The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  A strict formality governed all social relations, and elaborate customs were followed to preserve the women’s honour, which included preventing face-to-face contact with men other than their husbands or male relatives. If a man went to visit the home of a friend, he would knock on arrival; if the man of the house was not at home his wife would knock back from the inside to signify that she was there alone (because even speaking to an unrelated man was unseemly) and the visitor would go away. If a woman walked past a group of men in the street, the men would turn their backs in order not to gaze on another man’s wife, even though her face was veiled. A man would never ask a ‘brother’, ‘How’s your wife?’ because such an inquiry could cause offence; instead, he would ask ‘How’s your family?’ even if the man he was addressing had no children. If Rabiah’s sons came home to find the doors locked, they would never yell out ‘Mama!’ or ‘Rahmah!’ because it would be disrespectful to their mother and sister to stand in the street shouting their names. Instead the boys would call out their own names to signal that they wanted to be let in.

  The social regime precisely prescribed the roles of males and females, and enforced a respectful distance between the two. For Rabiah it was a welcome alternative to the chaotic domestic life she had known as a child and teenager. The role of women was strictly circumscribed, in a way that both tightly defined their activities and ensured their honour was sacrosanct. ‘It might be seen by non-Muslims as oppressive but for us that’s one way that you honour somebody and you show you hold this woman in the highest regard’, says Rabiah. ‘In Islam jealousy is a positive—protecting your women means you’re jealous over their honour.’

  Segregation between the sexes extended to the hospital where Rabiah worked, which treated only female patients and was staffed entirely by women. ‘It was an all-woman environment so it was very working-woman friendly’, she says. The hospital had a crèche where the female doctors’ children could be cared for while they worked. Male specialists were summoned as required, in accordance with a specially devised ritual. Outside the entrance to the women’s hospital was a bell. When the male specialist arrived he would ring the bell to signal his arrival. The female medical staff, who normally went about their work uncovered, would hastily don their veils and then ring another bell on the inside to let the doctor know it was safe to enter. The women staff would remain covered until the male specialist had left, when they would resume their work unveiled.

  In a polyglot community with such stringent social mores, it was easy to unwittingly cause offence. One day Rabiah heard a knock at her door and a man’s voice calling urgently ‘Umm Mohammed Australie!’ She knocked back to signify that there were no males at home, but instead of going away the visitor continued to call out. It was the husband of a Malaysian woman who had recently given birth to a girl. He spoke in Malay while Rabiah replied in Indonesian, the two languages similar enough to enable them to converse.

  ‘Umm Mohammed, it’s Abu Khadijah. I’m very sorry but my wife has sent me down here. She wants to know if you can come up because there’s something wrong with the baby.’

  ‘OK, tell me what the problem is’, Rabiah replied from behind the door.

  ‘The baby hasn’t stopped screaming for five or six hours, and she keeps pulling her legs up, as though she’s in pain.’

  ‘It sounds like gas in the stomach’, said Rabiah. ‘I’m busy at the moment but I’ll be there in half an hour. In the meantime, just turn her over and rub some aniseed oil on her backside.’ This was a popular remedy for releasing wind.

  There was silence behind the door.

  ‘Abu Khadijah? Are you there? Do you understand?’

  But the man had gone.

  When Rabiah had finished what she was doing she walked up the street to her friend’s home. ‘As soon as I got into their house and saw his wife I knew there was something wrong. Malays are very polite people, never rude, but she was averting her gaze and answering in monosyllables. At the end of the day I am an Australian and I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Is there some sort of problem?’ asked Rabiah.

  ‘Umm Mohammed, I can’t believe you did what you did’, her friend blurted out. ‘The way you spoke to him—why would you say such a terrible thing?’

  Rabiah was totally nonplussed. ‘I was looking at her as if she was from Mars.’

  ‘What do you mean? I told him to rub some aniseed oil on the baby’s pantat’, she said, using the Indonesian word for ‘backside’ and rubbing her own posterior by way of demonstration.

  The other woman gasped. ‘Umm Mohammed, what does pantat mean in Indonesian?’

  ‘It means backside.’

  ‘Oh, Umm Mohammed, in Malaysian it means the exact opposite.’

  Rabiah’s advice, which the father had taken as an instruction to rub oil on his daughter’s private parts, had caused grave offence. Among the multilingual Afghan-Arabs, such misunderstandings were common. Another conversation in which an Algerian man boasted about his wife’s couscous almost led to a shoot out. The name of the popular African dish is identical to an Afghani slang term that refers to a woman’s genitalia.

  Despite the occasional misunderstanding, Rabiah was in her element. ‘Pabbi was the best place I’ve ever been in my life. It was the closest thing to the implementation of Islam to the fullest extent, and it was a place that consisted only of people who had all gone there for the same reason. They were people who’d given up everything because they wanted to live under Islamic law. There were doctors, teachers, engineers, nurses, people from all over the world—every Arab country, Somalia, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, some Sunnis from Iran, there was even a Japanese, French, Germans, Americans, any country you can think of—but no Australians, just me.’

  The only other Australian she encountered in Pabbi was her friend Aisha, the Aboriginal convert whose husband had arranged Rabiah’s entrée into Pakistan. By now the couple were living in Peshawar and Aisha came to visit, bringing a jar of Vegemite to replenish the family’s exhausted supply.

  ‘What’s that you’re eating?’ asked an American friend who found her tucking into a piece of naan toast daubed with the spread.

  ‘It’s called Vegemite. It’s an Australian food. Would you like to try some?’

  The visitor screwed up her face in disgust at the taste of it. ‘Are you sure this is halal? I can’t believe something can taste so bad and be halal.’

  A familiar figure in the dusty streets of Pabbi was a tall, aristocratic-looking Saudi in his early thirties, who was fast becoming an icon among the Afghan-Arabs. Osama bin Laden had left his homeland of Saudi Arabia to join the jihad against the Russians after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The devoutly religious seventeenth son of a billionaire construction tycoon, bin Laden had been eager to make his mark by volunteering his services and wealth to support the Afghan cause. Arriving in Peshawar he teamed up with the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, who had been a professor at the Jeddah University where bin Laden studied business administration. By this time Azzam was heading up the Islamic Co-ordination Council in Peshawar, which united twenty organisations there to support the Afghan struggle. It was Azzam who established MAK to co-ordinate the influx of foreign fighters, and bin Laden who provided the funds to cover accommodation, living expenses and a monthly khafalla, or stipend, for every foreign volunteer. Together in 1988 they formed a new organisation to keep the jihad alive after the Russians had gone, which they called simply ‘the base’—in Arabic, al Qaeda.

  After Abdullah Azzam’s death in 1989, bin Laden had taken over the mantle of emir (leader) of the Afghan-Arabs and their new organisation, al Qaeda. He worked closely with Pabbi’s supremo, Sayyaf, who shared his Wahhabi creed and close working relationship with the Saudi establishment. Bin Laden provided the funding for Sayyaf’s military academy at Camp Sadda and his University of Dawah and Jihad in Pabbi. In return Sayyaf provided military training for the majority of the foreign volunteers, until bin Laden began
to set up his own network of training camps under Sayyaf’s protection and in his territory.

  After the defeat of the Soviets, bin Laden had left Peshawar and returned to Saudi Arabia, where he was at first lauded as a minor hero for his role in the Afghan struggle, but later had a bitter falling out with the House of Saud when he opposed the arrival of US troops to defend the Saudi peninsula after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Bin Laden’s passport would soon be seized by the Saudi authorities, his citizenship cancelled and his assets frozen. But for now he maintained a guesthouse and office in Peshawar from where payments were dispensed to the foreign volunteers and continued to visit Pabbi, the stronghold of his comrade Sayyaf.

  Rabiah remembers bin Laden’s visits, when he would leave his wives at home in Jeddah and stay in the modest quarters reserved for the shabab (young men) in Sayyaf’s compound where he was much admired. ‘Osama would stay at the shabab house all the time when he came to Pabbi. He was known because he was rich. He was someone who had sacrificed his wealth, his lifestyle, his family connections and stood up for what he believes in.’ Bin Laden was not yet a major leader in the jihad movement; at this stage he was principally a financier and supporter of the Afghan cause, and was little known outside Islamist circles in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was not yet on the radar of foreign agencies such as the CIA and the FBI, nor regarded as ‘someone who was anti-American’, in the words of the former CIA station chief in Islamabad, Milton Bearden.

  Bin Laden’s munificence helped to ensure that Sayyaf was still handsomely bankrolled, even after the multibillion-dollar pipeline from the United States to the mujahidin groups began to dry up after the Soviets were defeated. Belatedly wary of the consequences of supporting Islamic militants, in the early 1990s the United States stopped funding Islamist warlords such as Sayyaf and Hekmatyar, under a new policy of ‘sidelining the extremists’. Sayyaf’s relationship with the Saudi establishment had also soured because of his opposition to US forces on the Saudi peninsula during the war against Saddam Hussein. But despite dwindling support from the US and Saudi governments, the money from private Gulf donors such as bin Laden was still pouring in.

  ‘It would come in truckloads, I’m literally talking about boxes of it—boxes of US$100 bills’, says Rabiah. ‘It would be unloaded off the trucks and they would throw it in the tent like it was baked beans, and they would take bundles out as they needed it. I don’t think it was even counted.’ Most of it went towards weaponry and the cost of running Sayyaf’s military training regime. What funding did make its way to the orphanage and hospital was spent on expensive hardware rather than maintenance, personnel or training, to Rabiah’s dismay. ‘We had warehouses with the most amazing medical equipment—incubators, ultrasound machines; things that were never used, because no one knew how to use them.’

  It didn’t take long after Rabiah’s arrival in Pabbi for bin Laden to learn of the presence of the foreign mujahidah with six children, known as Umm Mohammed Australie. As Rabiah tells it, bin Laden was walking down the street past her house with a companion, an Algerian known as Abu Abdul, when he spotted her children playing in the street. Their conversation was related to her afterwards by Abu Abdul’s wife, who was Rabiah’s best friend in Pabbi.

  ‘I bet you can’t guess where those children are from’, Abu Abdul remarked.

  ‘They look sort of Arab’, bin Laden replied, noticing the children’s olive complexions inherited from their Indonesian fathers.

  ‘No, they’re Australian.’

  ‘Subhan Allah (Praise Allah)!’ bin Laden is said to have exclaimed. ‘Australian—that must be a first!’

  ‘It’s a woman on her own’, Abu Abdul continued. ‘She came with her children, she works in the hospital, she doesn’t have anything, they don’t even have air conditioning.’

  ‘Well they do now’, bin Laden replied.

  A few days later, an emissary delivered a brand-new air conditioner to her home—courtesy of Osama bin Laden, Rabiah was told.

  The encounter with the black-haired, olive-skinned Australian children who spoke fluent Arabic piqued bin Laden’s curiosity, according to the account related by Rabiah’s friend. ‘It fascinates me, I like to hear those kids talk’, bin Laden said. ‘If you hadn’t told me they were from Australia and their parents were not Arabs I wouldn’t believe it. They speak such good Arabic.’

  Not long after, bin Laden ran into Rabiah’s children in the street again while walking with his companion Abu Abdul. Eight-year-old Rahmah would remember the occasion vividly many years later, although at the time she didn’t know who the bearded stranger was. ‘All I remember was I was walking with my brother to the bakery and we came across two uncles. One I knew as he was the husband of my mother’s friend and the other I had not seen before and did not know his name.’ The two men called the children over.

  ‘Rahmah, do you know who this is?’ asked Abu Abdul.

  ‘No’, she replied.

  ‘This is the uncle that bought your air conditioner for you.’

  Bin Laden knelt down and put his hand on Mustafa’s shoulder, gave them some Afghani coins, then spoke to them in Arabic.

  ‘What are your names?’

  ‘My name is Rahmah, and this is my brother, Mustafa.’

  ‘And where are you going?’

  ‘To the bakery.’

  ‘We shall accompany you then.’

  Rahmah recounts that bin Laden walked with them to the lean-to bakery, where dozens of families from Sayyaf’s refugee camp were queuing for naan, the main staple of the Afghan diet.

  ‘Why are these people lined up here?’ bin Laden asked. Abu Abdul was about to explain but bin Laden interjected, ‘Let the children answer’.

  ‘It’s for the poor families, because they can’t afford to pay for their bread’, Rahmah explained. The baker had devised a credit system under which each family was given a stick of wood. The baker would carve a notch in the stick for every naan he gave them; later when they received their monthly khafalla (stipend) they would bring their sticks to the bakery and pay whatever they owed. According to Rahmah, bin Laden’s reaction was to hand the baker enough money for a year’s supply of bread: ‘ten loaves for the morning and ten for the afternoon for everybody that stood in the line’.

  Bin Laden’s gesture caused quite a scene at the crowded bakery, by Rahmah’s account. Women began chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and uttering prayers of thanks while young boys mobbed him trying to kiss his hands. Rahmah says bin Laden was so embarrassed that he raised his hands above his shoulders so they couldn’t be grabbed and kissed, while he retreated from the crowd.

  Stories like this about bin Laden’s generosity and self-effacing manner abounded among the Afghan-Arabs, and helped cement his iconic status. His mentor Azzam described him as ‘a heaven-sent man, like an angel’. American author Peter Bergen, a former CNN journalist who met bin Laden in 1997, likened him to ‘a turbaned Robin Hood, hiding out not in the forests of Nottingham during the Middle Ages, but in the mountains of almost mediaeval Afghanistan’. Bin Laden’s good works in this early period were even acknowledged by the former CIA chief in Islamabad, Milton Bearden, who co-ordinated US support to the mujahidin. Bin Laden ‘actually did some very good things’, Bearden noted. ‘He put a lot of money in a lot of the right places in Afghanistan.’

  The Afghan-Arabs benefited directly from bin Laden’s largesse through the monthly khafalla paid to foreign volunteers by MAK.

  ‘ASIO asked me, “Did Osama bin Laden ever give you money?”’ says Rabiah. ‘And I laughed—he probably did. Maybe it (MAK) is where the khafallas came from, I don’t know. We never asked questions, especially the women, because we didn’t need to know. Women didn’t know these things.’

  Rabiah’s family received an allowance of US$150 per month. She says it was always paid to her by Umm Mohammed Azzam, the widow of the MAK founder, Abdullah Azzam. Umm Mohammed Azzam was an illustrious character in her own right, admired as a ‘mother figure’ in t
he jihadist movement in Peshawar where she lived. After her husband’s death she took over the administration of a range of humanitarian services in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. She ran ten schools, a nursery and a charity called Darul Khayat—the ‘house of sewing’—which provided sewing machines, fabric and thread to Afghan war widows so they could earn an income from making clothing. She also ran the girls section of the Al Ansar school in Peshawar, which Rabiah’s children attended.

  Umm Mohammed Azzam herself was no great fan of bin Laden, who had fallen out with his mentor before Azzam’s death. Azzam had believed the Arab volunteers should integrate and join forces with the Afghan mujahidin, whereas bin Laden purposely kept his men apart to create a separate fighting force. (It was rumoured that bin Laden might have played a role in his mentor’s 1989 assassination; although this was never proven, it may also have influenced Umm Mohammed Azzam’s view.) ‘Bin Laden sought to pamper Arab fighters—even their food was different from that of Afghan mujahidin’, Azzam’s widow said in an interview. ‘We owe bin Laden our respect; he took part in jihad with his money, effort and sons. He sacrificed himself and his money. However, in truth, he is not a very educated man … He holds a high school degree. He enrolled in university but soon left. It is true that he gave lectures to ulema (Islamic scholars) and sheikhs but he was easy to persuade.’

  During Rabiah’s four years in Pakistan, Azzam’s plain-speaking widow became her friend and benefactor. ‘Let’s say I needed $200 for sheets in the hospital. I would go to Umm Mohammed or she would come to visit the hospital and ask me, “Do you need anything?” And I would say, “Yes, we need sheets”. I wanted coloured ones, not white, because the old white sheets were very grotty. They were washed by women out the back but they had blood and guts stains all over them and they always looked disgusting. I wanted coloured sheets to hide the bloodstains. She asked, “How many beds?” and I told her the number of beds.’