Face-Off. Chris Karsten

      9.

      Sajida’s father had sent her away from Kanigoram when the soldiers had arrived to drive the Uzbeks and the Taliban out of Waziristan. Mullah Wada had been visiting her father and they’d sat cross-legged on the carpets in the front room while she served them slices of sweet melon, the sardas her father grew himself, and glasses of yoghurt and goat’s milk.

      She’d remained standing and Mullah Wada had said: “Sajida, you’re a good child. You have respect for your parents and for the traditions of the Pashtun and our tribe, the Burkis, and our brothers and sisters, the Mahsud and the Wazir. You are clever and diligent at school. But your father fears for your safety. Here in Kanigoram, life is no longer the way we have known it. For eight hundred years we have driven out invaders and settlers. But what is happening now is something over which we have no control.”

      She’d known what the mullah meant. The trouble had started with the arrival of the Uzbeks, with their dusty beards and turbans and Kalashnikovs, after their long journey from Samarkand across the Hindu Kush. On their way they’d recruited young men from the tribal areas for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the TTP. Young boys, twelve, thirteen years of age and older, and now also young women, recruited as fedayeen for suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

      Nasir and other young men from Kanigoram were fleeing with them ahead of the Pakistan Armed Forces’ Operation Rah-e-Nijat, or Path to Salvation. They’d gone west, her father had told her earlier, to the caves of the Ingalmall and Tora Bora. From there they were fighting the new occupiers of Pashtun soil and the puppets they had left behind.

      Sajida had remained silent, as was proper, and stood listening, her fingers interlaced in front of her.

      Mullah Wada had said: “It is with a heavy heart that your father has made the decision. So heavy that he came to discuss it with me, and with the Maliks. The decision has been made that you must leave Kanigoram, Sajida, and go to the city.”

      To refuse or show the slightest resistance by word or gesture was unthinkable. Her eyes showed no sign of the turbulence in her mind.

      “To Peshawar?”

      “Not Peshawar. To Islamabad,” said the mullah. “To Jamia Hafsa in Islamabad, the madrasa for women at the Lal Masjid complex.”

      The Red Mosque was famous, and not only in the Muslim world.

      “But who will pay? It must be expensive.”

      For the first time, her father spoke. “Mullah Wada has arranged it, Sajida. Funds have been appropriated to give you the privilege of studying at the Jamia Hafsa madrasa.”

      “A scholarship fund has been established for you,” said Mullah Wada, “sufficient for your accommodation and studies. By your father’s brother, who left Kanigoram a long time ago. I think you were only about a year old when Mullah Burki left Pakistan.”

      “Mullah Wada corresponded with him by e-mail and sent photographs of you,” said her father. “My brother remembers you, but he didn’t recognise the lovely young girl in the photos. ‘Is this little Sajida?’ he wrote. ‘How beautiful she is, such delicate features, much like the young women of the Powindah. Skin the colour of saffron, hair like black lava glass, eyes like emeralds, like those of the Afridis of the Khyber.’ Your uncle has always been poetic.”

      The Powindah: nomads who left in search of new pastures every year, with their camels and their tents on trailers drawn by Massey Ferguson tractors. Decorated with colourful pennants, the entire caravan moved from the barren Zarmelan plains to the grass-covered steppes of the Derajat. Her uncle’s description reminded her of the great warrior poet Khushal Khan Khattak, who said about the Afridi women: “In stature, straight, like the letter Alif are the beautiful virgins, and of complexion fair, eyes the blue of sky and the green of grass, O so fertile their hills and valleys . . .”

      Mullah Wada said: “Mullah Burki is a rich and important man in South Africa. He’s the spiritual leader in his mosque in Johannesburg and a businessman who owns many shops, but he has never forgotten his Kanigoram roots. He says he knows what’s happening here, he follows it in the news, on the Internet and through his contacts in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. He wishes he could do more for jihad against the infidels who send their drones across the mountains to kill his people in Waziristan with missiles. But he’s blessed, and he would like to contribute to a proper masjid education for you in the madrasa at the Lal Masjid.”

      * * *

      At the madrasa Sajida met other young Pakistani women who also adhered to the strict tenets of their faith, especially the code of honour and submission. But at the same time, like her, they longed for the emancipation and cosmopolitan influences of the big city: television, movies and technology, light years removed from the constraints of an isolated existence in the mountains.

      At the madrasa they received lessons in English, Urdu, science, mathematics and social science. Also in the exposition of the Qur’an and the Hadith, as Imam Sahih al-Bukhari had collected and compiled the instructions of the Prophet. Sajida began to understand why Nasir had chosen the way of the mujahideen to go and fight in the Holy War. She pored over the interpretations of jihad, as Bukhari had grouped together all the Hadith dealing with jihad in one chapter in Book 52, titled Fighting for the Cause of Allah.

      In the city she spoke Urdu, and fluent English, instead of Pashto. She’d got mehndi because she’d seen how other