Soldiers of God

walked a total of twelve hours since the day before, zigzagging in a direction parallel to the border so that we might cross where there were no regime troops.

I groaned as Wakhil and the others stood up; that usually meant it was time to move on.

“No, you can sit for a while,” Wakhil said. “We only go to pray.”

4 Noble Savages

THE MUJAHIDIN dropped down on their knees and moved their hands lightly over the ground until their palms and fingertips were coated with dust. Holding their blackened palms before their faces, they each began to recite from the Koran:

Believers, do not approach your prayers when you are drunk, but wait till you can grasp the meaning of your words; nor when you are polluted — unless you are traveling the road — until you have washed yourselves. If you are ill and cannot wash yourselves; or, if you have relieved yourselves or had intercourse with women while traveling and can find no water, take some clean sand and rub your faces and your hands with it. Allah is benignant and forgiving.

On this parched and stony plate of earth, without a trickle of water in sight, they smeared their temples and foreheads, purifying themselves with the dust. Then each, at his own pace, began moving prayer beads through his fingers, silently mouthing the words “Allahu akbar” (God is great) 34 times, “Subhan iVaha” (God is pure) 33 times, and “Hamd-u-lilah” (Praise be to God) 33 times, so that the name of God was repeated 100 times. Five times throughout the day they performed the service.

My interpreter, Wakhil, had studied Arabic in the course of becoming a mullah, but the other two could not have understood much, or any, of what they recited. (Pukhtu, though employing the Arabic script, is no closer to Arabic than French is to English.) But as with Hebrew in the mouths of many Jews of the Diaspora, the incomprehensibility of those harsh, ancient gutturals seemed only to increase the power of the language over my bodyguards, Lurang and Jihan-zeb, whose faces were flushed with awe and tranquility.

I had traveled in enough Moslem countries to cease being enamored of such rituals. I had already seen these prayers performed many more times in my life than their Christian or Jewish equivalents, and I no longer found them strange or exotic. Nor was I blind to the hypocrisies that so often accompanied religious fervor. To me, the monologue of the Koran had always symbolized the sterile authoritarianism of the East, where all public debate was drowned out. Arabic (and Persian too) was a language I disdained, even though I knew the alphabet and many simple phrases. Like Greek, Arabic struck me as a flowery, ostentatious language structured for poetry and demagoguery, but without Greek’s flare for intellectual subtlety. Concerning the peoples of the Middle and Near Eastern deserts, I had always subscribed to the opinion of T. E. Lawrence, who in Seven Pillars of Wisdom wrote: “Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible options to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity.” In short, I was cynical toward the culture of Islam, and the more Islamic countries I visited and the more I listened to the relativist thinking of the region’s experts in the media and the State Department, the more cynical I became — even though I knew my attitudes might be viewed by others as merely the prejudices and self-justifications of an American Jew who spoke Hebrew and had lived for several years in Israel.

Afghanistan, however, was a new and radical experience for me. The whole psychology of the Islamic faith was different here from how I had ever seen it. True, the awful denigration of women was both unjustifiable and tragic: male-dominated cultures tend to be emotionally underdeveloped as well as intellectually sterile. Still, because Afghans harbored no political insecurities and were more relaxed in their faith than Arabs or Iranians, Islam in Afghanistan manifested a certainty and unintimidating dynamism that did not exist in Iran, Pakistan, or any of the Arab countries I had visited. It was only in Afghanistan that I was able — at least I think I was — to see Islam objectively for the first time.

Religion in Iran and the Shiite suburbs of south Beirut possessed fury. In Iran, tens of thousands prayed en masse, reciting the words, syllable by heated syllable, in unison, begetting a collective hysteria reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies. The cries of Allahu akbar carried a shrill, medieval, bloodcurdling ring. This was Islam’s perverse reaction to the political challenges of the twentieth century: to the pressures of nationhood; to the West’s military, economic, and cultural penetration of the Middle East; and to the creation of a Western-style Jewish state in its midst. But the young men with whom I was traveling in Afghanistan were, in an emotional sense, free and ignorant of those events. Afghanistan had never been industrialized, let alone colonized or penetrated much by outsiders. Unlike the Iranians, who seemed to pray just as fervently, the Afghans had never been seduced by the West and so had no reason now to violently reject it: Afghanistan did not require a resurgence of faith, for the Afghans had never lost it. Unlike most people in the Middle East, the Afghans were psychologically sure of themselves. Soviet bombs were the Afghans’ first and only contact with the modern world. And even toward the Soviets, who had killed Afghans on a scale that rendered Western crimes against Arabs and Iranians statistically infinitesimal, the Afghans cultivated a simpler, less personalized hatred, one that did not reduce noncombatants to enemies the way the Middle Eastern terrorists did.

Away from the tensions of the refugee camps in Pakistan, Islam had infused hope into the Afghan resistance without being too politicized by it.

In Pakistan, Islam was imposed from above, as a glue to hold together an artificially constructed nation of feuding ethnic groups. The religious passion that Zia sought for his people was something the Afghans had already inculcated in their bones without realizing it and without the need of an Islamic republic. Once inside Afghanistan, Islam, like so many of the customs of these mountains, existed in a time vacuum — in vitro, like a museum piece or laboratory specimen — purified of what the twentieth century had done to it in Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere. Islam may not have responded well to modern pressures, but at least now I could respect it for what it was originally intended to be — something I couldn’t do before.

Racked with thirst and fatigue, I watched in admiration as my companions spiritually and, it seemed, physically refreshed themselves with that dust. Of course, my respect was based on what I already knew about these young men rather than on what I was actually seeing. The image of Pathan tribesmen in Afghanistan rubbing their faces with dust and mouthing the name of Allah one hundred times was graphically indistinguishable from the many images of Moslem fanaticism. But because I had spoken with these mujahidin, and knew why they smiled and what they laughed at and what made them angry, because of the well of gratitude I felt when Wakhil said, after his prayers, “Don’t worry, Babar Khan, we will find water for you,” I knew that prayer had softened them, not made them harder or more intolerant.

What I knew most of all was that for Lurang, Jihan-zeb, and Wakhil religion was a private matter, just as it is for most Americans. They never spoke about it to me unless I asked, and they never proselytized. When I told Wakhil that I was Jewish, his only comment was: “Jews and Christians are people of the Book.” (Another mujahid had said, “Are Jews anti-Soviet?” After thinking for a second, I said yes.) At no time did these so-called Moslem fundamentalists make me feel uncomfortable. Never were they overbearing. These were not the sorts of perceptions that would have survived the brutal reductions of the television camera, the narrow boundaries of hard-news writing, or the quantifications of the think-tank analysts in Washington and London. What the American public really needed to know about the guerrillas it was supporting with billions of taxpayers’ dollars could never be provided by many of the people being paid to tell us.

It was only a fifteen-minute walk to water, which was provided at a camp of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s mujahidin. How like Hekmatyar to have a base just inside the Afghan border! He could then make the claim of having fighters inside while still being far removed from the fighting. Hekmatyar’s party (the