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.
CHAPTER 12
ISLAM 3.0
After our Hajj 1432, as Shahinaz and I hugged tearfully, we knew the immensity of the dangers we had overcome. Even our hugging at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz airport was forbidden! By then we couldn’t have cared less about the mutaween. Thousands of departing pilgrims were armed with gallons of Zamzam water and King Abdullah waved bye-bye from banners. It was as if the Saudis were eager to get rid of us.
“And who wouldn’t?” texted Adham with his familiar sarcasm. “Now we have to go and clean the mess you all made in Mecca. Yuck!” This journey had changed me forever in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years.
I texted Adham back, this time seriously, “Muslims leave Mecca, but Mecca never leaves them.”
“I hope Hajj teaches you no more melodrama ;-),” he replied.
Young Wahhabis passed out flashy pink booklets of propaganda with titles like The Life, Teachings, and Influence of Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab. Did they know putting a pink tint on the Kaaba might not be a good idea? Such books printed in all the languages Muslims speak exist in an infinite number of mosques worldwide. This was Saudi da’wa in action. They export Wahhabi Islam without raising a single saber.
During my thirteen-hour flight, I fully caught up with the Kardashians. It seemed that Kim was trying desperately hard to make another baby. Khloe and Lamar were headed to splitsville, Scott was back in rehab, and Saint was merely a glimmer in Kanye’s eye.
My Pakistani cab driver cruised up the West Side Highway toward Harlem. A recording of the Quran droned from his stereo. A decorative disc dangled from his rearview mirror. I leaned forward for a closer look. Etched in its surface was the Kaaba. The stereo called out, “Pilgrimage thereto is a duty men owe to Allah, those who can afford the journey; but if any deny faith, Allah stands not in need of any of His creatures.”
We passed a halal food cart on Sixth Avenue. It felt reassuring. I was getting home. Manhattan’s “halal” food carts are now ubiquitous. I have always talked to their mostly Arab workers and wondered if their purveyors know that the “music” they play from their carts is nothing but Quranic recitations and that halal is just the Muslim equivalent of kosher.
The reciter was intoning from the third Surah of the Quran (Al Imran, or “The House of Imran”) and its 97th verse. The qari (a Quranic reciter who follows the rules of recitation called tajwid) had a particularly beautiful voice.
I couldn’t believe the serendipity. “I’ve just returned from my Hajj,” I told my cab driver.
He turned around. “No way! I want to go so badly. I have been saving my whole life.” I could hear the deep yearning in his voice. The name displayed on his ID tag was Muhammad Pervez.
“Mashallah!” he said, using an exclamation used by Muslims upon hearing good news. “What was it like?” I told him I shared his name.
“Oh, it was wonderful. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, so to speak.”
He laughed. I rhapsodized at length. I deliberately omitted all of the garbage, the pickpocketing, the inequality—I accentuated the positive, just as my elders returning from Hajj used to do. The darker sides of the Saudi-controlled pilgrimage couldn’t be told.
“How much did it cost you?” he asked.
“For me and a friend—we paid around $12,000, but that includes everything.”
“Oh,” he said. There were practically tears in his eyes. “I could never afford it. Surely there are cheaper ways?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “The Hajj is meant for all.”
“Listen, this is not an accident that I am in your cab and we share the same name. You are being called by Allah,” I added.
“I always keep it in my heart,” he said, guardedly revealing a life-long quest.
“Where do you pray?” I asked Pervez as he unloaded my bags.
“96th Street Mosque,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll see you there one day. I try and go every Friday, and maybe after Hajj now there will be new rigor and discipline.”
“Inshallah.”
I started walking toward the front door of my building when I turned back. “What day and year is it? I’ve been living in Mecca time, where it’s 1432.”
He laughed and told me. As tip, I gave him $40, all the cash I had. It was an action of zakat, I told myself.
When I reached my apartment, Keith and I embraced tearfully. Then we lay down and just spooned for hours silently. I wasn’t able to describe my experience to
him, and he didn’t push me to. We’d been together for long enough to reach the stage of nonverbal communication taking precedence over the empty chatter new couples feel compelled to engage in. It was enough simply to be in each other’s arms.
I had returned just in time for Thanksgiving. Keith cooked all day to prepare an elaborate feast. I understand Thanksgiving’s violent roots, but it is such a uniquely American, nonsectarian celebration of pluralism. All Muslim and most Hindu festivals I’d experienced growing up were religious. But the turkey gets even avowed atheists like Keith to reflect on their lives and their gratitude in a way that you don’t normally see outside of a mosque, church, or synagogue.
Our Thanksgiving table included a gay Hindu man, a transgender man from Berlin, his French girlfriend, and a black woman—Harlem-born and bred. We went around the table and gave thanks.
My Harlem friend had a terrific sense of humor. “Today I am grateful for the silent majority that kept my favorite Kenyan-born, socialist Muslim in office!” She offered me a glass of wine.
“I don’t drink anymore,” I said.
“Oh, that’s what Saudi Arabia does to people, does it?” she joked. “What else did you change?”
A Sinner in Mecca Page 28