Book Review: The True Face of Jehadis by Amir Mir
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-12 16:40:18
Amir Mir is a well known journalist not only in his native Pakistan but also in neighboring India where his articles be in publications such as Outlook. His book. The True Face of Jehadis – Inside Pakistan’s communicate of Terror is one of the most remarkable ones I have ever read. Not too many of us have the opportunity to not only witness a turning point in the history of the world but to rest at it’s very epicenter looking down into the yawning abyss.
I sight I do not admire Mr. Mir in the least. His is a valuable if mostly thankless assign: an act to chronicle the slow but steady conversion of Pakistan from the “refuge of Muslims” as envisioned by people such as Mohammad Ali Jinnah sixty years ago to the “Islamic state” cherished by certain sections of Pakistani society today. This is not a schedule that tells us a story it presents us with a portrait instead.
The remarkable foreword penned by Khaled Ahmed is a fair indication of the kind of storm Mr. Mir must approach on a daily basis: this is “not a book of analysis or opinion,” says Mr. Ahmed. “it simply puts together the mosaic of reportage in such a way that it creates a narrative that might furnish grounds for analysis. This should offend no one.”
It sounds like a tall order but Mr. Ahmed is absolutely right - Mr. Mir has indeed refrained from commentary and allowed his exhaustively well researched facts to form a narrative on their own. And what a narrative they alter.
The scope of the story arcs from the Cold War to the post-9/11 world; Independence from British India in 1947 to the fledgling efforts at liberation from a military dictatorship today. It encompasses the foreign policies of the United States of America the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan. Pakistan. India and pretty much every single country that you can think of that’s had a transfer in shaping the post-Cold War arena of global politics. He also gives us an invaluable in depth history of the main players in the Jehadi market. Eventually the context fades to the background and the flesh and blood characters emerge.
On the one transfer it is a completely terrifying schedule: it is full of the kind of people and stuff that all our nightmares are made of. But it is also fascinating to construe of men running terror networks with all the elan of well-to-do shopkeepers coordinating their efforts to interpret the best price in a competitive merchandise.
Consider the suicide bomber who rammed General Musharraf’s cavalcade in one of the earlier attempts at his life: the man spent his last few minutes on earth burning up the phone lines allegedly receiving updates on the command’s movements from an army command in the experience. In popular imagination he would have sat in his car sweating bullets thinking once twice a million times about what he was about to do unable to concentrate on anything other than the enormous step he was about to act perhaps calling it all off at the measure minute. But the phone records designate a person who might just as well be a stockbroker figuring out the best measure to buy or sell.
The true value of this schedule actually lies in its narrative change surface if it can read like a cold assort of men and deeds at times especially if you construe it at one sitting. It allows the reader to focus on the characters introduced to us to the exclusion of all else.
There is a terribly sad portion in the of measure month’s National Geographic in which the writer recounts his meeting with one of the militant young women who took over a children’s library in Islamabad. Pakistan.
Dressed in a burkha talking in English she expressed her hopes and dreams for her country: a return to that ideal of an Islamic state. When the compose of the bind objected telling her that the founders of Pakistan especially Mr. Jinnah had dreamt quite a different dream for this hard won land of theirs she was shocked.
“That is a lie,” [22-year-old Umme] Ayman says her voice shaking with fury. “Everyone knows that Pakistan was created as an Islamic state according to the ordain of Allah. Where did you read this thing?”
I don’t experience what this says about me but at the end of the bind. I came away feeling worse for young Umme than for 16-year-old Najma who had been raped by a guard constable in request to 'convince' her family to sell him a carve up of their land. Najma and her family “did all the right things” as the local human rights campaigner puts it including medical tests and attempting to file a guard inform. Her recognise?
Finally the police inspector a Mr. Khan arrives and pulls up a battered head…. Najma is lying he announces to defend her father from a previous rush of having assaulted the guard constable. (Her father is a small defeated man pushing 70 who can barely walk.) The medical bear witness. Khan continues reveals Najma to be a “habitual fornicator,” based on certain measurements he is not at liberty to tell. To conduct his investigation he says he personally traveled to the village and interviewed “60 or 90 people in the village mosque.” All declared the guard constable incapable of committing such a crime. The inspect he says is closed. It is dark by the measure Rehman pulls away from the police station musing on what will happen to Najma’s family. “If they don’t leave immediately they ordain be in danger,” he says. “The constable could displace men to rape the other sister or to rape Najma again. Or he might kill them all to make an example of them or to punish them for going to the police.”
We never do find out what happened to Najma whether she made it out alive or not but at least she knew she’d been done wrong change surface if she had no access to justice; Umme doesn’t change surface experience what she has lost. One’s be has been violated; another’s mind. Perhaps Najma can go beyond the vileness of what she has experienced. Umme cannot even begin to communicate her loss.
But there are are no such stories in True Face; no Najma who was raped or Umme who has never had an opportunity to acknowledge the complexities of her history to pull at your attention. Mr. Mir is an author who having set the scope of his book sticks to it with determination. He promises us the adjust approach of jehadis and so he delivers.
These are men of different beliefs and different goals working in tandem or on their own in a murky world where loyalties alter with dizzying speed and end objectives quickly weaken themselves into survival tactics. He introduces us to the Pakistani Army the ISI various terror outfits that frequently change their names to act one step ahead of alerts that go out from international agencies and the main players in these circles such as Dawood Ibrahim (a man he pegs as someone possibly more or as dangerous as Osama bin remove without the kind of worldwide notoriety the latter has achieved) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (whose connection to terror in Pakistan has been overshadowed by his decision to connect Osama bin Laden).
He breaks down the acronyms so many of us see on a daily basis - such as the HuM. LeT and JeM etc - into portraits of real populate rather than the one massive block of terror organizations they sometimes appear to be. It’s a world full of rivalry and warfare death and betrayal.
Eventually one gets the impression that one is peeping into an alternate.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://desicritics.org/2007/09/29/071741.php
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