Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou

met. I wanted to talk to people there about September 11. The attacks happened thousands of miles away, but with American bombers visible almost every day from Khodja Bahuddin, even the residents of this refugee camp were affected. “It was an act of terrorism by Osama bin Laden, the man who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud,” one man told me. Over his shoulder I saw another man, much older, walking toward us. His beard was long and white, his brown face a mass of creviced wrinkles that radiated away from his eyes like bicycle spokes. He tapped the ground in front of him with a walking stick and the crowd parted as he approached. He told me his name was Mullah Abdul Samad. “We’re tired of living here, and we’re tired of this war,” he said. His voice was raspy, like paper tearing. I asked him about the attacks in New York. “I haven’t heard anything about this,” he said.
    Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, I met and then hired as a guide and translator a young man named Zaid Jan. As is not unusual when people live through dangerous moments together, we became friends. Zaid was intelligent and only twenty-two. He liked to say he had been born in the midst of war and it had been part of his life ever since, but he had never fought for any of the factions in Afghanistan’s civil wars. His English was excellent. Until about a month earlier, he had taught the language in Kunduz, which was under the control of the Taliban.
    There is a character in Martin Amis’s novel House of Meetings who is sent to a Soviet prison camp in Siberia for the crime of praising “The Americas,” by which he meant a woman whose hourglass figure resembled the shape of the two continents on a map. Zaid was similarly condemned because fanatics misunderstood what he said. One day he was teaching his students the English words for religious terms such as Christianity, Judaism, and Sikhism. One of Zaid’s students informed on him. A Taliban soldier came to see him the next day. The gunman was uneducated, dirty, and drunk on power. “I told him I was just using the words. I said I was an English teacher, not a political person,” Zaid said. It didn’t matter. The soldier concluded Zaid opposed the Taliban regime, beat him, and threw him in jail.
    When Zaid was released, he fled north. He now slept in the back of a friend’s shop but still met me every morning with his hair brushed and shiny, and his shalwar kamiz clean and without wrinkles.
    During one of our many trips to the front lines, Zaid and I stopped at Dasht-e-Qala, the closest still-inhabited village to the front lines. It was often necessary to get permission here before proceeding farther, though it was never refused, and the few guards who bothered to look at our papers later on didn’t seem able to read. There was a madrassah here, and we poked our heads inside. Twenty or thirty boys and girls aged five or six sat cross-legged with Qurans in their laps. They mumbled verses in Arabic, rocking their heads back and forth while their teacher, a young man aged seventeen or eighteen, walked up and down the rows and tapped those who weren’t paying attention with a long stick.
    Zaid Jan.
    Young boys at a madrassah in Dasht-e-Qala, Afghanistan.
    Girls at Dasht-e-Qala madrassah.
    Dr. Awwad was also there, frowning. “They have no idea what they’re saying. It’s just noises that they memorize and repeat from memory,” he said. “It’s what allows Islam to be abused. It opens the door to people like bin Laden.”
    Dr. Awwad walked behind one of the students, a young boy, kneeled and wrapped his thick arms around the student’s tiny shoulders. He selected a passage from the page of the Quran the boy was holding and sang it rhythmically. His clear voice, high and musical for such a big man, floated through the room and silenced the mumbling children.
    â€œThe Quran should be read like