The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  ‘Their familiarity with me was difficult for him because of my long association with them. They didn’t know Abdul Rahim very well. I had lived at Ngruki. Abdul Rahim came to meet them because I introduced them. He never lived there.’ Rabiah would later dismiss reports that her husband and his twin brother were significant figures in the Islamist hierarchy: ‘Abdul Rahim and Abdul Rahman were wannabes. They were more important to themselves than to anyone else.’

  While Ba’asyir and Sungkar were staying with them in Footscray, Rabiah decided to end her marriage to Abdul Rahim. From her perspective it was a pragmatic decision, in keeping with her view of marriage as an essentially practical arrangement.

  ‘An Islamic marriage is a contract between two consenting adults, and the function of the man and woman are very different’, she says. ‘If you marry someone who doesn’t demonstrate the ability to lead and instil confidence and bring about a feeling of contentment, then you cannot fulfil your duties as a wife.’

  Rabiah is quick to add that her utilitarian view of marriage does not rule out romantic love, which ideally will develop after marriage if the couple is well matched. But the contractual obligations must be met, and as far as she was concerned Abdul Rahim had demonstrably welched on his end of the bargain by failing to provide and care for her and the children, which meant she could not honour her own obligations as a Muslim spouse. In her meticulous study of the hadith Rabiah had made it her business to know exactly what her rights were under Islamic law and she now insisted on her right to a divorce.

  She raised the issue with Abdullah Sungkar, whose unsentimental approach had facilitated the end of her previous marriage to Pujo Busono six years before. Once again Rabiah persuaded Sungkar that it was within her rights under Islam to demand a divorce. ‘I told him I didn’t want to continue the marriage. He looked at all the evidence and thought it was better for both of us (to separate).’ Sungkar took the opportunity also to terminate the ill-conceived marriage contract between Rabiah’s daughter, Devi, and her brother-in-law, Abdul Rahman Ayub. They had never lived together as man and wife. Since the signing of the marriage contract Devi had been in Australia with her family while Abdul Rahman was doing military training in Pakistan. Sungkar had opposed their union from the outset and persuaded Abdul Rahman to agree to a dissolution.

  When Sungkar and Ba’asyir left to return to Malaysia, Abdul Rahim moved out of their marital home in Footscray. But within days he was back, insisting the marriage was not over because he had not actually agreed to a divorce. His attempts to effect a reconciliation ended dramatically not long afterwards, when he was again woken from an afternoon sleep by the children, lost his temper, and raised his hand to strike his stepdaughter Devi. For all their differences, Rabiah insists Abdul Rahim was not normally a violent man. ‘He used to get terrible headaches, no amount of medication would help. It was just circumstances, he was physically not well. When he got these headaches he didn’t know what he was doing.’ When Rabiah stepped between them to stop him hitting Devi, he struck her instead. The children started screaming and Devi rang the police.

  ‘I arrived just in time to see the police roughly grabbing Abdul Rahim and dragging him out of the house’, recalls Nadia Aboufadil. She describes a rather comical scene, as ‘this tiny shrimpy little Indonesian guy’ was manhandled by two burly constables. In those days ‘domestic’ disputes were frequently ignored by the authorities, but the Footscray police had no sympathy for Abdul Rahim, given his previous history. ‘You might be able to do that in your religion, mate, but you’re in Australia now. If you don’t leave, we’ll have to remove the children’, they told him. ‘The next day the department of child welfare came and told me that if he moved back into the house they would take the children’, Rabiah recounts.

  Finally, Abdul Rahim agreed to a divorce. Rabiah says she still harbours regrets over the failure of their five-year marriage. ‘Anybody who’s been divorced knows the loss and the regret and it’s something that no person, man or woman, could do easily.’ Despite its contractual formality, marriage in Islam is considered a sacred duty, which constitutes half a Muslims’s deen (religion), as decreed by the Prophet.

  ‘When I look back, I don’t think I ever married for the right reasons’, Rabiah reflects. ‘When I married it was always for a reason other than that. And getting married for any other reason—visas, or monetary reasons, or convenience—is not the correct intention. I got married or accepted proposals because I thought it would solve a particular problem I had, not because it was pleasing to Allah. It was always a way out of something. And if you marry with those intentions, how could you have the patience and tolerance and unselfishness that’s needed to live with someone else as a partner?’

  Ultimately though, she maintains it was out of her hands: ‘Why did I get married and divorced so many times? Because that’s what Allah wrote for me. And wisdom and good came out of all those marriages.’

  Their divorce was amicable. Rabiah and the children moved out of the dingy house in Footscray and into a spacious new housing commission home at Sunshine in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Abdul Rahim stayed in Footscray and had the children on weekends. Not long after this, Rabiah sent 15-year-old Devi off to Malaysia to attend Ba’asyir and Sungkar’s new Islamic boarding school in Johore.

  Rabiah was now comfortably ensconced in a brand-new, solid brick, four-bedroom home in Australian suburbia—but it was the last place she wanted to be. It was 1990 and the global jihad beckoned. In Afghanistan, the mujahidin had finally defeated the Soviet Union and formed their own Afghan Interim Government, which was preparing to take power as soon as the despised President Najibullah, installed by the departing Soviets, could be defeated. After ten years of war, Afghanistan was in tatters, with millions of its people displaced into sprawling refugee camps across the border in neighbouring Pakistan.

  The defeat of the mighty Soviet Union had inspired jubilation across the Muslim world. ‘The myth of the superpower was destroyed’, in the memorable words of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, an emerging icon of the Islamist struggle. A new wave of Muslim volunteers was converging from around the world, to join the jihad, help out in the relief effort, and be part of the new Islamic state of Afghanistan.

  Among those heading for the sub-continent were two friends of Rabiah’s: an Aboriginal convert named Aisha, and her husband, a Syrian-born religious teacher, Hassan. They had moved to Peshawar in north-west Pakistan where Hassan planned to start a new school. In the meantime he had made a standing offer to members of the Muslim community in Australia to take their sons back with him to study in Islamic madrassas (religious schools) in Lahore. During a visit from Peshawar, Hassan put a proposition to Rabiah.

  ‘Remember how your boy Mohammed always wanted to go to Afghanistan? Well, I’m going to open a school in Peshawar, and if you want Mohammed can come with me and go to school with my kids.’

  Thirteen-year-old Mohammed leapt at the adventure—anything to get out of regular school—and Rabiah accepted.

  ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, sister?’ Hassan asked her.

  ‘Yes. Say a duah (prayer) that Allah will give me a chance to go there too.’

  Hassan rang back a few days later and told her he had contacts with two of the Afghan mujahidin warlords, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, both of whom presided over large communities of Afghan refugees loyal to their organisations. They had assured him that any volunteers would be welcomed.

  ‘They’re crying out for women who can work in the hospitals and with the refugees’, said Hassan. ‘If you want to go I can arrange it. You would be given a house and taken care of.’

  Rabiah rang Abu Bakar Ba’asyir in Malaysia to seek his blessing.

  ‘I don’t know, a woman alone … I don’t know if I approve’, he pondered.

  She argued forcefully that she would be fulfilling her duty of hijrah, migrating for the benefit of Islam.

  ‘Let me think about it and pr
ay istikharah’, said Ba’asyir. ‘Oh, and I’ll talk to Aba.’

  Abdullah Sungkar was dead against it. The pair had been sending their own recruits to Pakistan for military training in the warlord Sayyaf’s camp for six years, but they were young, single men; a woman travelling alone with six children was an entirely different matter, Rabiah was told. ‘Aba didn’t approve of me going to Pakistan. He believed it wasn’t a place for a woman alone. Who was going to take responsibility for me?’

  But Ba’asyir knew she was desperate to go and that she was more than capable of taking care of herself, Islamic convention notwithstanding; apart from which, once she had made her mind up, there was no dissuading her. After checking on exactly where she was going, what she would be doing and who would be responsible for her, Ba’asyir cautiously gave his imprimatur, on the proviso that the Indonesians in Pakistan would not be able to look after her because they were all unmarried men. She would effectively be on her own, reliant on a bunch of notoriously fickle mujahidin warlords whom she had never met.

  ‘It happened very quickly’, Rabiah remembers. ‘Within a very short time, I borrowed the money for the tickets, and within three weeks we were on a plane to Pakistan. I had absolutely no money. I had the tickets—and nothing. But I knew Allah would look after us.’

  PART 3

  UMM MOHAMMED

  10

  JOINING THE JIHAD

  Pakistan, 1990–1994

  The tribal town of Peshawar in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province was like a scene from some exotic film set where mediaeval Central Asia meets the Wild West. Gnarled war veterans in black turbans with limbs missing sat cross-legged sipping green tea and swapping war yarns in the Street of Storytellers. Gun smugglers and gem merchants rubbed shoulders with spies, aid workers and sheikhs in the Smugglers Bazaar, where AK-47s and slabs of sticky black opium were sold alongside fridges, VCRs and treasures looted from the Afghan national museum. In a hotel lobby frequented by war correspondents and warlords, a polite sign advised: ‘Hotel guests are asked that their bodyguards kindly deposit all firearms at front desk’.

  Peshawar was the gateway to the legendary Khyber Pass, the perilous mountain switchback that leads to Afghanistan. Throughout the 1980s, the city had been Jihad HQ, the home base for the seven mujahidin parties that had fought for ten years to oust the Soviet Union’s forces from Afghanistan. By 1990 that war had been won, and the fractious warlords had united to form the so-called Afghan Interim Government, to continue their struggle against the pro-Moscow regime of President Najibullah, installed in Kabul by the Soviets before their last tank rumbled home across the border in February 1989. The decade-long conflict had left between one and two million Afghanis dead and had displaced two-thirds of the population. More than three million had spilled across the border into Pakistan, and on the outskirts of Peshawar squalid tent cities teeming with refugees stretched as far as the eye could see.

  Peshawar had also become a magnet for thousands of foreign Muslim volunteers who had flocked from all over the world to join what was seen as a holy struggle. They were known as the ‘Afghan-Arabs’, although many of them were neither Afghan nor Arab in origin. As well as the Persian Gulf, they came from Egypt, Algeria, Libya and Sudan; Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and western China; Bosnia and Chechnya; Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines; in fact from virtually every Muslim community in the world, even Australia. Some called them ‘the brigade of strangers’. In the words of one jihadist, ‘Peshawar was transformed into this place where whoever had no place to go went’.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Rabiah Hutchinson landed in Peshawar in August 1990 accompanied by her five youngest children. Mohammed was thirteen years old, and eager to become a junior holy warrior. Rahmah was coming up to her eighth birthday, a polite, well-behaved child but as determined as her mother. The elder of Abdul Rahim’s two sons, Mustafa was a serious-faced boy who would soon turn five, while his little brother Ilyas was a precocious two years and nine months. The baby of the family, Aminah, had just turned one and was still being breastfed. The family’s belongings bulged from a dozen ‘Chinese samsonites’, the durable striped plastic sacks used by budget travellers the world over. They contained pillows, doonas, electric blankets, fitted sheets, three sets of clothing per person, a bucket of Lego blocks, and a jar of Vegemite stuffed into each bag.

  They were greeted in Peshawar by a man who introduced himself as Abu Ubeidah, who was apparently a representative of the Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK), or Office of Services, a bureau set up to cater for the thousands of foreign volunteers arriving in Peshawar. MAK had been founded in the 1980s by the man known as the ‘godfather’ of the jihad, the charismatic Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, and funded by his young assistant, the Saudi billionaire’s son, Osama bin Laden. Abu Ubeidah drove Rabiah and her family to the new suburb of Hayatabad on Peshawar’s outskirts, where MAK had a guesthouse and where many of the Afghan-Arabs had made their homes. A colony of gaudy two- and three-storey ‘poppy palaces’ built from the proceeds of the opium trade had grown up there alongside the traditional Pashtun houses carved from dung-coloured mudbrick. Beyond Hayatabad the road led west to the anarchic frontier regions where tribal law prevailed, and where anti-aircraft guns could be spotted on the roofs of some of the fort-like houses.

  ‘I was put in this house and left. We were told, don’t go outside, it’s dangerous’, Rabiah remembers. ‘We could hear automatic gunfire and we’d go out at night on the roof and you could see explosions. Everyone had guns, you could hear the gunshots—it was so exciting!’

  The excitement evaporated when the children fell violently ill from dysentery, which left them with uncontrollable diarrhoea and vomiting. It was the middle of summer with temperatures in the high thirties, sauna-like humidity and an air-conditioning system that worked if and when the sporadic power supply flickered into life.

  After a few days, Abu Ubeidah came back, with a surprise announcement. ‘Now you’re here, you have to get married. It’s not feasible for a woman alone, you need someone to protect you.’

  Rabiah was furious. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t want to get married. I didn’t come here to get married.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stay here by yourself. If you don’t get married you have to go back.’

  He told her he would return in two days to hear her answer.

  Left to her own devices, Rabiah’s first resort was to pray for guidance. ‘I said to Allah, “I came here for your sake. You know my intention. If it’s pleasing for you, open the way for me to stay without getting married”.’

  Next, she got dressed in her black abaya and hijab and covered her face with the Arab-style black veil, the niqab, which was customary attire for many Afghan-Arabs. Then she ventured up onto the flat roof of their house to survey the scene beyond its 3-metre-high mudbrick walls.

  ‘The children were sick, I was stranded and alone, and I thought, what am I gonna do?’

  She knew her brother-in-law Abdul Rahman Ayub, the twin of her former husband Abdul Rahim, was out there somewhere. Abdul Rahman had left Indonesia for Pakistan in 1986, among the fourth batch of recruits sent by Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir for military training with Sungkar’s old friend the Afghan warlord Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, the leader of one of the seven main jihadist parties in Afghanistan. Abdul Rahman had completed his training at Sayyaf’s Camp Sadda, which was the first training camp set up for foreign volunteers. It was located about 100 kilometres west of Peshawar in the Kurram Agency, one of the Pashtun tribal zones that straddles the Afghan border. After finishing the three-year program, Abdul Rahman had gradu ated to become an instructor at Sayyaf’s grandly named Military Academy of the Mujahidin of Afghanistan at Camp Sadda. He taught Islamic theology and also specialised in traditional Indonesian self-defence including fighting with knives, according to a comrade. Rabiah knew he was out there; the question was how to find him.

  From the rooftop, she spied a young man who looke
d like an Arab walking along the street. Her children spotted the familiar steely glint in her eye and asked nervously, ‘Oh mama, what are you going to do?’ (It was a question they would ask many times. ‘I was always a constant source of embarassment to my children’, she remembers. ‘It got worse as the boys got older. They would say “Oh, no, what are you gonna do now, mama?”’)

  Downstairs, she strode across the dirt courtyard and out onto the dusty street to accost the young passer-by.

  ‘Salam aleikum! Excuse me, brother’, she called out in English. The young man looked up, startled to see a strange woman with a broad foreign accent gesticulating wildly. It was most uncommon for a woman dressed in the Salafi style to be so forward with a man she didn’t know. The Arab put his head down and kept walking.

  ‘Wait, brother, do you speak English?’ Rabiah persisted.

  ‘Little bit’, the flustered young man replied.

  ‘Are you a mujahid?’ she demanded to know.

  The Arab was plainly alarmed.

  ‘He had this look on his face, like he was asleep and having a nightmare, or he’d eaten something bad—he just couldn’t believe it was happening’, Rabiah recounts. ‘He was looking at me, like—“Is this woman CIA?” He didn’t know what to do. He kept looking around as if to say, “Please don’t let anybody see me”.’

  Evidently sensing that his inquisitor was not to be put off easily, the Arab came closer. ‘Yes, I’m a mujahid’, he muttered.

  ‘Well if you are a mujahid you have to help me. I’m a woman alone, I have five children in here, and I’m in big trouble. Do you know any Indonesian mujahidin?’

  The Arab was wary. ‘Maybe yes, maybe no.’

  ‘All right, listen to me. I’ve done hijrah, right? And that means Allah has given me special rights. The people who brought me here are trying to make me get married and I don’t want to get married. So you have to go and find my family for me.’