Q-News Sept-Oct 2006, Issue 368

In my 16 years as a journalist I’ve traveled the world and met many wonderful people and some that I would prefer never to meet again. I think of these characters as ghosts, people who operate in a world of shadows, dark and creepy. The attacks of 9/11 unleashed more of them and they are scarier than anything I’ve ever experienced. Some have transformed themselves into monsters, others into demons. I believe that such ghouls still exist. In fact, I know they do.

Take for example my close encounter with an armed and deadly member of Ahmad Shah Masood’s rag tag army in the winter of 1993. Our team was returning to Kabul along a perilous stretch of road shortly after interviewing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the only prime minister in modern history to have bombed his own capital. The Russians had long been driven out of Afghanistan and Moscow’s puppet regime in Kabul had taken a pounding from a coalition of Mujahideen forces. But the times had changed and now the “holy warriors” were killing each other.
I was ordered to get out of the vehicle. A gun was pointed at my head and I was accused of being an Indian spy. I saw my life flash before me. The pleas of our translator were drowned out by rocket fire followed by an endless stream of tracers that lit up the starry sky. Hekmatyar and Masood hated each other and for all the hate these two could muster, the people of Kabul paid dearly with their lives.
I could hear our translator saying “Canadian! He’s a Canadian journalist!” The poor chap was doing his best, but it was to no avail. I carried a Canadian passport, but to the young man holding the Russian-issued Kalashnikov it made no sense that a person who looked like he did and with his complexion could ever possibly be a Canadian. I had to have come from somewhere and India must have been an obvious choice to him.
I would have tried ‘Guyana’ but if an official at the ministry of interior had no geographical idea where that was, there was hardly any chance that this unschooled young fighter, hardened by years of war, would fare any better. How do you negotiate your way out of this situation? There is a sense of helplessness that overcomes a person and fear is palpable at moments likes these. Eventually, I decided to speak and the only words that would come out of my mouth were, “I’m a Muslim.”
“In that case,” he barked, “recite the kalimah.” I knew he wasn’t expecting the short form – that would have been too easy – so I recited the full passage, mentioning the angels, the prophets, the books, good and bad, and the Day of Judgment. He hugged me and as he did he called out to his armed comrades, masked by the darkness of night, to bring me a cup of tea. I discovered then what it means to have faith and later that night I made an oath as I lay in my bed shaken and restless.
I pledged that however strong my conviction was for any cause, I was never going to embrace violence as a means to redress any wrong, perceived or real. If that is ever translated to mean an end to my life, so be it.
I had long buried my dreadful experience when the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. The demons were uncaged. I had even forgotten that we were shot at, hijacked and robbed at gun point on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad. But soon after the United States rained hell down from the blue sky on the people of Afghanistan, I had another opportunity to return to Kabul.
The ghosts of the Russian invasion that I had encountered in my first visit were now replaced by a new and more dangerous menace – an odd league of radical Deobandis and Wahhabis. Masood was dead, killed days before 9/11 by members of Al-Qaeda posing as reporters. His forces were decimated by the Taliban and whatever was left of them was now under the command of Gen. Rashid Dostum, an unsavory character with a passion for vengeance.
It was also the Taliban, under the guidance of Mullah Omar a.k.a. Amir-ul-Mu’minin, who drove Hekmatyar and his fighters out of Afghanistan and into Iran. But with the Taliban a.k.a. the ‘Army of God’, literally decimated on the orders of the Vulcans in Washington and London, Hekmatyar rolled up his rugs and returned to his native land. Today, he is again dodging bullets and missiles, hiding out in the rugged mountains of southern Afghanistan. His aim is to drive the invaders out of his country and topple the Karzai government. To him, there is a pure Islamic state, the utopian dream of all Islamists, still to be established. It appears nothing has changed in all these years other than names and dates.
My experience tells me that to take sides in what amounts to wars between ghosts and demons is pointless. There are some ideological liberals in our community who take to the pulpit to argue that American, British and Canadian foreign policy is responsible for creating the fertile grounds for violent extremists to germinate. The argument is lame and they know it. It is true that Western foreign policy is often driven by greed and ignorance and in most cases it results in death and destruction to countless innocent people, many of them in the Muslim world. But to conclude that foreign policy is wholly responsible for terrorism and suicide bombings is hogwash. The people who are advancing this argument are trying to save their own skin.
Blaming Western foreign policy for fomenting extremism is precisely the argument that Ayman Al-Zawahiri and his new sidekick, American convert Adam Yahiye Gadahn a.k.a. ‘Azzam the American’ want us to advance to justify their vision of a ‘New Jihad World Order.’ When we buy in we end up advancing the goals of this fringe group of loud and obnoxious Muslim men and women who are hell-bent on heralding The End. There’s another name to describe their religious zeal – Messianic. Osama bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and now Gadahn, believe that the appearance of the Mahdi is near and that they will be the chosen ones to lead his army when good confronts evil in a final showdown before God brings everything crashing down in apocalyptic grandeur.
Isn’t this ‘holier than thou’ arrogant attitude what God makes blameworthy in the Quran? When the Prophet Musa (Moses), may Allah bless him, returned to find his people steeped in idol worship he scolds them with a profound question: “Would you like to hasten the judgment of your Lord?” (Al-A’raf, verse 150). And in another verse of the Quran, God says: “Man was created with a hasty nature. I shall show him My Signs (the Day of Judgment), but don’t try to hasten it. (Al-Anbiya, verse 38)
I’ve been watching hours of Al-Qaeda propaganda videos while researching a major documentary to be aired this fall on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). These videos were downloaded from the internet, copied and traded by one gullible young Muslim to another in Toronto, my city. They all carried the same frightening messianic messages made savory because their skilled producers used heart wrenching recitations of noble Quranic verses to make hideous acts appear chivalrous.
I’ve now realized this arcade of videos represents the old Al-Qaeda. The face of the new Al-Qaeda is ‘Azzam the American.’ His full beard and white turban does little to mask his slick and wily undertones. He knows exactly what to say and in doing so he is not tugging at our heart strings, he is appealing to our minds. He would like us to believe that Western foreign policy, in particular America’s, is the reason why he and his band of suicide bombers are prepared to bring terror to America, Britain and Canada. What astonishes me is not so much what he says, but the things he doesn’t say. At least in the West we can refer to these decisions as ‘policies.’
Anyone who was paying attention to Imam Suhaib Webb’s speech at the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) annual conference would have realized that it was a condemnation of Gadahn’s diatribe.
Imam Webb is blue-eyed, blonde, tall, and handsome American convert to Islam. He appeared on ISNA’s main session alongside Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Imam Zaid Shakir and Dr Ingrid Mattson, all converts, decked out with his Azhari turban and wearing the traditional robe of that great institution which covered the suit and tie he said his “Church going American grandmother would be proud of”. He did not mince his words.
Muslims in America, Imam Webb warned, must expunge these demons from the house of Islam. Demons like Gadahn and company. It was a message reiterated by Shaykh Hamza. “Condemn, if you wish Western foreign policy vis-à-vis the Muslim world, but resolve as well to abolish extremism, violence and a hateful discourse from your mosques, community and homes.”
This was the message that the estimated 30,000 participants at ISNA’s convention took home on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of 9/11. It was a strong message, made even more memorable because for the first time in all its 43 years, the predominately male leaders of ISNA and its sister organisation, the Muslim Students’ Association, chose a Canadian-born female convert to Islam as their president. Anyone who knows this organization is well aware that this is a huge leap.
Ingrid Mattson has served her organization well and it appears she has been groomed for leadership by two very powerful allies in the ISNA hierarchy, Abdallah Idris and Nur Abdallah, former presidents and pals from their activist days growing up in the Sudan. It was Abdallah Idris who brought Mattson into the loving embrace of ISNA in the late 1980’s and it was he who could not stop himself from exploiting her gender to tug at the purse strings of generous women in order to meet ISNA’s ever ambitious fund-raising targets.
If Muslims in the West are ever going to shake the ghosts of 9/11 they need to have leaders who are indigenous to the West, whether they are brown, white or black. 9/11 is our albatross and the faster Muslims accept this fact the more effective they will be in responding to the challenges it has put on their porches.
We have to prevent ourselves from getting sucked into the ‘blame game.’ The blame game is like a game of dodge ball where Muslims run around denying any responsibility for their misery, pretending it’s always someone else’s fault. Any ‘someone’ will do just fine as long as he or she is not an Arab or a Pakistani.

Nazim Baksh is this issue’s Guest Editor. He is a Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto and an award-winning journalist who has been covering the rise of global terrorism since the late 1980s.