Authors: Jason Burke
This picture of the young bin Laden is convincing. Such generosity, perhaps learned from his father, who always carried wads of notes to give to the poor, is something that almost all who have fought for or alongside bin Laden mention. Though in the Middle East the distribution of substantial sums would be expected from someone of his
status and background, former associates all refer to bin Laden’s munificence. Some speak of $1,500 donations for marriages,
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others talk of cash doled out for shoes or for watches for needy relatives.
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Bin Laden found time during his intermittent stays in Peshawar to teach at least one Afghan mujahid some Arabic.
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Many former fighters talk of group discussions during which bin Laden would narrate religious stories or sing religious songs. Most say that, at least in the early 1980s, he was still the quiet shy young man noted by his teachers ten years previously.
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There were some clues to a burgeoning sense of mission, however. Bin Laden repeatedly referred in conversations to Salah ad Din, the twelfth-century Kurdish general who united the Islamic factions of the Middle East to defeat the Crusaders and spoke often about
sura ya sin
, the thirty-sixth verse often referred to as the heart of the Qur’an and devoted to the problem of human moral responsibility and the certainty of resurrection and judgement.
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It is often said that bin Laden was funded by the CIA. This is not true and, indeed, would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul-Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia’s cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets’ ‘Vietnam’ was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channelled through the Pakistani government, which in effect meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers, was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world. Most of the major Gulf-based charities operating today were founded at this time to raise money or channel government funds to the Afghans, civilians and fighters. In fact, as little as 25 per cent of the money for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states.
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For Riyadh, the financial effort had a clear logic. In 1980, the Saudi government, shaken by Juhaiman’s attack on Mecca and the Iranian Revolution, perceived two clear threats to their position. One was internal, from the Islamic extremists who saw them as apostate rulers. The second was external. The events in Tehran had turned the minority
Shia strand of Islam into the Islamic world’s most radical and inspiring example of modern Muslim activism. Whereas Riyadh had always invoked Islam to uphold the political status quo, Iran’s new rulers presented the religion as a revolutionary ideology by which the rule of tyrannical kings could be ended and an egalitarian social and economic order created. Muslims everywhere, Sunnis and Shias alike, were celebrating the events in Tehran.
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The increased influence of the Shias could clearly damage the interests of the Saudis, and thus the interests of the majority Sunni, of which the house of al-Saud felt themselves to be the pre-eminent guardians, throughout the umma. Pouring their new oil-based wealth into the Afghan jihad and funding a massive campaign to increase the penetration of Saudi-style Sunni Islam overseas would, the house of al-Saud hoped, both roll back the Shia tide while simultaneously bolstering their Islamic credentials at home and abroad. The result was the exporting on an industrial scale of Wahhabi, Salafi, neo-traditionalist or ‘hard’ Islam, as some scholars characterize it, with its almost obsessive emphasis on the outward details of Islamic practice, Qur’anic literalism and profound hostility to all other forms of Islamic worship, let alone other religions. The Saudi campaign was bolstered by governments and private donors in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the Gulf. It was to have an enormous effect on the course of the Afghan war and on modern Islamic radicalism.
Prince Turki al-Faisal was, as head of the Saudi intelligence service, responsible for overseeing the distribution of the huge sums of money being collected for the Afghan jihad from both public and private sources. Official Saudi Arabian aid matched that from the USA, which went from $30m in 1980 to $250m in 1985. Unofficial Saudi aid involved similar, if not larger, sums.
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Though organizations such as the Muslim World League, and its subsidiaries the International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO) and the Islamic Relief Agency, played their part, al-Faisal needed reliable and honest men on the ground to manage the flow of funds to their recipients. Bin Laden was one. A number of other Saudis performed similar roles.
It is a mistake to overestimate the contribution made to the war in Afghanistan by the Arabs. Many Afghan mujahideen fighters, of whom
there were somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 fighting at any one time, saw the volunteers who came to join them from the Middle East as a liability. There were only a few hundred fighting at any one time and their contribution to the ‘jihad’ in military terms was negligible. The Afghan Arabs rarely fought in discrete groups and were usually deployed as small detachments attached to the various mujahideen factions. There was never an ‘Arab’ or ‘International’ brigade as such. Many volunteers merely turned up in Peshawar, made their way over the border and attached themselves to a commander.
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Estimates of how many Arabs took part in the ten-year combat vary. Some are ludicrous. Former CIA officials stationed in Pakistan at the time say it was a maximum of 25,000.
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It is likely that less than half of the volunteers actually saw combat, spending their time instead in support activities away from the frontlines. Many married local women and settled into desk jobs based in Peshawar or elsewhere in Pakistan.
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Though their fighting spirit was not doubted by the Afghans, the Arabs were generally disliked. Indeed, the profound gulf between the Salafi Islam of the majority of the Arab volunteers and the very different Islam of the vast majority of Afghans often caused problems and, on occasion, violence. The Arab fighters’ practice of taking local girls in ‘temporary marriages’ was particularly provocative.
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Yet it was the Afghan factions whose beliefs were closest to those of the Arabs and who were marginal at the beginning of the war that were dominant by its end.
The rise of political Islam in Afghanistan during the 1980s might seem to be a, slightly belated, part of the broad trend throughout the Islamic world in this period. The similarities with the rise of other political Islamist movements elsewhere, however, should not be allowed to make radical Islam’s eventual domination, ideologically and practically, of the war against the Soviets seem inevitable. Though there are strong coincidences with groups overseas, such as in the social backgrounds of key cadres, there are also differences. In 1979, in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere, Islamic radicalism was drawing most of its recruits from the recently urbanized and often impoverished lowermiddle classes that had resulted from massive population growth and economic development. In Afghanistan, particularly outside Kabul,
nothing even approximating a genuine middle class, let alone alienated, disappointed and struggling urban masses ripe for radicalization, existed. The Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had discovered this very rapidly when it took power in 1978. The PDPA cadres railed against the ‘superstition’ and ‘ignorance’ of the rural areas. What they had come up against was the solidity of a genuinely profound, deeply traditional faith.
That religion was, and to an extent still is, so deeply part of the personal identity and worldview of Afghans that it is hard for a secular, atheist Westerner to comprehend. I can remember standing in the early evening by the side of the road between Kabul and Kandahar in the summer of 1998. The road is so bad that, for long sections, the drivers of the ancient coaches and trucks and the newer, if as battered, taxis often prefer to drive along dry riverbeds rather than the linked potholes and craters that pass for a road surface. Traffic was, unsurprisingly, minimal. We had stopped at the crest of a hill and could see for miles in every direction. To the west lay the first ridges of the central Afghan highlands. To the east lay the mountains of the Pakistani frontier. Bands of
koochi
nomads were driving their herds of camels across the thin grass. Buses had halted at intervals along the raised road, and by every one I could see the passengers casting their
pattus
(traditional blankets) down in the fine dirt to kneel in prayer. The koochis too were facing Mecca beside their livestock. That night we slept on the floor of a
chaikhanna
, a basic roadside inn. In the morning, fifty men took their blankets and lined up for dawn prayers in the road outside. The equivalent in the West would be the guests of a motorway motel congregating for an outdoor service at 5am.
Such purely visual manifestations of faith reveal little of how Islam textures the lives of most Afghans. In the early 1970s, one Western writer likened ‘coming into Afghanistan’ to entering ‘some sort of temple’. ‘Waiting for customers, the shopkeepers counted their prayer beads with half-closed eyes, whispering the attributes of God,’ he wrote.
The dervishes, their headdresses tied… with cord, held out their begging bowls to pious passers-by in the bazaars. Friends greeted each other with
hand on the heart, heads bowed, praising the Lord for His gift of good health. The peasants did not ride a horse, an ass, a camel, or a taxi without first murmuring the name of God. The meals began with a divine invocation, the right hand silently kneading the grains of rice or the piece of bread because thus had the Prophet done… Every gesture was dictated by ritual and impregnated with the sacred.
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Little, at least in rural areas, has changed today. This was not, and is not, an academic, rarefied faith. It is a very real and practical part of everyday life. ‘The Islam practised in Afghan villages, nomad camps and most urban areas (the 90 to 95 per cent non-literates) would be almost unrecognizable to a sophisticated Muslim scholar.’
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It was, and is, a tolerant, flexible religion, similar to that practised throughout much of south and southwest Asia, east and north Africa and in many parts of the Middle East, full of mysticism, shrines, saints and tokens. It shares little with ‘hard’ Salafi and Wahhabi Islam or the political ideologies of Islam.
For the average Afghan villager, the two main religious groups in his life are the mullahs and the ulema. The mullahs are religious functionaries, leading the Friday service in a village mosque, administering the religious buildings, performing the small daily rituals that articulate daily life. Their upkeep is the responsibility of the village or its
khan
, the most powerful individual there. Though in some places they are respected, there is a strong culture of contempt for the usually unlettered, unsophisticated and parochial mullah. The ulema, however, distinguished by the titles of
maulvi
or
maulana
, are treated with profound respect. Unlike the mullahs, who were attached to an individual community, the ulema are a pan-Islamic body and were thus well placed to mediate between the villagers and the outside world, seen as the umma or the world Muslim community.
The first revolts against the Marxist regime in Kabul in 1978 and then, after December 1979, against the Soviets too, can be seen as part of a long-established local tradition of uprising against zulm, or oppression, reaching back to the days of King Amanullah, who reigned from 1919 to 1929, and to the wars against the British in the mid and late nineteenth century and well beyond. Such campaigns were
primarily led by local religious leaders, both ulema and Sufi
pirs
.
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The revolts of 1978–80 were as much against increasing state, and urban, interference in rural life as against the Soviet invasion. Those areas with the weakest links to Kabul and the regime rebelled first. The tribal areas in the east and south, dominated by the Pashtun tribes which, as the majority ethnic group, have the strongest history of benefiting from and participating in the state, rebelled last. As the ulema and the leaders of the Sufi sects had been intentionally marginalized by the state over the previous century they were a natural rallying point for any resentment against central authority, appearing untainted by contact with power. So in the first year of the jihad it was the
Harakat-e-Inqilab-e-Islami
movement of Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi, an alim, whose powerbase lay among the village mullahs and local ulema in the east of the country, as well as the students they taught, that received most popular support.
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In the revolt against the PDPA regime and the early years of the jihad against the Soviets, the aim of the rebels was reactionary: to expel the foreign intruders, but also to roll back the intrusive modern state with its intellectuals, bureaucrats and ideologues. This was a very different aim from that of the Afghan political Islamists who, drawing on the inspiration of Afghani, al-Banna, Maududi and Qutb, wanted not to roll back the state, but to appropriate and Islamicize it. Rural resentment was articulated, as it had been against the British in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in religious terms. Though the offence of the Marxists or the Soviets may not have been specifically directed against Islam, it was seen as such. The fight against it was thus a jihad. But a jihad that was very different from that of Qutb and his acolytes.