Abandoning my homeland to Abu Zubaydah

On the way back to our place in Delhi, we saw a slogan painted on a wall, “Soviets, leave Afghanistan now!” The jihad in my homeland had long ceased to be a domestic affair. Like Wimpy’s, it had become globalized — everyone’s business.

I realize now, with the benefit of hindsight, that in addition to being Muslims without a homeland, there was something else we Afghans in India had in common with Palestinians. We both had become international causes celebres. Everyone from the drivers of rusted rickshaws in old Delhi to the Dutch dopeheads of Goa had an opinion about us. We were the stuff of international news headlines. Visible and invisible at the same time, we inspired strong feelings and striking opinions, but the spotlight and outrage ultimately did nothing to soothe the pain of having “no homeland, no passport and no identity.” It was this pain that drove Abu Zubaydah to Afghanistan.

The inspiration for Arab Muslims to join the Afghan jihad against the Soviets chiefly came from the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, who was a mentor to Osama bin Laden and a founder of the armed Palestinian group Hamas. In his jihad recruitment pamphlet “The Signs of Allah the Most Merciful in the Jihad of Afghanistan,” Azzam takes the reader to a land of breathtaking miracles. Flocks of divinely commanded birds turn up at mujahedeen campsites, warning them of approaching Soviet aircraft. Angels appear on horseback, killing the atheist enemy before disappearing in a cloud of dust. Bullets hit the mujahedeen, carving holes in their shirts but leaving their chests intact. Those who die become martyrs, their bodies smelling of musk, the perfume filling the air for kilometers on end. Bright divine light shines from their tombs, lighting up the otherwise deadly dark of Afghan village nights. Azzam used these stories to argue that Allah himself was spearheading the Afghan jihad. He proclaimed that to join this jihad was the duty of any Muslim. These exact words are replicated repeatedly in Abu Zubaydah’s diary. He uses them to justify to himself, his family and his friends his decision to halt a degree in computer science in favor of fighting in Afghanistan.

As a diarist, Abu Zubaydah is heir to a long-standing Muslim tradition. The first known Muslim diarist was Ibn al-Banna, who lived in 11th century Baghdad. But if Banna’s journal reads like a who’s who of the Muslim intellectuals of his time, what we find in Abu Zubaydah’s diary is a chronicle of the ummah’s dropouts, outcasts and losers. Like a diligent student of hadith, Abu Zubaydah notes where a life story told to him might contain a bit of exaggeration, a lie here or there. All the men who shared their stories with him traveled to Afghanistan to escape lives marked by failure. They left behind them a trail of broken marriages, interrupted careers, unfinished degrees and, sometimes, close encounters with the law. In Afghanistan, they created their own international community and lived an existence disconnected from the very Afghans whose jihad they had joined. From Abu Zubaydah’s diary, it is clear that for many of these freelance fighters, Afghanistan was the second-best choice. Jerusalem was the prize, in part because they were told that murdering Jews doubled a martyr’s reward.  

I started reading Abu Zubaydah’s diary with an open mind, allowing myself no prejudice or preconception. A day and more than a hundred pages later, I could not help feeling let down by it. The journal at times reads like a pillow book, with explicit descriptions of sexually charged encounters (and the psychological torment that accompanied them). It is also a diet journal, revealing the pious young man’s obsession with his belly fat. It is, too, a war diary, chronicling his training in weaponry and military tactics. Perhaps the most striking, if not downright unpleasant, aspects of the diary, however, are the passages that deal with his immediate family and friends. Those who occupy this realm are not only full of flaws; they are in fact the exact opposite of heroic. Abu Zubaydah appears to have been traumatized after witnessing, as a young boy, his mother and his paternal aunt engaged in a physical fight. His father is portrayed as unreasonable, childish and prone to outbursts of violence. His friends he describes as backstabbers, leading him to conclude that friendships are nothing but a falsehood. The people in Abu Zubaydah’s world remind us of the characters that appear in melodramas, where greed, treachery and repressed sexuality run through every social interaction, creating a deeply unpleasant world in which no one can be trusted.

If Abu Zubaydah went to Afghanistan to escape the hypocrisy that shapes much of the Muslim world today, then he was bound to fail. After all, the demons that tormented him were not the communists and atheists he went to Afghanistan to fight. They were people much closer to home: his family, his own society in exile, his fellow Muslims in Saudi Arabia and India.

There is a reason it is the internal jihad that is called the greater jihad. It is clear that ultimately, Abu Zubaydah and those like him would have been better off looking inside themselves and fighting the jihad against their own demons than adding fuel to violence in other people’s homelands.