The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  As the months passed, the Pakistani government stepped up the pressure to force the foreign jihadists out. It faced stiff resistance, not least because the Pashtun code of honour known as Pashtunwali insists that hospitality and protection must be extended to their maymon, or guests. Furthermore, the Afghan-Arabs enjoyed the status of muhajirin, Muslim pilgrims who had migrated for the sake of Islam and must be given sanctuary. And the foreigners had no intention of simply walking away, according to Rabiah: ‘The Afghan-Arabs said, “We’ll fight, we won’t go peacefully”’.

  By Rabiah’s account she and her family were among the last holdouts who refused to leave, even when they heard that Benazir Bhutto was sending army tanks to surround Pabbi. As the tanks moved in to blockade the road to Sayyafabad, the mujahidin prepared to defend their ground, ordering the women and children among them to take shelter with Afghani families in the nearby refugee camp.

  ‘They took all the Afghan-Arab women and children and put us with the Afghans. We hid inside the Afghans’ houses for three days, we weren’t allowed to talk, we were in hiding.’ Rabiah was handed an AK-47 and given instructions on how to use it, which she was quite prepared to do if there was a fight. ‘I grew up in Mudgee, I used to go rabbit hunting with my brother when I was four and used to shoot cans with a telescopic rifle as a kid. Kalashnikovs are even easier. If you put them on roosh (automatic) you don’t even have to aim.’

  Rabiah says she never got the chance to test her skills with a Kalashnikov; the foreigners remaining in Pabbi had no choice but to leave.

  ‘When we had to leave Pabbi, it was like someone ripped your heart out. My kids and me, we feel like our life stopped when we left Pabbi. It was devastating—insofar as a Muslim can be devastated, because in the end it was what Allah planned.’

  Rabiah and the children left Pabbi in convoy with the remnants of Sayyaf’s Afghan-Arabs and returned to Peshawar where they were ‘swallowed up’ among the vast human sea of Afghan refugees, which was once again swelling daily due to fierce fighting around Kabul. Rabiah’s friend Umm Mohammed Azzam found her a house in Hayatabad and a job running the dispensary in a Saudi-funded hospital. They stayed on for about a year, but it was clear the Afghan-Arabs’ previous safe haven was coming to an end, at least for the time being. The foreign jihadists were no longer welcome in either Pakistan or Afghanistan, where the mujahidin leader Ahmed Shah Massoud had announced: ‘The reality is the jihad is over in Afghanistan. We do not need armed Arabs going around our country. It is better for them to leave.’

  ‘The time in Peshawar was horrible, I hated it’, says Rabiah. ‘It was just a very terrible time. We were being harassed. People started being asked, “Why are you here? Have you got a visa?” The army would come and pick up brothers when they were at the mosque. And the support of the Pakistani people had fallen because of all the infighting.’

  Their financial situation was once again desperate. With bin Laden and al Qaeda now headquartered in Sudan, the payment of a monthly stipend to foreign volunteers in Peshawar was a luxury of the past. Rabiah’s benefactor Umm Mohammed Azzam had run out of funds as well. ‘Things were really bad, the money had dried up, the khafalla had stopped. We didn’t have money. I’d been working for two or three months at the hospital without payment. We were literally eating once a day. Things were falling apart.’

  In a last-ditch effort to find new sources of funding, Rabiah was delegated by the Afghan-Arab community in Peshawar to travel to the United Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East to solicit donations. She is unclear about exactly who sent her, except to say she was assigned the task by a friend named Umm Mahmud whose husband was on a ‘committee’ responsible for financing projects such as the orphanage, hospitals and schools. (It may have been the Islamic Co-ordination Council, an umbrella group of Peshawar-based charities established by Abdullah Azzam.) She was given a ticket, itinerary and a list of people to see in the United Kingdom, France and Yemen, who might be willing to contribute. She believes she was chosen ‘probably because of the places I was being sent, and the novelty value of a “revert” who’d lived and worked with the Afghans. And I can speak multiple languages.’ The trip was almost aborted at the last minute because of consternation among the male committee members about a woman travelling the world alone without a mahram, or male relative, to escort her. In the end they decided the urgency of the task made it Islamically acceptable.

  She left the children behind with a ‘sister’ in Peshawar and set off, flying first to London where the expedition got off to a disastrous start. ‘I got to the United Kingdom and they wouldn’t let me speak or go to the mosques, because I was a woman.’ The London stop improved somewhat with a private audience that had been pre-arranged with Yusuf Islam, the former 1970s pop music idol known in his heyday as Cat Stevens. The British-born Muslim convert was renowned as a passionate advocate of the Afghan cause and benefactor of a range of Islamic charities. Rabiah visited him and his wife at an Islamic school they had recently established in London. To her mind, he was no longer the pop icon whose songs had been veritable anthems for the teen surf crowd on Sydney’s northern beaches. ‘Cat Stevens was the same as Robyn Mary Hutchinson. He had ceased to exist’, she says. ‘I spoke to him about the project and said we were in need of help because that was when things were starting to fall to pieces. Yusuf Islam just listened. I don’t know if he gave money because I didn’t actually collect the money. But he seemed very kind, concerned and genuinely interested, and he did say that maybe he could help out with books and school equipment.’

  From London, she continued on to France and Yemen to lobby Muslim communities for donations. She also took a detour to Australia, where she stayed with her younger sister Susan on Sydney’s affluent and leafy north shore—a starkly surreal contrast to the parched poverty of Peshawar. While there she rang some old friends to say hello after Susan urged her, ‘You don’t know how many people have said to me, “What happened to your sister? Did she die or fall off the world?”’

  Rabiah had hoped to secure money from her former husband Abdul Rahim Ayub for the upkeep of their children, and donations from the Muslim community so they could stay in Peshawar. But her efforts were fruitless on both counts, leaving her flummoxed that neither her former spouse nor her fellow Muslims viewed her continued stay in Peshawar as a cause worth supporting. ‘All I needed was $150 a month and I could have stayed. One hundred and fifty dollars a month was enough to support a family of six. The Muslims here spend more than that on their Tim Tam biscuits and smelly things for the toilet. I just wanted to be supported. But I didn’t get any support.’

  Rabiah returned to Peshawar empty-handed. ‘The whole thing was a pretty dismal failure. It only raised about $10 000 or $15 000—enough to keep a hospital going for about a week.’ The disappointment over her own failed efforts as a fund-raiser was overwhelmed by the realisation that the much vaunted Afghan jihad was coming to an inconclusive end. The victory over the Russians had been squandered, the rival mujahidin factions were continuing to tear Afghanistan apart, and there was still no prospect of an Islamic state.

  ‘It was a sadness that hit you at the core of your being’, says Rabiah. ‘Where had we gone wrong? Because Allah promises victory for Muslims, but it was just a mess. We had to look at ourselves—what had we done wrong?’ Her conclusion was: ‘What had gone wrong was that we hadn’t obeyed Allah. We started infighting. Allah will only give the Muslims victory when they are united.’

  She also felt betrayed by long-time Islamists such as Sayyaf, who she believed had sold out on their commitment to an Islamic state in return for a share of power in Afghanistan. ‘They were setting up a democracy, they were having elections, Sayyaf was part of it. It was wrong.’ For Rabiah, the objective was not democracy for Afghanistan, but securing an Islamic state. ‘I became a Muslim because I wanted to live Islam, not because I wanted to be a democratic Afghan or a republican American or a Pancasila Indonesian. If I wanted to live in a Western democracy sy
stem with the rule of law, I’d live in Australia.’

  The realisation that their struggle had foundered was a watershed—for Rabiah and the wider jihadist movement. She describes how at this point the movement polarised between those who felt that jihad had failed and those who believed the military struggle must continue. ‘After Peshawar they actually split into two distinct groups’, says Rabiah. On one side were the ‘Ikhwanis’, flag-bearers of the original Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwanil Muslimin, which had begun in Egypt and spread through the Muslim world. The pragmatists of the Brotherhood now believed that military jihad was futile and that their best course henceforth was to work within existing political systems to achieve Islamic law. The other camp, loosely termed ‘Salafi Jihadists’, believed that events in Pakistan and Afghanistan were merely a temporary setback, and that—like any revolution—the struggle must go on. This group completely shunned Western-style political systems and believed that military struggle was justified in order to establish Islamic law. It was in this camp that Rabiah’s allegiances lay.

  The Salafi Jihadists included the adherents of Osama bin Laden, now based in Sudan, and the remnants of Sayyaf’s Afghan-Arabs who were fleeing in all directions from Peshawar. In the coming years they would take their fight to Somalia, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and eventually further afield to the ‘far enemy’, the United States and its allies.

  But for Rabiah and her family the Afghan jihad had come to an end, at least for now. Dispirited and penniless, she had no option but to return to Australia. ‘It was just one of the many times that I came back when it wasn’t really a choice. I didn’t want to come back, but there wasn’t any money for wages any more in Peshawar. I couldn’t support myself, the money had run out, the hospitals were closing down, everyone was leaving.’

  She sold all her belongings—blankets, beds, whitegoods, cooking ware, and the air conditioner bought for her by bin Laden—to raise money for their airfares home. But she knew they would not be back in Australia for long.

  ‘It was not the end of the dream. Allah had something else in mind.’

  11

  ‘WAHHABI’

  Australia & Egypt, 1995–1999

  The culture shock of returning to Australia after four years with the mujahidin in Pakistan was worse than anything Rabiah’s young family had encountered when travelling abroad. The children had all been born or lived for much of their lives in third-world conditions in Indonesia or Pakistan. Five-year-old Aminah had been a baby when they left Australia and didn’t speak English. The two youngest boys, Mustafa and Ilyas, had forgotten much of their native tongue and conversed more readily in Arabic and Dari. Eleven-year-old Rahmah would later describe a recurring dream; she was twenty-one years old, spoke twenty languages and was still in fourth grade at school.

  They were picked up at the airport by Rabiah’s former husband, Abdul Rahim Ayub, who took them to stay at his two-bedroom flat at Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches. After a week there they moved to a refuge run by the Muslim Women’s Association at Yagoona in the city’s outer south-western suburbs.

  ‘For my children, it was almost like I’d picked them up and I’d put them on another planet’, Rabiah remembers. ‘Everything they’d learned in their lives—this is right, this is wrong, this is how you do and don’t behave—it was absolutely 180 degrees the opposite. And some of it was funny, but some of it was terrible.’

  The first morning in the communal dining room—where even sitting up at a table for breakfast was an oddity—Aminah couldn’t recognise anything that looked to her like food.

  ‘Mama, what’s for breakfast?’ she asked.

  ‘Have one of these—this is what they eat here’, Rabiah replied, pointing to the miniature cardboard packets of cereal on the table.

  ‘But they’re boxes.’

  ‘No, there’s stuff in them you can eat—here, have this one.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s called Rice Bubbles.’

  Aminah stared with dismay at the contents of the little box, which resembled no food she’d ever seen.

  ‘Mumkin ruz bidoon bubbles?’ she asked plaintively in Arabic. (‘Can I have the rice without the bubbles?’)

  At night in the refuge the children were put in a room with bunk beds, another disconcerting novelty after four years of sleeping on wooden pallets on the floor. Eight-year-old Mustafa fell out of the top bunk, sustaining concussion, and was taken to Sydney’s Westmead hospital where a doctor proceeded to ask him a series of standard questions to assess whether the blow to his head had caused any serious damage.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Mustafa’, the boy replied.

  Checking the paperwork, which showed the child’s given name was Abdullah, the doctor frowned.

  ‘When is your birthday?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Like many Muslim families, Rabiah’s did not celebrate birthdays.

  ‘Who is the prime minister of Australia?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did you get for Christmas?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The doctor concluded the boy had severe amnesia. In fact he just had a bump on the head, but the questions the doctor assumed any child would be able to answer were entirely foreign to his life experience.

  Within a short time the children fell ill with a range of ailments including the common cold, gastroenteritis—apparently from the strange bugs in the food and water—and asthma. On doctor’s orders Rabiah bought them regular beds, a precaution against the dust mites that make asthma endemic in Australia. They had trouble adjusting to the food and all lost weight. Rabiah believes they were homesick for their mudbrick house in Pabbi. ‘For the next year all they said was, “Can we please go home? We don’t like it here”.’

  The children were enrolled in the local state school, a condition of their accommodation at the women’s refuge. Five-year-old Aminah, a bright and inquisitive pupil like her older sisters, was eager to begin, until they pulled up at the school on day one to be greeted by a female teacher in a sleeveless top and three-quarter-length shorts. Aminah was accustomed to female teachers being covered from head to toe in black.

  ‘Please, what have I done? Why are you going to give me to these people?’ she shrieked at her mother.

  ‘Aminah thought I’d gone completely mad, handing her over to the kafr (non-believers)’, Rabiah recalls.

  Her predicament worsened at morning assembly, when Aminah and her siblings were called up onto the stage in the school hall for an official welcome. By this stage Aminah was trembling with fright, Rabiah recounts: ‘She doesn’t know if she’s going to be executed or not, so she’s shaking and crying’. After the principal introduced the newcomers, a boy of Aminah’s age stepped forward to give her a hug and kiss of welcome. It was all too much for her brother Ilyas. He and his siblings had grown up attending a segregated school; they had never played with children of the opposite sex who were unrelated to them—let alone been hugged and kissed in public by complete strangers. Ilyas jumped on the boy and dragged him off, shouting, ‘Anyone touches my sister and I’ll kill them’.

  For the two eldest children, Devi and Mohammed, now aged nineteen and seventeen, returning to Australia presented the possibility of a life radically different from the austere Islamic lifestyle their mother had chosen. Both of them seized the alternative. Mohammed, who in any event was too old to stay at a women’s refuge, went to stay instead with Rabiah’s sister, Susan, at her home on Sydney’s northern beaches. He got a job as an oxy-welder, stopped praying and got his ear pierced. Another man who met him at the Dee Why factory where he was working says, ‘I wouldn’t say he was anti-Islam but he had ceased to practise and he didn’t associate with the Muslim community’. After a couple of weeks at the refuge, Devi left with her two-year-old daughter Huda and went to stay with Susan as well. (Huda’s Iraqi father, who had intended following them from Pakistan, never got a visa and
didn’t make it to Australia.) Susan, who had three children of her own and doted on her niece and nephew, was happy to offer them a home, and made no secret of her disapproval of their unsettled life, being dragged by their mother on her travels around the world.

  ‘She thought she was saving them’, says Rabiah. ‘She thought she was giving them the chance of a normal life, rather than the indoctrination they’d had with me.’

  Like her brother, Devi soon shed her Islamic attire, abandoning the shapeless robe she had worn in Pakistan for jeans and t-shirts, which she initially teamed with a headscarf. She moved with baby Huda into a flat in beachside Harbord, where Rabiah had hung out with her friends as a teenager smoking marijuana joints in the sand dunes. Eager to continue her curtailed schooling, Devi enrolled in a TAFE course to complete years eleven and twelve of secondary school, intending to go to university to study sociology or languages, according to Rabiah.

  ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you’, Devi announced one day when her mother rang to say she was coming to visit. ‘I’m not wearing hijab any more.’

  For Rabiah this was a crushing blow. Devi’s simple act of discarding the headscarf felt to Rabiah like a massive rejection of all that she believed in and had instilled in her children. ‘I felt extreme sadness. She’s my firstborn child and she was letting go of something that I believed would bring her eternal happiness.’ She was referring not simply to the garment, but to the faith it symbolised. She believed that for a woman to go out without being ‘properly covered’, which meant at least concealing her hair, was a ‘major sin’. ‘I’m a mother and I believe in the laws of Allah. Obviously any mother doesn’t want her daughter to do something that will bring the anger of Allah upon them.’

  In a later conversation, Devi asked her: ‘Mama, can we leave Islam out of our relationship? Can you just be my mother and I be your daughter and let me find my own way? Will you agree that we will put Islam aside in our relationship?’ Rabiah’s response was: No, she could never put Islam aside.