American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (6 page)

W
HAT ARE THE ULTIMATE GOALS OF THE TERRORISTS?
What makes them tick? Why do they hate us so powerfully? The international jihad movement is loose and decentralized, but it does flow around the world from certain fertile sources. The sources themselves move—from, for example, Pakistan to Sudan to Afghanistan—yet wherever they are, they inspire and direct hundreds and thousands of followers.

In 1994 I had the chance to meet some of the leaders who at that time were using Pakistan as a base. I was accompanied on this trip by my colleague Khalid Duran.

Before teaching in Germany and America, Khalid spent seven years—1967–1974—teaching Islamic law in Pakistan. He knows the country well. In 1994 Khalid went along with me to meet Hudaifa Azzam, the son of Abdullah Azzam, the legendary Palestinian mullah who was the first to conceive of Islam’s international holy war. The visit was arranged through Azzam’s nephew, who lives in Chicago. Azzam had begun preaching worldwide jihad from a secure base in Pakistan. As the Afghan war with the Soviets was dying down, he asked, why stop here? The Middle East was full of corrupt secular rulers who had abandoned the true faith. The military training the volunteers from those many countries had received in the hills of Afghanistan would serve as a basis to challenge those regimes. If the U.S.S.R. could be defeated, Azzam argued, so could the U.S.

Someone must have been disturbed by his message. In 1989, Azzam was murdered on his way to Friday mosque services, when his car exploded while winding through Islamabad’s narrow streets. Just who murdered Azzam remains a mystery to this day, but his teachings have lived on. His organization was morphed into Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. But Azzam provided the spiritual cornerstone. I was excited by the prospect of meeting Azzam’s eldest surviving son, Hudaifa, only twenty years old when his father was killed.

At the time, the whole Arab world was perturbed by the return of “al-Afghan,”—guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan. They were no longer needed in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Now they were eager to put their practical experience to work in their own countries or anywhere else where they might be able to spread the jihad and their militant view of Islam. Some went to Kashmir, the disputed territory located on the northern frontier between Pakistan and India that is under Indian control, where a guerrilla war had been launched against New Delhi’s troops in 1989. In 1993, a few hundred “Afghans” made their way to Bosnia, much to the chagrin of the Bosnian government, which wanted the conflict to be seen as a European issue rather than an Islamic one. But staying in Afghanistan was not an option. In truth, few of the Arab mujahideen had displayed outstanding military skills. Instead they became known for their cruel treatment of prisoners and for tyrannizing the people in the “liberated areas.” (These habits have proved their undoing as allied forces have liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban. The Arab Afghans have become isolated and despised by all.)

A number of Arab governments held meetings to discuss this new threat. Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt felt most intimidated. In the 1920s Egypt had given birth to the Muslim Brotherhood. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jihad, had assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. The civil government was sick of fundamentalists. Algeria had a socialist regime that was equally unacceptable to the zealots. Algerian authorities outlawed the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front or FIS) in 1992, after it was poised to win Parliamentary elections. Tunisia’s progressive democratic government, headed by president General Zinedine ben Ali, felt similarly threatened.

The other black-sheep nation was Pakistan. Many “Afghans” actually spent most of the war in Peshawar, the provincial capital, not far from the border, which became their unofficial headquarters. The local people had soon had enough of these immigrant “Muslim brothers” with their bossy manners—even though Arabs generally enjoy a special respect in this part of the world since they hail from the holy land of Islam and all are considered relatives of the Prophet. The Pakistani Islamist party, Jamaat e-Islami, adopted the Arab Afghans as allies at a time when they had few others. The fundamentalists had never had a very strong popular following, although their doctrine pervaded the Interservices Intelligence Directorate—the “ISI”—which is the real ruler of Pakistan. Now the Jamaat embraced their new “Arab brothers,” hoping to capitalize on their prestige.

When Abdullah Azzam was killed in 1989, his two oldest sons died with him. He left behind a large surviving family and a band of dedicated followers, most of whom worked with his “Mektab e-Khidemat Lil-Mujahideen,” or “Office of Services for the Mujahideen,” a small Arab outpost that published
Al-Jihad,
a monthly Arabic magazine. In the late 1980s and early 1990s that outpost was usurped by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, which had formed as an offshoot of Azzam’s Peshawar-based group.

Handsome in jeans and a leather jacket, Hudaifa looked more like a denizen of Madrid or Naples than a guerrilla warrior. Although as tall as his father, he had nothing of the late sheikh’s austerity. The family home was in a suburb of Peshawar, but Hudaifa occupied another house in Islamabad’s privileged E-6 sector, where many diplomats and high-ranking Pakistani officials live. This is not to say he lived in grand style. In 1994 the house was divided into two apartments with Hudaifa, his wife, and their newborn son in the rear, living in utter simplicity. The kitchen was a mess, and it was hard to find a clean glass. “We had many guests last night,” Hudaifa offered in man-of-the-world style. His wife was nowhere to be seen. The Azzams strictly observed
purdah,
and as males we would never be permitted to see her.

At the time, Hudaifa was a student at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, which is housed in the grand National Mosque, a huge tent-like structure with four minarets at the foot of the Margalla Hills, which serve as a backdrop to Pakistan’s new capital. Created in the 1960s, Islamabad is still expanding rapidly. The mosque is a tourist attraction, and on holidays large numbers of people assemble there for prayer. On postcards, the building seems grandiose, but in person this impression evaporates quickly. Both the mosque and the university are the accomplishments of General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the religious conservative who ruled with an iron fist from 1977 to 1988. The university was the personal brainchild of this man whom the not-so-pious Pakistanis derisively nicknamed their “priest president.”

Incorporated into the new university was the Islamic Research Institute, created in 1962 to reform Islamic law and modernize the religion. It quickly became a target of fundamentalist wrath. The “priest president” placed it under the new university’s jurisdiction and all thoughts of reforming Islam quietly disappeared. None of this appeared to be known to Hudaifa, who walked past the Institute’s front door every day but did not know its history. In fact, most of his classes were taught by Arabs who disguised their sense of inferiority in this environment by staying aloof from Pakistani scholars. Hudaifa, although possessing a fine mind open to fresh impulses, treated the Pakistanis in almost a colonial manner. In the course of our first week, the only materials we saw Hudaifa read were our passports, which he apparently wanted to memorize.

Our visit to the Institute was an emotional reunion for Khalid, who had taught here from 1967 to 1974. Before long almost a dozen of his former colleagues had gathered to welcome him. To our amazement, Hudaifa did not know a single one—nor was he very curious. To him they were all just Pakistanis, with nothing to differentiate a shopkeeper or night watchman from an internationally known scholar. Later he admitted his reservations. He said that most Pakistanis were hypocrites and opportunists. “Nothing remains a secret in this country,” he told us. “Everyone takes bribes, without exception.” These national and ethnic differences constantly disturbed the utopian concepts of Islamic brotherhood. “The oneness of the
umma
quickly founders once Muslims from one culture are set in another,” is how Khalid explained it to me. “The more Islamist they are, the more problems this creates, since the slightest deviation from their own norm is considered a deviation from the pure faith.”

The problem that has always faced the jihad is—to use military terminology—an extreme form of “mission creep.” The fundamentalists would like the entire world to accept their version of Islam, so no matter where they start, they are always tempted to expand their targets. Hudaifa’s contempt for moderate Pakistanis, and his understanding that Muslims from different cultures were at odds, reflected this. Sizing him up, I tried to determine where the bulk of his energies would lie.

Having heard the stories about Arabs indulging in a kind of slave trade, and forcing “unity” on Muslims from different cultures by “marrying” Afghan girls and widows, we gingerly asked Hudaifa about intermarriages. “People are very different,” he replied. “With such disparate customs and mentalities, it is not easy to live together. But the jihad has brought Arab brothers from different countries together and made them marry from each other’s families.” The practice, of course, goes back to the Prophet Muhammad. In fact, a sister of Hudaifa’s had been given in marriage to an Algerian, a loyal lieutenant of Azzam and a veteran of the Afghan war and the FIS war on Algeria, now in London. We tried to suggest to Hudaifa that the large-scale population movement among Muslim countries—the influx of hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti Palestinians into Jordan in the outwash of the Gulf War, for example—would unsettle many of these countries. He did not see the point and was obviously unaccustomed to sociological explanations. In his Manichean vision, the world is divided into good and bad, Islam and the infidels. All Muslims are good, therefore they should get along with each other.

We were ready now to head from Islamabad to Peshawar and the Afghan border. Hudaifa offered to drive us in his black Toyota, his only self-indulgence, and we happily accepted. Hudaifa turned out to be an aggressive driver, but he delivered us safely.

The journey was a historical treat. The Gandhara region was originally conquered by Alexander the Great, who built the city of Taxila, leaving behind a contingent of soldiers. Maintained for three hundred years, the kingdom was eventually swallowed by the local population, which had adopted Buddhism. It is now the home of some of the oldest Buddha statues in the world—although none as large as the rock statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, which the Taliban destroyed in March 2001. We passed a memorial pillar where our highway crossed the Grand Trunk Road, which once crossed the entire Indian subcontinent. Hudaifa declared that the pillar had been built by Muhammad bin Qasim, the Arab general sent from Baghdad to conquer India in the eighth century. Khalid rolled his eyes and quietly informed me that the pillar was erected by the British in the nineteenth century.

As we passed through Wah, Pakistan’s most important center of arms production, Khalid explained that it was a favorite hangout for bandits, who attacked travelers and disappeared into the rugged countryside. I was skeptical. But the next morning the papers reported that robbers had attacked a bus and made off with 200,000 rupees only minutes after we passed through the area.

We arrived at Azzam’s family residence in the dark of night. We were greeted at the gate by the night watchman, a ubiquitous figure in Pakistan. From his looks, he was probably a former mujahid. The house didn’t look like a fortress or guerrilla headquarters. Inside there was virtually no furniture, just some mattresses spread over a richly embroidered Oriental rug. After being introduced to Hamza, Hudaifa’s seventeen-year-old brother, we all squatted on the floor. Hamza, who was attending high school in Peshawar, seemed to think of little else but getting married. Premarital sex is a capital sin in Muslim society, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. He enquired seriously about the daughters of Abu Ayman, his uncle in Chicago who had arranged the visit for us. His questions were so solemn and serious that it was hard not to laugh. We could only tell him that the two daughters we had met were both married. But there was a third daughter, Hamza insisted, who was supposed to be very pretty. (Back in the United States several months later, we actually relayed Hamza’s interest to the uncle, who expressed unmistakable approval. Our matchmaking efforts may not have been entirely in vain.)

In Peshawar, even going to the bathroom in a sex-segregated society is difficult. When we informed our host of our needs, he sent word to the women throughout the house to stay out of sight. When I was in the bathroom, I sensed the whole household holding its breath while waiting to return to normal. When I was through, a young man stood waiting to escort me back to the living room.

Hudaifa showed me a photo album of his father. He had quite a few of them. We also saw expressions of grief from the media. Even Pakistan’s prime minister Benazir Bhutto had sent condolences—though Azzam had criticized her publicly. After a dinner of delicious Palestinian food, Hudaifa drove us to our hotel.

Next morning Hudaifa took us to the Office of Services, where we met Salih, a Palestinian staff member. He spoke English fairly well and was quite communicative, trying to convert me to his cause. Like Hudaifa, Salih spoke quite favorably of the United States, especially our freedom of religion and expression. Nowhere in the Muslim world, he said, was a believer granted such freedom to live his faith and express his views. The problem, he said, was that the United States supported tyrannical regimes in the Arab world, especially in Israel. Jews, he explained, have too much power in America, controlling our media and shaping national policies.

He also objected to America’s immorality, specifically its sexual promiscuity. It’s a commonly heard charge; at times it appears to be the Islamists’ principal problem. Their main criterion for good and evil in this world is marital fidelity, with virginity as a precondition to marriage. Some of the “Arab Afghans” migrated to Pakistan because they saw their own societies succumbing to sinfulness. On arrival, however, they soon discovered that sinfulness exists here as well, especially in large cities such as Karachi and Lahore. Peshawar was a little more acceptable but still declining. For these pilgrims, Pakistan—which literally means the “Land of the Pure”—was not the Shangri-la they anticipated. In 1996, when the Taliban began to take power in Afghanistan, many of them moved across the border.