By JOHN STACKHOUSE, The Globe and Mail
Saturday, September 15, 2001
I awoke before dawn on Thursday, to the sound of my infant daughter crying, and thought of Sultan, a Pakistani pilot, warrior and hate-monger. And I shuddered. He hadn't really crossed my mind in the three years since we met, but this week, with talk of jihad and terrorism and hate and pilots, I could think of few people other than Sultan, and how his twisted dream had followed me around the world.
His last message to me had made that dream clear. "Death to America," he vowed.
I met Sultan on a wickedly hot evening in rural Pakistan. It was in August, 1998, just after followers of Osama bin Laden had blown to pieces two U.S. embassies in East Africa. He introduced himself both as Sultan Atiqur Rahman and as Sultan Ahmed, and made no bones of the fact that he, a veteran of the Pakistani air force and the holy war in Afghanistan, was running a training school for Islamic militants.
He cheered bin Laden and was thrilled with the bombings. They were, he said, just the beginning.
I frantically took notes, and filed a story that ran under the headline: "They use the gun to spread the faith." But I was eager to get out.
I was tired of the hate and hypocrisy that bubbled constantly in Pakistan and India.
After seven years of living amid so much deprivation and then watching America's Golden Age unfold every night on television, I feared that I was beginning to see the roots of Sultan's anger. Then again, like a lot of people in South Asia, I also longed for the peace and tolerance that seemed to sprout freely in the West's fertile soil.
Within a year, my wife and I were back in Toronto, a place where we could raise our children with a degree of serenity. I laid my notes of the evening with Sultan to rest in the attic, where they remained until this week, when it became apparent that such a move could not guarantee a sanctuary.
Now, the hope that we could shelter our children from the likes of Sultan may be gone too.
I don't know where he is now but I met him at his Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad, or Centre for Preaching, outside the village of Muridke on Pakistan's side of Punjab. We were about an hour's drive north of Lahore, a decadent party town where, Islamic law notwithstanding, Scotch flows freely in many homes. All my best Pakistani friends lived in Lahore, at least when they were not in London or New York.
Muridke is a different world. I was there, thanks to a helpful journalist in Lahore, with Suzanne Goldenberg, a Winnipegger who writes for London's Guardian newspaper. We already knew something of the place, that it trained hundreds of young men every year to take up jihad, or holy war.
It was also the spiritual headquarters of Lashkar-e-Taiba, "Army of the Righteous," a very mean militant group that ran its real training camps - the finishing schools for fanatics - in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sultan's group trained boys to fight mainly in Indian Kashmir, but also Sudan and Afghanistan. It also had close ties with the groups and madrassas in northwestern Pakistan where the Taliban first emerged.
Here, not far from the Indian border, the "Righteous Soldiers" enjoyed a 200-acre estate, carved from some of crowded Punjab's best farmland. And on it they had built the school, six mosques, a hospital, a playground and a shopping centre. The room where we sat was well air-conditioned.
Every autumn, the campus put on a religious festival that draws tens of thousands of people who also can watch demonstrations of commando manoeuvres, examine the newest weapons from abroad and listen as weeping parents eulogize their sons killed in battle.
The cost of the buildings, we were told, had been underwritten by anonymous "donors" in the Middle East. The land had been donated in the 1980s by Pakistan's military government, the one propped up so actively by the Reagan administration. The annual operating budget came from generous Pakistanis around the world and from Inter-Services Intelligence, the country's spy agency.
People commonly referred to the school as "Koran and Kalashnikovs" and, as we entered, we could see why. We had an armed escort and, before reaching the teachers residence, we passed graffiti in Arabic that read: "Democracy leads to secularism" and "Jihad leads to dominance of Islam."
Sultan was there to welcome us, and to introduce Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the movement's spiritual leader. They greeted me with a Muslim hug of brotherhood. They told Suzanne she would have to cover herself with more than a headscarf. Two teenaged boys arrived with a more appropriate cover - a bed sheet. "Your feet!" Sultan exclaimed, noticing the last exposed part of her body. She covered them, too.
The boys left and returned with a tray bearing bottles of warm Pepsi, which the professors of fanaticism opened and shared with us. They said they had allowed us this rare visit on one condition: We had to swear we were not American.
Sultan hated the place. "We will go to America with the gun," he warned as we sipped our Pepsi.
He described bin Laden not as a man but an "institution," and he claimed that in the 1980s, he left the Pakistani air force to fight in Afghanistan with the infamous Saudi millionaire turned jihad warrior. Americans had trained them in the weaponry they used to repel the Russians, he said, but now he hated them as well as the old Communists. (Pepsi, he explained, wasn't American - it was made in Pakistan.)
Sultan also said he planned to go to the United States. Rereading my notes this week, I was forced to pause. "First, we will ask them [Americans] to take up Islam," he said. "If they don't, then we will use the gun."
I guess I should have asked him whether he planned to use his piloting skills as well; after all, we discussed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and Sultan was eager to say how much he despised New York and all its opulence. It was, he said, a city run by Jews.
"The Jews are the real terrorists," added Saeed, his superior. I glanced at Suzanne, under her bed sheet, and wondered whether they had any inkling she's Jewish.
But sitting on the floor of a school in rural Punjab, Manhattan's renaissance just seemed so far away that it wasn't worth probing. This gang had far better targets close by, I thought. Hindus in India, Shia Muslims down the road, the Scotch-swillers in Lahore.
After Sultan's vitriol against Jews, Saeed made a point of saying how terrorism was, in his mind, a very bad word. Terrorism involves the killing of innocent people, while jihad is about helping the poor and oppressed - although sometimes those who get in the way have to be killed.
•••
Those were crazy times in Pakistan. The United States had just rained missiles on Afghanistan, and a few had fallen short, crashing on Pakistani soil.
I had been to a mosque in Peshawar, on the Afghan border, where a cleric said, with a bit of prescience it seems: "From this day on, a new war will start against the United States and against Americans."
In Islamabad, the capital, a leading cleric told 800 worshippers that "you can go out and kill Americans."
The complaint against the United States stemmed from more than a few misdirected missiles. For the better part of the 1990s, Washington had imposed economic sanctions to prompt Pakistan into following a Western agenda - yes to democracy, yes to human rights, no to drugs. At the same time, the West also was playing pussyfoot with a succession of Pakistani governments, giving aid, then taking it away, inviting the prime minister to the White House, then refusing a good photo op.
I still believe that most Pakistanis want a secular government with liberal leanings, although democracy is not a popular topic at the dinner table for people who live in little huts and herd goats for a living. Many of them would just like a day off.
Sultan and Saeed felt that their school was what those young goat herders, and the country, needed. According to the short, beefy Saeed, himself an engineer, a new Islamic state must be technologically sophisticated so that it can provide jobs and decent living standards to its people. His students learned computer science and engineering, and 55 affiliate schools scattered around the countryside produced an annual crop of teenagers for higher education. It had a Web site (markazdawa.org).
Of course, democracy was heretical and also had to go, Saeed said. That was part of their jihad. "In Islam, God is the ruler. But in democracy, the right is given to all people. In democracy, the right to rule is transferred to the common people."
For the next hour or so, we tried to gain some understanding of these men who held such sway over their acolytes - enough to send them to their deaths. They were articulate, thoughtful and genuinely concerned, it seemed, for the plight of the many poor Pakistanis who lived around them.
It was hard not to agree with their desire to overthrow the corrupt government in Islamabad, and do something about the whisky-lovers of Lahore, where many are millionaires but few pay their taxes. It was hard not to admire the genuinely good schools and health clinics they ran.
But they kept coming back, unprompted, to the United States and the Jews, whom Sultan described, menacingly, almost as an ancient plague. Once India was defeated, he promised, "the Jews" would be his army's target.
When it was time to leave, Saeed presented me with hardcover copies of the Noble Qur'an and The Sealed Nectar, Biography of the Noble Prophet. They had been imported from Saudi Arabia. He told me to read the books if I wanted to understand jihad, which, he reminded me yet again, was not to be equated with terrorism. We embraced, and then I left.
Pakistan had been under pressure to shut down the Muridke campus, which had opened in 1989.
The U.S. State Department placed the organization, and Saeed, on its list of terrorists. But with so many other battles to fight in Pakistan - drugs, corruption, dictatorship and, before those, the Soviets - little hate factories in the countryside didn't seem worthy of a diplomatic offensive. And so they grew. Rather than censuring the place, senior government officials beat a path to its door.
My Pakistani friends already felt defeated by the movement. I. A. Rehman, a former journalist and human-rights activist, and one of the finest people I know, said the fight against the Russians, and now the rise of fundamentalists with guns, had made people like Sultan feel invincible.
Perhaps he was right. Back then, as now, the threat was not just the bomb-throwers or the suicide pilots, or some perceived maniac named bin Laden. The threat lay in the hate spewed by people like Sultan, a hate you can hear spoken just as clearly these days in parts of the United States.
This week, there seemed to be nothing to contain the passion for vengeance I encountered that night at Muridke. The month, the year, the continent had changed. But the sentiment remained the same, as the vitriol once again poured out of a notebook I thought I had put away for good.
