The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  Rabiah was pleased when Umm Mohammed Azzam returned with piles of linen dyed a dark maroon. ‘When she brought the sheets I had no idea where they came from. It wasn’t necessary for me to know.’

  Not long after the incident with bin Laden at the bakery, Rabiah received an intriguing proposal. Within the Afghan-Arab community, the societal pressure on a middle-aged single mother to marry was intense. Rabiah’s marital status had been an ongoing issue since her arrival, with ‘the brothers’ insisting that if she wanted to stay in Pakistan she would have to get married. The proposition was relayed to her by bin Laden’s frequent companion in Pabbi, Abu Abdul.

  ‘Umm Mohammed, there is a Saudi man who has inquired about you. He has other wives but they are in Saudi Arabia. He travels backwards and forwards, he is very well off, and he is interested in marrying you.’

  Rabiah says she didn’t ask the Saudi’s name but agreed to consider his proposal. This was passed on to her suitor who was due to return to Saudi Arabia shortly and reportedly replied, ‘Inshallah (God willing), if it’s my fortune, good’. However, the anonymous propositioner never came back to press his offer. This was around the time that bin Laden’s passport was seized by the Saudi authorities and, after a final trip to Pakistan, he fled into exile in Sudan. While it was rumoured that the mysterious Saudi who had proposed to Rabiah was indeed Osama bin Laden, she says she never found out for sure.

  Rabiah received numerous such offers. Another came from a well-known sheikh who was head of the Rabitah al-Islamiyya in Peshawar, a Saudi-sponsored organisation for the promotion of Islam. Eventually she accepted one of these proposals and married. She refuses to disclose the identity of this fourth husband or the details of this marriage. It is one of three marriages she would not discuss for the purpose of this book, insisting they were ‘not important’.

  While Rabiah was in Pabbi, her old mentors Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir were still in exile in Malaysia where they would soon form their new organisation Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) to fight for an Islamic state in Indonesia and beyond. Starting in the mid 1980s, the pair sent about 200 recruits from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to train in Sayyaf’s Camp Sadda.

  ‘All the non-Arab Afghan-Arabs were trained by Sayyaf’, Rabiah says. ‘His academy was a real academy, a military academy with privates, lieutenants, captains and sergeants. They did book study, and had passing out parades and uniforms.’ The rookies who passed through Camp Sadda would later become the shock troops of JI. They included leaders such as JI’s long-time military commander Zulkarnaen, its future secretary Abu Dujana, and Abu Rusdan, who would serve as a caretaker emir. Also trained there were footsoldiers such as Imam Samudra, Dulmatin, Ali Imron and Mubarok, who would later kill 202 people in the Bali bombings of October 2002; and Rabiah’s former fellow teacher from the Ngruki school Ali Gufron, also known as Muklas, who was executed with Amrozi and Samudra in 2008 over the Bali bombings. Rabiah says that as far as she knows Muklas and his cohorts never came to Pabbi and she never met them.

  ‘There were women there who didn’t know what their husbands were doing’, she says. ‘Men’s and women’s roles were very separate. You wouldn’t even ask a woman about her husband—I probably could have got myself killed by doing that. No respecting woman would want to know that much detail about a man who was not part of her own family. I’d be either a woman with loose morals or a spy or at the very least someone who was so stupid and ignorant that I was dangerous. It was done on purpose because the less you know, the less you can say.’

  Another habitué of Camp Sadda who would later achieve infamy was a Pakistani, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in North Carolina, and worked in Peshawar as Sayyaf’s secretary and served on the ‘media committee’ that published his organisation’s magazine. A decade later, Mohammed would gain infamy as ‘the Brain’—his al Qaeda nickname—behind a string of diabolical schemes that culminated in the September 11 attacks on the United States. As with many of the rising stars in the jihadist firmament, Rabiah knew Mohammed only through his wife, who was known by her kuniya as Umm Hamza. They met at the hospital in Peshawar while Rabiah was acting as midwife for a mutual friend. Later, when 10-year-old Rahmah needed to travel from Pabbi to visit an eye specialist in Peshawar, Umm Hamza invited her and Rabiah to stay at their home. Rabiah says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not home at the time. Beyond that, she says she knew the infamous ‘KSM’ only by his fearsome reputation: ‘He had a fierce temper. He was known to be very scary and very staunch.’

  Among the Indonesian contingent in Pabbi was Rabiah’s brother-in-law Abdul Rahman Ayub, who was now teaching Arabic at Sayyaf’s technical school. About two months after Rabiah’s arrival, Abdul Rahman announced that he wished to renew his marriage to her eldest daughter Devi, which had been dissolved a year earlier without them having lived together as man and wife. Devi was now fifteen and was still in Malaysia studying at Sungkar and Ba’asyir’s boarding school. Eager to have her firstborn reunited with the family in Pakistan, and believing she was now old enough to marry, Rabiah agreed to Abdul Rahman’s proposal.

  ‘When he spoke to me about it, I thought—he was a good person, he was not like Abdul Rahim, he was good with the children, and he was responsible.’ Her agreement was conditional on Devi coming to stay with her in Pabbi and not beginning to live with Abdul Rahman as his wife until she was seventeen. When Rabiah contacted Sungkar and Ba’asyir in Malaysia to arrange her daughter’s travel to Pakistan, Abdullah Sungkar was adamantly opposed to it. He thought the idea ‘ridiculous’ and argued she should stay and finish her schooling. But Rabiah typically ignored Sungkar’s protestations—and her daughter’s own reluctance—and Devi soon joined them in Pakistan. The result was a disaster. When Devi arrived Abdul Rahman decided he wasn’t prepared to wait for a year after all to claim his new bride and insisted she move in with him immediately, to Rabiah’s fury. When Devi announced she didn’t want to be married to him, their union was once again annulled on the grounds that he had reneged on the agreed conditions. Abdul Rahman’s failure to subdue his defiant bride and her obstreperous mother was the source of much gossip in Pabbi, according to a colleague, and soon afterwards he left Pakistan and returned to Malaysia, ‘embarrassed and ashamed’, says Rabiah.

  Devi’s ill-conceived mismatch was a source of lingering bitterness in the life of Rabiah’s family. She is not a woman prone to regret, but this is one exception. ‘If I had the ability to change anything I’ve done in the past, that would be the thing I would change. I sincerely regret that that happened, although I believe that everything happens for a reason. I just didn’t have the wisdom to be able to think of the long-term consequences. Whatever possessed me, I really thought it would be a way to keep the family together. Stupid me.’

  A year or so later, Devi married an Iraqi man who was working at an orphanage in Peshawar, a union her mother played no part in arranging. Nine months later, she gave birth to Rabiah’s first grandchild, a girl named Huda Jehad.

  In April 1992 the Afghan mujahidin claimed another historic victory, with the collapse of the despised Najibullah regime that the Soviets had left behind in Kabul. An Islamic government was hastily constituted by the mujahidin groups to take power in Afghanistan. But the promise of peace and stability proved illusory. The rival factions remained deeply divided by ethnic, tribal, religious, political and personal enmities, and a bloody power struggle soon erupted between the two strongest warlords, the legendary Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Massoud and his bitter enemy, the Pashtun, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In an attempt to broker a reconciliation, Osama bin Laden flew to Peshawar and arranged a telephone conference between the two chieftains, but his efforts at peace-making failed. While Massoud’s forces occupied the capital, Hekmatyar’s troops massed on the outskirts of Kabul in readiness for a bloody showdown.

  For a while, life continued much as normal in Pabbi, which remained largely cut off from the outside world, its citize
ns unaware that their holy struggle was about to descend into a vicious civil war. Two years after her arrival, Rabiah was offered a new job in a school being established for orphaned Afghan girls. It was a project initiated by an Afghan woman whom Rabiah knew as Umm Abdullah, the niece of a leading Pashtun politician, Sebghatullah Mojadiddi, who had been named president in the transitional government in Kabul. Umm Abdullah had lived in Saudi Arabia for fifteen years and had a PhD in mathematics, by Rabiah’s account, while her husband, who held a masters degree, taught English at Sayyaf’s university. A feisty feminist by Afghan standards, with an uncommonly accommodating husband, Umm Abdullah believed all girls had to be educated in order to play a meaningful role in the new Afghan state, including girls whose fathers had been ‘martyred’ in the war. (Any child without a father was deemed to be an orphan, even if his or her mother was alive, because in Islam fathers are deemed financially responsible for their children.) Umm Abdullah’s project faced trenchant opposition from the Pashtun patriarchy who saw little need to educate girls and resented the spread of Saudi-funded Wahhabi orthodoxy in Afghanistan. In the face of their hostility, Umm Abdullah had raised the funds and succeeded in persuading Sayyaf to back her project.

  Rabiah was assigned the position of ‘medical officer’ at the school, with responsibility for the health care of several hundred girls. ‘I was for all intents and purposes the doctor there. I diagnosed them and prescribed the drugs that were needed’, she says.

  The school offered an extremely limited curriculum. The girls were taught to read and write the Quran in Arabic and the Afghan language, Dari, which meant that in the process they learned to read and write. In addition they were taught domestic skills such as sewing, beading and embroidery. Given the profound conservatism of the Pashtun culture, it seemed like an achievement at the time. But Rabiah would later conclude that limiting girls’ education to religious studies and basic literacy was a tragic failing. ‘We made a mistake in Pakistan in the 1980s. The women’s schools opened by the Arabs were only for religion. They didn’t have the foresight to educate Afghan girls on a broader level. Sayyaf did have a school that taught secular studies, but it was only for boys; the only girls section was a nurses college and a female medical faculty. The orphanages taught Quran, reading and writing, and manual skills. But there was no broader education. It was a very, very big mistake. A whole generation was lost—not just girls, because even boys were not educated in general either.’

  But these criticisms are made with hindsight. At the time, like most of her cohorts, Rabiah was swept up in the revolutionary fervour of forging an Islamic state. And suddenly, it seemed within their grasp. ‘We honestly thought we’d obtained the objective and the difficult days were over. There was an expectation that we would all move to Afghanistan and live happily ever after.’

  But in August 1992 the short-lived elation over the mujahi-din victory was shattered when the Pashtun warlord Hekmatyar launched a barrage of rocket fire against Kabul, aimed at dislodging his bitter rival, Massoud. The attack precipitated a savage new contest for power. Over the next eighteen months, Kabul was subjected to the most ferocious bombardment it had ever endured, which killed 25 000 people and destroyed half the city.

  It was events on the other side of the world, however, that would finally spell an end to the Afghan-Arab idyll in Pabbi. In February 1993, a Ford van carrying a 540-kilogram bomb was detonated in the underground carpark of the World Trade Center in New York. The bombers had hoped to topple the twin towers, but on this first attempt they succeeded only in ripping apart five lower floors, leaving six people dead and more than 1000 injured. The perpetrator was a Kuwaiti-born engineer, Ramzi Yousef, a nephew of Sayyaf’s secretary, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Yousef had travelled to Peshawar in the late 1980s, stayed at bin Laden’s guesthouse and trained in Camp Sadda, according to a fellow militant who later testified to having seen him there between 1989 and 1991. Yousef’s attempt on the World Trade Center was the forerunner for his uncle’s successful destruction of the twin towers eight years later on 11 September 2001.

  Yousef’s attack concentrated world attention for the first time on the looming ‘blowback’ from the Islamic militants who had flourished in north-west Pakistan, thanks in large measure to US and Saudi support. It also brought Osama bin Laden onto America’s radar, although there was no clear connection between him and the World Trade Center bombing, and little was known at this stage about who bin Laden was or what he was doing. The FBI was told in 1993 that a ‘Saudi prince’ was supporting radical Islamists plotting attacks in New York. A CIA report that year named bin Laden as an ‘independent actor (who) sometimes works with other individuals or governments’ to promote ‘militant Islamic causes’. However, when the Congressional Taskforce on Terrorism published the names of several dozen ‘prominent figures in Islamist terrorism’ in September 1993, bin Laden’s name was not on the list. This was not because he was operating in secret, but simply because he remained a marginal player at this time.

  However, investigations into Ramzi Yousef’s bombing would gradually focus keen attention on activities in the militant training camps of Pakistan and Afghanistan, including Sayyaf’s Camp Sadda where Yousef had trained. A US State Department report in 1995 asserted that ‘all the factions’ including ‘the regime in Kabul’ are ‘involved in harboring or facilitating camps that have trained terrorists from many nations who have been active in worldwide terrorist activity’. It singled out Sayyaf for ‘continuing to harbor and train potential terrorists in his camps’.

  Under pressure from the United States, the Pakistani government of Prime Minister Benazhir Bhutto launched a crackdown aimed at expelling the foreign fighters entrenched in the North West Frontier Province and along the Afghan border.

  ‘Benazir Bhutto wanted the Afghan-Arabs out in no uncertain terms’, Rabiah recounts. ‘She started having the security forces round people up, imprison them, and send them back to their own countries. She threatened to clean Pabbi out if people didn’t give up and leave.’

  Sayyaf and his lieutenants had left already, relocating to Afghanistan to fight it out for control of their ravaged country. Their former benefactor, bin Laden, had gone as well, expelled from his native Saudi Arabia and now living in exile in Sudan. With his departure, the flow of money to the Afghan-Arabs had stopped.

  ‘Times got really tough’, Rabiah remembers. ‘We couldn’t run the generator any more because there was no money. So we had no electricity. The hospital had no medicine, we didn’t even have antibiotics.’ A Saudi princess had donated US$100 000 to buy milk for Afghan children—so there was milk, but not much else. ‘I remember because I asked a sheikh if we could use the money for antibiotics and he said it wasn’t permitted because she’d given it for milk. It used to frustrate me—what, are you gonna fatten them so they can die of infection?’ Even food was running short. ‘Just before we left Pabbi, all we had left was half a cup of old oil and some lentils. We’d been eating lentils and bread, lentils and bread, lentils and bread. My children hate lentils.’ There were family problems as well. Rabiah’s eldest son, Mohammed, who had grown into a rebellious fifteen year old, had tired of life in Pabbi and run away to Peshawar to stay with a friend whose father worked for the United Nations, according to Rabiah.

  Rahmah—who was ten years old by this time—remembers the day the family’s food ran out in Pabbi. ‘My mother at that point was working in the hospital with no pay as they could not afford to pay her any more. It came to the day that we had spent our last rupiah on bread and we had nothing. My mother had used the last grain of lentils in the house and we had no more kerosene. Subhan Allah (Praise Allah), I remember this day very clearly … We had just prayed thuhr (midday prayer) when my mum called us and sat us down and explained to us that we had made hijrah and Allah will not leave us, but at the same time we must face hardships as the sahbah (companions of the Prophet) did. I could see my mother was holding back her tears as she continued to tell us how we
had spent our last rupiah and that she did not know how and when our next meal would be. So she told us to make dua (prayer) and she held us all … My siblings were too young to understand, but I was old enough and I began to cry.’

  Rahmah recounts that suddenly they were startled by a knock at the door. It was strange, as usually no one left their houses at thuhr time because it was so hot. Rahmah and her brother ran and opened the door, to find a man in a turban dressed all in black, standing in front of a shiny new pickup truck.

  ‘Is this the house of Umm Mohammed Australie?’ asked the stranger.

  ‘Yes it is’, Rahmah replied.

  ‘Can you give her this’, said the man, handing Mustafa a white envelope.

  ‘We ran inside and gave it to my mother’, Rahmah’s account continues. ‘And when she opened it she found enough money to last us five months, Allahu Akbar.’

  ‘Who was that man?’ Rabiah asked the children.

  ‘We don’t know, we’ve never seen him before.’

  ‘Quickly, run out and ask who he is and how did he know of us.’

  But by the time they got outside there was no sign of the man or his shiny car, not even a cloud of dust.

  Rahmah was sure it was a miracle that had saved them. ‘Until this day I believe that Allah sent that man, and if I close my eyes I can still see his face and exactly what he wore and the car … and I can remember thinking, masha Allah (thanks to Allah) what a big new beautiful car.’