Rabiah and the five children moved into Feiz’s carpeted fibro-cement double garage. It had a fridge, microwave, computer, and mattresses on the floor for sleeping on. ‘The kids loved it’, says Rabiah. ‘They said, “This is great, it’s like living in Pabbi again”.’
In early 1999, Rahmah—who was now sixteen years old— became engaged to be married. The husband chosen for her by Rabiah and Sheikh Omran was a young man named Khaled, the son of a devout Lebanese family in Lakemba. He was one of Sheikh Omran’s followers and a regular at the Haldon Street prayer room. The Islamic marriage contract signifying their betrothal stipulated that Rahmah would stay with her family for another year before going to live with Khaled, at which time the formal wedding celebration known as the walima would take place.
Not long after this, tragedy struck when Rabiah’s close friend Khadija, the wife of Sheikh Omran, was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. The entire community was shocked. Khadija was much loved; moreover, she had been a devotee of organic food who had made her own bread and kept bees for honey, yet suddenly her body was riddled with cancer. To compound the tragedy, Khadija and Sheikh Omran had five children.
Distressed by her friend’s illness, Rabiah left her children in Sydney and went to stay with Khadija at her family’s home at Cooronbong near Newcastle, where Khadija’s mother had taken her daughter to nurse her through her illness. They tried all manner of treatments, from conventional drugs to new-age elixirs, but it was soon apparent that the cancer was terminal. It was a traumatic and emotional time for all who knew her. Some among Khadija’s friends and family resented Rabiah’s black-veiled presence and her strongly stated opinions about her friend’s treatment, which included objecting to the natural remedies that were failing to alleviate Khadija’s intense pain. Nadia Aboufadil had not seen Rabiah since she had left Melbourne for Pakistan a decade earlier. Nadia was grief-stricken by Khadija’s illness and incensed at Rabiah ‘taking over’ her treatment.
‘She was not human any more when she came back’, says Nadia. ‘She just didn’t seem to be a person any more. She had changed so much. I didn’t like the new Rabiah at all—but I could see it was a progression of the original Rabiah. I hated her. I wanted to beat her up.’
Khadija’s brother, the soccer star Craig Johnston, who had flown from the UK after learning of his sister’s illness, had never met Rabiah before. A life-long surfer, Johnston recalls Rabiah chatting at Khadija’s bedside about her days on the surf scene. Johnston remembers her as ‘a strong-willed person’, but says: ‘Charmaine’s condition was dreadful and it was a very emotional time for us all. As far as I knew this lady was just there to help my very sick sister with her religious beliefs and her pain.’
While the family clung to hopes of a miracle, Rabiah could see that her friend was dying. She was constantly at her bedside, urging her to pray and seek Allah’s grace.
‘For God’s sake, will you shut up—can’t you see I’m dying?’ an exhausted Khadija snapped at her more than once, Rabiah recalls.
After Khadija passed away in December 1999, rumours circulated that Sheikh Omran and Rabiah would marry. ‘It got really nasty’, Rabiah remembers. ‘People were gossiping that I’d only gone to look after her from ulterior motives, because I wanted to marry Abu Ayman. I think it was just that people can’t mind their own business, and they wanted to put an ulterior motive on me staying with Khadija when she died.’ Rabiah says Sheikh Omran never proposed and that she would not have married him even if he had. ‘Abu Ayman wouldn’t marry me—I was his student, he respected me. And I was so far removed from the type of woman Khadija was. The wives of sheikhs are usually simple, undemanding women, who are able to sacrifice themselves.’
In the aftermath of Khadija’s death, Rabiah felt the familiar need to get away. And at the end of 1999, the opportunity arose. A couple of friends who had recently married were planning to do the haj pilgrimage to Mecca. The pilgrims were Maryati Idris, an Indonesian woman whom Rabiah had met in Jakarta and had also known in Cairo, and her husband, Jack Thomas, a Muslim convert from Melbourne. Rabiah had met Thomas when the couple attended Rahmah’s wedding in Sydney. Maryati rang Rabiah a few months after the wedding to announce that the couple were going to ‘do haj ’.
‘Inshallah I’ll be able to go next year’, Rabiah said.
‘Why don’t you come this year? It would be awesome if we could go together’, Maryati suggested.
‘I’ve saved enough money for myself to go, but I need enough for my son because I can’t go alone. By next year I’ll have enough for Mustafa to come with me.’
Maryati rang back a few days later.
‘We want you to do haj with us. If you come with us, we’ll pay for Mustafa.’ It was a calculated act of generosity as Muslims believe that enabling someone else to make the pilgrimage will be specially rewarded by Allah.
Rabiah accepted their offer, then did some calculations of her own. She had wanted to do haj ever since converting to Islam. But for the same cost as two people taking the expensive package tour to Mecca, her entire family could travel abroad to live in an Islamic country. She rang Abu Bakar Ba’asyir in Indonesia to seek his advice on whether she should do haj or hijrah, migration for the sake of Islam. Ba’asyir gave the advice she wanted to hear: doing haj would benefit only her and Mustafa, while doing hijrah to a Muslim country would allow her whole family to reap rewards. Maryati was surprised by the change of plan, but Rabiah assured her that donating towards hijrah would also earn Allah’s pleasure.
The children were startled when Rabiah came home from the travel agent with return tickets to Pakistan for herself, 14-year-old Mustafa, 12-year-old Ilyas, 10-year-old Aminah and her granddaughter Huda, now aged seven, who had been living with them since Egypt.
‘But Mama, we don’t have any money or anywhere to go. Where are we going? And what are we going to do?’
As always, Rabiah had a plan. They would travel to Peshawar to look up her old friend Umm Mohammed Azzam and reunite Huda with her father, who Rabiah believed was still in Pakistan. Rahmah and her husband Khaled would join them there later.
At this point Rabiah insists she had no thought of going to Afghanistan, where the black-turbaned zealots of the Taliban had swept to power three years before. ‘I didn’t support the Taliban at all. I had heard a lot of negative things—that they were beating women up, women had no rights, they weren’t allowed to be educated. I thought they were a bunch of uneducated Afghans who had a very flawed concept of Islam and they were imposing it on the people of Afghanistan.’
12
A LETTER TO OSAMA
Afghanistan, 2000–2001
ATTENTION: ENTRY OF FOREIGNERS IS PROHIBITED BEYOND THIS POINT
The big black lettering on the sign outside Peshawar hinted at the perils of the journey ahead, as a dilapidated taxi carrying Rabiah and the four children rattled along the Jamrud Road, west towards the Afghan border. Dawn broke and thin spirals of smoke rose from the roadside teashops and kebab stands as they drove past the Smugglers Bazaar and the vast squalor of the Kachagari refugee camp. As they entered the Khyber Agency, an autonomous tribal zone barred to foreigners except with an armed tribal escort, the guard at the checkpoint took a cursory glance and waved them through. The woman in the sky-blue burka, two girls in hijabs and a pair of swarthy youths in faded shalwar kameez must have looked like any Pashtun family.
On either side of the bumpy bitumen, vendors squatted beside pyramids of tomatoes and beckoned from stalls selling bottled water and guns; the sheep tails hanging in some stores signified hashish for sale. As the road ascended through the Suleiman Ranges, small stone forts and mudbrick Pashtun houses dotted the barren hillsides, dwarfed by the grand fortified compounds of opium and weapons smugglers. The girls gripped hands as they passed under the stone archway of the Jamrud Fort, a relic of a bygone Sikh empire, which marks the entrance to the legendary Khyber Pass.
The ribbon of tarmac—once reputedly so narrow that two fully la
den camels could not pass abreast—climbed higher until they reached the final checkpost. After a muttered exchange of cigarettes and baksheesh, they were again waved on. Then, through the dusty windows of the taxi, a breathtaking vista spread out before them—the majestic Hindu Kush mountains enclosing the treacherous switchback leading to Afghanistan.
Rabiah clutched the children tightly and whispered, ‘Inshallah (God willing), today we will be going in’.
They had arrived in Peshawar a few months earlier— Rabiah; her two younger sons Mustafa and Ilyas, now aged fourteen and twelve; 10-year-old Aminah; and granddaughter Huda, aged seven. They were met by Huda’s father, an Iraqi refugee who was now teaching Arabic at a Peshawar university. He had remarried and had three young children. He found Rabiah a downstairs apartment in a house owned by another Iraqi family in the old ‘Afghan-Arab’ enclave of Hayatabad. Rabiah enrolled the children to resume their studies at Abdullah Azzam’s Al Ansar school, but when she went to look up her old friend Umm Mohammed Azzam, she discovered the jihad pioneer’s widow had returned to her native Jordan and was not expected back for several months. Most of the people Rabiah had known in ‘the first jihad’ were also gone. When she got her son-in-law to drive her to Pabbi she found a ghost town, its mudbrick houses crumbling and taken over by Afghan refugees. In keeping with the ever-shifting realignments of Afghan politics, Pabbi’s former patron Sayyaf had abandoned his old base to join forces with Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance and was now living in a modest compound outside Kabul.
While the politics had changed, there was a new buzz about Peshawar. Throughout the 1980s it had been the launching pad for the jihad against the Russians. Now it was the staging point for a new wave of would-be mujahidin, arriving to join the Taliban in Afghanistan.
‘I got there and people were flocking into Afghanistan’, says Rabiah. ‘People were arriving constantly, weekly, from all over the world to cross over.’ Rabiah maintains she was surprised. Her impression at this point was that the Taliban were a bunch of bearded hoodlums ‘who wanted to keep Islam in the dark ages’.
There was intense debate in Peshawar about the kind of Islamic state the Taliban had enforced. The black-turbaned warriors had swept to power in 1996, to the initial relief of a populace brutalised and desperate after seven years of savage civil war between the rival mujahidin factions after the defeat of the Soviets. The puritanical taliban (students) raised in the madrassas along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border had vowed to restore security and order, based on Islamic law. As the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid wrote:
They saw themselves as the cleansers and purifiers of a guerrilla war gone astray, a social system gone wrong and an Islamic way of life that had been compromised by corruption and excess … From their madrassas, they learnt about the ideal Islamic society created by the Prophet Mohammed 1,400 years ago and this is what they wanted to emulate.
And so they did, starting with the announcement on Radio Shariat: ‘Thieves will have their hands and feet amputated, adulterers will be stoned to death, and those taking liquor will be lashed’.
The muhajirin (migrant) community of Peshawar was polarised—as was the broader jihadist movement—over the Taliban’s draconian methods. Some had branded them ‘Islamically deviant’ and puppets of the Pakistani ISI (Inter Service Intelligence), which sponsored their meteoric rise. Others sympathised with their ‘year zero’ approach, and believed the excesses of their early years were short-term aberrations that would ultimately give way to the creation of a perfect Islamic state. Rabiah decided to go and find out for herself.
When her daughter Rahmah arrived in Peshawar, heavily pregnant and accompanied by her husband Khaled, they were stunned to learn that Rabiah had decided to ‘go over the mountain’—local parlance for crossing into Afghanistan. Not long after their arrival Rahmah gave birth to a son named Zubair in Peshawar. From all that she and Khaled had heard, Afghanistan was no place to take a newborn baby. The infant mortality rate was 18 per cent, the highest in the world; a quarter of all children would die before their fifth birthday. Only 29 per cent of the population had access to health care, and only 12 per cent to safe water, so children were dying of preventable diseases such as measles and diarrhoea. Rahmah and Khaled refused to take their infant son to such a place. Rabiah was dismissive of their concerns and angrily announced she was taking the other children and going without them.
But getting to Afghanistan was no simple enterprise. The border was closed to foreigners. Only the tribal Pashtun—most of whom had no personal documents, let alone passports—were allowed to cross freely. Rabiah knew, however, that there was a well-worn route. Their Iraqi host put them in touch with a people smuggler who could make the arrangements for a fee of $200—whether or not they made it across.
When they arrived at the border crossing at Torkham, 58 kilometres west of Peshawar, the scene before them was bedlam—a jostling melee of heavily laden camels, donkeys, horse-drawn carts, ancient Mercedes buses, trucks belching diesel fumes, and a river of humanity on foot. Merchants hawked kebabs, tobacco, carpets, clothing and foodstuffs from a grimy metropolis of roadside stalls. Overhead, the trees and lampposts were festooned with garlands of black tape, ripped from music cassettes banned by the Taliban and confiscated on the spot from unwary travellers.
The border was marked by a crude metal archway over the road, and more signs in Urdu, Arabic and English: ‘Warning—no foreigner is allowed beyond this point. Anyone passing will be prosecuted.’ From raised platforms on either side, soldiers from the Pakistani Frontier Scouts with rifles slung over their shoulders scanned the crowd for anything out of the ordinary—such as foreigners attempting an illegal crossing.
Rabiah adjusted her burka and surveyed the scene from behind the blue mesh that concealed her eyes. She whispered a prayer and pulled Aminah’s and Huda’s hijabs tightly around their faces. Huda clung to her beloved teddy bear, which had been renamed Beniah and given a ribbon and a thatch of sewn-on woollen hair, after Huda decided she was too old to have a boy teddy. Mustafa and Ilyas unloaded their few bags and an Esky cooler carrying drinking water from the taxi. They would have to cross the frontier by foot.
‘OK, we’re going to split up now’, Rabiah instructed them. ‘Ilyas and Aminah, you walk ahead. Huda will come with me. Mustafa, you walk separately on the other side. And no matter what happens, don’t look back. Even if one of us gets caught, you just keep walking.’ Nervously they slipped into the crowd and walked to the crossing.
‘I sent Ilyas and Aminah ahead, and I saw them cross’, Rabiah remembers. ‘Huda and I were just ahead of Mustafa. He was alone on the side.’
A moment later, Rabiah and Huda were through. A few steps behind them, Mustafa was about to cross when a Pakistani soldier, whose attention was apparently drawn by the large Esky he was carrying, singled him out. The soldier barked a question at him in Pashto, a language Mustafa didn’t understand; he caught only the last word, ‘Kabul’. Guessing that the guard was asking where he was going, Mustafa grunted ‘Kabul’ back. The guard was apparently satisfied and motioned him through.
On the Afghan side of the border they regrouped, Mustafa still sweating from his brush with capture, Rabiah and the girls weeping with sheer relief. Looming over them was an enormous sign in Arabic: ‘May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon you. You have now safely entered the land of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.’
‘I’ll never forget it, we stood there and the tears rolled down our faces’, Rabiah recalls. ‘You will never be able to put it down on paper, the feeling of crossing over and knowing that you had entered the place where you belonged. That was the best day of my life.’
From there they took another taxi to the city of Jalalabad, about 60 kilometres west of the border on the road to Kabul. Laid out in the sixteenth century as a winter resort for the aristocrats of the Mughal Empire, Jalalabad lies on the southern bank of the Kabul River on a fertile floodplain that irrigates a vivid patchwork of or
ange groves, rice fields and sugar cane. Rabiah had a friend from Peshawar who was now living in Jalalabad and had invited them to stay. ‘I simply asked, “Where do the foreigners live?” And we were pointed in the right direction.’
Rabiah’s friend, an Austrian woman known as Umm Sofia who was married to a Moroccan, lived in a compound of mud-brick houses surrounded by rice fields and connected by dusty alleyways, which turned into a muddy mire in the rain. There was no electricity or running water, and diseases such as cholera, typhoid and malaria were endemic. Rabiah loved it. ‘Afghanistan was incredibly beautiful, it used to take my breath away. Every time I left the house, looking at the mountains and the rivers, I always felt the most breathtaking beauty. At night, standing on your roof and just looking up at the stars when there’s no electricity, they were so bright it was like you could put your hand out and touch them. Or standing on your roof looking at the mountains covered in snow, it was breathtaking, I could feel it in my chest, my heart would expand.’
Jalalabad was home to a small cohort of Muslim émigrés from Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa. Some were veterans of the jihad against the Russians; others were newcomers drawn by the utopian vision of an Islamic state. A few had followed Osama bin Laden when he relocated from Sudan to Afghanistan after the Taliban’s rise to power. Bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan four years before, in 1996, after US pressure on the Sudanese government forced him from exile in Khartoum. After arriving by chartered jet with three wives (a fourth refused to accompany him to Afghanistan), innumerable children and a retinue of staff and fighters, he was given the use of a farm south of Jalalabad, where his followers set up tents for the wives and dug latrines and drainage ditches in a complex enclosed by barbed wire. By the time Rabiah arrived in Jalalabad, bin Laden’s base had been deserted except for a handful of families whom she visited there once to treat a sick child. Bin Laden and his entourage had relocated to the desert city of Kandahar, headquarters of his Taliban hosts.
The Mother of Mohammed Page 27