Circle Around the Sun

by M. D. Johnson

  In 1915, dar es Islam, ‘The Promise of the Arab Realm’, was given to prominent Arab families, but by the following year a secret agreement known as the “spheres of influence” was reached between Great Britain and France, with the approval of Russia. Its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France called for the reconstruction of the Turkish held regions of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. These areas would in turn be administered by the French and British governments. The division gave the Britain zones of influence over Transjordan and Iraq, while France held control over Syria and Lebanon.

  On November 2nd, 1917, The Balfour Declaration, perhaps the least known yet most insidious document ever written, was endorsed as world policy. Named after Arthur James Balfour (Earl of Balfour) the Foreign Secretary to the Conservative Government of David Lloyd George, this document gave mandate to the British Government. Balfour, himself a former Prime Minister, authored the document which promised European Jews a Zionist home, and by doing so fanned flames of social and political unrest which would burn for generations.

  The Declaration stated in part;

  “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

  and went on:

  “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the task of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of those countries. Zionism, right or wrong, good or bad is rooted in age old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profound impact than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit the ancient land.”

  The Arabs believed that by rendering their support to France, Germany and Russia in World War I, they were assured independence. Conversely, the Jews already in Palestine raised troops to fight on the side of the British, believing also that this put them one step closer to self-determination as a nation.

  The British Government had, by the end of the ‘Great War’ created a series of Arab countries, intentionally pitting warring tribes and families against each other. Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt were the result. In 1927 Britain received the approval of The League of Nations to create a protectorate of Transjordan. This mandate gave Britain control of Palestine and ensconced them firmly in the center of Middle Eastern affairs, while resentment festered on all sides.

  Ten years later, in 1937 the British proposed a partitioning of Palestine, as did the United Nations in 1947. In 1948 the State of Israel waged a war of terrorism (or freedom fighting, depending on which side one supported) against British occupation, declared independence and was formally recognized on May 15th , 1948 by United Nations. The Arabs attacked the new nation immediately, thus beginning an animosity between two peoples which has continued to the present day.

  Historically, the actual location of the Hebraic ancestral homeland is not mentioned in sacred Hebrew texts or the Christian Bible, nor is it mentioned in the Islamic Qu’ran. It has been the view of many Middle Eastern political scholars that the current site of the State of Israel is nothing more than a creation of the present day inhabitants who are of European descent.

  And so it was within the confines of this troubled social climate, in a place of spectacular beauty called the Garden City, an elegant residential quarter built in the early 1880s not far from the historic River Nile, that Ibrahim Zaidane Desai was born. His parents, Myriam and Mohammed were Moroccan Berbers. Family legend, however, told of the first Desai ancestor hailing from the region of Raischur, thousands of miles away in India, where he was allegedly ousted in a tribal feud. He traveled throughout Asia and finally as an old man settled in North Africa, where he bartered a young Berber girl from her family. Desai stayed with the Berbers, married into their important families and his descendants became an integral part of their community. Mohammed Desai knew only the legend of his Indian forbearer. For generations his blood was steeped in the proud and fierce people from the remote village of Anmeter in the high Atlas Mountains and it was the same genetic makeup that spurred his Desai ancestry which ultimately led Mohammed Desai to Egypt. He first arrived as a successful trader, and later settled in Cairo, eventually becoming a wealthy dealer of antiquities. Ibrahim, his oldest child and only son, in keeping with the family tradition, spoke Berber and Arabic. He later learned English and was sent away to complete his education in the Victoria College in Alexandria. The college, founded in 1902, was the center of elitist British academia and Ibrahim would socialize with the sons of Saudi royalty and diplomats. Mastering French and German while also perfecting his English and his manners, it was here he would later meet John Davenport, son of a British Army Colonel Byron Davenport, second son of Lord Hoylake, and John’s sister Elizabeth Anne, who attended Alexandria’s English School for Girls.

  Less than a decade later and after much familial conflict, Ibrahim and Elizabeth Anne, his English bride, made two homes within two different cultures and successfully raised their daughter of dual heritage to be completely at ease within both.

  The Davenports, however, being landed gentry from Cheshire, were privately horrified at the Arabic blood now infiltrating their family by way of Ibrahim. They were, nonetheless content to repair their ancestral home at his expense. And so it was within the clash of two cultures that the woman named Emily Byron Desai to her English relatives, but known as Amina Desai to her extended Middle Eastern family was born.

  Emily’s language skills were much sought after in adulthood, but it was the extensive knowledge of both Middle Eastern and European antiquities that her heritage afforded her which led her to summer employment at the firm of Heinrich Scholl, GmbH, a flourishing antique showroom in the ancient German university town of Heidelberg. The position allowed her to earn a living while continuing her studies. For many years thereafter she would wonder how different her life would have been had she had excelled in mathematics or psychology instead.

  It was here during 1968, that glorious summer filled with long walks around the ancient Heidelberg Schloss, a castle some six hundred years old and the old bridge across the River Neckar where she found herself strongly attracted to a tall, handsome fellow student and co-worker from Afghanistan named Ghulam Ansari.

  Ansari and his closest friend Mustafa Jalil attended Heidelberg University, each studying German Culture and Politics. Both planned eventual diplomatic careers and hoped for a long-term German assignment. Ghulam Ansari’s father was a high-ranking diplomat who had several successful European tours of duty. It was a foregone conclusion that Ghulam would exceed his father’s expectations. It was obvious to all that the young man had looks, charm and money. More obvious, however, he was also shrewd and highly intelligent. His greatest gift, friends would remember years later, was his ability to always look innocent.

  The three young people first met shortly after each responded to an intriguing English language advertisement in the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung for students looking for “fun employment” presenting antiques and reproductions to European and American buyers. Art students or students of European antiquities were most welcome to apply. Emily had been an instant summer hire, her knowledge of art history, the several languages she spoke, along with her upper-class albeit Northern, British accent sealed the deal.

  Ghulam’s exotic looks were no disadvantage when he interviewed. He was well over six feet tall with glossy black curls reaching to the nape of his neck, his olive skin tanned to a golden brown in the almost Mediterranean temperature that summer. He had a taut muscular body with broad shoulders. When Ghulam smiled his face lit up and his long hooked nose wrinkled, one perfect eyebrow raised higher than the other always gave him a questioning expression. Yet he always managed to retain a natural reserve that bordered almost on shyness. He was sentimental in nature, kind hearted, and only when he spoke of Afghanistan did his façade crumble.

  Ghulam missed his mountainous homeland and it continually pained him to talk of the pl
ace he always referred to as Aryana. The Ansari family was wealthy. They were reputed to be tribal descendants of the celebrated llth Century poet Khawaja Abdullah Ansari. Ghulam’s father, Masud Ismael Ansari was a diplomat, well-known and respected in his own right. The young man’s mother Humera was a former university professor. While Ghulam was not yet betrothed, he realized fully that his family expected him to marry him a ‘maiden’ of their choice. His parent’s marriage had been arranged and well brokered. It was highly successful as was generally the case within those born to money and power in Afghanistan. To his parent’s dismay, his love for Emily Byron Desai, once revealed had slightly lessened their social standing in both in Kabul and their ancestral home in Herat near the castle called Pai Hesar.

  The family believed wholeheartedly in survival, and a good marriage was a complete necessity. Spousal selection was too difficult and complex a decision to reach alone in another country. One could, within limits, cut ones teeth on foreign girls, but one did not marry outside the clan, nor in many cases even outside of the region. Marriage was a decision made by a family with the only best interest of one’s child in mind. Such decisions could not be taken lightly as marriage was a commitment to family and family was the center of life. While they rejoiced in Emily’s Arabic blood, they were utterly horrified at their son’s living arrangement. United in their belief that sending him to be educated outside of Afghanistan had been a bad decision, they still could not embarrass themselves or their son by forcing him home. No doubt in time he would see the error of his ways. Their own exposure to Western Europe through Ansari the elder’s various diplomatic appointments had been pleasant and uneventful, in some respects comparable to a nine year holiday with pay. They were not exactly inexperienced in the ways of the western world but living together without formal agreement could, they knew, only lead to tragedy, of this they were sure. Their knowledge of the girl’s English side was never taken into consideration. Emily was never, even through the passage of time and changes in life, ever accepted by the Ansari family. As befits their culture, she was always treated fairly and hospitably, but with a tolerance afforded outsiders who were Muslim but not Afghani. They would, however, in later years learn to love their only grandson.

  Ghulam’s closest friend and second skin, Mustafa Jalil was short, squat and of Afghan-Mongol heritage. He wore his straight hair bluntly cut across his forehead covering his eyebrows. His eyes were dark slits, his nose small and inelegant, and his full lips covered well spaced, white spatulate teeth. Mustafa smiled infrequently, his expression was one of continual defiance. Banging his fists on tables to make his point, he spoke German with a thick, guttural Heidelberg accent and dreamed of revolution and an all Muslim community, an Ummah with total submission to Allah and the adherence to the path of Islam. A path, Mustafa prayed, which would eventually stretch across Central Asia. As it had in the past, so it would be in the future, Inshallah, God Willing!

  Mustafa was always seen in faded blue jeans baggy and a cut t-shirt, topped always by an embroidered sheep-skin suede coat, Afghan in origin, with exquisite hand stitched needlework in beautiful colors all completely hemmed in fur. This was both his summer and winter uniform. It never varied. He was Hazaras, a remnant of the Mongol war lords who had invaded ancient Afghanistan with Genghis Khan in 1219 and intermarried with the local tribeswoman that they won in conquest. Despite his rough appearance, Mustafa was extremely intelligent. He spoke several of Afghanistan’s native dialects and was passably fluent English and French. His passions were chess, war strategy and military history, not only of his country but of Western Europe as well. His only vice was the daily consumption of fine blond hashish which helped him focus on his only obsession, which was the way the ancient civilization of Afghanistan, once known as the cradle of civilization, had been raped and bastardized by all who conquered her. There were no permanent women in his life. Occasionally he picked up a girl to sate his urges, but he always forgot them quickly, moving on to more serious or practical matters.

  Mustafa liked to travel on weekends. He traveled light, with a backpack, nothing more. Driving his VW Beetle, he would visit other university campuses and meet with like-minded central Asian students. It was on such a visit at a student gathering that he became acquainted with an older woman, who was newly separated from her husband, a famous publisher and leftist columnist named Klaus Reiner Roehl.

  The woman, who had returned to the University of Bonn campus, was a recent recruit of the Sozialisticher Deutscher Student Bund, the Socialists Student Union (SDS), not to be confused with the tamer American organization bearing the same initials. Mentored by the organization’s leader, “Red” Rudi Dutschke, she was an aggressive debater and a brilliant orator. Her ex-husband’s magazine, ‘Konkret’, published the odd combination of bare breasts and backsides combined with insignificant hippie poetry extolling the left wing Volksreis or Peoples War on the Establishment. It garnered a cult-like readership among German speaking students throughout Europe. Slender, very attractive, redheaded with steel-rimmed round John Lennon glasses and a myopic stare, she was becoming the free woman’s voice of the anti-authoritarian student movement. Her name was Ulrike Meinhof, and she was the undisputed queen of Euro-radical chic.

  When they met, Mustafa was deeply enmeshed in his tribal culture, having grown up in the western corner of Afghanistan at the crossroads of the ancient silk routes. The area was then known as Registan, a flat, stark desert, but at the center of this barren wasteland was the oasis town of Herat. Herat was the heart, Mustafa Jalil believed, of Afghan culture. It teemed with poets, artists, and philosophers. Herat as he remembered had splendid gardens filled with lilies and roses. Herat was paradise, a gift from Allah to the world, containing in one place all the treasures of the earth. Herat was worth fighting for!

  Mustafa had seen firsthand the impact of both Russia and Britain upon his country. He knew that the great game they played for control began far back in the nineteenth century. Moreover, as a scholar of military history he understood their motives. Purely and simply, Afghanistan was exploited by all who had invaded her, such was the way of things.

  But Mustafa’s dislike of all things western did not include this strange German woman, with whom he freely conversed well unto the dawn. Ulrike Meinhof understood his need to rid his country of outsiders. Her views were very similar. She had endured the aftermath of World War II and the shame of living under the cloak of the fascism that had wrapped around their parents, ultimately robbing the entire generation that followed of their history. They were the children who paid a high price for the failure of the Thousand Year Reich. This was a woman who could also look around and see that her beloved Germany, while receiving restoration from the victors of the Second World War was also on the road to Americanization. Conversely, Americans were absorbing German culture. The invasion of American and British GIs left a trail of fatherless children and false promises in its wake. Germany was rebuilt by the American dollar, but at what cost to the Fatherland’s youth? “We Germans are proud,” she had said. “The New Left must flourish and the SDS will lead the way.”

  Ulrike Meinhof saw herself as a bridge between anarchy and communism. Like Mustafa she read the works of Marighella, Fanon, Guevara, Marx and Lenin. She was vehemently anti-American and decidedly opposed to the Vietnam War. She was, she told him, making plans to recruit on every campus in the country. They needed each other. Not just to distribute leaflets on street corners. This was war! Ulrike told him that she, along with other supporters would be in Heidelberg the following week. She had made contact with several Middle Eastern students who also wished to help the cause. Together they would rid Germany of the sheiss Armee, and then increase student activism in on behalf of Palestine, where already many students believed that country’s political unrest was a powder keg ready to explode.

  “The Palestinians are waging a war against those pieces of shit who back Israel,” Meinhof raged, “and we have a duty to help them.” As she l
ater confided, “We have a plan. There is, my friend, a political white paper for you to consider, written by a colleague. It is called ‘Repression Tolerance’, in which he says, ‘Suppressed overpowered minorities have the natural right to employ extra illegal means.’ In short, our own reign of terror. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

  Meinhof went on to suggest that they could meet in Heidelberg. She was going to speak to some supporters in a house on the Mittemaierstrasse. Mustafa, she insisted, should come. In fact, she suggested perhaps he might bring some other, equally interested people with him. “Kindred spirits” she had said. He immediately thought of Ghulam. Ghulam wasn’t a leftist, but they did share the passion for freeing Afghanistan from all outside influence. Of course, he observed, Ghulam could do nothing without the English girl.

  Very little could surpass Mustafa’s dislike for Emily, with her detestable hazel eyes and olive skin. She was too blatant, like most Europeans. He despised her. Those hideous thick blonde curls! He liked to tease her, nicknaming her Harpo after the curly-haired Marx Brother he would watch on German television. That’s all they were fit for, Americans, he mused. Comedy! She would, he knew, ultimately destroy his friendship with Ghulam and like all of her kind would bastardize their culture. She could not, despite her Arabic blood, ever be part of their cause. He planned to free his land and reinstate a pure culture throughout Central Asia, meeting his brothers under God throughout the Middle East and beyond. A Muslim land without boundaries! A cause to which he was committed for life. But this woman was a bad influence. She spoke too freely, too often and too loudly. She was Euro-trash, a hybrid. Her morals and her values were diametrically opposed to his, but logically, he thought, she could be useful. She was multi-lingual and she was in love with his closest friend. Best of all, she had money and connections.