A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  “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 a
bject 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.