis. But there had never been direct interference in each other’s affairs.
Revolutionary Iran did things differently—it positioned itself as the protector of Shias everywhere. Khomeini saw Shias both as a conduit to export the revolution—as in Lebanon with groups like Hezbollah—but also as subjects of his borderless wilayat. Students in particular were targeted. The Shia Imamiyat Student Organisation (ISO) became a revolutionary outfit, promoting Khomeini’s vision and agenda in Pakistan. Within a few years, the ISO would be directly linked to the office of the Supreme Leader. Pictures of Khomeini went up in its offices; young students hung his posters in their bedrooms. Religious students were aggressively courted: in the past, Pakistanis had mostly gone to study in Najaf, but within a year of the revolution four thousand students received scholarships from the Iranian government to study in Qom for up to a year. By the time they returned, many had fully embraced the concept of the wilayat, preaching it to others in Pakistan.
There is no telling how receptive Shias in Pakistan would have been to Khomeini’s message of revolution if Zia had not provoked them, but the provocation gave clerics like Hussaini a powerful rallying tool. Allama Hussaini was a revolutionary at heart, a rabble-rouser who irked the Iraqis with his protests about the oppression of Shias while he lived in Najaf. While he was in Qom, he had sent letters of protests to the shah. When the zakat siege took place in 1980, he rallied thousands of volunteers from his home in Kurram. At that time, Hussaini was still a relatively unknown figure outside Kurram, but by 1984, the thirty-seven-year-old cleric had become the head of the TNFJ. He went to visit Khomeini to receive official support. Hussaini had previously been appointed as Khomeini’s representative, a wakil, but official recognition carried more weight. It also meant he could collect khums, a Shia religious tax, some of it for the benefit of the Shia community in Pakistan and some to send to Khomeini. The Iranian Supreme Leader was also a marja’a taqlid, an object of emulation for followers. Most of the high-ranking clerics who hold the position of marja’a are in Iraq and Iran, and their representatives around the Muslim world collect a portion of the khums tax from the faithful on their behalf. In the 1980s, Pakistan became a huge source of such revenue for Iran.
Hussaini was in awe of the ayatollah. He thought Khomeini was blessed, the real representative of the Hidden Imam on earth, and the only man who could break the dominance of the great powers—both the US and the USSR—on other countries, including Pakistan. Copying revolutionary Iran, Hussaini tried to introduce the new tradition of “Jerusalem Day” in Pakistan in 1984; later he added a “Death to America” day. For Hussaini, only an Islamic revolution modeled after Iran’s revolution would solve Pakistan’s woes, although he was careful never to give the impression he wanted to bring down the regime with violence. Zia may have been his “near enemy” but Hussaini had “far enemies,” the same ones that Khomeini despised so much: Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism. He spoke of them with disdain, those “Wahhabis who wrap themselves in the mantle of Islam,” and ranted against the House of S
aud, attacking them where it hurt most: parroting Khomeini’s favorite line, Hussaini said the Saudis were bad custodians of Mecca and Medina. The task, he insisted, should be given to a committee of Islamic countries. Hussaini’s rise provoked fissures in the community; clerics who followed the more quietist tradition didn’t approve of his Iranization of Pakistan’s Shias.
The more Hussaini and the TNFJ agitated and showed off their newfound power, the more they aggravated Sunni radical groups—a local tit-for-tat mirroring the mix of petulant and sometimes violent reactions the Saudis were having to Iran’s export of revolutionary zeal. At the time, Hussaini was running a religious seminary in Peshawar, spreading Khomeini’s gospel. He wasn’t the only one to settle in the city. Those “Wahhabis in the mantle of Islam” that he hated so much were there now too. The Arab fighters joining the war against the Soviets had converged on Peshawar. They drove big cars, carried big guns, and threw a lot of money around.
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They trickled in at first, but they stood out immediately. By the mid-1980s, they had taken over whole neighborhoods and were renting dozens of houses on the pine-lined streets of University Town, a quiet part of Peshawar, just outside the nineteenth-century walls of the gated citadel city, a prosperous area filled with whitewashed one-story bungalows and flowering bougainvillea. They ran charities and religious seminaries, they had brought their wives and children, and the wives had more children. They were not all Wahhabis, they weren’t even all Saudis, but “Wahhabi” was the blanket term used derogatorily by men like Hussaini and Khomeini to rile up their followers against those Sunnis who espoused the Saudi practice of Islam. For the Arab fighters, Peshawar was the perfect base—Afghanistan was just an hour and a half away, past Torkham Gate and through the famed Khyber Pass, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in “The Ballad of the King’s Jest.”
When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town.
Peshawar’s fate was to be located on the Grand Trunk Road, Asia’s oldest and longest route. From Alexander the Great marching to India, to the British colonizers who made it their administrative headquarters for the province; from the caravans of traders on the Silk Road to the hippies traveling to India in the 1960s, Peshawar could be everything to everyone: purushapura, in the old Sanskrit, a “city of men.” The diverse city had a layered past where Sikhs and Hindus had lived among the tribal Pashtuns before independence. A city of flowers, it still had beautiful, lush gardens at its entrance, a leftover from Mughal and British times. Conservative but inclusive, this was a city and a region of famed Pashtun warriors who could recite the verses of two books by heart: the holy Quran and the poetry of their very own Peshawari Sufi saint Rahman Baba. Hundreds of daily visitors thronged the shrine of the seventeenth-century poet, while grandmothers lulled children to sleep with Baba’s poetry of love and peace.
Long misunderstood by outsiders, Peshawar had been reduced to a “city of evil countenances” by Kipling and other orientalist writers and journalists who perpetuated the myth with references to “cold black eyes” peering “out of narrow alleys” and fearsome tribal warriors who were “inarticulate” and expressed themselves in the ancient Peshawar way (according to such writers, by firing their rifles). True, there had always been guns on sale in Peshawar’s markets, and drugs too, but in the 1980s, the “city of evil countenances” finally earned the reputation Kipling had bestowed on it. Peshawaris didn’t see it happening at first. Without their say, their city became a petri dish for ideological experiments that would one day produce an explosion of hatred on the other side of the world. But they were its first victims. Peshawar’s fate was also to be the headquarters of the Afghan mujahedeen leaders in exile, home to several hundred thousand Afghan refugees, hundreds of Western aid workers, charities, and UN agencies—and the growing contingent of Arab Islamist activists, fighters, and journalists, lured by the siren call of jihad and the thrill of action.
The Egyptian contingent was the biggest. The doctor Ayman Zawahiri was there; released from jail after the Sadat assassination and now leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, he would rise to number two in al-Qaeda in the years to come. Mohammad Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin, also out of jail, had traveled to Peshawar for jihad after his brother had killed the “near enemy.” He played a key role in channeling fighters to Peshawar and would later try to assassinate the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Issam Berqawi, aka Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi, a Palestinian who had grown up in Kuwait, arrived around 1985. He had studied in Medina, where he had come in contact with Bin Baz and rejoiced in the access to books on Wahhabism. Maqdissi’s brother-in-law was Abdellatif al-Derbas, the associate of Juhayman al-Otaibi, who had helped print Juhayman’s incendiary pamphlets in Kuwait in 1979. Maqdissi greatly admired Juhayman, and in Peshawar he would write books that took the zealot’s vision even further, lambasting the Saudi state and inspiring a new generation of fanatics. For now, he was in the shadow of people like Osama bin Laden. Still young and shy when he first showed up in Peshawar, Bin Laden was flush with money, as the scion of a wealthy family that ran a large construction company and was close to the royal family. At first, he only made trips from Jeddah, but he finally settled in Peshawar with his family in the mid-1980s.
The Arabs kept to themselves in clusters of houses; they paid good rent. Though many Peshawaris resented them and their haughty ways, it was hard to turn down their money. Shop signs in Arabic went up around the area, and they were good customers, so grocers catered to their needs. They drove around in cars with tinted windows, ran schools and mosques, and published books in Arabic that would feed generations of violent militants. They were establishing a small Arabistan in the middle of Pakistan (just as Iranians were setting up a Little Tehran in Baalbek).
Jamal Khashoggi, the young Saudi graduate of Indiana University, was there, too. Now a journalist writing for Saudi publications, he sent excited dispatches from the front about the daily life and the exploits of the Arab fighters, who, in his eyes, represented the unity of the Islamic nation—this Afghan war was a good war, a war of the faithful against the unbelievers. This was also a war that served everyone’s interests: the Saudis who needed to rebuild their reputation after the debacle in Mecca, the Americans who wanted to give the Soviets their own Vietnam, and Zia who used it to hold on to power.
Until the early 1980s, Islamist revolutionaries and militants were still focused on the struggle against their respective governments, confined by national borders, as in Syria or Egypt. Although their goals were roughly the same—to bring about an Islamic government in their country—there was no bigger, unifying cause. (Arab fighters had joined the ranks of the PLO on occasion, but it had never become a real transnational legion of fighters.) They had watched the success of the Iranian Revolution and marveled at the power of the spoken word and the ability of Islam to bring millions to the street. With the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, they discovered the battlefield—and one another. Islamist jihadists of every nationality and creed came together and got high on power.
If Beirut was the supermarket of the left in the 1970s, where Marxists, communists, Egyptians, Iraqis, and all the Palestinian factions debated and theorized, published and drank in bars arguing over ideas and then fought in the streets, Peshawar was the supermarket of the Islamists in the 1980s without the drinking: there the discussions were about Islamic law, fatwas, the war of the believers, the unity of the Muslim nation, and the humanitarian needs of Afghan refugees.
There was actually alcohol available in Zia’s Pakistan, bootlegged or smuggled, served in hidden speakeasies or hotel bars, including in Peshawar, which had always evaded full government control and where spies, journalists, and Western aid workers s
ought a break from the nearby war in the city’s watering holes. Some bars were for foreigners only, like the American Club, which opened in 1985 and served drinks and cheeseburgers, and held aerobics classes. Bin Laden was its most famous neighbor. The Intercontinental Hotel, overlooking the Pakistani Armed Forces’ eighteen-hole golf course, inaugurated in 1975, was where mujahedeen leaders, journalists, and Westerners now all rubbed shoulders, uncomfortably. On one reporting assignment in Pakistan, Jamal sat in the garden of the Intercontinental Hotel with the mujahedeen as they discussed their day and their next moves and looked sneeringly at the Westerners sitting at the bar. One of the fighters called to the waiter: “Close the curtains, we don’t want to see these people inside.” There was no violence, no ransacking of bars, no attacks against Westerners, not yet. The bar still managed to serve alcohol until well into the 1980s, but the tension was building. Jamal was young and excited to be part of something greater than himself. He posed for pictures with a Kalashnikov, and he spent days, sometimes weeks, with the Arab fighters, bonding with them and pouring his heart into his dispatches. But in that fleeting moment in the garden, he sensed the arrogance of the Arab fighters, the friction between worlds and cultures. One of his Islamist friends had once criticized him for helping a European aid agency unload a shipment for Afghan refugees—why was Jamal helping the kuffars, the infidels? “Because these kuffars are giving millions of dollars of goods to the Afghan refugees,” he replied. “Are you?”
