Confessions of a Mullah Warrior E-Book

Masood Farivar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Masood Farivar was ten years old when his childhood in a then peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan was shattered by the Soviet invasion of 1979. Fleeing across the border to Pakistan, Masood entered a madrassa for refugees, but soon returned to his home to join the anti-Soviet jihad. Two years later, having fought alongside the Afghan mujahideen and Arab and Pakistani volunteers, Farivar left his country to study at Harvard, and then worked as a journalist in New York. But finally, after a decade in the United States, he felt he had to return to Afghanistan. Having seen terrorism turn America into a hotbed of anti-Muslim racism, he now returned to a country devastated by war and a safe haven for international terrorists. In this remarkable memoir, Masood paints a vibrant portrait of his family and his nation's history, reveals the world of militant Islam by taking us deep inside the madrassas, vividly recounts his experiences on the battlefield at Tora Bora, and conveys the culture shock of a Muslim living in the West today.

Leseprobe

CONFESSIONS OF A MULLAH WARRIOR

Born in 1969 in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, Masood Farivar fought in the anti-Soviet resistance in the late 1980s before attending Harvard University, from which he received a degree in history and politics. His journalism has appeared in major publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice. He lives in Afghanistan.

CONFESSIONS OF A MULLAH WARRIOR

MASOOD FARIVAR

Atlantic Books

LONDON

First published in the United States of America in 2009 by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This electronic edition published in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Masood Farivar 2009

The moral right of Masood Farivar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

978 184887 312 4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

In memory of the victims of Afghanistan's ongoing war

Contents

CONFESSIONS OF A MULLAH WARRIOR

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Acknowledgments

CONFESSIONS OF A MULLAH WARRIOR

Prologue

April 1989—The wind whips across a dry, narrow canal outside Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The afternoon sun warms me through my soiled and sweat-drenched piran tuban (tunic and pants) as I stand over a pile of mortar shells, ammunition boxes, rifles, and blankets. To my left, our loader lies in a pool of blood, his right leg blown off above the knee. Doctor Hamid, who is also the mortar gunner, gives him a shot of tranquilizer and radios for help. Now he asks Awalgul to take over.

"Laghmani," Awalgul barks at me, "give me good rounds."

We're taking heavy fire from a hilltop a mile across the plain, and Awalgul wants to respond with "good" mortar rounds, the kind that fly with a beautiful upward trajectory right into the heart of enemy territory. The faulty rounds have bad serial numbers and sometimes explode inside the mortar.

"Laghmani, hurry up," he shouts as he slides another round into the steaming mortar. Putting his fingers into his ears, he cowers as the round shoots out.

This is the third week in the battle of Jalalabad, the mujahideen's final march to liberation. After nine years of occupation, Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in mid-February, leaving behind the embattled regime of Najib. Before their pullout, we were convinced victory would be swift and decisive. Jalalabad would be captured, a temporary government would be established, and Kabul and the other Communist-controlled cities would fall one after the other. But after a few government outposts went down, the battle drew to a stalemate, and the Jozjani militia, which forms the backbone of the enemy defenses and is notorious for its ruthlessness, has received fresh reinforcements. Their guns continue to pound our position for half an hour.

Two pickup trucks suddenly turn up the road. Several armed men sprint across the field toward us, a distance of two hundred yards. As they approach, I spot my twenty-five-year-old cousin Saboor among them. Shy, soft-spoken, and thin as a reed, he's traveled from Peshawar to assist with supplies.

"We need to go to Farm Number Four," he says, referring to a state citrus farm under our control.

Then Saboor turns to Awalgul. Tall and broad-shouldered with boyish good looks, Awalgul is a jokester (he sarcastically nicknamed me Laghmani after the denizens of my ancestral province Laghman, who have a reputation for shrewdness) and tries to keep our spirits up. He decides that I should go to Farm Number Four with Saboor. We load the wounded soldier into the pickup, which then speeds off down the potholed road toward the Pakistan border.

Saboor and I follow in a second truck. I sit in the back with half a dozen other fighters wrapped in woolen patoo shawls and carrying rifles. Every couple of hundred yards, we hear the whoosh of an incoming artillery round and the driver slams on the brakes. His timing is good, but when a round lands particularly close to us, I quietly murmur the declaration of faith just in case: Ashhaduan la illahah, illalahu, wa Ashhaduanna Muhammadan Abduhu wa rasulluhu—I bear witness that there is no god but God, I bear witness that Muhammad is his Servant and Messenger.

A couple of miles later, we turn onto a narrow dirt road and stop on the edge of the farm. I don't understand why we've stopped in an exposed area until I turn and look over my shoulder. A young man, not much older than I, is chained to the stump of a tall cypress tree, its branches sheared off by shrapnel. Behind the stump is a crater, the work of a SCUD missile. While a plane hums overhead, invisible and out of antiaircraft range, bursts of machine gun fire crackle across the farm. An artillery round explodes in a huge plume of smoke and dust about thirty yards away from the man. He looks anxiously across the open plain and somberly moves his lips.

Standing up in the back of the truck to look closer, we see the man turn his head toward us. His expression reminds me of a virgin groom on his wedding night, his spooky eyes tiny and black, shyly sparkling with anticipation. For a moment I suspect he's an Arab who, as part of a vendetta, must have been tied up by a vengeful Afghan. The driver and Saboor exchange words. Saboor sticks his head out of the window and gestures at the man.

"Do you know who that is?" he asks. "He is an Arab and he wants to become a shaheed." A martyr.

As a logistics and liaison officer, Saboor has, over the years, arranged for hundreds of Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan.

"Who brought him here?" I ask.

"I don't know, but he's one of the crazy ones. I just wanted to show him to you," he says matter-of-factly.

"Who chained him?" I ask.

"Probably one of his friends. There are a lot of them here, you see. They all want to become shaheeds."

Later Saboor tells me that several such men had been spotted around the farm since the start of the battle of Jalalabad. They chained themselves to trees during the day in hopes of achieving martyrdom before the sun went down, and by evening their comrades would come to pick them up, dead or alive.

"He's picked a nice spot," I say, tongue in cheek, because I really don't know what to say at all. "May God grant his wish and make him a shaheed."

In the back of my mind, though, this didn't make any sense. Clearly this man wasn't afraid of death. So why did he bind himself? Did he feel his cowardice would get the better of him on the battlefield? Was he fearful of being denied the promise of eternal life in the cool shade of palm and apple trees, and the company of black-eyed damsels? Why did he travel such a great distance to Afghanistan? Not to fight, but to tie himself to a tree?

I hear the unmistakable whistle of an incoming mortar round. The driver hits the gas. Instinctively, everyone in the back of the truck crouches down. As we speed away, the chained man shouts, "Allahu Akbar!"—God is great! One of my comrades mouths a prayer for protection against the evil eye.

Since joining the resistance in 1987, and later working as a combat reporter, I'd met dozens of Arab volunteers: young, naive, and fanatically religious men drawn to the battlefields of Afghanistan by the promise of eternal life. When the battle of Jalalabad began in earnest a couple of weeks ago, I met two Arabs near our mortar position. We were taking cover in a trench during a particularly fierce firefight. The Arab men were jittery, and from the way they held their rifles it was clear they had never been in a battle before. Knowing a smattering of Koranic Arabic, I tried to engage them in conversation without sounding like a seventh-century bedouin, but they brushed me off, either unable to understand what I said or uninterested in talking.

They muttered something to each other and leapt out of the ditch, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as they raced across the open plain that separated us from the enemy positions, firing at targets that were far out of range. What were they doing? The enemy encampments were a mile up in the hills. Someone shouted at them in Arabic to come back. But they kept on running. I wondered then if they were acting out fantasies of becoming martyrs like the legendary early Muslim warriors who would fearlessly lunge at the infidels with their drawn swords, leaving their lives in the hands of God. Yet many would-be shaheeds failed to realize the Prophet was a shrewd man. He urged his followers "to tie the knee of the camel and then rely on God." What these men were doing was pure folly. As I peered up from the edge of the trench, I heard gunshots and watched both men fall. Drawing heavy fire, we had to abandon our position, and their fallen bodies.

When I look back on the war and how it came to put Afghanistan at the center of Islamic terrorism, I think about that chained man, and thousands of men just like him, who martyred themselves for God. Young and overzealous, these Arabs were war tourists who had bought their way into our country—and most Afghans resented their presence. While we called our struggle a jihad, a holy war, we were fighting first and foremost to liberate our country. The Arabs, who saw us as lesser Muslims, were seeking heavenly rewards. The more politically minded of these fighters declared, with a fierce conviction I could never understand, that "jihad will go on until the green flag of Islam flutters over Moscow and Washington"—an ominous utterance we shrugged off as the rhetorical ejaculation of misguided men.

In a sense, these men symbolized what the war had morphed into by 1989. This was no longer a jihad, a war of liberation against the godless Soviets; it had degenerated into a conflict manipulated by outsiders, each with very different ambitions. The Pakistani military orchestrated the battle of Jalalabad in hopes of bringing friendly Afghan groups to power. The Americans had financed a lengthy jihad and, throughout the war, rallied international support and encouraged volunteers to take part. The toughest fighters received the most American support even if they were in open contempt of America. When the Soviets left, Washington pushed to bring more "moderate" forces to power, but the effort was halfhearted and quickly abandoned. As for the Arabs, they poured into Afghanistan in ever-larger numbers, even after the Soviet withdrawal. Their ambitions wouldn't become fully clear until September 11, 2001.

Many Arabs saw the victory in Afghanistan as the first step in a larger jihad, though Afghans found it hard to call the horrors of the decade-long civil war that followed a victory. I had no idea at the time how long the war would drag on and how many more of my countrymen would lose their lives. No one did. Nor did anyone know that some of these Arab fighters would one day come back to haunt Afghanistan—and America.

Chapter One

Every child who is born is born with a sound nature; it is the parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Magian.

—Prophet Muhammad

Summer 1974 or 1975—"Agha, Agha," I said excitedly, "look, there's a fish in the river."

It was a late summer afternoon and I was tugging at Agha's shirttail and tiptoeing over a creaky wooden footbridge, exhilarated and frightened by the rush of the muddy Alishang River twenty feet below. Agha was Sufi Ramazan, my father's father and a beloved, gray-bearded elder of our ancestral village of Islamabad in eastern Afghanistan in the province of Laghman. While my cousins called him by the more formal Baba Jee, I for some reason had adopted the term my father and uncles preferred for him: Agha, or Dad. Ever since he'd given me my name and chanted the azan, the Islamic call to prayer—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, God is great, God is great—into my ears as an infant, Grandpa Agha had taken a special liking to me, the only son of his oldest son.

I didn't know it at the time, but Agha had decided to introduce me to our ancestral homeland, a world away from my birthplace of Sheberghan in the north. I was happy to get away from Sheberghan for an adventure-filled cross-country trip, but as I clutched Grandpa's shirttail and insisted that I'd spotted a fish in the river, he responded with words that still ring in my ears: "It's a piece of wood, you silly. Now walk carefully or you'll be swimming with the wood."

I was five or six. Agha was pushing seventy and quite fit for his age. He sported a long, neatly trimmed gray beard and a white silk turban. As a district governor in the north of Kabul, he'd earned a reputation for meting out harsh punishments to criminals, but he was kind and gentle with children.

Safely across the river, I let go of Agha and began waltzing through a vast, chest-high field of sugarcane. The village, a cluster of a hundred or so adjoining mud huts and a handful of more sturdily built two-story compounds, lay beyond the field. The sugarcane distracted me. Until Grandpa told me what it was, I thought it was a fatter, thicker variety of nay, a species of bamboo used to make calligraphy pens. When I learned what it was, I started pulling at some of the stalks but they were taller than I and much more stubborn and wouldn't succumb to my efforts. Agha, finding me straining and sweating, pulled out his pocketknife and cut several canes. I remember proudly carrying the canes over my shoulder and following Agha to one of the compounds to spend the night in a cool room.

Only a few other memories from that visit to Islamabad and other villages in our ancestral province of Laghman have stayed with me: meeting old relatives who wore traditional clothes and spoke in a village dialect I could hardly understand; throwing rocks at sheep and cattle; enjoying local delicacies that I associated with the home of my ancestors—corn bread, fried cheese, brown sugar rocks. And one final image: standing next to a cluster of tombs as Agha lifted his wiry hands in prayer. It wasn't the first time he and I had stopped along our journey to pray for the dead, but these little dirt mounds of tombs weren't ordinary—they belonged to ancestors of ours who had brought Islam to eastern Afghanistan, their history closely tied to that of the country.

* * *

I was born and raised in the town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan, a very different place from Islamabad. Once a bustling Silk Road trading post, Sheberghan fell on hard times after Genghis Khan's army sacked it in the thirteenth century. While I was growing up in the 1970s, it was something of a backwater town, despite a multiethnic population of some ten thousand. Native Uzbeks predominated, but there were large pockets of Tajiks, Pashtuns, Turkomens, and even nomadic Arabs.

To the other townsfolk, we were Laghmanis—shrewd, industrious, enterprising, and educated. There were so many Laghmanis in Sheberghan that one large neighborhood was informally known as Laghmani Street. Many were close relatives of ours. Grandpa Agha and Grandma Bibi lived there with their three sons, my father, Uncle Khan Agha, and Uncle Agha Shirin. My mother had an older brother and a younger sister as well as two cousins. I knew what to call these close family members, but many others were related to us through blood and family ties so complicated that I sometimes wondered why I called a certain relative a kaakaa, a paternal uncle, rather than a maamaa, a maternal uncle, or a khaala, a maternal aunt, rather than 'ama, a paternal aunt.

To get answers I'd sometimes turn to Ama Koko, my mother's feisty, slightly hunched maternal aunt. Widowed at a young age and childless, Ama Koko never remarried and instead divided her time between her three brothers and their four dozen children. Whenever she visited us, she'd spend much of her time reading the Koran or the book of Hafez, both of which she'd taught to my mother and her siblings. Like many others in the family, I'd occasionally ask her to consult Hafez to divulge my luck. She would open the book at random and start reading at the first verse her eye fell on. The fourteenth-century Persian verses didn't make much sense to me, but Ama Koko always found a way of putting them in terms a child could understand: "Khwaja Hafez sees fabulous fortune in your future."

When I wasn't asking her to read my luck, I'd pester her with questions about our extended family. A great storyteller, she was open to answering any question except the one that hung over her like a dark cloud: how she'd lost her young husband, the son of a powerful khan near Islamabad, in a tribal feud on the day after their wedding. Everything else was fair game.

"So Ama Koko, where were you born?" I'd start.

"Charikar."

Charikar is a small town north of Kabul.

"Charikar? What were you doing in Charikar?"

"My father was a government officer there."

"What was your father's name?"

"Jalilur Rahman."

"What was your grandfather's name?"

"Jamilur Rahman."

"So how are you related to Father?"

"Don't you know?" she'd say, irritated. "Your father is my niece's husband. Don't you see?"

"No, I mean how else are you related?"

"Well, your father is my mother's stepcousin's son. He is also my sister-in-law's son-in-law …"

The interrogation would go on and on, sometimes for an hour or more. By her next visit to our house, I'd forget many of the names and subject her to the same battery of questions. But she could never go back more than three generations in the family genealogy.

Years later I came across an old family manuscript that filled in the holes in Ama Koko's narrative. Titled Sifat-naamah-I Darwish Khan-I Ghazi, or The Hagiography of Darwish Khan Ghazi, the hundred-page manuscript opens in 1582, the year Darwish Khan, a middle-aged, fanatical general, led an army from central Asia to the regions surrounding Islamabad, the last non-Muslim pocket of Afghanistan. Accompanying Darwish Khan at the head of the army was his octogenarian spiritual advisor and prayer leader, Sultan Quli, my fourteenth forefather. Sultan Quli was no ordinary mullah. He was the grandson of Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahrar, one of the eminent religious figures of his time and the leader of the Sufi brotherhood known as the Naqshbandiyyah.

Sufism was more than an esoteric spiritual pursuit at the time; it was a way of life for millions and a vehicle by which Islam spread through central and south Asia. Among the many mystical brotherhoods, the Naqshbandiyyah boasted by far the largest following, but what set it apart from other Sufi fraternities was not simply the brotherhood's practice of the "silent prayer" but, more importantly, its close ties to the ruling authorities—first the dynasty founded by Timur in the fourteenth century and later Babur's Moghul empire. Ahrar and his descendents served as powerful, behind-the-scenes advisors of both dynasties. As the late German scholar Annemarie Schimmel put it, Ahrar believed that "to serve the world it is necessary to exercise political power" and to bring political rulers under control so that God's law can be carried out in every aspect of life.

The task facing Darwish Khan's army was daunting: conquer and convert some of the Hindu Kush's toughest and most fiercely independent denizens. Darwish Khan did not hesitate to remind his troops what they were fighting for. As he put it, they were part of a battle between God—the One and the Omnipotent—and the gods and idols of the infidels. As the holy warriors took up position on the bank of the Alishang River, native Pashtun tribesmen began to mobilize. While the infidels sacrificed goats to their gods Pandad, Sharwee, and Laamandee, Darwish Khan summoned Allah's help, assuring his troops that "a man needs courage, not a saber by his side." His army likely took his words seriously, as it was believed that Darwish Khan possessed extraordinary powers, an example of which was the ability to gallop headlong into an encroaching army, slicing dozens of infidels in half "like cucumbers."

A total of sixty-six valleys were conquered and converted, but the expedition wasn't a complete success. While the native Pashtuns submitted to the new faith, another, non-Pashtun tribe, living in adjacent valleys, tenaciously resisted conversion. Originally hailing from the Kandahar region, they had fled north to the Hindu Kush some seven hundred years earlier and spoke in strange tongues, worshipped idols, and sang and danced around their dead. Legend had it that they were descendents of Alexander the Great's army, which explained why many of them had blue eyes and blond hair. The Afghans called the region Kufristan or Kafiristan—the "land of unbelief" or the "land of infidels." For the next three centuries, Kafiristan served as a constant reminder that Darwish Khan's mission to bring Islam to the heathens remained unfulfilled.

As for Darwish Khan and Sultan Quli's descendents and the remnants of the army, they settled on the bank of the Alishang and christened the encampment Islamabad, or City of Islam, and built ties with the newly converted Pashtuns. They intermarried with them, acquired land along the Alishang, and built a thriving settlement in the heart of the Pashtun belt. While many lived off the land, the direct descendents of Sultan Quli continued the religious profession of their ancestors, maintaining mosques, running Koran schools, and appointing prayer leaders and preachers across the region. Religion also ensured that every male in the family, and more than a few females, were literate in the midst of an illiterate society. Seeing it as a source of power, they passed it down to their children, generation after generation.

Meanwhile, in matters both important and banal, tribal ways often prevailed despite the injunctions of Islamic law. Murders went largely unpunished. Few, if any, thieves had their hands chopped off. Women only occasionally received the legal right to inherit property promised to them by the new, egalitarian religion. Much to the shock of Islamabad's piety, some desperate tribesmen traded their wives for cattle. People lived their lives according to the guiding principles of Pashtunwali—the way of the Pashtun. Its main tenets required showing hospitality to all, providing shelter for those in need, and retaliating against those who have wronged you. Pashtunwali made no distinction between rich and poor, landlord and peasant. A khan who looked the wrong way at a peasant's wife could be dragged through the mud, his face blackened, his house burned down, and his family banished. A peasant who stole money could simply pay it back instead of having his hand cut off in accordance with Islam dictates. Everyone, regardless of wealth, was expected to provide lavish hospitality to guests. Khoday dih ghareeb krhee, chaah dih bih ghayratah krhee went one proverb: God made you poor, but who took away your honor?

Darwish Khan's wish for Islamic conversion came to pass in the nineteenth century, due to a fortuitous turn of events. In 1893 the British, who had made two futile attempts to conquer Afghanistan, drew a new border between Afghanistan and British India that came to be known as the Durand Line, named after its architect, Sir Mortimer Durand. Their goal: transform the unruly land of the Afghans—Yaghistan, or the "land of insolence"—into a docile buffer state between Czarist Russia and British India.

The Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan, whom the British had christened the "Iron Amir" because of his ruthless and authoritarian rule, saw this as an opportunity to enlarge his domain. While not a religious fanatic, he quashed an uprising by the minority Shiite Hazaras of central Afghanistan in an effort to rally tribesmen to join his motley army in a jihad against the infidels of Kafiristan. Many panicked Kafirs embraced Islam outright, while other tribal leaders offered to pay tribute to the amir to avert war. This was a tactic they had used for centuries to fight off the spread of Islam, but the amir demanded complete and unconditional conversion.

The campaign to pacify Kafiristan was short-lived but violent. Hundreds were killed while thousands more crossed into the neighboring Chitral region of modern Pakistan, where their Kafir offspring live to this day. When the jihad was over, some sixty thousand infidels had embraced Islam and pledged their allegiance to the amir. With the valley subdued, the amir dispatched an army of mullahs to instruct the converts in the ways of Islam. None other than my maternal great-grandfather, Jalilur Rahman Khan, led a troop of mullahs into the valley, with specially trained barbers circumcising men both young and old in accordance with Islamic tradition. My paternal great-grandfather, also involved in the campaign, took into marriage a young girl from the area. She was one of the many women who were taken as spoils of war from the region, which the warriors renamed Nooristan, or the "land of light."

By the time of Nooristan's conquest, little of Islamabad's past power and prestige was left. In fact, the seat of Islam in eastern Afghanistan had declined into a poor hamlet, overshadowed by the fast-growing Moghul-era frontier town of Jalalabad to the southeast. One by one, the men of Islamabad started leaving in search of economic opportunity elsewhere. Many joined the Iron Amir's bureaucracy, some his military. Grandpa Agha started out as a county clerk before moving on to serve as a district chief in several provinces. His older brother became a provincial police chief in northern Afghanistan.

One of the men to strike gold was Grandpa Baba, my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1895. When he was five, he lost his father and was raised along with his two younger brothers and younger sister by his mother and their maternal uncle. He was a mullah who spent most of the first two decades of the last century working as a mirza north of Kabul. Mirza is an ancient Turkic regal title that had only recently come to designate anyone who was either a scribe or a notary. In an attempt to consolidate his power, the amir went beyond his southern tribal base to build a modern state bureaucracy, commissioning a professional army and centralizing the government. Starting with my great-grandfather Jalilur Rahman, men in my family whose predecessors had for ten generations borne the clerical title mullah now were calling themselves mirzas. It wasn't that these men were abandoning religion. On the contrary, our family maintained two mosques in Islamabad and pilgrims continued to visit the shrine of Darwish Khan and other pioneers. Yet after three centuries of enjoying the power and prestige that came with their position as men of religion and learning, they realized becoming mirzas was a way into the lucrative new world of government service.

As Grandpa Baba mastered the art of official letter writing and penmanship (his apprenticeship required developing a distinct handwriting style—straight alifs, curvy baas, loopy seens—for the entire Arabic alphabet), he seemed destined to follow in his uncle's footsteps. Then, in early 1919, King Habiburrahman Khan was assassinated in his sleep during a hunting expedition near Jalalabad. While the dead monarch's religiously conservative brother and twenty-seven-year-old liberal son jockeyed for possession of the throne, my great-uncle packed up his family and moved back to the secure environs of Islamabad.

Prince Amanullah Khan assumed the throne with the support of the reformist, anticolonialist Young Afghans, who modeled themselves after their Turkish counterparts, and Amanullah soon dispatched a letter to the British viceroy of India declaring Afghanistan's independence. When the British demurred, he did what Afghan rulers had always done when faced with a foreign adversary: he rallied the tribes for a jihad. There followed a series of what Western historians would call "inconclusive skirmishes," fought mostly by southeastern tribesmen, descendents of men converted by Darwish Khan's army. Grandpa Baba spent much of the 1920s as a midlevel district administrator in Laghman. The decade marked one of the most turbulent periods in modern Afghan history, as the young king's effort to transform Afghanistan into a modern secular state, modeled on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkey, was met with stiff opposition from an alliance of the religious establishment and Pashtun tribes.

By 1929, the liberal regime of King Amanullah was teetering, and Grandpa Baba found himself in the improbable position of defending a monarch who was being accused of heresy. A religiously inspired Tajik movement had overthrown the king, and Grandpa, as a government official and a member of the religious establishment in the Pashtun belt, had sided with a Pashtun general who eventually restored the monarchy. Leaving his post in the Alishang district, Grandpa retired to Islamabad where he reinforced the village's defenses, waiting for months on an enemy force that never materialized. His effort didn't go unrecognized, however. Having struck up a friendship with Mohammad Gul Khan Mohmand, the leader of the Mohmand Pashtuns, one of the tribes fighting the Tajik insurgency, Baba soon found himself in the upper echelons of power as he followed Mohmand to northern Afghanistan.

Running as a surrogate father and son team—Mohmand never sired a son; Grandpa grew up without his father—they governed one of Afghanistan's five administrative regions through much of the 1930s. Mohmand bore the grandiose title of chief executive of the Northern Territories. Grandpa, with his less illustrious title of fourth director, was second in command. Their style of government was ruthless. Justice was swiftly delivered, if only to quash dissent and secure the government's hold on power. To many non-Pashtuns in the north, Mohmand, a self-styled Pashtun nationalist, came to embody the dictatorial rule of the government.

While Mohmand took quarters in the governor's mansion, Grandpa Baba acquired the residence of the former chief executive, an imposing, turn-of-the-century structure of more than two dozen rooms with arched doorways, guesthouses, servants' quarters, stables, and a two-acre pomegranate garden with a large pool surrounded by tall birch trees. Soon Grandpa's clan—his mother, younger sister, two brothers, five wives, and their children—moved in. My mother and her three dozen siblings and cousins grew up behind the sheltered walls of the compound, where they were attended by a retinue of servants, cooks, and maids. Theirs was the life of the ruling aristocracy.

Adee, Mother's slight, soft-spoken, octogenarian grandmother, was the family's matriarch. With a taste for long black robes and soft linen headdresses, she was a spiritual healer of sorts who attracted a large following from the city. Her son, my grandfather, ran the day-to-day affairs of the household, and while deeply pious, he allowed a liberal atmosphere to flourish within the compound. The adults prayed five times a day, but the children were never forced to join them. Growing up, they developed different degrees of piety. Some, like my mother, were rigidly observant (her own mother came from a clerical background); others, especially the boys, rarely prayed, meekly avoiding Grandpa Baba's stern gaze during the five daily calls to prayer.

For a man of his position and generation, Grandpa was remarkably liberal, which inevitably led to some interesting contradictions. He had a deep sense of justice and fairness and did not play favorites among his five wives. He was pious yet never forced his children to pray. Religion was a matter between them and their God. In social and cultural matters he was open-minded, yet he strictly enforced pardah, which assured that nonblood male friends and guests never saw the faces of his womenfolk. He allowed his daughters to attend school, first fully covered and then, when the government made the burka voluntary, with their faces (although not their heads) uncovered. The daughters, out of respect as much as fear, would always hide their short, Western-style skirts and stockings by changing into baggy white cotton pants and linen headdresses before entering Grandpa's room. Once, in Kabul, he was persuaded to venture into the banquet hall where one of his younger daughters was having her wedding reception. Horrified by the sight of so many bare legs, including those of his own daughters, he barged out, cursing them all to hell.

In 1961, when Mother was thirteen, the first girls' school opened in Mazar-I Sharif. This was a bold act, considering that it had been the opening of a girls' school in Kabul during the 1920s that led to King Amanullah's downfall. Rabiah-I Balkhi Lycee for Girls presented a major dilemma to Grandpa, who as a respected member of society had to consider the social implications of exposing his sheltered daughters to the outside world. However, he valued education and, after consulting his two younger brothers, decided that all the girls in the family would go to school. A tutor was hired, and after a year of studying, they took entrance exams and enrolled in different grades. Mother was placed in the fifth grade, but by all accounts she was an unenthusiastic student drawn more to knitting sweaters than solving math problems. So by the time she was in the ninth grade, when Father's family proposed, she was happy to take his hand.

Father was my mother's second cousin, and his journey to northern Afghanistan had charted an improbable course. Unlike Mother, he was born in Islamabad, where his path to become a qadi, an Islamic judge, seemed a clear one. His father was a senior government administrator, his mother the daughter of a prominent mullah from the powerful Safi tribe. Although Grandpa Agha himself had chosen public service over a career in religion, he took pride in his clerical pedigree and wanted his three sons to pursue a religious path. While Grandpa served in remote provincial outposts, the family stayed behind in Islamabad, where Father studied first at the family mosque, then later at the local primary school. Along the way he developed a voracious appetite for reading. Years later he recounted how he spent a long winter devouring the bulky Thousand and One Nights, and any other classics he could get his hands on, by the glow of a kerosene lamp.

After sixth grade Father was sent to Kabul to attend the Darul Ulum-I Hanafi, Afghanistan's top state-run madrassah, or religious seminary, and a stepping stone to entering the College of Islamic Law at Kabul University. It was distinctly modern in amenities and curriculum, offering classes in both secular and traditional religious subjects.

The madrassah was originally developed during the eleventh century, a full two centuries before its European counterpart, as an institution of religious learning that trained students in Islamic law and jurisprudence. While European colleges would evolve into secular institutions of higher learning, the madrassah retained its religious mission. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the madrassah's strictly religious curriculum and conservative intellectual outlook were called into question by a growing number of Islamic reformists. Recognizing the central role the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment played in the West's march to progress and prosperity, these modernist thinkers argued that only by embracing European sciences could the Islamic world hope to regain its ancient glory. The ensuing decades-long clash between the conservative religious establishment and the reformists produced little change in the madrassah curriculum, but it did lead Westernized governments such as Turkey and Persia to open modern secular schools.

In Afghanistan this clash led to the establishment of the country's first secular public high schools in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Yet young King Amanullah's radical efforts to reshape Afghanistan in the image of Kemal Atatürk's Turkey backfired. Less than ten years into his reign, an alliance of conservative mullahs and southern tribesmen forced him into exile in 1929. Amanullah's successor, Nadir Khan, a reform-minded, pragmatic prince and former army general, recognized the limitations of his conservative society. While reopening the public schools, his government established new madrassahs where modern sciences were taught alongside traditional religious sciences, much like the madrassah my father attended.

Father's education was innovative, especially in its teaching of contemporary spoken Arabic. Young, sophisticated, and friendly Iraqi and Egyptian teachers introduced colloquial Arabic into a curriculum that had emphasized classical Arabic for hundreds of years. Classical Arabic grammar had developed on the basis of the Koran and pre-Islamic bedouin poetry, and its usefulness was limited to unraveling the messages of the Koran and the Hadith, or the sayings of Muhammad. Students learned to say, "Potipher's wife tore Joseph's shirt from behind," but could not share their enthusiasm for their mother's eggplant dish. The Arabic that Father learned in madrassah was, by contrast, a living, spoken language.

As much as Father loved to read, he was drawn even more to the sciences: the thrill generated by solving algebraic problems; the allure of the intricacies of human anatomy; the awe inspired by invisible atoms. This would inevitably lead to complications. While in the ninth grade, Father committed one of the most sacrilegious acts imaginable in a madrassah. Following instructions in his chemistry textbook, he distilled alcohol using simple household pots and pans. The successful experiment, which he secretly shared with more than a few classmates, deepened his passion for science and led him to drift away from the madrassah altogether. Kabul at the time was a charming, well-to-do city with tree-lined boulevards, tranquil neighborhoods, and thriving restaurants and teahouses frequented by the country's growing, largely Western educated, secular elite.

In Kabul, Father spent his weekends and short holiday breaks from school at the home of his uncle, who was the chief justice of the supreme court and a close friend of the madrassah's president. Uncle Insaf exhorted Father to excel in his religious studies, but Father was more interested in tutoring the justice's young, studious son in physics. It was an ideal arrangement, as Father didn't particularly fit in with Kabul's clean-shaven men who wore Western-style clothes and spoke with the refined accent of educated elites. He was torn between a desire to embrace Kabul's liberal culture and an awareness that he was forbidden by his father to do so. Feeling alienated, he would return to his dorm room every night and lie in bed, quietly imitating the Kabul accent he badly wanted to pick up, and painfully conscious he'd have to live with his facial hair for the rest of his life.

Then opportunity knocked: a science school recently founded by the University of Wyoming in Kabul was taking applications. Father took the placement test and scored ninety-nine out of a hundred points. He dropped out of the madrassah, despite his father's refusal to give his blessing, and enrolled at the American Technical School. There he spent the four happiest years of his life. He shaved off his beard, stopped praying, quickly learned English, and immersed himself in mechanical engineering. Although his friends playfully called him maulana, which means "supermullah," the title of a distinguished man of religious learning, he socialized at teahouses and befriended worldly university students.

After graduation he took a job as an engineer with the state-run Oil and Gas Exploration Company, spending the next several years working the fields near Sheberghan before winning a scholarship to study petroleum engineering in Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan.

When Father returned to Afghanistan in 1966, he was thirty-three, well past the marriage age. It was time for him to settle down. At the urging of his parents, he agreed to an arranged marriage to his first cousin's daughter. Theirs was a grand wedding, paid for by Father's family. Payment for the ceremony was the only cost Grandpa Baba exacted. To him the custom of paying a bride price, which was common in northern Afghanistan, was an abomination; it was also un-Islamic. He expected, though, that the would-be groom would honor his family, so instead of pledging a large amount of cash and prime real estate, Father's family threw a weeklong party, complete with separate bands of male and female musicians—for male and female guests—to which hundreds of friends and relatives were invited. Father and Mother then moved to Sheberghan, bringing along several trunks and a young Uzbek servant named Girau.

In Sheberghan, they lived on the oil and gas company's campus, a sprawling development of offices and residential neighborhoods complete with green, manicured lawns, running water, electricity, and central heating—amenities unheard of in most of Afghanistan.

In many respects, however, Sheberghan was like any other small provincial capital: quiet, dusty, low-key, timeless. This was where Afghanistan's national ring road, built by the Americans and the Soviets in the 1950s and 1960s, ended before branching off west and north to the Amu Darya River. The main street was lined by handsome one- and two-story concrete homes, but for the most part Sheberghan consisted of flat-topped and domed mud huts and windy dirt roads that produced dust storms in the summer and turned into mud in the winter.

In the main town square a rusty public address system, hanging from a poplar tree overlooking a posse of parked buggies, alternated between broadcasting scratchy Radio Afghanistan news segments and municipal announcements. For those not lucky enough to catch the broadcast, a jaarchee, or professional town crier, went from neighborhood to neighborhood, shouting important and often not very important announcements at the top of his lungs.

While not as big or significant as it had been two thousand years ago, Sheberghan retained something of its Silk Road character as a center of vibrant commerce. A large grain bazaar and a partly roofed produce market carried freshly picked vegetables, apples, pears, apricots, peaches, and mounds of large Uzbek melons; a meat market of about two dozen butcher shops slaughtered animals on the premises; and two sprawling livestock and firewood and fuel markets twice a week, on market days, crawled with peasants from nearby villages, peddling everything from sheep, goats, and camels to cow patties and dried sheep dung.

Like much of northern Afghanistan, Sheberghan had four regular seasons, with brutally cold winters and searing summers and two mild seasons in between. With each season came distinct colors, sounds, and smells. Spring, which classical Persian poets compare to the Day of Resurrection, was the most colorful, complete with black barn swallows and gray sparrows, red tulips and yellow daisies, blossoming Judas trees and pink, red, and white roses—a burst of vitality that followed the gray cold of winter. Walking through town in April or May felt like walking through a medieval Persian perfume market. The scent was more pungent indoors, where most everyone kept rosebushes. Years later it occurred to me that the roses, exquisite as they were, might have served a more practical function besides providing aesthetic pleasure. Strategically planted near outhouses, they were intended to mask the odor of excrement that would become overpowering with the onset of warm weather.

On the modern campus of the oil and gas company, we did not have to worry much about foul odors. Nor did we notice the noise of the bazaar. A jaarchee occasionally passed through the neighborhood, and less frequently a peddler of fish or a man on a tricycle bartering trinkets in exchange for recyclable tin and worn-out plastic sandals. "Koonah bah now. Koonah bah now," he would shout. "Used for new. Used for new." By sundown the neighborhood became silent but for the chirping of frogs and the bark of a stray dog or two, until the sun reappeared in tandem with the cock crow and call to prayer. This was a time and place where most people didn't own watches but even a blind person could tell the hour of the day by the sounds alone.

Almost everyone in our neighborhood was an engineer or manager or accountant for the exploration company. Many were products of Kabul University, at the time Afghanistan's only university, children of privilege with professional degrees who ended up working for an oil company with an expanding bureaucracy but little in the way of actual petroleum reserves to justify its continued growth. It was the common fate of most college graduates. In the absence of an established private sector, they became government bureaucrats, "paper pushers" my father called them, himself included, of course.

The paper pushers who made up Afghanistan's nascent middle class were a far cry from the men in my family who had spent most of their lives in the service of God, whether in the mosque or on the battlefield. "Middle class" was a Western concept used to refer to the tiny number of high school and university educated people working for the government. Naturally, wherever they went, members of this new "class" brought with them the cosmopolitan mores they'd acquired in Kabul and little of their village ways. The true mark of a middle-class lifestyle was Western-style clothing, whose purchase the government encouraged by giving college students an annual "suit" allowance. Not surprisingly, many felt awkward, even embarrassed, in Western clothes. To avoid public embarrassment, some would wear traditional baggy pants and turbans on their way to school and then change into trousers and don fedoras before entering the grounds. By the 1970s, though, city residents dressed mostly in Western clothes in public—in schools, government offices, even in courtrooms.

The clash between village and city showed in other ways. Among my father's relatives and peers, for example, polygamy was unheard of. In fact, they found it passé, something their fathers did. But while some men had started marrying outside of the family (one even married a Ukrainian woman at university in Kiev), most of my relatives, like my father, still preferred first or second cousins, the way their fathers had done.

Considering its size, Sheberghan offered plenty of diversions. It had a soccer stadium, a couple of volleyball courts, and a movie theater that showed Bollywood hits and an occasional Iranian flick or American western. Whether Bollywood or Western, the color posters of the mostly black-and-white movies, both current and upcoming, advertised their ishq and jang and khandan content—love and war and song—the only things viewers cared about. What the posters didn't warn viewers, however, was that the films contained plenty of images of Hindu temples and worshippers offering sacrifices to their idols. To register their wounded feelings, the viewers—and they weren't the fanatical, idol-breaking types—would spit between their feet on the floor of the smoke-filled movie theater upon the appearance of the first image of a Hindu god and then curse aloud. Initially I didn't know what it was all about and only later, when I realized something about idols was wrong, did I start joining the adults in spitting bouts during our occasional visits to the movies.

On foot, you could run up and down Sheberghan and visit its every nook and cranny in less than an hour. By car, you could cover the whole ground in less than ten minutes. The movie theater was a ten-minute walk from our house, the soccer stadium five minutes farther. But I didn't have to venture even that far in search of entertainment; the boys played plenty of games right outside our house. While my sisters played hopscotch with pieces of gravel, I kept busy shooting marbles, walnuts, and the balls of sheep ankles. We also played a form of baseball called toop dandah, and another called chilik dandah, with a bat and a six-inch-long stick with sharpened ends. In both games the winner would use his points to make the loser run a certain distance and chant zoooooooooooooooo without catching his breath.

On Fridays, Hasan, our live-in servant, would treat me to a special adventure for a young boy—a local dogfight. Hasan had a dark face, sun-baked and scarred by smallpox. Kind-hearted and jovial, he'd ended up in our house by accident. The original servant given by Grandpa Baba was Hasan's older cousin, Girau, but he could not bear Mother's harsh treatment and ran away after less than a year, prompting Grandpa Baba to send Hasan as a replacement.

While Hasan endured Mother better than his cousin, a visit from Grandpa Baba was his opportunity to voice complaint. Hasan knew that Grandpa treated servants fairly. Grandpa summoned Mother.

"Is it true that you curse Hasan all the time?" Grandpa inquired.

Taken aback by her servant's boldness, Mother looked at Hasan and said, "Damn your father, when did I ever curse you?"

The problem didn't go away, and I came to sympathize with Hasan. He lived in the servant's room by the front door. It was a small, spartan room, furnished with a simple rug, a pallet, and a couple of pillows that Hasan would wrap into a bundle and place in the corner of the room after getting up each morning. He also owned an old tambourine that he was trying to teach himself to play.

My ventures to the dogfight with Hasan were the highlight of my week. They were staged on a bare piece of land outside town. A crowd of a hundred or so men—mostly traditionally dressed, illiterate Uzbek peasants from nearby villages and a few boys my age—would gather around a circle. Hasan seemed at home here, greeting strangers and some acquaintances in Uzbek, a language I hadn't yet learned. But with their strong accents, even those who spoke Farsi were hardly comprehensible to me. Profanity flowed from their mouths as readily as drool from the dogs' mouths. This was not the kind of event Father and his friends would attend.

As we waited for the fight to begin, vendors walked around the circle of spectators selling chewing gum, cigarettes, and cookies. Hasan would always buy me a treat. Finally, one by one, the dogs and their owners would walk into the ring. The dogs were large and vicious, not the type that strayed on the streets of Sheberghan, but carefully groomed and specially trained mixed-breed hounds and shepherds. Thrilled and frightened, I'd grab Hasan's arm with both hands, swaying back and forth with the crowd as the dogs moved around. They would go after each other like prizefighters in a ring, trying to pin each other down. Sometimes, but not always, blood would ooze out.