Book Review: The True Face of Jehadis by Amir Mir

Amir Mir is a well known journalist, not only in his native Pakistan but also in neighboring India where his articles appear in publications such as Outlook. His book, The True Face of Jehadis – Inside Pakistan’s Network 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 stand at it’s very epicenter, looking down into the yawning abyss.

I find I do not envy Mr. Mir in the least. His is a valuable, if mostly thankless, task: an attempt 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 book 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 face 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 yield 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 make.

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 hand 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 hand it is a completely terrifying book: it is full of the kind of people and stuff that all our nightmares are made of. But it is also fascinating to read of men running terror networks with all the elan of well-to-do shopkeepers coordinating their efforts to capture the best price in a competitive market.

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 General’s movements from an army officer in the know. 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 take, perhaps calling it all off at the last minute. But the phone records reflect a person who might just as well be a stockbroker, figuring out the best time to buy or sell.

The true value of this book actually lies in its narrative, even if it can read like a cold catalogue of men and deeds at times, especially if you read it at one sitting. It allows the reader to focus on the characters introduced to us to the exclusion of all else.

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There is a terribly sad portion in the cover story of last 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, earlier this year.

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 author of the article 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 will of Allah. Where did you read this thing?”

I don’t know what this says about me, but at the end of the article, I came away feeling worse for young Umme than for 16-year-old Najma, who had been raped by a police constable in order to 'convince' her family to sell him a parcel 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 police report. Her reward?

Finally, the police inspector, a Mr. Khan, arrives and pulls up a battered chair….Najma is lying, he announces, to protect her father from a previous charge of having assaulted the police constable. (Her father is a small, defeated man pushing 70, who can barely walk.) The medical evidence, Khan continues, reveals Najma to be a “habitual fornicator,” based on certain measurements he is not at liberty to divulge. 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 police constable incapable of committing such a crime. The case, he says, is closed. It is dark by the time Rehman pulls away from the police station, musing on what will happen to Najma’s family. “If they don’t leave immediately, they will be in danger,” he says. “The constable could send 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 even if she had no access to justice; Umme doesn’t even know what she has lost. One’s body has been violated; another’s mind. Perhaps Najma can go beyond the vileness of what she has experienced. Umme cannot even begin to address her loss.

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But there are are no such stories in True Face; no Najma who was raped or Umme who has never had an opportunity to appreciate 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 true face 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 shift with dizzying speed and end objectives quickly dilute themselves into survival tactics. He introduces us to the Pakistani Army, the ISI, various terror outfits that frequently change their names to keep 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 Laden 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 join 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 people 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 universe. I came away at the end of the book unable to comprehend the daily reality of these men (and women). I can see them clearly, but their lives are not merely foreign, they are thoroughly alien. 

Some of you might remember a song from Guru Dutt's masterpiece, Pyaasa: Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai? Roughly translated, it means something like: Even if you were to win this world, what use is it? Those words were penned by Sahir Ludhianvi in 1950s India, as a generation delirious with its new found freedom came abruptly face to face with the immense challenges they faced as a young nation. 

Whenever I think of the jehadis and their aims, I wonder to myself, if God came down on Earth tomorrow and granted their' every wish - then what? What does the world have to offer people who think that death is something desirable, a gateway to a better world? What sort of a world would people like that build? Pyaasa's disillusioned poet said, Jalaa Do Ise Fooq Dalo Yeh Duniya, Jalaa Do, Jalaa Do, Jalaa Do (Burn it ,set this world on fire, Burn it, burn it, burn it) The jehadis are already burning it up. What comes next?

This book is ostensibly about Pakistan. But it has lessons for everyone of us.

Read excerpt