The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  She handed him a scrap of paper with Abdul Rahman’s name scribbled on it.

  ‘If you can find this man, tell him I’m here with all his nieces and nephews, and he must come because we are in trouble.’

  The mujahid took the paper but looked doubtful, so she gave him a parting warning. ‘If you don’t do anything, and if me and my children die here, you’ll be responsible before Allah on judgement day.’

  Within twenty-four hours Abdul Rahman had received the message and came knocking on the door of the house. The younger boys, Mustafa and Ilyas, Abdul Rahim’s sons, were beside themselves with excitement; they had never met their father’s identical twin and thought it was their father himself come to see them. After Rabiah explained their predicament, Abdul Rahman left again to speak to his superiors. The next day he returned with a Toyota pickup truck, loaded Rabiah and the five children onboard and set off into the arid wilderness.

  Their destination was the sprawling mujahidin encampment of Pabbi, about 20 kilometres east of Peshawar, which was now a major base for the foreign volunteers who had flocked to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pabbi was the stronghold of Abdul Rahman’s commander, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, a principal protagonist in the Afghan jihad.

  Sayyaf was a former professor of Islamic law at the Shariah faculty at Kabul University. After studying at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, the intellectual hothouse of the global jihad, he had become a leading light in Afghanistan’s nascent student Islamist movement, as deputy head of the Muslim Youth Organisation in the 1970s. He spoke fluent classical Arabic and followed the Wahhabi creed of Saudi Arabia, which made him a favourite of the Saudi establishment, whose petro-dollars were helping to bankroll the jihad. He was a wily politician with a flowing white beard and an imposing 1.9-metre frame, which he habitually draped in colourful Afghan batu, lengths of woollen fabric that doubled as blankets or shawls. It was Saudi support and funding that enabled the creation of Sayyaf’s party, Ittehad-e-Islami (Islamic Union), which was closely aligned with Saudi intelligence. When the jihad first erupted, the Saudis chose Sayyaf as spokesman for the muja-hidin. After the Soviets were defeated and the so-called Afghan Interim Government was created, Sayyaf was named nominal prime minister, thanks in large measure to the US$26 million in bribes paid to his peers by his Saudi benefactors.

  The lavish funding from Saudi Arabia also bankrolled an elaborate complex known as ‘Sayyafabad’, located in the town of Pabbi. It was a township of 40 000 people with its own hospital, orphanage, madrassas and mosques. It also boasted an institute of higher learning called the University of Dawah and Jihad, with separate colleges of science, literature, medicine, English, shariah law, Arabic and engineering. Pabbi had previously hosted Sayyaf’s military training base as well, but this facility had moved in the mid 1980s to Camp Sadda, near the Afghan border.

  In addition to staff, supporters and trainees, Sayyaf presided over a populace of some 100 000 Afghan refugees, who were nominally affiliated with his tanzim (organisation), Ittehad-e-Islami. When the jihad against the Soviets had first begun in 1979, the mujahidin had been a rabble of dozens of separate militias. To ensure it was able to organise and control them, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) anointed just seven parties to receive money and arms. Sayyaf’s was the smallest and was added last to the list purely because of his Saudi sponsors’ clout. Afghan refugees arriving in Pakistan had to sign up with one of the parties to become eligible for shelter and food. The system ensured an instant constituency for Sayyaf, who commanded little support among the Afghan population because his Wahhabi dogma was alien to the Sufi-influenced style of Islam traditionally practised by the tribal Pashtun. Sayyaf was popular among the Afghan-Arabs, however, because his organisation was extremely well funded and armed, and because of the enthusiastic hospitality he offered foreigners who came to join the jihad.

  The arrival of a thirty-something, unmarried Australian woman accompanied by five children in Sayyaf’s dusty desert redoubt created something of a stir, by Rabiah’s account. ‘People couldn’t comprehend how a woman had just turned up, because the other women there came with their husbands. For a woman to just turn up with that many children saying “I’m here for the jihad, just like you”, it was a concept they just couldn’t get their heads around.’

  Rahmah—at the time a wide-eyed eight year old—describes her first impressions of the Afghan-Arab village in Pabbi: ‘It was three streets made of poor mud houses on dirt roads, all connected to each other by lanes, and situated on each end of the streets was a tent with armed Afghan guards. It was at that time known as the village of the muhajirin (migrants), as many of the families of the mujahidin stayed there. It was summer and 50-degree heat. The ground was extremely dry and if anyone walked on it, it would cause clouds of dust.’

  Rabiah and the children were allocated half of a traditional Pashtun mudbrick house, with a kitchen, sitting room and one bedroom, which the six of them shared. The electric blankets she had brought after being warned of the severe winter cold were never unpacked. Pabbi had no electricity, just a communal generator that provided power for about two hours in the morning and two hours at night. In any event it was so hot that when they walked along the road clumps of melted bitumen stuck to their shoes, which then became caked in dirt. They used kerosene lamps for lighting and gas cylinders, called ambooba, for cooking. There were no telephones or television and virtually no communication with the outside world.

  ‘Pabbi was hard core’, Rabiah remembers. ‘The people who lived in Peshawar had ceiling fans and electricity and running water; some of them even had CD players. Pabbi was really rugged—even by Afghanistan standards. The living conditions were shocking. The scorpions used to crawl out of the roof and the cockroaches would climb on you and the mosquitoes were so big you had to tie yourself to the mattress or they’d carry you off in the night. In summer it was 50 to 52 degrees, and in winter it got so cold the water would ice up and wouldn’t come out of the taps. There was cholera and typhoid—and the dust!’

  In spite of—perhaps in part because of—its privations, Rabiah remembers Pabbi as ‘the best place in the world’. ‘It’s hard to believe you could be so happy’, she says. The harsh simplicity of their existence evoked memories of her childhood in Mudgee and Wollar, except that the socio-economic tables were turned. Here poverty, frugality and sacrifice were virtues that would surely be rewarded. ‘It didn’t matter, because we thought after all this hardship Afghanistan will become an Islamic country and we’ll all go and live there happy ever after.’

  Rabiah was put to work in Sayyaf’s al Jihad hospital where the inmates of Pabbi’s rambling refugee camp came for medical treatment. Like everything else the hospital was made of mud-brick, with upper walls fashioned from plywood frames and mosquito wire to allow the air to circulate. The women’s hospital where Rabiah worked had four wards: maternity, surgical, infectious disease and children’s. There were ten or twelve beds in each ward, and often two patients to a bed. Hundreds more lined up for outpatient treatment each day, and the crowd waiting for treatment sometimes got so unruly that the hospital employed an orderly armed with a stick to whack them into line.

  Like one of the ‘barefoot doctors’ in Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, Rabiah was trained on the job. Her superiors were an assorted collection of mostly foreign volunteers, including an Algerian vet and a Pakistani gynaecologist trained in the United States, who told Rabiah, ‘I’ll teach you everything I know’. She became a proficient midwife and learned to diagnose and treat common ailments such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and diarrhoea, and injuries caused by exploding mines, which were treated with Yemeni honey, renowned for its healing properties. The conditions were primitive to say the least.

  ‘We used to use and re-use disposable syringes until you could literally no longer push them through the patients’ skin. There was no such thing as cleaning the tables where the women gave birth. If the patients died we simply pushed them asid
e.’ Within a few months of their arrival, Rabiah’s youngest boy, three-year-old Ilyas, contracted cholera. He grew so thin that his ribcage protruded beneath his waxy skin like an African famine baby. After a few weeks in hospital, the doctors told Rabiah to take him home. ‘They sent him home to die. They said, “There’s nothing more we can do. Just take him home and whatever Allah has written for him will happen”.’ Despite her own faith, she railed against their fatalism. ‘We were living a life where you realise your limitations. You become very resigned to death—but I wasn’t yet.’ The boy was gravely ill for three months but finally made a full recovery.

  Like all the Afghan-Arabs, Rabiah was known by her kuniya, an Islamic nickname derived from the name of the individual’s eldest child, which is at once a term of endearment and respect. Men are known as ‘Abu’—which means ‘the father of’— followed usually by the name of their eldest son, while women are referred to as Umm (pronounced oom), which means ‘the mother of’. Rabiah was known as Umm Mohammed, ‘the mother of Mohammed’. Because there were so many women whose first sons were named after the Prophet, she was widely known as ‘Umm Mohammed Australie’. She says the patients called her Doctor Jan, which translates roughly as ‘dear doctor’.

  The third-world desert town of Pabbi became home for Rabiah and her children for the next three years. Her rare provenance ensured everyone knew who she was. ‘People knew me because I was unusual, I was weird—an Australian with no husband and six kids who came and gave up dunya (worldly comfort) for the sake of Allah.’ For Rabiah, her new moniker signified another milestone in her personal journey, marking her transition from a Muslim who has merely ‘submitted’ to Islam, to a true believer. ‘The transformation from Robyn to Rabiah to Umm Mohammed has just been a natural process of progression of who I really am’, she says. ‘The difference between Rabiah and Umm Mohammed is that Rabiah became Umm Mohammed with knowledge and understanding of what true Islam is.’

  It was a spartan life. They rose each morning at 4 a.m. as the azan resounded across the flat mud rooftops. After dawn prayers, the boys would run to the bakery down the street, a lean-to shack where the Afghan baker used a stick of wood with a nail in it to flick steaming rounds of flat naan bread from a huge wood-fired tandoor set in the dirt. At home they would eat the warm naan for breakfast with jam or honey and cream made from buffalo milk. At 5 a.m. the children boarded a bus that took them to school in Peshawar, an hour-and-a-half journey along a potholed road prowled by khatta aturk (highway bandits) who mercifully let the school bus pass unmolested.

  The legendary jihadist Abdullah Azzam, founder of MAK, the forerunner of al Qaeda, had established the school they attended. Azzam’s military motto was ‘Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues’. However, he also believed the children of the jihad needed a solid education, and had founded the Al Ansar school in Peshawar for the offspring of the Afghan-Arabs. His school taught a mixture of secular and religious subjects and the children were taught to memorise the Quran from kindergarten. However, Sheikh Azzam opposed rote memorisation; with every Quranic verse they memorised the children would also learn its origin and meaning, the hadith that explain it and the laws that derive from it. By the time Rabiah arrived in Peshawar, Abdullah Azzam was dead, having been assassinated in 1989 and his body buried in the Martyrs’ Graveyard in Pabbi. His school was being administered by his wife.

  Rahmah and her siblings attended the Al Ansar school for about two years. Rahmah recounts those days with fond nostalgia: ‘I can still smell and feel the cold dawn breeze—well, freezing breeze—on my face, waiting for the school bus to take us on a near two-hour drive to Peshawar … and the hot bread we would buy on the way. On the way back us children would gather up the remaining school money and buy some kebabs and have a group lunch on the bus. It was something that we always looked forward to. Even though coming home was a near three-hour drive, it was one I enjoyed (because) I felt I had a purpose—and that was to grow up a good Muslim.’

  As Rabiah tells it her children took to life in Pabbi ‘like ducks to water’. However, 13-year-old Mohammed continued to struggle with his studies. In the highly regimented Arabic schooling system of Peshawar, where the children were whacked with sticks for misbehaviour, no allowances were made for a dyslexic foreign boy. Mohammed dropped out of the school after about six months. Rabiah suggested he switch to Sayyaf’s technical school, where the director had offered him a place.

  ‘I just can’t handle their system, it’s not gonna work’, Mohammed protested.

  ‘But he’s a really good brother, and he knows shariah’, Rabiah assured him.

  ‘I don’t care if he knows Ronald Reagan, I’m not going.’

  Mohammed eventually enrolled to study carpentry at Sayyaf’s technical college, according to Rabiah. He finally got his wish to join the mujahidin when, during school breaks, the boys were taken across the border into Afghanistan for a taste of jihad. Rabiah says they were not allowed where there was fighting but were taken to ‘the backlines’ where they were taught to fire an AK-47 and ‘help out’ around the camp.

  When the children returned from school each day they would sleep until it was time for the asr (afternoon) prayer, which then left three hours free time until sunset. This was the time for socialising, when the women and girls visited each other in their homes, while the men sat drinking tea and discussing the news of the day. Rabiah attended lessons in the Pabbi kindergarten where the Afghan-Arab women studied the Quran and Islamic law. The older girls played mostly within the walled courtyards of their homes, while the younger ones played in the streets where the boys kicked soccer balls and built their own mudbrick forts in the dirt, playing at being little mujahidin.

  Despite the war dragging on across the border in Afghanistan—and notwithstanding the poverty, dirt and disease—their life in Pabbi was a secure and ordered existence, centred on the family, and governed by a code of discipline and morality that was uniformly understood—all of which Rabiah had longed for. ‘It was a society built on the belief that everybody had a place and everybody had a time. The children were very independent in their lifestyle and they had the security of their homes. They had very few chores because we had so few material possessions. You sweep your house, wash your clothes, cook your food, and that’s it. Because it was such an ordered life, you always knew where your children were; they had freedom, they were safe, everybody knew each other, there was no fear of child molesters. It was very safe and secure.’

  Her daughter Rahmah’s memories are similarly rosy: ‘As a child growing up in Pabbi there was always something to do, even though to most people if they ever saw Pabbi they would say, “What on earth could anyone do here?” It was a very tight-knit community, everybody knew each other and everybody helped each other … From a very young age we were taught the oldest took care of the youngest, the strong protected the weak, and women were always put first. Boys were taught that the girls took first preference, like for example when (the Muslim festival) Eid came and we would all go to the little hut they called a store, the girls would always be allowed to buy first while the boys stood outside and waited.’

  As the dust settled and the harsh light of day softened, the azan would ring out again to summon the menfolk to the mosque for the maghrib (sunset) prayer while the women retreated to the privacy of their homes or high-walled courtyards.

  ‘My best memories of Pabbi was when the electricity was cut off at night in summer for a few hours’, Rahmah recounts. ‘We children would all play in the streets, the boys usually playing their own game, and the girls, we would play our own games. But the best of all times was when a group of uncles would be in town from Afghanistan, they would gather us around and tell us stories of the miracles they had experienced in the battle field. I can remember listening with all my heart and would always pray the electricity stayed cut off for longer.’

  The women of Pabbi formed a kind of exclusive society of their own, in whic
h their integral role was only enhanced by their separateness from the men. It was communally based, so that everything was shared; when a new muhajir arrived, the ansar— the resident Muslims whose duty it is to welcome them—would chip in to donate cooking pots, clothing, bedding and whatever else the newcomers needed. When a woman had a baby the others would draw up a roster to share her cooking, cleaning and washing. Just like in Mudgee, everyone knew everyone else and there was a palpable sense of community. But here there were no ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’; and the dirt and deprivation only intensified the sense that they were part of an exclusive elite, united by their unyielding faith, their disdain for material wealth and their righteous sense of mission. And unlike in Indonesia, where she had always felt a foreigner, here it also didn’t matter where you were from. It was like a little United Nations of Muslim fundamentalists.

  ‘It didn’t matter what colour, size or shape you were, you were judged on your piety and knowledge’, Rabiah says. ‘I had American friends, French, German, Chinese, Indonesian, Malays, Filipinos. The majority of the sisters were very well educated; there were vets and an engineer; one was a professor of maths, another was a biochemist; there were numerous graduates from Islamic faculties. Most were bi- or tri-lingual, many spoke French or English. The idea that Muslim radicals are poor, downtrodden and uneducated is a myth. They were exceptionally intelligent women.’

  The men and women of Pabbi modelled their behaviour on the first generations of Muslims known as the Salaf al-Salih. ‘Pabbi was like a little Islamic state in Pakistan’, says Rabiah. The men wore the trousers of their shalwar kameez above their ankles and their beards at least the length of a man’s fist. The women wore flowing black gowns like the Prophet’s wives and covered their faces in the company of men who were unrelated to them. There was no music, because music was regarded as the azan (call to prayer) of Shaytan (Satan). There were no two-storey houses, so no one could look down on unveiled women in the courtyards of their homes. Their adjoining walled courtyards were connected by doorways built into the mudbrick walls; when the men were away fighting or training, the doors would be left open so the children could run from house to house and the women could mingle freely with their neighbours; when the men were at home, the doors would be locked.