TARIQ, ali - The Duel

by Ali, Tariq

  During the 1980s and 1990s this complex became a transit camp for young jihadis on their way to fight in Afghanistan and, later, Kashmir. Abdullah made no secret of his beliefs. He was sympathetic to the Saudi Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and during the Iraq-Iran war was only too happy to encourage the killing of Shia “heretics” in Pakistan. Shia constitute 20 percent of the Muslim population in Pakistan, and prior to Zia’s dictatorship there was little hostility between them and the majority of the Sunnis. Abdullah’s patronage of ultrasectarian, anti-Shia terror groups led to his own assassination in October 1998. Members of a rival Muslim faction killed him soon after he had finished praying in his own mosque.

  His sons, Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, then took control of the mosque and religious schools. The government agreed that Aziz would lead the Friday congregation. His sermons were often supportive of Al Qaeda, though he was more careful about his language after 9/11. Senior civil servants and military officers often attended Friday prayers. The better-educated and soft-spoken Rashid, with his lean, haggard face and ragged beard, was left to act as spin doctor and was effective in charming visiting foreign and local journalists.

  But after November 2004, when the army, under heavy U.S. pressure, launched an offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, relations between the brothers and the government became tense. Aziz in particular was livid. When, according to Rashid, “a retired colonel of the Pakistan army approached us with a written request for a fatwa clarifying the Sharia perspective on the army waging a war on the tribal people,” Aziz did not waste any time. He issued a fatwa declaring that the killing of its own people by a Muslim army is haram (forbidden), “that any army official killed during the operation should not be given a Muslim burial,” and that “the militants who die while fighting the Pakistan army are martyrs.” Within days of its publication the fatwa had been publicly endorsed by almost five hundred “religious scholars.” Despite heavy pressure from the mosque’s patrons in the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s military intelligence, the brothers refused to withdraw it. The government response was surprisingly muted. Aziz’s official status as the mosque’s imam was ended and an arrest warrant issued against him, but it was never served, and the brothers were allowed to carry on as usual. Perhaps the ISI thought they might still prove useful.

  Set up in 1948 with officers of the three services of the Pakistan military, the ISI was originally a routine intelligence directorate specializing in the gathering and analysis of information and focused largely on India and local “Communist subversion.” Its size and budget grew at a phenomenal rate during the first Afghan war against the Soviet Union. It worked closely with U.S., French, and British intelligence services during that period and, as described later in this book, played a central role in arming and training the mujahideen and, later, infiltrating the Taliban into Afghanistan. With a level of autonomy no greater than that allowed the CIA or the DIA in the United States, the ISI operated throughout with the official approval of the military high command.

  Earlier in 2004 the government had claimed to have uncovered a terrorist plot to bomb military installations, including the GHQ (general headquarters) in Rawalpindi and state buildings in Islamabad, on August 14. Machine guns and explosives were found in Abdul Rashid Ghazi’s car. New warrants were issued against the brothers and they were arrested. At this point the religious affairs minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, General Zia’s son, persuaded his colleagues to pardon the clerics in return for a written apology pledging that they wouldn’t become involved in the armed struggle. Rashid claimed the whole plot had been scripted to please the West and in a newspaper article asked the religious affairs minister to provide proof that the minister had supposedly asked for the undertaking. There was no response.

  In January 2007, the brothers decided to shift their focus from foreign to domestic policy and demanded an immediate implementation of Sharia law. Until then they had been content to denounce U.S. policies in the Muslim world and America’s local point man, Musharraf, for helping dismantle the Taliban government in Afghanistan. They did not publicly support the three attempts that had recently been made on Musharraf’s life, but it was hardly a secret that they regretted his survival. The statement they issued in January was intended as an open provocation to the regime. Aziz spelled out his program: “We will never permit dance and music in Pakistan. All those interested in such activities should shift to India. We are tired of waiting. It is Sharia or martyrdom.” They felt threatened by the government’s demolition of two mosques that had been built illegally on public land. When they received notices announcing the demolition of parts of the Red Mosque and the women’s seminary, the brothers dispatched dozens of women students in black burkas to occupy a children’s library next to their seminary. The intelligence agencies appeared to be taken aback, but quickly negotiated an end to the occupation.

  The brothers continued to test the authorities. Sharia was implemented in the gender-segregated madrassas (religious schools) housed in the mosque complex, and there was a public bonfire of books, CDs, and DVDs. Then the women from the madrassa directed their fire against Islamabad’s upmarket brothels, targeting Aunty Shamim, a well-known procuress who provided “decent” girls for indecent purposes, and whose clients included the local great and good, a number of them moderate religious leaders. Aunty ran the brothel like an office: she kept office hours and shut up shop at midday on Friday so that clients could go to the nearest mosque, which was the Lal Masjid. The morality brigades raided the brothel and “freed” the women. Most of the girls were educated, some were single parents, others were widows, all were desperately short of funds. The office hours suited them. Aunty Shamim fled town, and her workers sought similar employment elsewhere, while the madrassa girls celebrated an easy victory.

  Emboldened by their triumph, the brothers next decided to take on Islamabad’s upmarket massage parlors, not all of which were sex joints, and some of which were staffed by Chinese citizens. Six Chinese women were abducted in late June and taken to the mosque. The Chinese ambassador was not pleased. He informed President Hu Jintao, who was even less pleased, and Beijing made it clear that it wanted its citizens freed without delay. Government fixers arrived at the mosque to plead the strategic importance of Sino-Pakistan relations, and the women were released. The massage industry promised that henceforth only men would massage other men. Honor was satisfied, even though the deal directly contradicted the Sharia, which usually decrees the death penalty for homosexuality. The liberal press depicted the antivice campaign as the Talibanization of Pakistan, which annoyed the Lal Masjid clerics. “Rudy Giuliani, when he became mayor of New York, closed the brothels,” Rashid said. “Was that also Talibanization?” Rashid, were he alive, would have strongly supported the “resignation” of Governor Spitzer.

  Angered and embarrassed by the kidnapping of the Chinese women, Musharraf demanded a resolution to the crisis. The Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, Ali Saeed Awadh Asseri, arrived at the mosque and spent ninety minutes with the brothers. They were welcoming but told him that all they wanted was the implementation of Saudi laws in Pakistan. Surely he agreed? The ambassador declined to meet the press after the visit, so his response remains unrecorded. His mediation a failure, Plan B was set in motion.

  On July 3, the paramilitary Rangers began to lay barbed wire at the end of the street in front of the mosque. Some madrassa students opened fire, shot a Ranger dead, and for good measure torched the neighboring Environment Ministry. Security forces responded the same night with tear gas and machine guns. The next morning the government declared a curfew in the area, and a weeklong siege of the mosque began, with television networks beaming images across the world. Rashid, infatuated with publicity, must have been pleased. The brothers thought that keeping women and children hostage inside the compound might save them. But some were released and Aziz was arrested as he tried to escape in a burka, only to be released quietly a week later and allowed to ret
urn to his village.

  On July 10, paratroopers finally stormed the complex. Rashid and at least a hundred others died in the ensuing clashes. Eleven soldiers were also killed and more than forty wounded. Several police stations were attacked, and ominous complaints came from the tribal areas. Maulana Faqir Mohammed, a leading Taliban supporter, told thousands of armed tribesmen, “We beg Allah to destroy Musharraf, and we will seek revenge for the Lal Masjid atrocities.” This view was reiterated by Osama bin Laden, who declared Musharraf an “infidel” and said that “removing him is now obligatory for Muslims.”

  I was in Pakistan in September 2007 when suicide bombers hit military targets, among them a bus carrying ISI employees, to avenge Rashid’s death. But in the country as a whole the reaction was muted. The leaders of the MMA (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal), a coalition of religious parties that governed the Frontier Province and shares power in Baluchistan, made ugly public statements, but took no action. Only a thousand people marched in the demonstration called in the provincial capital, Peshawar, the day after the deaths. This was the largest protest march, and even here the mood was subdued. There was no shrill glorification of the martyrs. The contrast with the campaign to reinstate the chief justice could not have been more pronounced. Three weeks later, more than one hundred thousand people gathered in the Punjabi city of Kasur to observe the 250th anniversary of the death of the great seventeenth-century poet Bulleh Shah, one in a distinguished line of Sufi poets who promoted skepticism, denounced organized religion, and avoided all forms of orthodoxy. For Bulleh Shah a mullah should be compared to a barking dog or a crowing cock. In response to a question from a believer as to his own religious identity, the poet replied:

  Who knows what I am,

  Neither a believer in the mosque,

  Nor an unbeliever worshipping clay,

  Neither Moses nor Pharaoh,

  Neither sinner nor saint;

  Who knows what I am . . .

  That this and similar poems are regularly performed throughout Pakistan is one indication that jihadis are not popular in most of the country. Nor is the government. The mosque episode raised several important questions that remain unanswered. Why did the government not act in January when the vigilantes first poured out? How did the clerics accumulate such a large store of weapons without the knowledge of the government? Was the ISI aware that the mosque concealed an arsenal? If so, why did they keep it quiet? What were the relations between the clerics and government agencies? Why was Aziz released and allowed to return to his village without being charged?

  I wondered if I might find answers to these questions in Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, a few miles from the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan. I had not visited the city for over a quarter of a century, not since it had become the headquarters of the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and its governor, a close colleague of General Zia’s, had defended the heroin trade. On that occasion in 1973 I had crossed the Afghan border and returned without a passport, just to see if it could still be done. Pleased with my success I then took a bus to Rawalpindi. I still remember the thrill of catching sight of a bloodred sunset filling the sky as we crossed the river Indus on the bridge at Attock.

  The old bridge always brings back memories of childhood and youth. The sight of the turbulent waters below helps recall the history that had, in the shape of successive conquerors from Europe and Central Asia, marched through here on its way south and long before Alexander. How many soldiers had died making the crossing on makeshift rafts? The Mogul emperor Akbar had built a giant fort just upstream from where the Kabul River merged noisily with its more famous cousin. Its strategic aim was to house a garrison that could ward off invaders and crush local rebellions and, no doubt, tax merchants.

  Thirty-four years later, on my way by car from Islamabad, I could not suppress my excitement. I stopped the car to take a look at the river and the fort above. The fort is now a notorious political prison, a torture center used by successive Pakistan governments and not just the military kind. I tried but could not see the two black rocks that, as I remembered, jutted from the river just below the fort. Where were they? Perhaps they could only be seen from the old nineteenth-century bridge, a masterpiece of Victorian engineering, surrounded by Mogul ruins, including an old gravestone labeled “prostitute’s tomb” (a punishment inflicted by a queen on her husband’s favorite mistress) that used to make us giggle as children.

  The two rocks had been named after two brothers, Kamal-ud-Din and Jamal-ud-Din, who were flung down from their peak into the river below on the orders of the great Mogul emperor. Akbar’s toleration of dissent has been greatly exaggerated. Its true that while the Catholic Inquisition was sowing terror in Europe, Akbar, himself a Muslim, ruled that “anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” The interreligious debates he organized in Agra included Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Jains, Jews, and the atheists of the Carvaka school, who argued that Brahmans had established ceremonies for the dead only “as a means of livelihood” for themselves.

  But Akbar sometimes flouted his own injunctions when his power was challenged. Hence his deep anger with the rebellious Pashtuns from Waziristan and their challenging philosophy. The brothers were members of a sixteenth-century Muslim sect, the Roshnais, “Enlightened Ones,” founded by their father, Pir Roshan. They rejected all revealed religions and hence the Koran. They argued against the mediation of prophets or kings. The Creator was alone and each person should relate to Him as an individual.* Religion was a personal matter between Allah and a believer.

  Akbar was busy trying to create his own synthetic religion as a way of bridging various confessional and class divides and uniting India. The persecution of this sect, however, was not the outcome of ideological rivalry. The Enlightened Ones were popular among the peasantry in the region, and their approach to life was often used to justify rebellions against the central authority. The Mogul king, who founded the city of Peshawar as a military and trading base, regarded this as intolerable.

  Peshawar, now a city of over 3 million, has trebled in size over the last thirty years. Most of its new inhabitants consist of three generations of refugees, a result of the interconnected Afghan wars unleashed by the big powers (the Soviet Union and the United States respectively) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The colonial city built by the British was designed as a cantonment town, to house a garrison that protected the northwestern frontier of British India against czarist and Bolshevik intrigues. This function has been preserved and expanded.

  Peshawar remains a border city, but it is not the case, as the New York Times reported on January 18, 2008, that “for centuries, fighting and lawlessness have been part of the fabric of this frontier town.” This view is derived from the minstrel of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling, whose descriptions were mistakenly read as history. In a dispatch from Peshawar, a location he characterized as “the city of evil countenances,” to the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore on March 28, 1885, hostility to the British presence was described as follows:

  Under the shop lights in front of the sweet-meat and ghee seller’s booths, the press and dins of words is thickest. Faces of dogs, swine, weasels and goats, all the more hideous for being set on human bodies, and lighted with human intelligence, gather in front of the ring of lamp-light, where they may be studied for half-an-hour at a stretch. Pathans, Afridis, Logas, Kohistanis, Turcomans, and a hundred other varieties of the turbulent Afghan race, are gathered in the vast human menagerie between the Gate and the Ghor Kutri. As an Englishman passes, they will turn to scowl upon him, and in many cases to spit fluently to the ground after he has passed. One burly big-paunched ruffian, with shaven head and a neck creased and dimpled with rolls of fat, is specially zealous in this religious rite—contenting himself with no perfunctory performance, but with a wholesouled expectoration, that must be as refreshing to his comrades, as it is disgusting to the European, sir.... But he is only one of
twenty thousand. The main road teems with magnificent scoundrels and handsome ruffians; all giving the on-looker the impression of wild beasts held back from murder and violence, and chafing against the restraint.

  There was little trouble during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, except when wars were being waged by the British Empire in Afghanistan. Although the British, attempting to crush and defuse a nationalist current demanding independence, had imposed military rule and were administering heavy punishments for trivial offenses in the frontier province, the largest movement during the twentieth century was explicitly peaceful. Ghaffar Khan and Dr. Khan Sahib, two brothers from a landed family in Charsadda, decided to launch a political, nonviolent struggle against the British in 1930. The Redshirt movement, as it became known (because of the color of the shirts worn by its supporters rather than any other affinities; their inspiration was Gandhi not Lenin), spread rapidly throughout the region. Ghaffar Khan and his volunteers visited every single village to organize the peasants against the empire and branches of the movement emerged even in the remotest village.

  The British authorities, stung by the growth of support for this organization, were determined it should be “nipped in the bud.” This led to the notorious massacre in the Qissa Khwani (Storytellers) bazaar in 1930, when a thousand or so Redshirts who had gathered to welcome Congress leaders were informed that the authorities had refused to let the leaders enter the province. The Congress held a mass meeting and called for an immediate boycott of British-owned shops. The governor ordered the arrest of Ghaffar Khan and others under Section 144, a legal clause in the public-order ordinance prohibiting the assembly of more than four people in public spaces, a law still much used in South Asia. The demonstrators refused to move, and troops opened fire, killing two hundred activists. More people poured out onto the streets, their numbers compelling the troops to withdraw. Peshawar was under the control of its people for four whole days without any violence prior to the entry of British military reinforcements. The massacre and its aftermath were described by a colonial officer, Sir Herbert Thompson, as a typical case of “a child astonished by its own tantrum, returning to the security of the nanny’s hand.”*