An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (22 page)

According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan,
“In the decade before the war, he [Zahir Shah] and his father [Nadir Shah] had sought development assistance from the Germans who had constructed a radio tower, a power plant, and a handful of small carpet factories and textile mills in Kabul, all of which were under a royal license.”

In 1933 the Afghan authorities prohibited Jews from traveling without special permits and from engaging in any import-export businesses without a license. Such permits and licenses were of course withheld. According to Aharon, “Between the establishment of the Bank-i-Milli and the restrictions on trade, the Jews were hard-pressed to find sources of income.”

In the late 1930s Afghanistan granted Germany the right to manage road construction in the country. Germany also began shipping equipment to be used in Afghan hydroelectric plants and textile mills; in return Afghanistan was sending Germany cotton and wool. According to Kashani, “Three hundred agents of the Third Reich assisted Afghanistan economically and also took part in overt incitement to anti-Semitism. . . . The Jews of Afghanistan had already in 1935 written to the Zionist authorities in Palestine about ‘the inciters’ who are Hitler’s men.”

I now recall that my Afghan family had only German cars—
Mercedes Benzes. They also had many German appliances made by Siemens, such as radios. I remember meeting many Germans in Kabul. They were all quite warm to me. That wife of the former mayor of Kabul—the one who helped me with one of my escape plans—was German.

According to Aharon, from 1938 to 1945 Nazi Germany made payments to various Arab leaders—and to “Ghulham Siddique, the former Prime Minister of Afghanistan under King Amanullah.”

The Jews of Afghanistan were quickly reduced to lives of squalor. They were also trapped. Some Jews, including the elderly chief rabbi, Mula Yakkov Simon-Tov, had already emigrated to Israel in 1922—he, poor soul, was murdered by rioting Arabs in 1936 in British Palestine. Mainly Jews were forbidden to leave the country until the late 1940s or early to mid-1950s.

One must wonder why. Why would a Muslim kingdom want to hold on to impoverished Jews—from whom they could borrow no money and levy few taxes? What kind of hostages were these Afghan Jews?

According to Aharon, in the 1940s Jewish men were drafted into the Afghan army but were not permitted to carry any weapons. Instead they were required to clean animal stalls and received no wages. Nevertheless Jews were required to pay a war tax (the
harbiyyeh
) because they “were ‘exempted’ from the military since they could not bear arms. What little money they had went to their military superiors in exchange for mercy.”

Afghanistan was not a Nazi country—yet it not only impoverished its Jews, it also sheltered German Nazis after World War II.

In his charming book,
Afghan Interlude,
published in 1957 (four years before I arrived), the British traveler Oliver Rudston de Baer, who was there in the mid-1950s, confirms that many Nazis had indeed found a safe haven in Afghanistan.

He notes that the government underpaid the Germans as teachers, doctors, and engineers, because they “‘might consider it unwise to return to their countries.’ These people, of whom there were many, were completely in the power of the Afghan Government, for it was the Afghan Government, not their own, which protected them in return for their services.”

De Baer once encountered a group of Germans who worked in a sugar factory in Baghlan. They were relaxing in a swimming pool. “Their unpleasantness on hearing that we were British convinced us that they were representatives of the many Nazis who, afraid to return to their own country, have settled in Afghanistan and are now busy doing innumerable technical jobs for the Government and who live in salutary fear that their residence permits may not be extended.”

Photos of the Afghan army celebrating Afghan Independence Day in 1965 remind me of Hitler’s army. The soldiers march stiffly, step high—they are almost goose-stepping. There is definitely a European and Nazi influence here.

The legendary warriors of Afghanistan do not look like European soldiers. I met some. They were tall, rugged, sweet, charming, low-key, turbaned men wearing loose-fitting clothing—who just happened to be deadly with a rifle and a knife.

But just as I am slightly and irrationally nostalgic for a country in which I was held against my will—so too many Afghan Jews of that era still miss Herat and Kabul, just as the exiled Iraqi and Egyptian Jews miss their homes and ways of life in the Arab world.

Many years later, safely perched in America, Afghan Jews insist that the Afghan
government
was helpful to its Jews.

Jack Abraham was born in Afghanistan and lived there until he was eleven. In 1964 his father built the only remaining synagogue in Kabul. Radio Free Europe quotes Abraham as saying, “We never had persecution in Afghanistan. And the government was very helpful to us. If there was any kind of a thing happening out on the street, they would inform the Jews, ‘Take it easy, don’t go to work’ on these particular days because people were talking negative, and they would put police outside our doors for protection.”

While the government may not have passed laws against practicing Judaism, why did the negativity in the streets require police guards at Jewish doors?

Sara Aharon ultimately concludes that the restrictions and expulsions were mainly because of “the Afghan regime’s internal, insidious jealousy of the Jews and their supposed affluence.” Thus, the Afghan government wanted to punish both the Jews and the Hindus in Afghanistan precisely because they had been successful entrepreneurs.

A
fter 9/11 Afghanistan was in the news every day. It still is. Most newspapers carry at least one, usually two, articles on events taking place in Kabul or Kandahar or Mazar-i-Sharif.

After 9/11 journalists interviewed every Afghan they could find, anyone who knew anything about the country that had sheltered bin Laden. The media also interviewed Afghan Jews. Like many of the Jews of Islam, Afghanistan’s Jews tended to remember their country fondly.

In 2001 Jacob Nasirov, who was born in Kabul and served as the rabbi of Congregation Anshei Shalom in Queens, told Felicia R. Lee of the
New York Times
that Afghan Jews are sad for “what was and what could have been in a once-beautiful country where Jews had lived for 2,000 years. The Jews were not insiders, but they were tolerated and allowed to establish their own businesses, to practice their faith.”

Another member of the congregation, Michael Aharon, told Lee that the “Jews of Afghanistan had a very good life. When I see what has happened to this country in the last ten years, especially when I see kids without shoes, it really hurts me.”

I am both puzzled and moved that these Jews still feel such fondness for Afghanistan, especially considering the nature of their impoverishment, followed by their captivity there, and eventual flight.

Perhaps I should not be surprised.

Jews have always yearned for Jerusalem, from which they’d been exiled many times, but they also yearned for each and every one of the
countries where they had been persecuted and where their ancestors once lived and are still buried.

Biblical Jews wept bitter tears after leaving Egypt, where they had been the pharaoh’s slaves. They missed what they were used to: the food, the smells—everything familiar, as opposed to the unknown wilderness and the fierce challenges that freedom imposes.

Andre Aciman in
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
and Jean Naggar in
Sipping from the Nile
write with love and nostalgia for the Egypt they had to flee. Like Lucette Lagnado, author of
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
and
The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn,
these writers had charming and cultured extended families who had lived in the Ottoman Empire for many centuries.

According to Rabbi Angel, despite being impoverished and perennially endangered, the Jews of Islam still enjoyed a deep sense of community, continuity, religiosity, and dignity—and this is what these Jews find lacking in new and more modern places and times.

A
bdul-Kareem had loved me, he had loved a Jew. I do not doubt this. I loved him, too—although everything changed after my first month in Kabul.

We were not Romeo and Juliet; we were not
Nino and Ali,
the beloved fictional creations of Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum. Nino is a blonde Circassian princess; Ali is a dashing Muslim warrior. They meet and live in Baku. As Kurban Said, Nussimbaum longed to unite the Muslim East and the Judeo-Christian West. His love story is set in the Caucasus just before the Russian Revolution.

Looking back, knowing what I now know, I must ask: How could Abdul-Kareem have been so foolish, so blithe, as to have brought a Jewish American bride back to a country that had impoverished its small population of Jews and granted safe haven to German Nazis? Did he think that the rules of history would never apply to us?

In 2011, Abdul-Kareem proudly told me that when he was the deputy minister of culture, he had negotiated treaties with UNESCO that would give “landmark status” to ancient sites in Afghanistan. Abdul-Kareem insisted that whatever foreign archeologists would discover should remain in Afghanistan and that the world body would fund both restoration and archiving. In this context he had restored the synagogues of Herat and Kabul. They are all empty now. One has been converted into an Islamic school for boys. I tell him this. He says nothing.

I ask Abdul-Kareem, “Why did the Jews leave Afghanistan?”

“Gee, I have no idea. Probably they up and left because they wanted to go to Israel anyway.”

Like his mother before him, Abdul-Kareem claims to have no idea why Afghan Jews left Afghanistan. Is this sheer ignorance or deadly denial?

Ah, but who am I to condemn or mourn the plight of Jews in Muslim lands? What standing do I have? I am a Jew who quietly and privately converted to Islam while I was in captivity. I did so not at the edge of a sword but merely in the hope that doing so might make my miserable life more bearable in purdah.

No. I did so because I was terrified about what might happen to me if I refused to do so.

I was a secular antireligious rebel. One religion seemed as foolish and dangerous to me as the other. But obviously I was ashamed, embarrassed, by what I’d done. I never mentioned it to my parents or told any other living being. I did not take this conversion seriously. And I managed to forget all about it for many years.

I am writing about it here for the first time.

As I’ve said: I will never forgive myself.

However, the 9/11 attacks upon America forced me to confront my long-ago experience in a new and even more serious way.

Eleven

9/11

W
here were you on 9/11?

There was a time when people asked where you were only about the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone remembered where they were and what they had been doing at that moment, as if time itself stopped when the fatal shots rang out in Dallas.

On November 22, 1963, I was at work. I left early. Later I bought my first-ever television set. I told the journalist Jack Newfield, my late friend and colleague, “I want to be able to watch the coming assassinations live, as they happen.”

Our nation would bear witness to at least four more high-profile assassinations within the next half-decade.

President Kennedy’s presumed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed two days later, on November 24, 1963—during a perp walk on live television. His killer, a Texas nightclub operator, Jack Ruby, was arrested, tried, and convicted; he died in jail in 1967.

These murders were like sordid wax museum exhibits, grisly horror shows, but they were history. They were played and replayed on national television. These events would forever haunt the memories and imagination of my generation.

A little more than a year after JFK’s assassination, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was gunned
down by fellow Nation of Islam members in New York City due to his public condemnation of Elijah Muahammed.

On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis by the white supremacist James Earl Ray.

A mere two months later, on June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by a Palestinian, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who still remains incarcerated in California. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sirhan’s defense argued that he had been “psychologically scarred” by his exposure to the Israeli war for independence. An ad for a pro-Israel march had started “a fire burning inside him,” and Sirhan became enraged when Senator Kennedy promised military support to Israel.

These immensely promising national figures, relatively young men (the oldest was JFK, who was forty-six), were all murdered. Our nation reeled, perpetually in shock. None of the killers showed any remorse.

This was the turbulent yet liberating decade in which I came of age after my captivity in Afghanistan.

W
here were you on 9/11?

I was at home. I sat very still on my couch, transfixed before my television screen, afraid to move, afraid to miss anything, afraid to get up, knowing that when I got to my feet the old world would be forever gone, forever changed, and that we’d be facing a new and more dangerous world and time.

I was then living in Park Slope, in my hometown of Brooklyn, and my next-door neighbor, Anja Osang-Reich, was a German journalist who worked for
Der Spiegel.
By midafternoon we had both wandered out into our front yards. Anja remembers that I said, “Now we are all Israelis.”

She wrote it down, and years later she interviewed me for a book she was writing about her experience of 9/11.

I knew in my bones that ordinary life would change for civilians everywhere: The world’s airports would soon resemble Israeli consulates and embassies with metal detectors and elaborate screenings.

Like Israelis, American children have grown up knowing they are not automatically safe in their country or in their world. They understand the need for security at airports; they do not protest having to take off their little shoes and stand for a long while in a long line.

9/11 was also a turning point for American intellectuals and activists. Some blamed America and felt the jihadists were justified in mass-murdering civilians. Others, like myself, strongly disagreed.

One friend insisted that the people who worked in the World Trade Center could not possibly be innocent.

“How could they be,” she said, “when so many people are starving to death and homeless, here and around the world?”

“Are you saying that we are all guilty because we live in America? Do you believe that America itself is somehow existentially guilty and deserves to be brought down?”

“Well,” she said, laughing, “you’ve put it rather well.”

Her heartlessness eerily paralleled the heartlessness of the 9/11 jihadists.

The Muslim warriors who carried out the attacks were young: Their average age was twenty-four. Their visas were mostly six-month “tourist/
business” visas that were approved by the State Department regardless of red flags in their applications. Fifteen were Saudis, the others were from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon.

These jihadists viewed the West and Western values as repulsive and dangerous. They despised the idea of human and individual rights, free speech, religious freedom, separation of state and religion, women’s rights, gay rights, and a host of other rights and privileges, including the right to sex before marriage, the right not to marry, and the right to choose one’s marital partner.

My heartless friend stands for all these values.

And therefore she was among all those who swiftly demonized anyone who dared say that Muslim Islamists had launched a war. Anyone who criticized Islamist terrorism was a “racist conservative” and an Islamophobe.

Ironically such a label was also applied to ex-Muslim dissidents like the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Indian-born Ibn Warraq, Egyptian-born Nonie Darwish, and the Syrian Americans Dr. Wafa Sultan and Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser.

9
/11 changed everything. It changed us all.

I will never forget what happened on 9/11. I can still smell the air: It was a sickening combination of industrial fuels, hate, and human suffering. Scorched souls, acrid and agonizing, burned my throat and my eyes and my mind.

9/11 was also a personal wake-up call. I felt as if Afghanistan had followed me back to America. Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Omar Abdel-Rahman, and Ayman al-Zawahiri had hatched this lethal scheme in their hideout in Afghanistan, where they were under the protection of the Afghan warlord Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Bin Laden called the 9/11 assault on America “blessed attacks” against the “infidel . . . the new Jewish-Christian crusade.” He further explained that he had targeted the Pentagon and the Twin Towers because of American support for Israel.

I have a conversation with Pierre Rehov, an Algerian French Israeli filmmaker who has gone undercover to film terrorists on the West Bank and in Gaza.

“Look,” he points out. “These guys are young and testosterone-laden men who are denied sex with women. They think they can only get that in paradise with seventy-two virgins. They are so sexually frustrated that they are willing to die to get laid.”

“Yes, you have a point,” I say, “but I have an additional observation. You know that bin Laden’s father had fifty-seven children. My guess is that bin Laden was starved for paternal attention and approval—and he therefore became a charismatic ‘father figure’ to other, similarly father-deprived young men. Such deprivation in a savagely patriarchal culture may render young men particularly vulnerable to a bin Laden–like serial killer by proxy. In Afghanistan I had witnessed the competition between sons for a father’s attention and favor. Abdul-Kareem and his brothers were constantly vying with one another in an attempt to secure positions within the family, which could be granted only by the patriarch, Ismail Mohammed.”

Osama bin Laden’s son Omar published a book with his mother, Najwa bin Laden, and the author Jean Sasson. The book is titled
Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World.
Najwa was Osama’s first cousin as well as his first wife. They married when she was fifteen and he was seventeen.

Omar tells us that what enraged Osama and set the wheels of 9/11 in motion was that Saudi Arabia had allowed America to come to the defense of Kuwait in 1990.

The elder bin Laden was “offended by the sight of a mainly Christian western army defending their [Muslim] honor.” Bin Laden coveted that honor for himself. His warriors had successfully fought the Soviets. Why not choose him and his men? Infidel male soldiers were bad
enough, but, Omar writes, “At the first sight of a capable-looking female soldier my father became the most outspoken opponent of the royal decision to allow western armies into the kingdom, ranting, ‘Women! Defending Saudi men!’”

Most Westerners utterly fail to understand the importance of woman’s subordination in terms of Islamist male psychology.

According to Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby, the splinter Muslim Brotherhood group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat “undertook their plot not only or even primarily because of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. . . . Rather, they considered the work on women’s rights championed by Sadat’s wife, Jihan, an existential threat to true Muslim society.”

There are men (and women) who view woman’s freedom as so dangerous that they are ready to imprison, torture, and kill on a massive scale in order to stamp it out. Many Westerners refuse to believe that this is true or that what happens in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan has anything to do with their lives in Europe or North America.

They are wrong.

T
he year 1979 was as much a turning point as 9/11 was.

On November 4, 1979, Khomeini’s Islamists stormed the American embassy in Teheran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days.

Something else happened in 1979.

On November 20 five hundred transnational dissident Wahabi
Islamists, led by a Saudi named Juhayman al-Otayei, stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca and held it for two weeks. They took hundreds of hostages. The Saudi king bartered away his modernization initiatives in order to receive the religious permission necessary to launch a countermilitary action at Islam’s holiest site. This included having French soldiers supply poison gas and help craft the plan of attack.

When it was over, 127 Saudi soldiers were dead and 451 had been wounded. During the fighting 87 dissidents died at the scene and 27 in hospitals shortly thereafter. Of those who survived, 63 were beheaded in the public squares of eight Saudi cities.

The twenty-two-year-old bin Laden was outraged at how the Saudis handled this Wahabi takeover, which Khomeini promptly dubbed an “American-Zionist conspiracy.”

Bin Laden was incensed by the treachery of
Muslims
who had called upon infidels for help. He would make it his mission to fund and train Muslim fighters against the infidels. And he did so in Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, while bin Laden was arming and fighting alongside the mujahideen, in separate incidents Iranian, Palestinian, and Libyan commandos bombed American embassies and Marine barracks, hijacked planes, blew up European synagogues and nightclubs, and exploded Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

In the 1990s Iran’s Hezbollah, al-Qaeda’s Saudis, and Palestinians joined together and exploded a bomb-laden truck outside the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing American soldiers and wounding hundreds of civilians; in 1998 al-Qaeda detonated two car bombs simultaneously, destroying the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 and wounding thousands of civilians.

Islamists everywhere blew up hotels, ships, tourist buses, nightclubs, churches, synagogues, mosques, airports, trains, and shopping malls, and both Muslim and infidel civilians on every continent.

Something awful also happened in New York City.

In the early 1980s a blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was implicated in the successful plot to assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Abdel-Rahman was jailed, tortured, and eventually expelled from Egypt. Following his expulsion, Abdel-Rahman went to Afghanistan to work with Osama bin Laden, who was aiding the mujahideen in their resistance against Soviet occupation. Abdel-Rahman left Afghanistan to raise funds for international jihad.

Although Abdel-Rahman was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, he obtained a tourist visa and began delivering fiery Arabic sermons in New York City, calling for the death of Americans and Zionists and raising money for jihad.

In a fatwa Abdel-Rahman condemned Americans as the “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists.” And he called on Muslims to assail the West, “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”

Many good Americans believe that everyone has the right to say anything. Why would we prohibit anyone’s free speech, especially if it takes place in a religious setting?

“In America, we have a First Amendment,” a good friend pointed out. “Religion and state are separate. We can’t just go into a mosque and censor speech or arrest someone for what they say or think or for actions they have yet to commit.”

“You don’t think these jihadists are crying ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater?” I ask. “That they are not a clear and present danger?”

“That, my dear, must first be proven in a court of law.”

He expressed the mind-set of many principled American law professors and judges.

But what if radical Islam/Islamism—as practiced by the likes of Osama bin Laden—is not exactly a religion but is, rather, a blend of fascism and totalitarianism, a political and military pseudo-religious
ideology—a death cult bent on world domination? What if Abdel-Rahman’s sermons consisted of illegal hate speech intended to legitimize bin Laden’s war on infidels?

What if twenty-first-century Wahabi and Salafist Islamism is not what most Muslims wish to practice? What if such fiery sermonizers have hijacked the possibility of Islam’s evolution and created a dangerous cult of their own? Who will stop these hijackers—if that’s who they are? (Some say that they are not hijackers, that they are practicing the true Islam, that the Qur’an commands war against infidels.)

In 1993, under Abdel-Rahman’s direction, jihadists exploded a car bomb in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Evidence revealed that the sheikh and his gang planned to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the FBI building.