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Overview
Masood Farivar was ten years old when his childhood in peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan was shattered by the Soviet invasion of 1979. Although he was born into a long line of religious and political leaders who had shaped his nation’s history for centuries, Farivar fled to Pakistan with his family and came of age in a madrassa for refugees. At eighteen, he defied his parents and returned home to join the jihad, fighting beside not only the Afghan mujahideen but also Arab and Pakistani volunteers. When the Soviets withdrew, Farivar moved to America and attended the prestigious Lawrenceville School and Harvard, and ultimately became a journalist in New York.
Farivar draws on his unique experience as a native Afghan, a former mujahideen fighter, and a longtime US resident to provide unprecedented insight into the ongoing collision between Islam and the West. This is a visceral, clear-eyed, and illuminating memoir from an indispensable new voice on the world stage.
“Like the war poets who told you what it was really like to be in the trenches, Farivar survived to tell us about life on the front lines of the clash of civilizations—and it rings with more truth than any other account of these famous events I’ve ever read. In these troubled times, this is a book that is brave, honest, humane, and full of love.” —Aidan Hartley, author of The Zanzibar Chest
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555848231 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Every child who is born is born with a sound nature; it is the parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Magian.
— Prophet Muhammad
Summer 1974 or 1975 — "Agha, Agha," I said excitedly, "look, there's a fish in the river."
It was a late summer afternoon and I was tugging at Agha's shirttail and tiptoeing over a creaky wooden footbridge, exhilarated and frightened by the rush of the muddy Alishang River twenty feet below. Agha was Sufi Ramazan, my father's father and a beloved, gray-bearded elder of our ancestral village of Islamabad in eastern Afghanistan in the province of Laghman. While my cousins called him by the more formal Baba Jee, I for some reason had adopted the term my father and uncles preferred for him: Agha, or Dad. Ever since he'd given me my name and chanted the azan, the Islamic call to prayer — Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, God is great, God is great — into my ears as an infant, Grandpa Agha had taken a special liking to me, the only son of his oldest son.
I didn't know it at the time, but Agha had decided to introduce me to our ancestral homeland, a world away from my birthplace of Sheberghan in the north. I was happy to get away from Sheberghan for an adventure-filled cross-country trip, but as I clutched Grandpa's shirttail and insisted that I'd spotted a fish in the river, he responded with words that still ring in my ears: "It's a piece of wood, you silly. Now walk carefully or you'll be swimming with the wood."
I was five or six. Agha was pushing seventy and quite fit for his age. He sported a long, neatly trimmed gray beard and a white silk turban. As a district governor in the north of Kabul, he'd earned a reputation for meting out harsh punishments to criminals, but he was kind and gentle with children.
Safely across the river, I let go of Agha and began waltzing through a vast, chest-high field of sugarcane. The village, a cluster of a hundred or so adjoining mud huts and a handful of more sturdily built two-story compounds, lay beyond the field. The sugarcane distracted me. Until Grandpa told me what it was, I thought it was a fatter, thicker variety of nay, a species of bamboo used to make calligraphy pens. When I learned what it was, I started pulling at some of the stalks but they were taller than I and much more stubborn and wouldn't succumb to my efforts. Agha, finding me straining and sweating, pulled out his pocket-knife and cut several canes. I remember proudly carrying the canes over my shoulder and following Agha to one of the compounds to spend the night in a cool room.
Only a few other memories from that visit to Islamabad and other villages in our ancestral province of Laghman have stayed with me: meeting old relatives who wore traditional clothes and spoke in a village dialect I could hardly understand; throwing rocks at sheep and cattle; enjoying local delicacies that I associated with the home of my ancestors — corn bread, fried cheese, brown sugar rocks. And one final image: standing next to a cluster of tombs as Agha lifted his wiry hands in prayer. It wasn't the first time he and I had stopped along our journey to pray for the dead, but these little dirt mounds of tombs weren't ordinary — they belonged to ancestors of ours who had brought Islam to eastern Afghanistan, their history closely tied to that of the country.
* * *
I was born and raised in the town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan, a very different place from Islamabad. Once a bustling Silk Road trading post, Sheberghan fell on hard times after Genghis Khan's army sacked it in the thirteenth century. While I was growing up in the 1970s, it was something of a backwater town, despite a multiethnic population of some ten thousand. Native Uzbeks predominated, but there were large pockets of Tajiks, Pashtuns, Turkomens, and even nomadic Arabs.
To the other townsfolk, we were Laghmanis — shrewd, industrious, enterprising, and educated. There were so many Laghmanis in Sheberghan that one large neighborhood was informally known as Laghmani Street. Many were close relatives of ours. Grandpa Agha and Grandma Bibi lived there with their three sons, my father, Uncle Khan Agha, and Uncle Agha Shirin. My mother had an older brother and a younger sister as well as two cousins. I knew what to call these close family members, but many others were related to us through blood and family ties so complicated that I sometimes wondered why I called a certain relative a kaakaa, a paternal uncle, rather than a maamaa, a maternal uncle, or a khaala, a maternal aunt, rather than 'ama, a paternal aunt.
To get answers I'd sometimes turn to Ama Koko, my mother's feisty, slightly hunched maternal aunt. Widowed at a young age and childless, Ama Koko never remarried and instead divided her time between her three brothers and their four dozen children. Whenever she visited us, she'd spend much of her time reading the Koran or the book of Hafez, both of which she'd taught to my mother and her siblings. Like many others in the family, I'd occasionally ask her to consult Hafez to divulge my luck. She would open the book at random and start reading at the first verse her eye fell on. The fourteenth-century Persian verses didn't make much sense to me, but Ama Koko always found a way of putting them in terms a child could understand: "Khwaja Hafez sees fabulous fortune in your future."
When I wasn't asking her to read my luck, I'd pester her with questions about our extended family. A great storyteller, she was open to answering any question except the one that hung over her like a dark cloud: how she'd lost her young husband, the son of a powerful khan near Islamabad, in a tribal feud on the day after their wedding. Everything else was fair game.
"So Ama Koko, where were you born?" I'd start.
"Charikar."
Charikar is a small town north of Kabul.
"Charikar? What were you doing in Charikar?"
"My father was a government officer there."
"What was your father's name?"
"Jalilur Rahman."
"What was your grandfather's name?"
"Jamilur Rahman."
"So how are you related to Father?"
"Don't you know?" she'd say, irritated. "Your father is my niece's husband. Don't you see?"
"No, I mean how else are you related?"
"Well, your father is my mother's stepcousin's son. He is also my sister-in- law's son-in-law ..."
The interrogation would go on and on, sometimes for an hour or more. By her next visit to our house, I'd forget many of the names and subject her to the same battery of questions. But she could never go back more than three generations in the family genealogy.
Years later I came across an old family manuscript that filled in the holes in Ama Koko's narrative. Titled Sifat-naamah-I Darwish Khan-I Ghazi, or The Hagiography of Darwish Khan Ghazi, the hundred-page manuscript opens in 1582, the year Darwish Khan, a middle-aged, fanatical general, led an army from central Asia to the regions surrounding Islamabad, the last non-Muslim pocket of Afghanistan. Accompanying Darwish Khan at the head of the army was his octogenarian spiritual advisor and prayer leader, Sultan Quli, my fourteenth forefather. Sultan Quli was no ordinary mullah. He was the grandson of Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahrar, one of the eminent religious figures of his time and theleader of the Sufi brotherhood known as the Naqshbandiyyah.
Sufism was more than an esoteric spiritual pursuit at the time; it was a way of life for millions and a vehicle by which Islam spread through central and south Asia. Among the many mystical brotherhoods, the Naqshbandiyyah boasted by far the largest following, but what set it apart from other Sufi fraternities was not simply the brotherhood's practice of the "silent prayer" but, more importantly, its close ties to the ruling authorities — first the dynasty founded by Timur in the fourteenth century and later Babur's Moghul empire. Ahrar and his descendents served as powerful, behind-the-scenes advisors of both dynasties. As the late German scholar Annemarie Schimmel put it, Ahrar believed that "to serve the world it is necessary to exercise political power" and to bring political rulers under control so that God's law can be carried out in every aspect of life.
The task facing Darwish Khan's army was daunting: conquer and convert some of the Hindu Kush's toughest and most fiercely independent denizens. Darwish Khan did not hesitate to remind his troops what they were fighting for. As he put it, they were part of a battle between God — the One and the Omnipotent — and the gods and idols of the infidels. As the holy warriors took up position on the bank of the Alishang River, native Pashtun tribesmen began to mobilize. While the infidels sacrificed goats to their gods Pandad, Sharwee, and Laamandee, Darwish Khan summoned Allah's help, assuring his troops that "a man needs courage, not a saber by his side." His army likely took his words seriously, as it was believed that Darwish Khan possessed extraordinary powers, an example of which was the ability to gallop headlong into an encroaching army, slicing dozens of infidels in half "like cucumbers."
A total of sixty-six valleys were conquered and converted, but the expedition wasn't a complete success. While the native Pashtuns submitted to the new faith, another, non-Pashtun tribe, living in adjacent valleys, tenaciously resisted conversion. Originally hailing from the Kandahar region, they had fled north to the Hindu Kush some seven hundred years earlier and spoke in strange tongues, worshipped idols, and sang and danced around their dead. Legend had it that they were descendents of Alexander the Great's army, which explained why many of them had blue eyes and blond hair. The Afghans called the region Kufristan or Kafiristan — the "land of unbelief" or the "land of infidels." For the next three centuries, Kafiristan served as a constant reminder that Darwish Khan's mission to bring Islam to the heathens remained unfulfilled.
As for Darwish Khan and Sultan Quli's descendents and the remnants of the army, they settled on the bank of the Alishang and christened the encampment Islamabad, or City of Islam, and built ties with the newly converted Pashtuns. They intermarried with them, acquired land along the Alishang, and built a thriving settlement in the heart of the Pashtun belt. While many lived off the land, the direct descendents of Sultan Quli continued the religious profession of their ancestors, maintaining mosques, running Koran schools, and appointing prayer leaders and preachers across the region. Religion also ensured that every male in the family, and more than a few females, were literate in the midst of an illiterate society. Seeing it as a source of power, they passed it down to their children, generation after generation.
Meanwhile, in matters both important and banal, tribal ways often prevailed despite the injunctions of Islamic law. Murders went largely unpunished. Few, if any, thieves had their hands chopped off. Women only occasionally received the legal right to inherit property promised to them by the new, egalitarian religion. Much to the shock of Islamabad's piety, some desperate tribesmen traded their wives for cattle. People lived their lives according to the guiding principles of Pashtunwali — the way of the Pashtun. Its main tenets required showing hospitality to all, providing shelter for those in need, and retaliating against those who have wronged you. Pashtunwali made no distinction between rich and poor, landlord and peasant. A khan who looked the wrong way at a peasant's wife could be dragged through the mud, his face blackened, his house burned down, and his family banished. A peasant who stole money could simply pay it back instead of having his hand cut off in accordance with Islam dictates. Everyone, regardless of wealth, was expected to provide lavish hospitality to guests. Khoday dih ghareeb krhee, chaah dih bih ghayratah krhee went one proverb: God made you poor, but who took away your honor?
Darwish Khan's wish for Islamic conversion came to pass in the nineteenth century, due to a fortuitous turn of events. In 1893 the British, who had made two futile attempts to conquer Afghanistan, drew a new border between Afghanistan and British India that came to be known as the Durand Line, named after its architect, Sir Mortimer Durand. Their goal: transform the unruly land of the Afghans — Yaghistan, or the "land of insolence" — into a docile buffer state between Czarist Russia and British India.
The Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan, whom the British had christened the "Iron Amir" because of his ruthless and authoritarian rule, saw this as an opportunity to enlarge his domain. While not a religious fanatic, he quashed an uprising by the minority Shiite Hazaras of central Afghanistan in an effort to rally tribesmen to join his motley army in a jihad against the infidels of Kafiristan. Many panicked Kafirs embraced Islam outright, while other tribal leaders offered to pay tribute to the amir to avert war. This was a tactic they had used for centuries to fight off the spread of Islam, but the amir demanded complete and unconditional conversion.
The campaign to pacify Kafiristan was short-lived but violent. Hundreds were killed while thousands more crossed into the neighboring Chitral region of modern Pakistan, where their Kafir offspring live to this day. When the jihad was over, some sixty thousand infidels had embraced Islam and pledged their allegiance to the amir. With the valley subdued, the amir dispatched an army of mullahs to instruct the converts in the ways of Islam. None other than my maternal great-grandfather, Jalilur Rahman Khan, led a troop of mullahs into the valley, with specially trained barbers circumcising men both young and old in accordance with Islamic tradition. My paternal great-grandfather, also involved in the campaign, took into marriage a young girl from the area. She was one of the many women who were taken as spoils of war from the region, which the warriors renamed Nooristan, or the "land of light."
By the time of Nooristan's conquest, little of Islamabad's past power and prestige was left. In fact, the seat of Islam in eastern Afghanistan had declined into a poor hamlet, overshadowed by the fast-growing Moghul-era frontier town of Jalalabad to the southeast. One by one, the men of Islamabad started leaving in search of economic opportunity elsewhere. Many joined the Iron Amir's bureaucracy, some his military. Grandpa Agha started out as a county clerk before moving on to serve as a district chief in several provinces. His older brother became a provincial police chief in northern Afghanistan.
One of the men to strike gold was Grandpa Baba, my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1895. When he was five, he lost his father and was raised along with his two younger brothers and younger sister by his mother and their maternal uncle. He was a mullah who spent most of the first two decades of the last century working as a mirza north of Kabul. Mirza is an ancient Turkic regal title that had only recently come to designate anyone who was either a scribe or a notary. In an attempt to consolidate his power, the amir went beyond his southern tribal base to build a modern state bureaucracy, commissioning a professional army and centralizing the government. Starting with my greatgrandfather Jalilur Rahman, men in my family whose predecessors had for ten generations borne the clerical title mullah now were calling themselves mirzas. It wasn't that these men were abandoning religion. On the contrary, our family maintained two mosques in Islamabad and pilgrims continued to visit the shrine of Darwish Khan and other pioneers. Yet after three centuries of enjoying the power and prestige that came with their position as men of religion and learning, they realized becoming mirzas was a way into the lucrative new world of government service.
As Grandpa Baba mastered the art of official letter writing and penmanship (his apprenticeship required developing a distinct handwriting style — straight alifs, curvy baas, loopy seens — for the entire Arabic alphabet), he seemed destined to follow in his uncle's footsteps. Then, in early 1919, King Habiburrahman Khan was assassinated in his sleep during a hunting expedition near Jalalabad. While the dead monarch's religiously conservative brother and twenty-seven-year-old liberal son jockeyed for possession of the throne, my great-uncle packed up his family and moved back to the secure environs of Islamabad.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Confessions of a Mullah Warrior"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Masood Farivar.
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