If you take Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh as a single South Asian entity, you come up with the world’s largest number of Muslims (Indonesia is second in this configuration)—more than in the entire Middle East. This South Asian Trio used to be one single nation till the departing British colonizers split them into India and East and West Pakistan. They have shared languages, cultures, and histories. But the split (partition) led to history’s bloodiest and biggest mass migration. Like their new names, East and West Pakistan sat on their assigned sides. The problem was that the world’s second-largest population of Muslims contained at the time in Hindu India sat inconveniently in the middle. In 1971, India supported East Pakistan’s war for independence, and it became its own nation of Bangladesh, as a result of a war that was as much about geography as it was about language and culture.
It was natural for me as an Indian Muslim to go back where I came from. One of Islam’s truest legacies lives in South Asia, which was undivided not so long ago. Colonizers have always redrawn national boundaries with the blood of innocents. The US is new to colonial style behavior and the sorry results of its foolish attempts at it are fought on the streets of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to name just a few. More significantly I realize that America is not only bad at colonialism; it as a nation despises it.
Each time I go home, I get new insight into the “Islam problem,” as one Pakistani TV pundit put it. For a while, Deobandi Islam enjoyed greater supremacy in South Asia than it does now, because of its strong influences on the Taliban. The primary reason for the lost influence is Wahhabi penetration. That dogma has meant the death of a carefully built syncretism that had been crafted over centuries between Muslim (Mughal) rulers, idol-worshipping (Hindu) subjects, and the meaningful numbers drawn to the Sufi way of life. The desecration of countless mausoleums of Sufi mystics is proof of the cobra-like ability of Wahhabi Islam to swallow all that comes in its path. The Deobandis, in fact, have always known the historical context for Daesh.
I first went back in 2006, when I was filming A Jihad for Love.
“Well, I can take you to the entrance, but promise that nothing will be seen and you are not filming me,” insisted Zainab Alam. I had requested to meet her in the city of Lucknow, home to India’s highest Shia population. Though a senior scholar at the University of Lucknow, she was not granted much prestige by her school, but Zainab had spent decades quietly studying the role of women in Islam, throughout history and today. On this day she was taking me and my Shia cameraperson to the Nadhwa madrassa (school) or to use the more officious name, Institute of Islamic Sciences. This school is directly linked to the Sunni Deobandi School of Islam that was born where I was and provided the ideological foundation for the Taliban. Several schools Deoband spawned either didn’t allow women in at all, or if they were lucky enough to gain entry they had to be fully covered—Zainab’s hair flew free.
In the West, “radicalization” toward global jihad happens by the flickering light of laptops belonging to hermetical psychopaths tuned in to the social-web-savvy Daesh. They hide behind undetectable browsing apps that promise to conceal or change IP addresses. But surely the NSA is able to overwrite those and join them on these midnight prowls of the dark web where Daesh partially lives?
Often these killing machines will never meet in person. There will never be contact with their Emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (rumored killed in 2016), or with his shura (counselors), or even a visit to their self-declared capital of Raqqa in Syria. But a few thousand have made the schlep to the “front lines.”
But 2006 was a time when Osama was still alive, running his jihad chocolate factory. This jihad came packaged in different flavors. Entering Nadhwa, I wondered if “radicalization” happened in open sight here? I found the word problematic because I, too, was a radical Muslim, but of a completely different kind. So much Islam stood between al-Qaeda and me. Here, hundreds of Nadhwa schoolboys with white skullcaps bobbed their heads up and down in rote style recitation, its repetition intended to instill focus. They would never know the Quran’s poetry or depth of meaning, or the context of its history.
“What are you learning about today?” I asked one.
“Takfir,” he said, one Muslim accusing another of being an infidel.
“Do you know what happens to a kafir (infidel)?” I asked. He giggled and shook his head. I wondered if he’d already been taught the un-Quranic principle that “all infidels should be killed.”
“What else are you learning?” I asked, wondering further if he knew there was severe sharia punishment for using takfir lightly.
“Taqlid,” he said. This word means literally “to blindly follow.” It is encouraged to follow a mujtahid, a scholar of sharia law, as per the majority Hanafi madhhab (school) opinion in India. Islam has four schools of thought. Hanafi, because of the Mughal and Sufi influences, has become more pluralistic than the Hanbali of the Wahhabi, the most puritanical. Just a year before I got to Nadhwa, the so-called “Amman” message had been delivered calling for unity and tolerance in the Muslim world. It had been endorsed by 200 ulema worldwide. It was a tedious document dealing with issues of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence), but it formally stated that Sunni Islam comprised Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki, and Hanbali as the four schools of theology. The Shia got two schools—the Jafari and the Zaidi—and in addition there were two others that fit neither sect, Ibadi and Zafari. The unanimity they craved was not to be. I am pretty sure that neither Osama nor Baghdadi nor anyone here ever read the Amman message. I spoke to a bespectacled student after he had asked me Wahhabi-style to switch off my camera because it was “haram.”
“We are learning about ibn Taymiyyah,” he said. This, I knew, was treacherous territory. I asked him if he had been taught about Ayah 33 of al-Ma’aidah, the 5th Surah from the Quran. I quoted the Ayah. I had committed it to memory because I had been challenged about its specificity:
“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.”
“I don’t think such punishment can be used in modern times,” the boy retorted, confidently. And he reminded me about the preceding (contentious) Ayah 32, which in part said: “We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person—unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” The entire Bush administration would have qualified!
“Yes,” I said, “I am glad you pointed that out. Killing even one innocent human is like killing all of humanity.” It was one of my favorite Surahs and this young man’s retort could have been mine. I knew he was a rarity. Western scholars ranting about “context” had probably never been to a school like this, where the use of context was selective yet available to students like him. They wouldn’t find it in the Quran’s classical Arabic. Yet this young man had. I hoped he became an alim (a learned one) and was not swallowed up by extremism. This lived Islam was so different from the faraway quad of a US campus—where reality doesn’t really exist.
Alim is singular for ulema, the closest Islam got to clergy. For many Sunnis, they are the highest authorities. They are guardians of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet). Technically, Muhammad did not ordain a clergy.
Two abaya-wearing women had emerged from nowhere in the corridor. The teen made a great show of averting his eyes, even though there was nothing to be seen in their shapeless black forms with slits for eyes. He retreated back into his all-male world.
Nadhwa had a five-year curriculum such that after year one of Arabic, all teaching was in the language. Impoverished Muslims often see learning Arabic and the Quran as fortunate for their children, in a country where “English medium schools” proliferate but remain unreachable. A global network of charities based on da’wa (proselytizing) linked to zakat (charity), one of the five pillars of Islam, had always existed. It funded schools like Nadhwa and Deoband. It pre-dated al-Qaeda. But Muslims like me have long known that not all the moolah was sent to Islamic schools.
In the fourteenth century, the biggest scholar of Hanbali Islam (extremist school) was a man named Ibn Taymiyyah. This man issued a fatwa saying that violent jihad against disbelievers was permissible and encouraged. He was speaking of the Mongol invaders of his time. Scholars say they were so called because they didn’t follow sharia. Centuries later Wahhab was a major fan. The puritanical Taymiyyah allegedly gave violent jihad a big thumbs up, saying:
It is obligatory to take the initiative in fighting those people, as soon as the Prophet’s summons with the reasons for which they are fought has reached them. But if they first attack the Muslims then fighting them is even more urgent, as we have mentioned when dealing with the fighting against rebellious and aggressive bandits.
For Daesh, who seem to have forgotten 9/11, this means neither Iraq nor Syria attacked the US or Western Europe first or at all. It was the other way around. In their perverted logic, Muslim land was attacked first.
Taymiyyah was making violent jihad against all non-Muslims a duty for all Muslims. “Those people” clearly meant “non-Muslims.” It was a medieval time of banditry and mayhem in these deserts. They (the Mongols) were killing his people with highly trained armies. I wonder if a violence-loving imam in Islamabad can be convinced that because of ijtihad, independent reasoning, Taymiyyah’s opinions need to be read in context.
Did the jihad al-nafs (struggle with the self) exist for him? I had always been intrigued by Taymiyyah’s never marrying or having even a female companion in his entire life. Was he homosexual? I had dangerously and privately wondered while studying accounts of his life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ibn Saud’s savage Ikhwans must have looked up to Taymiyyah as an emulatory figure. Ditto Daesh.
It would be almost impossible to find a foot soldier of Daesh, sometimes even unschooled in the correct way to pray, who knows more than the name Taymiyyah or even the Islamic principles “really” favored by the Prophet and his companions. Those are the examples they claim to emulate. Yet their schooling has been quick. Your Islamic duty? Kill and Die. Your entire family gets salvation and so do you by ending up a shaheed (“martyr”) in heaven where the houris (virgins—some say seventy-two of them) and other delights await. On that day at Nadhwa, a teacher directed his students to open Ayah 191 of Surah Al Baqara (“The Cow”), which said:
And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith.
Soon the couple of hundred little boys were bobbing their heads up and down in repetition.
“The Hindus don’t eat cows. So should we kill them?” asked a curious student.
Aware of my presence, the teacher changed the topic. The question remained unanswered and the boy was reprimanded. Would he have answered with a yes were I not there?
More than 70 percent of the world’s Muslims do not read, speak, write, or understand Arabic. They have learned the Quranic verses in classical Arabic by rote. Most have no idea what they say. The differences between classical and colloquial Arabic, with the latter coming in many regional forms, are enormous. The burden of learning placed on a student of the language is heavy. At a higher grade or probably further into this lesson itself, this teacher would possibly explain to his students what his idea of “they” was. He could arguably embellish his definition of kafirs by saying it was the Hindus, the Jews, and the Christians—pretty much the entire non-Muslim world, Dar al Harb (“House of War”). I am not sure he would engage in comparative theology to teach them what preceded this verse in Ayah 190: “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.”
Entering India in the seventh century, Indian Islam is as old as Islam itself. Most of the history of this time has been one of Hindus and Muslims coexisting peaceably, with both faiths even taking from each other. I was a product of that kind of doctrinal marriage, and in this room at Nadhwa, the ground beneath my feet seemed to slip.
The call to prayer rang out. I had often admired the musical variety of muezzins’ azaan (call to prayer) in many countries. But here it felt strangely out of sync.
Wahhab would be pleased to learn just how far his ideology had spread, from 96th Street in Manhattan to Nadhwa and Deoband in India, even though he saw its early split between violence and nonviolence. To the horror of India’s “secular” elite, the Wahhabi Deoband keeps on getting media attention with fatwas such as one declaring photography un-Islamic. India now has a right-wing Hindu government. Its influence on its Muslim citizens will be judged by time. During that 2006 trip, a Shia friend suggested being Muslim in India was like being black in America. Bang on, I remember thinking.
As children we were taught to seek the ra’y of elders. In Urdu and in Arabic, the word means “opinion.” The elders included the scholars of sharia law, the mujtahid. They were qualified and led exemplary lives. Sahih Bukhari (the most influential Sunni canon of Muhammad’s hadith) talks about how difficult it is to become a mujtahid. In my twenties I questioned how it was possible for the fluid concept of ijtihad to describe Islam’s rigid and complex universe. Was personal effort the best way to describe jihad, as with the self? And was it OK to draw semantic links amongst the terms jihad, mujtahid, and ijtihad? Did a mujtahid have enough ijtihad-ic credentials to become a vessel of sharia to ordinary Muslims? Learning the Wahhabi-ijtihad relationship, over years of study, has made the latter less attractive.
Unfortunately, the majority of today’s Ummah use taqlid, blind following. And that’s perilous. The dangerous Hanbali school is only for al-Qaeda and Saudi types, some claim, wrongfully. But Wahhabi export has been so successful that most taqlid lands at Wahhabi/Hanbali doorsteps anyway.
For a moment, Nadhwa seemed otherworldly. MSNBC and CNN could never penetrate these walls with their logic of “moderate Muslims.” America’s punditry was planets away.
Was this curriculum a rehash of Deobandi, Wahhabi, and other dangerous theology? Were these elementary teachers adequately schooled? Ijtihad, to expand even further, needed a legal and scholarly interpretation of the Quran, of sharia, and of the canon. It was a lifetime of academic rigor. Achieving mujtahid-hood was as hard as getting into Harvard. Legal issues, for example, needed analogical reasoning and an ability to whip out a Surah or Ayah from the Quran as needed. Hafizs—those who memorize the Quran—were ideal. God’s sharia was just, immense, and divinely ordained.
Unlike other religions, Islam decrees everything from how you clean your pubes post-heterosexual sex to how you arrange a table for iftar (Ramadan sunset meal) to what really is rightful jihad as the Prophet divinely understood and morally interpreted it. There needs to be ilm, or knowledge, of the precedent as well. Most important, every single thing a “good Muslim” does is rigidly prescribed in the canon and the Quran revealed to Muhammad. While almost none in the West has the qualifications to say so, many claim the doors to ijtihad closed in the tenth century. Others say no, with the Shia of Iran saying that they even allowed it through the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This makes them seem more in tune with the times than Sunni Muslims. The Saud-Wahhabi theology loves ijtihad. Hamas in Palestine favors ijtihad. Osama used it to invalidly claim mujtahid status.
“More chai?” interrupted a teacher, breaking my train of thought. The gaggle of teachers said they were all mujtahids. We sat there and discussed the semantics of the words ijtihad and thus mujtahid, deriving from the verbal roots of the word jihad. They remained silent as I spoke about how Osama, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the Wahhabi establishment of Saudi all claimed ijtihad, as well. I told them how dictatorial regimes throughout the Muslim world fear it because they think it will strengthen pluralism while undermining political unity, the latter being a necessity to subjugate their populations. Their response was unanimous: India is a secular country, so none of this mattered here.
My other thoughts I kept to myself. The dirty work of crafting a façade of “political unity” in the entire Arab Middle East is done by each country’s feared Mukhabarat or intelligence agency, basically a Second World War Stasi-style secret police. They are used with equal and terrifying consequences by a wide range of dictators like Sisi in Egypt, the battered Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and even the supposedly Westward-looking King Abdullah II of Jordan. For these regimes ijtihad is allegedly akin to bida. In the past fourteen centuries, opinions on whether ijtihad is a continuing Muslim calling or not have been equally debated. As an individual I feel my ability to use independent reasoning is sacred to me. I believe that ijtihad is not a novelty for the progressive age, because it has been around for centuries. But arguments for its being a “solution” for the “troubles with Islam” are specious at best.
And who wants to sit in the same chair with al-Qaeda and the Wahhabis who condone the principle anyway? Not I.
More chai and another green room with a different cast of teachers. They had made it clear we couldn’t film this conversation. One said that an Islamic caliphate was just around the corner.
“On September 11, 2001,” said another teacher, “God’s will became reality.” A third argued that disbelievers like Jews and Christians created 9/11 as a conspiracy. Most of them bent over backward saying how they stressed “ijtihad” for their students from a very young age. Over endless cups of chai, this is the kind of hogwash these so-called ulema indulged in. And their bullshit homage to ijtihad was just that.
It was around that time I began to start thinking that ijtihad was just not what it was hyped up to be. Islam didn’t just have one problem. And that’s because there was no one kind of Islam. There were many, and each would have to be dealt with differently. Warfare, it could certainly be argued, would be a rightful jihad to annihilate the “disbelievers” for, let’s say, an al-Qaeda “soldier”? I left them with a question: “So do you think America’s war against al-Qaeda and Iraq makes violent jihad a justifiable duty for all Muslims?” Disturbingly, all of them nodded.
Pointing at me, one said, “Even upon you if you are a good Muslim.”
I had come to Lucknow to film closeted but devout gay Muslims for A Jihad for Love. Lucknow had the largest Shia population in the entire Indian subcontinent. The gays called themselves koti (one who receives anal sex) zenana (one who acts like a woman), in a lighthearted, friendly way. Qasim, a Shia, was one of them.
The UK’s Channel 4 had FedExed us press badges, thus granting us access to the mosque and home of Syed Kalbe Jawad, the most senior Shia cleric in South Asia, whose ante-room contained a giant portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Syed was notorious and I, like Qasim, felt trepidation. This was the man who had organized 1 million people into the largest-ever demonstration by Muslims against the US, Israel, and Denmark when the Danish cartoons controversy erupted. This was a man who in 2016 compared Wahhabi Saudi Arabia to “the Jews.” He went further to say that the Saudi execution of the venerable Saudi Shia Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was a plot hatched by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The Shia syeds claim direct lineage from the Prophet Muhammad. India’s many Islams were complicated and I had spent years studying them. Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the grand imam of one of the largest Sunni mosques on the subcontinent, Jama Masjid in Delhi, also claimed he was a syed. Neither of these men would ever reconcile their prejudices.
I had been filming the pious Qasim. Spiritual violence is a real thing and he was a victim. I hoped to capture a confrontation between this young man and the cleric. Sure enough, when we were granted our on-camera audience, Qasim displayed surprising candor.
“In Allah’s house, the doors of forgiveness are always open,” said the syed. The cleric wore a black turban and cloak, the uniform of his high rank. If he’d been Catholic, he’d have been wearing bright cardinal red.
Qasim persisted with his questions. “What if I had prayed for forgiveness already? Would that absolve me?” and “What if my attraction to men persists, even after I’ve been forgiven?” The syed grew irritated. The always-open “doors of forgiveness” seemed to be closing shut as the conversation grew heated. Finally, the syed encouraged Qasim to see a psychologist.
“You have a disease,” said the cleric, after about twenty minutes of filming. On our rickshaw ride back, Qasim said, “It is God’s will that I was born into this caste,” adding, “He put the heart of a woman in a man’s body, which is my misfortune.” I tried to comfort him. Though unusual, this was not surprising to me. Qasim had used the English word caste. But why? Islam ostensibly had no caste system—the Ummah was equal, one God under one law. But Islam was also adept at adoption and blending in. Thus, the caste system that people assume is uniquely Hindu exists sometimes in many kinds of Indian Islams, as well.
Islamic da’wa (proselytizing) could only benefit from this unique ability of the religion, to both give to and take from other faiths. The Taj Mahal would not have existed if Hindus had been excluded from its creation, symbolically, culturally, or physically. More than two centuries of Islamic (Mughal) rule, which begun in the early sixteenth century, was initiated with violent warfare, like all including Christian civilizations and religions. But it did not lead to a constant state of “Islamic war” in South Asia. The opposite happened. A rich musical, artistic, architectural, linguistic, literary, cultural, and cinematic history emerged from the Islam-Hinduism marriage. Pervasive Indian Islamophobia was reserved for the twenty-first century. In 1582, the Muslim Mughal Emperor Akbar developed a new religion called Din-I Ilahi (“the Religion of God”). It was said to have taken the principles of all the faiths that divided his empire—Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism—and brought them together into a cohesive new whole whose primary principle would be mutual tolerance. Akbar was unique. He cherished intense debates on philosophical and religious matters.
“We are descended from the Mughals,” my aunt Khala often used to say. She never produced any proof. Whenever my mother lamented the loss of her favored language, she explained that the Urdu that she wrote in was a language born from the Hindi of the Hindus and the Persian of the Mughal courts.
After our discussion with the syed, we rejoined Zainab. Over chai and biscuits in her meager apartment, we discussed the problems of contemporary Islam.
“Have you ever had access to women within Nadhwa-trained families?” I asked.
“No,” she said. At this point I asked her about the Ayah 31 of Surah 24, An Nur (“The Light”), which in some translations seemed to clearly include “homosexuality” in one of its verses. Women were allowed to “show their finery” amongst many others to “male attendants who do not have any need for women.”
“There you have it! Evidence in the Quran!” I said, believing at the time that this referred to kotis like Qasim as much as it referred to me.
“Most people you will meet on this journey will have little knowledge of the Quran,” she replied.
I told her how every single “teacher” at Nadhwa had a zabiba—literally, “raisin,” but used to identify the forehead of the pious, a kind of prayer bump. We both agreed they were hypocrites. Praying frequently does not a good Muslim make.
I knew she knew a great deal about my favorite subject.
“So as you know, in some parts of India Wahhabism is seen as a reform movement . . .” I began gingerly.
“Of course,” she said, “In eighteenth-century Islam there were reform movements all over the place. Wahhab promised the same, including to people like my grandfather who used it to the very last day.”
I challenged her about barbaric Wahhabi ideology that lay at the heart of Saudi sharia and was now everywhere. Zainab was a very learned woman, having earned her PhD in Islamic theology at India’s famed Aligarh Muslim University.
“You have to study its appearance in context,” she said, telling me what I already knew. Wahhab was a product of a time when Islamic empires were losing to colonizers. His pact with ibn Saud was necessary for “stability,” she said. The man in his own lifetime saw his “reform” bastardized. It is true that a “split” between “peaceful” and “violent” occurred in Wahhab’s lifetime. However, even his “peaceful” puritanical theology was destined to be a destructive force.
We discussed how Osama was in part a product of the violent part of Wahhabi logic. We assessed the immense anger and a sense of loss amongst empires of Muslims because their borders were being redrawn by colonizers like the British. For the Mughals and other Muslim powers, this political disintegration became a religious problem too. And then came the eighteenth-century Wahhab with his seventh-century logic.
“Yes, it was puritanical. It hated the Sufi style that the Mughals had encouraged and celebrated. It took away the freedoms of Muslim women, which they till then had taken for granted. But I still wonder if Wahhab thought he was on a divine mission to build what he viewed as an equal Ummah just like the Prophet had envisioned it,” I said.
“That is worthy of research,” said Zainab. “He was from the Nejd and thus walked the same sands the Prophet’s early Muslims walked. He would have despised Hindus.”
“But then why did it appeal to your grandfather?”
“Because even Deobandis embraced it. He was drawn to Wahhab’s condemnation of idol worship, India’s main religion. You see, he saw Wahhabi Islam as a reform movement. Which it was, in the eighteenth century.” We both agreed that Wahhab himself had believed in Tawhid, the sunnah, and the Quran, and was probably not a violent man. His successors invoke his name “for horror,” I said.
I was happy to find a Muslim woman scholar who said that Wahhab was no political ideologue. His transformation into the latter was the handiwork of Muhammad ibn Saud, eager to set up a divinely ordained monarchy.
We spoke about the contexts of those times. In 1744, post-treaty, Wahhab and the early ibn Saud deliberately moved tribes from nomadism to sedentary life, which allowed Wahhabi proselytizing. But even at the time, the ancient “ghazu” raids that had only involved the plunder of livestock for food morphed into takfiri and kafir human slaughter.
The Saud-Wahhab marriage was one of convenience. Wahhab would have no followers if ibn Saud did not conquer and bring them to him. Critically, Wahhab found no Islamic evidence for the ibn Saud–created Ikhwan’s annihilation of humans. They were no martyrs, he said.
Was he an eighteenth-century Arab version of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther? He preferred literacy, ijtihad, and Quranic exegesis. But he also favored public beheadings and taking away Quranic rights for women. For me, his “revivalism” is a bastardization of the Quran’s comity. Sufi mystic ibn Arabi had said in the thirteenth century, “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest.” Wahhab would never have agreed. But surely he knew that a great deal of Islam’s geographical expansion had used Sufi mythology, venerated by kings, mystics, and ordinary mortals alike.
“But Wahhab would have destroyed all the Sufi shrines here in Lucknow,” I said to Zainab. Sufi mystics like India’s syncretic “Chisti” Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya was buried a few blocks from one of the homes where I grew up. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was normal for scholar-poets like him to say that he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, and not even a Muslim, because once the divine had been revealed to a believer, these manmade divisions no longer mattered.
She agreed about Auliya but added, “Wahhabization of this region is so complete that it’s only a matter of time. Just look at Afghanistan and Pakistan.” I could not imagine an India without a Nizamuddin. But twenty-first century Islam is increasingly suspicious of its Sufi mystical roots and legacy.
Wahhab’s distaste for needless violence died with him. Future Sauds used jihad and takfir with equal ferocity to slaughter entire tribes. They plundered cities like Karbala, holy to the Shia at the turn of the nineteenth century. The ascendant Wahhabis were thrilled to see the evolving demise of the Ottomans they had warred with several times. However, there was relentless butchery in Arabia until Abdulaziz ibn Saud in 1932 formally established what Adham and I, like many, call KSA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This modern entity remembers the savagery at its roots full well and is never afraid to use it, even in our times.
I sometimes wonder what Zainab would think of Wahhabism’s impact on Daesh? How would she view the wastelands of Syria and Iraq, and their connection to “end of days” logic? Daesh savages break bread with their own, and everybody else is up for death with lances and swords. Ignoring Islam, they have routinely massacred “apostates” including unarmed villagers in their thousands, thinking nothing of raping women and slaughtering children, and routinely slitting the throats and even beheading male captives. Their cameras capture it all competently. In the late 1920s, Abdulaziz al-Saud or ibn Saud (not the Saud who made the Wahhabi pact) was as captivated as the Crawleys at Downton with telephones and the telegraph, cars, cigarettes, and gramophones. His own itinerant Ikhwan said anything modern (not used in the seventh century) was bida, heretical innovation, and declared war on him. He finally defeated them in 1930, but they never really went away.
Ibn Saud got his early ulema to say “militant jihad” was un-Islamic. The rest of Wahhab’s ideology became Saudi sharia. This official stance was clearly never practiced. After 1979, Western governments including the US, as afraid of revolutionary Shia Iran as the Sauds, gave their blessings to the Saudi project of Wahhab-izing the planet.
I asked Zainab what she felt about this Wahhabi spread-ology.
“Islam has destroyed itself,” she said sagely.
It has been years since we saw each other.
“I’m looking for the moon,” said a little boy. “My father sent me to find it.”
I was perched on a rooftop in chaotic Old Delhi, above the tangled web of wires that were miraculously able to bring intermittent electricity to the surrounding homes. It was winter 2012 and I was now a Hajji. Celebration was in the air. This night was called Chand Raat (“The Night of the Moon”). Shopkeepers cooked mithai (sweets). My favorite was the sevaiyyan (toasted, sweet vermicelli noodles). Women applied henna, and everyone wore new clothes. Ramadan was ending. For a month, I had fasted from sunrise to sunset like millions of my fellow Indian Muslims and began my renewed journey with faith and vigor. I joined tens of thousands of supplicants at New Delhi’s Jama Masjid wearing a kurta (tunic) my mother gave me. Just a year ago I had pounded Saudi sands.
That night we searched for the sliver of a crescent moon called hilal that would signal Ramadan’s end and assure the faithful that their prayers had been answered. We waited for Delhi’s highest cleric to proclaim the hilal sighting through many loudspeakers. Often sectarian, south Asians, like their TV channels, reported different times of the moonrise. Joyous cries and firecrackers took over when he proclaimed the sighting. I suppose that seventh-century Muslims weren’t aware of time zones. But finally the declaration was made. Tomorrow was Eid al-Fitr.
I retched on the stench permeating my second-class cabin on the train to Saharanpur. This stench brought back uncomfortable memories of childhood. I checked into the shabby Atlantis Hotel, which was far from even being a distant 1,000th cousin to its shiny sister in Dubai. My beloved Real Housewives of Beverly Hills frolicked and quarreled in nouveau-riche luxury in the latter. This one welcomed me with cockroaches scurrying about what the staff in Hinglish were calling a “suit” in lieu of “suite.”
The next morning, I spoke with a local cleric at my childhood mosque about my intentions in Saharanpur.
“This is a complicated issue,” I said, daring to explain that I went on the Hajj with Shia pilgrims and that their madhhab (doctrine) left the question of the method of goat slaughter as a matter open to the individual. I was never sure about what the various Sunni madhhab said on the issue.
“They ran out of goats,” I explained. “I wasn’t able to complete the final ritual of my Hajj. Our Shia group leader said he had done it on our behalf. I don’t know if this is a matter of fiqh,” or Islamic jurisprudence.
The junior cleric held his earlobes in imitation of a schoolboy’s punishment. In India, disobedient children are told to clasp their earlobes. After a while, this hurts like hell, and is used as a common form of corporal punishment and public shaming.
“Astaghfirullah!” he exclaimed. The translation is “Forgive me, God,” but it could be better understood as an outburst like “Oh, my God!” The melodramatic cleric was indicating his shock that I dared travel among Shia. He scurried into another room and retrieved a pile of books. “There are many religious opinions on this matter,” he said.
I cut him short. “You just need to tell me if I can do a qurbani (sacrifice) after the Hajj is finished.”
Sensing money, the mullah was eager to please.
“If you have the means, you can do it,” he said. “Let me warn you—there’s a lot of fiqh that will nullify your Hajj because you went with Shia apostates.”
As I got up to leave his mosque, the cleric left me with a final question: “But can you make sure the meat is distributed here in this neighborhood?” I nodded and hugged him twice, as many Indian Muslims do when bidding goodbye to a same-sex member, slipping 3,000 rupees into his hands.
I wandered the streets of Saharanpur. For me these were streets of shame. My mother never forgave me for being gay. I looked all over the streets of the wood market, and there it was: our childhood halal butcher shop. To my disbelief, the same man was still running the family business. His wrinkles told the story of a difficult life.
“Do you remember me?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I always cut the meat for your family on Eid.”
“I need a qurbani.”
“You want me to do it for you, you mean?”
I did not explain the circumstances that brought me to his shop. “I need to use my own hands, but I want you to be there to finish the job. Please don’t ask too many questions.” I handed him 10,000 rupees, a sum that would cover the cost of the sacrifice and quell any curiosity that might inspire him to get chatty with me. I associated this man with my past, which was marked by judgment and worse.
“How about eleven o’clock, tomorrow morning? I hope your wife and children are well!” It was inconceivable to this man that I could have reached adulthood without taking a wife and reproducing, as all good Muslims should.
The stink of daily death is particular. In the West, the smell born from animal slaughter is conveniently hidden away. Here in India, death in any form is out in the open. Slaughterhouses compete for space with every other kind of business, so one is never far from its unique odor. I met the butcher at the appointed hour the following morning. Together we procured a goat from a nearby market. The closer we got to the final act, the more I was plagued with inner conflict. On the one hand, I was dreading the experience. I had never performed an act of violence in my life. The sight of the slaughter was familiar to me, but I’d always kept a safe distance. Never before had I taken an animal’s life with my own hands. On the other hand, I desperately craved the catharsis that I hoped would follow the sacrifice. I had left Saudi Arabia feeling that my Hajj was incomplete. My faith had been severely tested there, and having missed the chance to perform the sacrifice, I felt bereft. With the force of my own will, I had created a scenario that would enable me to find atonement.
Knife in hand, I stared at the goat I had personally nicknamed Ismael. As a child, my perception of the story of Ibrahim sacrificing his son Ismael was shaped by my fragile relationship with my own father. We were emotionally distant in both directions. The idea that Ibrahim was so ready and willing to sacrifice his own son struck me as an authentic portrayal of a father-son relationship. As a boy, I felt that if my own father had been given the choice, he, too, would not have hesitated to place me upon the altar. Would I find last-minute redemption as Ismael had?
No redemption for this thrashing animal was at hand.
“Bismillah,” I said, as I brought the blade to the goat’s throat. I struggled to break the skin.
“Push harder,” said the butcher. The goal was to cut the jugular vein, the carotid artery, and the windpipe in a single clean swipe. Every aspect of Islam is carefully regimented. I summoned all my discipline to ensure that I performed the dreadful ritual correctly.
When it was done, I clutched the dead animal. My clothes were soaked with blood. My mind raced. Did I do it correctly? Had I been blessed with redemption? Were there certain supplications that I’d neglected? Would my mother have approved? What would my father think? The finality this brought was unfamiliar. With this animal, had I also killed my childhood?
I recited the first chapter of the Quran, which had always brought me comfort. Not this time. I felt like a murderer. I fell to the ground in a fetal position and lay there for what seemed like hours. I had never felt more unclean. Few Muslims would approve of what I did next. Covered in blood, I climbed to the rooftop and performed the Namaz (prayer) with extra rakats (prescribed movements). I was performing the wrong prayer at the wrong time, all while covered in animal blood, and thus in no state of tahara, or purity. In Islam, prayer had always been performance—a kind that is used to instill discipline and a retreat into the spiritual. Heavily ritualized, it’s almost like the yoga of the Hindu religion.
As a child I had used the very expansive Ayatul Kursi (“Verse of the Throne”) from the Quran to comfort me into sleep, and it unfailingly did that. But I had learned its meaning only as an adult. This is probably the most famous Quranic verse in the world, used for countless occasions, comforting me to sleep being one of them. I had often seen it etched in all kinds of wall hangings, silk, velvet, and more. Infinite styles of Arabic calligraphy, as seen in the Taj Mahal, were used for this verse, too.
“Allah. There is no god but He—the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there can intercede in His presence except as He permits? He knows what (appears to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He wills. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feels no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory).”
On that night in 2012 it still worked, better than any sleeping pill.
I was back in India, again. It was late January 2014. I sat on the verandah of the lavish Golf Links home of a prominent Delhi socialite. I was visiting her guest, a well-known Pakistani journalist called Ghalib Kidwai. He had just run in to “order” some more chai. I was in India, editing the film that would become A Sinner in Mecca upon its release in 2015. Delhi had not yet turned into a 50-degree-Celsius hellhole. Late January was still nice enough to sit outside. Ghalib and I had known each other for years from my early days as a cub reporter. He was always my ear to Pakistan, a country I had only once been granted a visa to. Visiting each other’s country is nearly impossible for Indians and Pakistanis. Like many North Indians, my family had deep connections to Pakistan and vice versa. My grandfather had studied at a prominent Lahore college.
Ghalib, who is an atheist, knew the film I was editing and was afraid for me. We had been talking about a critical 2013 EU report that received scant media attention. “I just brought these pages; the whole thing is hard to get,” he said. He knew I might quote him. His name and affiliation, like all others in this book, have been changed. Public knowledge of our long-standing friendship could do him and his career great harm—my name was notorious in Pakistan. Ghalib was my first Pakistani friend to discover that my first film was on Lahore’s pirated DVD market.
It had taken some journalistic digging for him to find these quotes from the EU report. This usually comatose entity paying its bureaucrats hugely inflated salaries to manufacture miles of PowerPoint presentations seemed to have done something useful? I rifled through its tedious pages. It tried to explain the global network of finance using the Islamic principles of zakat and da’wa. It had started in the seventies with the Saudi oil boom that made Osama’s family rich beyond description. There were ibn Saud and bin Laden billionaires everywhere. This cash had fueled al-Qaeda and much other mayhem. Safe in their seemingly secure, lifelong desk jobs, these bureaucrats had finally woken up to a fact that Muslims had known for decades.
There it was on the photocopied page 74 of the EU report: Wahhabi and/or Salafi groups (depending on how you chose to name them—for me they were one and the same) based in the Middle East were closely involved in the “support and supply of arms to rebel groups around the world.” Any Gulf returnee to Pakistan in the eighties could have told you that. We had known it for years but here was proof that the Sauds and their Wahhabi clerics had direct links to terrorism. It warned that, “No country in the Muslim world is safe from their operations . . . as they always aim to terrorize their opponents and arouse the admiration of their supporters.” Ghalib returned with more chai.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Do you think that the Obama White House knows?”
“What do you think?” he said.
He said some English-language print media in Pakistan had written about it in 2013—because they were infested with this terror in their own backyards in Pakistani Punjab and its unruly NWFP. But why were the cable pundits and the Obama White House silent on this critical new finding? Bin Laden was dead, but al-Qaeda still existed and this is how Daesh and the remains of al-Qaeda were getting a great deal of their money. The EU nine-to-fivers would soon learn that “radicalization” was happening under their very noses in Brussels, just a few metro stops away. But there was a greater scourge that Ghalib and I had to discuss.
“Even a college sophomore with political science as a major would be able to tell the EU that the biggest example of this had already been the US and Saudi support of the early Afghan jihad against the Soviets—a phenomenon that created al-Qaeda,” I said to Ghalib.
“It’s simple, Parvez. Zakat fueling militants and building the Ummah (da’wa) can now happen online.”
“Like a PayPal for zakat and jihad,” I said, sipping my tea.
Were the little boys in Nadhwa and Deoband taught the philosophy that was the bedrock of the Talibs, al-Qaeda, Sarajevo jihadis, and more? Did they watch Daesh beheading videos? I had grown up with charities such as these in physical form.
Around Ramadan they would appear at our doorstep. “Even the smallest zakat is fard (obligatory) because God willed it,” they would say. We always paid.
The EU report went further. The authors estimated that Saudi Arabia alone had spent more than $10 billion to promote Wahhabism through Saudi charitable foundations. The tiny and super-rich state of Qatar, primarily known for the creation of Al Jazeera, was the newest entrant to the game, supporting militant franchises from Libya to Syria.
Ghalib had more to tell me. They have known this since the Bush years, he said. Bush’s own State Department in 2006 issued a report.
“It probably disappeared into some vault in the basement of the Harry Truman building in DC,” I said, laughing.
Ghalib told me that the 2006 report had clearly said that Saudi donors and unregulated charities had been a major source of financing to extremist and terrorist groups over the past twenty-five years. Bush 43, as with his father’s administration, had always been in bed with the Saudis. America’s thirst for oil was unquenchable. The US dared not give State’s own report much play publicly, hoping it would disappear. It did.
That Delhi afternoon chai extended toward dinner. Ghalib drew my attention to what was going on in the Pakistani side of Punjab. I remembered from my reporter years groups like Al-Khidmat, Jamaat-ud-Daawa, and Jaish-e-Mohammed having feet in both India and Pakistan. Every time the Indian government declared a group like Jaish terrorist, a new one popped up.
Both Ghalib and I surmised that now there were literally thousands of these groups, big and small, from all across Muslim countries and communities like Mali, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and more. What did they do? They took Muslims of diverse traditions within Islam that are exceptionally moderate, like South Asian Sufi-enriched Islam, and flew in Wahhabi imams to preach intolerance.
After Hajj I no longer drank, so while Ghalib savored his favorite Black Label I asked for more chai.
“Pakistan finally a failed state? Which is why an Osama was able to hide there for years, not far away from the APS boarding school you went to?”
“You can’t make such an expansive statement. You love nuance. You should know better,” Ghalib said. He was right. Many in the Indian Hindutva right wing did consider Pakistan a failed state and I did not want to share their rhetoric.
Osama made Pakistan one of the most important stops in global Islamic terrorism. It had, in my opinion, been in a state of civil war since its inception of being carved out of what was British-ruled India, the jewel in the crown. Notably, years of democracy were interspersed throughout. Pakistan had given the world a democratically elected female head of a Muslim state in Benazir Bhutto. It was also important to acknowledge that Bangladesh, which until 1971 was called East Pakistan, had almost always been an Islamic democracy, alternatively ruled by two women, Begum Khalida Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the latter being the only living female head of state who had the title of sheikh and used it. Islam was not incompatible with democracy, as bin Laden and his right-wing counterparts in the US liked to rage. Not many looked at the Islamic pluralism that allowed democracy led by women not once but several times. A glass ceiling that even America has not been able to shatter has forever been destroyed in Islamic democracies. Yes, Muslim women can be and have been heads of state and run them. And no, Islam is no stranger to or incompatible with democracy, as a self-satisfied BBC documentary producer had condescendingly said to me before a panel at a film festival.
I digressed, telling Ghalib about my time in Dhaka a few years before. I was invited to cocktails at the home of an “industrial giant” family made rich by the suffering hands of desperately poor Bangladeshis working in their clothes-manufacturing sweatshops. We were in a mansion in a rich neighborhood called Gulshan. Women dripping diamonds wore the region’s famed sarees. My dying mother had cherished the two she had, when we used to live in Calcutta in what before 1947 was the Indian state of Bengal on its eastern edge. On its western end sat the State of Punjab. The British split both states, and millions were slaughtered in the name of religion. Lahore became the capital of the Pakistani Punjab and Chandigarh the capital of the Indian Punjab. Similarly, Calcutta became the capital of the Indian West Bengal and Dhaka the capital of what was called East Pakistan. In 1971, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, another subcontinental female prime minister, India enabled a civil war that liberated East Pakistan and created Bangladesh. Bangladesh was immensely proud of its creation—the war had been amongst other things fought over language. Urdu from West Pakistan was being imposed on East Pakistan, while Bengali really was the language of their people.
On this night, the women at this mansion smoked and drank copiously just like the men. One who was rumored to be having an affair with a US diplomat shared a cigarette with me and was appalled I was living in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Shanti Nagar (Neighborhood of Peace) in a hotel ironically called the White House.
“I am glad Gulshan is so close to the airport,” she purred. “I have never been to such areas. They are not safe. I am sure we can find you a nice accommodation at the club or another hotel here.” Unlike in Bombay and Cape Town, where the shantytowns were closest to the airports, Dhaka’s geography put Gulshan closest. This Chanel No. 5 vision that stood before me had probably never left Gulshan to see the real Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world. All she needed was this part of town to be chauffeured around in and then escape to Europe from the nearby airport.
An elderly intellectual-looking man approached me asking what kind of film I was making. I dared not tell him. I changed the subject and allowed him to launch into what seemed like a rare idea: “Have you seen how this country is being ruined by the Islam of the Taliban? I just wish India had never been separated.”
I was surprised, but it was a sentiment my grandfather would have probably shared. Bangladesh was increasingly under the influence of Taliban, and thus Deobandi, philosophy. The women at this party proudly wore bindis, part of a cultural heritage they shared with the Hindu Bengalis of the Indian side. But the bindi wars had started. In mosque after mosque, sheikhs and imams railed against them, saying they were symbols of the shirk practiced by the Hindus, and Muslim women should not wear them. Some Bangladeshi Muslim women still wore bindis on their foreheads, though neither of the two alternating women prime ministers did. For Hindu women, the bindi was sometimes a religious signifier of being married, but more often than not it was just an accoutrement of beauty, and that’s how Bengali women in this country used it.
“Lahore and Delhi are like that, too, Parvez,” Ghalib told me that day in 2014. I knew that in our part of the world abject poverty lived right next to excess and opulence, but I disagreed.
“Come on, Ghalib. Delhi is hardly like that—this is the world’s largest democracy. And the one time I went to Lahore, it was not like that either.”
“Don’t throw the world’s largest democracy BS on me, my friend,” he laughed, but I knew he was serious. For Pakistanis, Indian democracy had always been a sore subject.
Pakistan had suffered the worst kind of Wahhabi indoctrination and had the scars to prove it. In the late seventies Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq, a US ally, put Wahhabi logic into his hudood (literally, “limits”) ordinances for a sharia-compliant Pakistan. The Saudis were overjoyed, and the US looked the other way.
Ghalib had spent his teenage years in Zia’s time. He had seen his country change almost overnight as these infamous ordinances were born. Overnight, stoning women to death was OK? Whose Pakistan was this? A sharia system parallel to the penal code was being established, and it was a circus. The delusional Zia wanted to recreate the raison d’être for Pakistan itself. In his head Pakistan was created to be an Islamic state. What he forgot was that his nation’s famously alcohol-consuming founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah was partial to democracy and secularism; and worse, a Shia! In February 1948 Jinnah addressed “the people of the USA” on radio, saying in part:
I do not know what the ultimate shape of the constitution is going to be, but I am sure that it will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam. Today these are as applicable in actual life as these were 1,300 years ago. Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy.
Islam teaching democracy? He meant it because he knew it was possible.
Zia, on the other hand, was a murderous dictator, who sentenced a popular prime minister, Benazir Bhutto’s Soviet-leaning and democratically elected father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to death by hanging.
“There was no way the CIA and the US were not involved in that,” said Ghalib, echoing popular opinion. Once Zia was done with Bhutto, his newest idiotism was Nizam e Mustafa (literally, “Rule of the Prophet”).
“But whose Prophet?” I asked Ghalib.
“Zia was a perfect partner for the Saudi Wahhabi machine,” he said.
“Look at it this way, Parvez. Till 2006 you could stone a woman to death for adultery in the streets of Lahore or Karachi.” Zina, or adultery, was punishable in the Wahhabi way. Rapists of women roamed free while the women victims languished in prison. I always viewed the rowdy Pakistani Muslims blessed with intellect superior to the Saudis’. I told Ghalib about Basheer, the “honor killer” I had met during Hajj.
“Thank God for my namesake,” I said to Ghalib, referring to Pakistan’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, under whose watch a Women’s Protection Bill was put into place in 2006. It made rape punishable by the more-stringent civil law. But Pakistan was Wahhabi-indoctrination paradise and the Federal Shariat Court remained—civil laws had to be “sharia compatible.” Perhaps it was a sign of progress that a female justice in the form of Ashraf Jehan got to be one of the eight justices on this court.
“Good for her. I am thankful,” he said sardonically as we discussed this strange legal system.
Political Islam and Pakistani identity were coalescing. To its credit, when not under military rule, Pakistan had functioned for brief periods as a working democracy with the exercise of real civic franchise. Islam is not democracy-averse. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia, all in their own ways prove it. And the world’s third-largest Muslim population votes in the world’s largest democracy (India).
I asked Ghalib if old-fashioned recruitment still worked.
“Why would it ever go away?” he said. My evolving thesis since Nadhwa was getting affirmed.
We were talking about a country that suffered endemic poverty. According to the UN Development Programme’s 2013 “Human Development Index,” Pakistan was number 146 out of 187 countries. The index had been developed as a marker measured by life expectancy, literacy, education, and standards of living.
As in India and Bangladesh, the rural poor made up two-thirds of the country. Pakistan was the world’s second-largest Muslim nation and almost 70 percent of its population was poor? The statistics spoke for themselves. Poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment were the norm for South Asian Muslims who constitute the majority of Muslims on the planet.
“I cannot tell you how angry I feel at the handful of Muslim cable analysts who have completely NO idea of what they are dealing with,” I said to Ghalib. “They throw about the one term they have learned—ijtihad. Many of these idiots even claimed that the failed revolution of Egypt was a social-media phenomenon.”
We tried to connect the dots between the Saudis, the dead Osama, and the surging Daesh. The Sauds will never admit it, but they built an opaque and complex global network of bank accounts with links to Islamic charities, which in turn have links to terrorists. Post-9/11 the scion of the bin Laden family, Bakr, absolved his own vast clan of any responsibility because they had excommunicated Osama and cut off all financial links to him. Osama probably had withdrawn his share of the bin Laden annual dividends (millions) years ago, before he fled Sudan. It was comical. Post-9/11, Geneva was overrun by bin Ladens and Sauds trying to save their money. The latter reluctantly, in 1994, stripped Osama of his Saudi citizenship. They could get Osama out of Saudi Arabia, but they couldn’t ever get the Saudi out of Osama. Days after 9/11, George W. Bush’s White House cleared the secret evacuation of twenty-four prominent bin Ladens present on US soil, engaged in pursuits ranging from academia, real estate, and lobbying the capitol to just Rodeo Drive or 5th Avenue shopping. This was a time when millions of civilians remained unable to fly. Allegedly, a frantic King Fahd called his embassy in DC saying there were “bin Laden children all over America.” It is logical to assume that a phone call between the Saudi king and George W. Bush made the entire bin Laden evacuation possible. The bin Ladens were no strangers to America and were, in fact, friends to the Bush White House.
After 9/11, Bush paid Saudi Arabia two visits, an obligatory, almost humiliating ritual of US presidential genuflecting at the feet of King Abdullah. Obama doubled that number, paying four. The absurdities continue: this country with no human rights became a member of the indolent United Nations Human Rights Council. As if that were not enough, in 2017, this, the most misogynist society on the planet, which treats its women as chattel, was appointed to the UN Women’s Rights Commission. The hypocrisy of the UN could not be clearer.
And in less than a year, Donald Trump, a man whose very election was contested, would welcome the man who really ran Saudi Arabia, Deputy Crown Prince Salman, to the Oval Office—both men, members of the small club of the world’s most dangerous leaders. Weeks later, during his first foreign trip, Trump would land in Riyadh for the optics of that familiar presidential genuflection to the now incapacitated eighty-one-year-old King Salman. It was a horrific “reset” to this parasitic relationship, which had become icy toward the end of Obama’s second term.
Ghalib and I both knew of the twenty-eight pages about the Al Saud and bin Laden family links to al-Qaeda that were redacted from the 9/11 Commission Report about the (real, I believe) collusions between the monarchy and the bin Ladens with al-Qaeda—the question had haunted two presidencies. When Congress finally got the pages declassified in 2016, there was not much there. The problem is, if it were not for Saudi Wahhabi Islam (taught to fifteen of the hijackers), there would have not been an al-Qaeda and a 9/11.
“Whoever monitors the kind of websites I go to at the NSA in the US or even the government here in India is having lots of fun. At least it’s for a good cause,” I said.
“Don’t joke about such things,” admonished Ghalib, “these things have real consequences.” It was almost certain that the notorious Pakistani Intelligence had him on its watch list.
We discussed how the majority in Egypt, the most populated Arab country at 82 million, lived in abject poverty. As in South Asia, it was endemic.
“Poverty is directly proportional to illiteracy, which in some cases is directly proportional to the number of times you pray or visit a mosque,” I said. Ghalib agreed.
I knew that in spite of India’s syncretic past, we were now sitting in the most Islamophobic nation in the world. Being Muslim in India was like being a young black man in America. Muslims filled Indian prisons. And the glass ceiling for highly educated Muslims was set to pretty low. And India could never have a “Muslim Lives Matter!”
For many of the world’s almost 1.7 billion Muslims, smartphones were not a reality, and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit were things a few might have just heard about. The majority lacked easy access to the web, though they craved it. Most people had ordinary mobiles. iPhones and Galaxies? Not as much. A big part of the “radicalization” of Daesh happened mostly on the laptops of second- or even third-generation European Muslims. Muslims gathered in small Pakistani towns like Sialkot, along its terrorist highways, are a planet away from the “riches” of Muslims sitting in Brussels, Vienna, or Paris.
However, old-fashioned recruitment still works for Daesh, as it had for al-Qaeda. Always on the verge of economic collapse, Pakistan would turn up with its begging bowl at the doors of the Saudis. The “ever benevolent” Al Saud saw it as their zakat duty to help poor Muslim countries. So periodically free cash and oil were given to a Pakistan or a Bangladesh. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Saudi oil and cash came with Wahhabi mullahs and curricula. Even Iran jumped into the donation spree, knowing that in the subcontinent lay the world’s second-largest Shia population. Iranian cash came wrapped in militant Shia ideology.
Putting things in statistical context had always helped me. Muslims are a quarter of humanity. Six in ten Muslims live in Asia and not in Arab countries, which, including the often-forgotten North African countries like Algeria and Morocco, only get 20 percent of the global Muslim population. Ten to 13 percent are Shia Muslims and 87 to 90 are Sunni Muslims. Egypt is the only Arab nation that appears on the top-ten list of countries with the most Muslims. By 2050, India will be the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. And yes, they will live within a majority-Hindu country. Is Eurabia a real threat? When you believe ludicrous statements like Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, it can be. But Lebanon has fewer than 5 million people and only 55 percent of them are Muslim. Germany has 81 million people and in 2010 had 4.8 million Muslims. Only one in five Muslims lives in a non-Muslim country. Most important, two-thirds of the world’s Muslims live in ten of the world’s poorest nations. The tiniest fraction of these Muslim numbers lives in Europe. Of them, an infinitesimal number believes in driving trucks into celebratory crowds in Nice or Berlin.
Most Shias (between 68 and 80 percent) live in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India, and Iraq. Iran has 70 million Shias; the rest are split between India, Pakistan, Bahrain, and Iraq. India and Iraq have almost similar Shia numbers. Iran’s 70 million Shias constitute 40 percent of the world’s Shia population. With the world’s second-largest Shia population, India follows Iran. At number three is Pakistan with a sizeable 40 million. They are always the targets of violent Pakistani Wahhabism.
It’s important to note that India has more Shias than Pakistan. This leads some to talk of the fortunate diversity of Islam—a statistical possibility, they say, only in this majority-Hindu nation, the world’s largest democracy. In comparison, the US will remain majority white until 2043—interestingly, a year when Islam will become Ireland’s second religion. Using the above, Muslim “rationalists” say Islam can be seen as decades ahead of the West. But they conveniently forget to mention that next to Islam’s variety lies treacherous sectarianism, intolerance, and violence. Islamophobes are right that in countries like Saudi Arabia, Christians and Jews cannot openly pray. But Muslims can be sure they are surveilled in India, Europe, and the US.
Ghalib had another report about Islamic sectarianism for a talk he was going to give at New Delhi’s rusty relic of the Raj called the IIC.
“I wish people would realize the greatest violence in the world is Muslim killing Muslim,” I said to Ghalib. “I wish they did the math with due diligence.”
“The streets of our cities flow with Shia and Sunni savagery,” he replied.
For many Muslims, the oil-rich Saudi Arabia of the seventies was paradise. The desperately poor rushed to work, finding plenty of jobs, everything from being chauffeurs to construction workers and toilet cleaners. An entire nation with modern infrastructure including roads needed to be built. Saudis would never do this kind of lowly work—these were their Mexicans. The eastern, oil-boom flood came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia. From its west, Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians poured in. They raised entire families and returned home as devout soldiers of ibn Wahhab. Their women were sheathed in abayas and burqas, and their girls could now be married at puberty. This Islam was their legacy. In the twenty-first century, the Islamic charity network with its Saudi roots came to Pakistan’s rescue repeatedly. The massive earthquake in 2005 and the floods of the year Osama was killed were proof.
“Not all that money went to survivors,” said Ghalib. In reality a lot of that aid money was actually funneled to extremist groups that targeted India and the West with the support of Pakistan’s Mossad, RAW (Research and Analysis Wing).
The fourth- and fifth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan were famously dynamited by the Taliban a few months before the West became the target of their al-Qaeda brothers. Immeasurable historic legacy was lost at the orders of Osama bin Laden’s host and cohort, Mullah Mohammed Omar. He was fast turning the clock in Afghanistan back to the seventh century with beheadings, lashings, and limb chopping. The Buddhas were idols; destroying them was sunnah; the Prophet had done the same to the idols in the Kaaba. The irredentism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda was picked up by Daesh. The syncretic Islam of the region was dying. Any idols, including the graves of saints that had the misfortune of crossing paths with these marauders, had to be destroyed. The violence that the Urdu Deobandi Islam sanctioned for the Taliban was built upon the Arabic logic of al-Qaeda.
Ghalib and I also discussed Dr. Zakir Naik, a famous Indian Wahhabi zealot.
“I interviewed the bastard,” Ghalib said. “As expected, he made no sense.”
“Oh, boy, really? Because his YouTube lectures make a great deal of sense if you are his kind of person. He is very glib,” I replied.
Like the extremist group, Ahl e Hadith (“People of the Hadith”), Zakir Naik had a long untrimmed beard and did not seem to prefer a mustache. In this, he was perverting Prophetic couture. His television channel, Peace TV, which had ratings in the millions, was banned. So he found love greater than he could imagine on YouTube. Naik spoke with Wahhabi piety. It was rumored that he had said all Muslims should be terrorists (I never found the video to prove it). He had claimed that George W. Bush engineered 9/11, and he openly advocated the death penalty for homosexuality and apostasy. India is proud of its constitutional freedom of speech, so the government allowed his other activities, including sermons in front of large audiences, and his YouTube sound-bites proliferated. Naik had huge audiences and did town-hall-style Q&As in which he opined on pretty much anything he was asked. Immensely popular in Pakistan as well, he was an Indian Joel Osteen, though his dogma would be very unchristian to most in the West.
As a delicious meal of biriyani was discreetly served, we discussed things we had spoken about before. “Let’s switch to English,” Ghalib said, sensibly. Our conversation was a charged one in the context we were in. Servants in India, while common, were no longer as servile as they had once been. Socialites in posh neighborhoods like Golf Links where phirangis (“foreigners”) stayed still bitched about how hard it was to find any who stayed. It was obvious. Why scrub floors when you can work for a call center or deliver pizzas to the world’s largest middle class? It was a nationwide “problem.”
“These innumerable charities and groups are like cancers that have spread throughout the body of the nation,” Ghalib said. He strangely foreshadowed the infamous characterization of Islam itself as a “cancer” and “not a religion” by Trump’s short-lived appointee for the National Security Advisor, General Mike Flynn (a man of lies just like his master). Neither of us knew that in the next three years the world would turn upside down with just one election.
At the time, sometimes armed with almost $100 million split among violent jihadi groups, the “charities” targeted the poorest families. Violent jihad is what many of them drilled into the bobbing-up-and-down children’s heads of the kind I had seen in Deoband and later Nadhwa. Under their governments’ noses, in South Asia, money from these worldwide pots of zakat reached the hardline maulanas of local mosques who were very involved in the recruiting at ground level. A maulana was a respected religious leader, whose clout was earned with degrees from a Dar-ul-Uloom (literally, “House of Knowledge”). He knew both kalam (scholastic theology) and fiqh (jurisprudence). The derogatory “mullahs,” on the other hand, were seen as rabble-rousers.
The best age to “catch” future soldiers of “the jihad” was between eight and fifteen. The trajectory was always the same, nurture and indoctrinate them till their late teens, then send them to the teeming terrorist “boot camps.” It is here that they finally learned how to use AK-47s and newer assault weapons and hand grenades. For those mujahideen, it was Christmas all year round.
“So they still always target multiple-child families? Low income, poor-yield crops, and no access to ‘real’ education or jobs at call centers or delivering pizzas in Lahore?” I said. Ghalib nodded. Initial “identification” of potential recruits was done by the maulanas themselves, often accompanied by visitors from terrorist groups that had political fronts.
A maulana would arrive at the doorstep of a poor family saying their “condition” (poverty) was directly proportional to their un-Wahhabi actions, from visiting Sufi shrines for blessings or even listening to local Sufi peers, thus becoming one with the shirk of the idolators. These traditions went back generations, but a visit from a maulana was a huge honor. He would typically say that the fastest way to earn “God’s favor” again was to devote the lives of one or two of their sons to Islam. They already knew the family’s demographics. Muslim families tended to produce multiple offspring, so they were ripe for plucking. The maulana over cups of chai (the downtrodden are always hospitable) promised to educate the boys at his madrassa (school) and later find them work in “Islam’s service.”
A few weeks later, a second visit followed with a more ominous agenda. Shahadat, or martyrdom, was discussed. In the unlikely event that a son was “martyred” (they never used the words “death” or “killed”), there would be instant salvation not just for the son but for the family as well—in this life and in heaven. They moved between the celestial and the real world with ease. Each son had a price (obviously), all cash. The family was to receive compensation for their “sacrifice” to Islam. By the early 2000s, the going rate for a male child was about 500,000 Pakistani or Indian rupees (approximately $6,000 US). This was big money for the impoverished. Few families would refuse it. Plus, they got bragging rights that their sons were committed to the “cause” of Islam. Un-contextualized Quranic verses were often thrown about by the maulana in the recruitment process.
In the last few years, maulanas have also started recruiting young girls, which by its very nature, in a very patriarchal process, is messy and often involves child marriage.
The mood was somber as Ghalib lingered over his new peg of whiskey. “It never stops, does it?” I said.
“Their success is directly proportional to how poor the family is,” he said.
We both knew that Pakistani and Indian RAW claimed they “watched” the larger urban madrassas. The Wahhabis knew how to outsmart them by keeping madrassas small, at less than 100 students. The indoctrinated children were left with almost no contact with the outside world. Videos of cowboy-style Daesh is what they now get as entertainment. In an earlier time, it was the less-sleek al-Qaeda videos. This was not a social-media universe with laptops and smartphones. But it was getting harder to ignore the power of the social web. This was not a “Grand Theft Auto” world equipped with Xboxes, either. But it was catching up. Both Nadhwa and Deoband, like many Pakistani counterparts, had websites. The curriculum was always Wahhabi. The Shia were not Muslim, just like the Hindus, Jews, and Christians, and it would take violent jihad to obliterate them. Democracy, Pakistani or Indian or Bangladeshi-style, was the enemy in a world where “Dar al-Islam” was the desired state. The recruiting maulana often visited the families who had offered their children, singing the praises of the progress they had made. Graduates often had two choices: become minor clerics themselves, of the kind I had met at Nadhwa, or go to local jihad boot camps. The latter was decided by the teachers, who carefully monitored a child’s ability to engage in violence and an acceptance of “jihadi” culture.
“The real boot camps are in the FATA or the NWFP,” said Ghalib. The former was the acronym for Pakistan’s lawless “Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” and the latter for the “North West Frontier Province,” where Peshawar, a key city on the terror silk route, was located.
Successive Pakistani “governments” had done little about this. In India, the problem, though present, was not as widespread. Zia-ul-Haq, who was killed in a plane crash (which in rumor-rich Pakistan was “deliberate”) had done his ungodly work carefully—the Pakistani bureaucracy is filled with his appointees, who remain sympathetic to these organizations and to militant Islam.
“Not an accident, Ghalib, that Osama bin Laden spent his last years living in Abbottabad right under the noses of that Pakistan Military Academy compound,” I said as we parted that night.
“Be careful, Parvez. Even though we didn’t speak much about it, I know the kind of work you are doing. It can have consequences, especially in this part of the world. When are you getting your US citizenship?” he asked, giving me a hug. I said it was at least a year away.
I was no stranger to fatwas calling for my death. But his words stayed with me as I was chauffeured back to my hotel on that chilly Delhi night, three years after my Hajj.