A Founders' Porch exclusive profile on the most feared holiday ever
It was beginning to look a lot like Ramadan, everywhere I went. The ninth of the Islamic calendar’s twelve months – known for supermodel-scale fasting, forced cordiality, praying, grudging forgiveness, and alms (yes, you have to pay for this misery, too) – was two or three nights away, depending on which Afghan astronomer’s earnest lunar calculations you heeded. The Mayor of Kandahar City had been killed by a turban-bomber two days earlier, in the wake of the turban bombing of a national religious council chief at the wake for the late warlord of greater Kandahar Ahmad Wali Karza. And this year, the holiday season that really does come earlier every year would coincide with the Taliban’s perennial August finale: During a holiday when a single prayer counts for 1,000 months of prayers, would the Talibs be trying for 7,200 virgins? Or would they front-load attacks in preparation for a parched Ramadan respite? Meanwhile, my staff making its list of Ramadan-induced office disabilities, and me checking it twice due to my shock at its length and scope. The crap, crappiest time of the year, it seemed.
As I rode my Chinese “honda” motorbike to the Kandahar City police headquarters for a hoped-for meeting with its newest marshal – the young, charismatic, controversial General Abdul Razziq – with visions of pomegranate break-fasts dancing in my head, a flimsy mustached teenage policeman (one of Santa Razziq’s eager little helpers, as it were) stopped me at a makeshift checkpoint. Passing for a gangly, pasty Pashtun, I was nearly waved through, until my Chinese sleigh stalled out. A rookie mistake – but from young Cub Scout Sahib’s perspective, a nervous Talib’s mistake.
In a twitch his baked eyes went rabid, perhaps seeing faces of friends killed by the Taliban’s daily motorbike attacks.
I raised my hands. “Zuh Americayum,” I’m American, I said, wondering whether he was one of the Taliban’s ANP-infiltrators who would not believe his luck.
“Ta Americayay?” he mocked me, as if I were lying, then cocking his AK-47 and aiming it at my chest.
In April, a ticked off Afghan pilot killed eight US servicemen at Kabul International Airport in a whimsical shooting spree. While it’s debatable just how whimsical cold killings like this can be – “He always used to say that he wanted to see the corpses of dead ISAF invaders shot with his machine gun b4 his own death,” a Talib tweeted after an Afghan officer’s 29 October killing of 2 Australians –a phenomenon of un-premeditated emotional killings of Americans by Afghan security forces was plaguing the country this year, and the thought “so this is how it happens,” was fluttering in my blurred eyes as I dropped the bike and crouched behind the hood of a parked Corolla, ever-so-gently shouting “mashkeel nasta,” no problem.
So ingloriously it may have ended if a brave Kandahar friend who had been tailing me had not rushed to the scene of what would have been a non-criminal escalation of force, yelling in Pashto “It’s ok, I know him.” Cub scout Sahib exchanged some words and lowered his rifle, his eyes receding to the stoner’s happy-squint, the bullet ejecting to the ground with the most immaculate brass glimmer I’d ever seen, and earnest offers of “chai, khariji (foreigner)?” My friend mentioned Razziq, and fearing Allah-knows-what, the policeman pelted me with apologies. “Mashkeel nasta,” I said, “manana, manana, thank you.” My life-saver and I scrapped the meeting plans and called it a day.
This was my personal preface to Ramadan-in-Kandahar, but violence, confusion, mistrust, vengeance, and chaos in the infamous “spiritual heartland” of the Taliban comprise the banal preface to every Kandahari’s Ramadan. Barring a summer Ramadan-in-Alaska, where the midnight sun would make the daylight fasts fatal, the stress of Ramadan here must make it one of the world’s fiercest. It was this appreciation of the 30-day jihad ahead –not some multi-culti kick or a dark Kurtzean mission to know the people by knowing the horror – which led me to accept the Ramadan Challenge. Not that it had been offered. Even when I’d accept tea-time offers from locals, my negative reply to their customary, “You are Muslim, right?” would unfailingly suck the joy from the dry air. Anyone who couldn’t have guessed Greg Mortenson was something of a fraud before Jon Krakauer’s April 2011 investigative revelations regarding “Three Cups of Tea” should see how far Mortenson’s third-time’s-a-charm formula gets them in Kandahar: After nearly three-hundred cups of tea with Pashtuns, what mattered more to them was that Islam was not my cup of tea.
Nevertheless, most were shocked and flattered by my solidarity, with some even interpreting it as a hopeful turn towards the light. As one dogmatic staffer’s post-Ramadan e-proselytization pitched, “Islam don’t order killing of innocent people, robbery, mugger, steal, drinking of wine, [now in bold, perhaps sensing a tragic flaw] prostitution and other bad things,” generously adding, “I think you are most able to become a real honest Muslim, so kindly please study about real Islamic religion.” But overall, the Kandahris’ appreciation of my Ramadan participation was secularly genuine. As the Hazara cook Ali Baba put it, “Even if we were Buddhist and you did our Buddhist tradition, it makes us happy that you respect our tradition.”
Kind words, though an inference too far. My immediate purpose was of practicality rather than respect: the staff, hard-working though it was, was already scape-goating the month of the spiteful sun: working without food, water, cigarettes, and chai would demand shorter hours, more breaks, and an AC purchase order, for starters. If our civilian aid efforts were not to fizzle out in a year of record casualties, I had no choice but to preemptively partake. When the first “but I am fasting” excuse flew on day one, my wry “aren’t we all…” struck a devastating blow.
To mark the arrival of Ramadan (or “Ramazan,” as Afghans pronounce the Arabic letter Ḍād’s affricate trill) is to dirty oneself in the first of many catechistic free-for-alls over Ramadan’s legal loopholes. It begins when the new moon can be seen. But by whom? And with eye-glasses? And supposing it’s cloudy? Geo-politics scavenge on the confusion: Saudi Arabia declared Ramadan on the first of August, but Iran said the second. To my dismay, Pajhwok Online News reported on July 31st that Afghans would recognize August 1st. And so it began:
11:30 pm (Ramadan Eve): I chug three waters and stuff myself with stale nan, the Afghan bread delivered hot and soft every morning only to magically turn to cardboard by the afternoon.
11:35 pm: Shameless in my infidelity, I will not be praying for Allah’s strength during Ramadan – an all-natural yet perilous strategy never before attempted by a Kandahari. Nevertheless, since Koran-study is a special tenant of Ramadan, I decide to read a sura-a-night. Most Kandaharis, just like the Prophet Muhammad (or when g-chatting, “The Prophet – PBUH”), are illiterate, and few speak Arabic – the unalterable language of the Koran. I often saw 8 year-olds sitting cross-legged along the backstreets with heads bobbing stoically over their laps’ Korans, it being the thought that counts. This gives the local Pakistan-trained mullah pre-vaticanesque power in his Friday homilies: whether the Taliban or ISAF conquers Kandahar, it will be by the consent of the reverend. I, however, have a bootlegged English-language Koran. Tonight’s two-page sura: Thick Clots of Blood. “In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful…”
12:30 am: I am dreaming of accidentally sleeping past sunrise and facing panicked hunger.
1:30 am: I wake up to relieve a desperate bladder.
3:30 am: My alarm rings. I plod in flip-flops and basketball shorts to the refrigerator. Muslims wake up before dawn for the day’s first prayer even in Ordinary Time, but in Ramadan it’s followed by a hibernation meal, prepared by the women-folk who have been up since perhaps one. Lacking a Men’s Health Guide to Ramadan, I realize I have no food strategy: some foods, I suppose, might make me hungrier or expand my stomach. I opt for the food pyramid: buttered nan, a melon slice, a spoonful of chopped cucumbers, what appears to be a leftover chicken spinal chord (this is Kandahar), and a piece of Ali Baba’s delicious cocoa-swirl pound cake. I had chugged three more waters (Ramadan, after all, means “scorched”) when out from the mosques there arose such a clatter.
3:45 am: At dawn from our rooftop, Kandahar City seems peaceful: with the power supply switched off, the only lights are the stars, the green glow of generator-powered minaret bulbs, and the red flicker of the US Army’s surveillance blimp keeping watch above the American base ten kilometers away. From a checkpoint stereo, Farhada Darya and his run-on rebab serenade the police. An occasional whiz of a traffic cop’s whistle; a hint of sewage and campfire smoke – “yeti,” as some US soldiers call the primeval smell. And now, a tap-tap-tap from the mullah’s loud-speaker, and an “Alla-a-a-ah Akbar” sealing our fate. Betraying my inner-atheist, I am in awe at this reveille’s timelessness and power. All adult Kandaharis of able health have hereby submitted themselves to the fast, as their ancestors have done for over a thousand years. Feeling as if I’ve entered Kandahar’s orbit, I go back to sleep.
5:45 am: I have to go to the bathroom, again. Is this interstitial cystitis? No, it’s Ramadan.
7:15 am: I wake up for work realizing I’ve dreamed of stabbing a would-be thief who bizarrely bleeds thick clots of blood. If that’s one sura’s effect on my psyche, I wonder what the entire book might do to a collective sub-conscience.
The true challenge of Ramadan, of course, is not to simply survive it, but keep your job in the process. Responsible for Afghan staffs in Uruzgan and Zabul provinces as well as Kandahar, I had hitherto thought it a dereliction of duty to not be properly spun on Nescafe during working hours. Yet to my relief, hunger was just as strong a stimulant, and my caffeine withdrawal was limited to a light headache.
After a mid-morning walk to the warehouse to meet aid beneficiaries from the Taliban-infested Zhari district, I realized the kicker would not be coffee, but water. Kandaharis say that Allah, in his wisdom, made Ramadan to purify the body after eight months of parasites and rot. Albendazole works fine for me, but whatever dehydration’s healthy payoff, it didn’t appear to help, for example, the Minnesota Vikings’ Muslim safety Husain Abdullah over the past few football season Ramadans. As his coach Brad Childress recalled: “We said, ‘What's wrong with Husain Abdullah? It doesn't seem like he has enough spunk.’” Here, the spunkless day-laborers loading food bags, solar panels, and tool chests for spunkless longbeards whose sons were killed just weeks earlier in Taliban crossfire, only showed signs of vim (albeit schadenfreude) when I informed them that I too was on the nothing diet.
Back at the office, lunchtime came like the birthday of an ex-lover. I resorted to my iPod to keep my mind off it. Having survived the lunch hour, I informed Noor, the hard-working but religiously lax (he’s more interested in WWE wrestler John Cena than the local mullah, for example) 30 year-old office coordinator, of my secret weapon. “But you know, we are not listening to music in Ramadan,” he said with a regretful smile. Jesus, I thought, momentarily panicked over whether sleep is even permitted (it is). It seemed the only genre with Ramadan immunity was Kandahar music – the name our office guards had grimly given to the bup-bup-bops of nearby Taliban firefights. But moments later in the separate-but-equal female office, I heard 19 year-old Sediqa listening to Pakistani pop music. Granted, she is likely the most liberal woman in Kandahar, having boasted of once pushing a flirtatious bicyclist into the gutter as she rebelliously walked to work without a burka. But being liberal in Kandahar just means knowing the loopholes. “We already are not eating or drinking. We can at least have music,” she said.
The true test would be Amin, the 25 year-old wispy-bearded aspiring mullah who I’d had my eye on for openly calling himself a non-violent Talib (aid work in Kandahar is impossible without a few shady connections, but I’d have had zero tolerance for open admiration of the actual Taliban). Aha, he was listening to music on his computer. “Yes, but that is Islamic music, so that is ok.” Sensing space for interpretation, I chose the Sediqa School of Jurisprudence.
It is widely understood that one is at greatest risk of Ramadan relapse between the hours of 4 and 6 pm. Speech becomes salivaless and precious, resulting in stocatto mumbles, which prompt requests to repeat, ultimately escalating into a scene of irritability and parsimony. Thus, it’s best spent isolated, which in turn brings sinister temptations as the minds turn dark: “But no one will ever know…” Yet I was never able to get a Kandahari to admit to even thinking of cheating. I thought of it quite often, usually justifying it in terms of work efficiency. Luckily I had an antidote. The common nap: relieves hunger, foul moods, and exhaustion, and helps you forget for an hour that you need a saline IV.
Iftar, the breaking of the fast, came at 7:15 pm that first day, dropping to 6:40 by the end of Ramadan.Loopholes abound, with the desperate ones calling it from the lowest possible vantage. But when you’re within listening distance of a mosque, you wait for the mullah’s verdict. At this point, I felt lightweight and giddy, my appetite slightly fading. Then came the old man’s familiar tarzanish call to prayer. But this time it was beautiful – perhaps in an unhealthy, Stockholm Syndrome kind-of-way – but beautiful still, especially knowing that the generous cantor, to whom I felt allied for the first time, was delaying his own break to allow us ours. The water hit me like an endorphin cocktail. The pound cake, which I took first, was like a “special” brownie, making everything seem pleasant. These Muslims might be on to something.
The highlight of the following two weeks was my time conversing at Iftar with the two twenty-something compound-hands: Mashal, a posh Dari-speaking Kabuli with a “Broken Angel” ringtone, who wears a sleeveless soccer shirt over his Pashtun capri pants and can usually be found updating his facebook status with a “missing u still!!! :(((” for his Kabul girlfriends with Indian actress profile pics. And Jafar, a goofy-faced, gullible, kind, 6’4” Pashtun, born-and-raised in Kandahar City, often rendered incoherent by Mashal’s unsure translations of his Pashto. They prepared true Iftar meals – which start with eating some dates and end with lots of melons and oil-with-rice – and were eager to talk to the foreigner.
A common topic was the Taliban. While the first day of Ramadan had brought a summer record low of 5 attacks, zero deaths, and a partridge in a pear tree in the southern region of Afghanistan according to UN security reports, death tolls soon rose back to 10-15. There were even some particularly gruesome reports of children being hung, or forced to step on prototype IEDs.
Mashal: The fucking Taliban man. They fucking ruin everything man.
Kabir: (wild-eyed, trying his English): They are junglemen!
Me: What?
Kabir: Junglemen!
Mashal: He means, they are wild, like people in the jungle. All of our problems are the fucking Pashtuns.
Kabir: (smiles sheepishly).
Mashal: And Pakistan. And Iranian. And Russian.
Kabir tells us how he recently returned from a medical trip to Quetta, Pakistan. Amazed at the kingly aura of the black-turbaned, eye-shadowed young Talibs – Pakistani soldiers salute them, and people yell “make way!” as they enter his café – Kabir tried to take a photo with his cell phone, only to have a dour Talib order its deletion.
Mashal: Yeah man, fucking Taliban. In Kabul it’s not like this. We are listening to music, the girls are not covered, we are even drinking. I am telling my girlfriends, ‘give me head.’
Me: (eager to validate a flowering classical liberal) Nice.
Kabir: (smiling, not understanding).
Mashal: How is America? There is a girl in America that wants to marry me so I can come there. She is from Kuh-something.
Me: Colorado?
Mashal: (pulls up her facebook profile: a 40-something Kentucky carnie, balding and jack-toothed).
Me: Oh Kentucky. Yeah, Kentucky is kind of like our Paktiya. Mountain people, you know.
Kabir: (upon hearing the translation) Woooow. Kentucky.
Most aid workers are pampered with frequent leaves in Afghanistan, and I was due on the 12th day of Ramadan. I flew first to Kabul, where I lowered the Enrique Iglesias cd volume to ask Abdul, my glittery-jeaned taxi driver, how his fast was going. “It’s very hard man. But I’m here in a taxi, I can put down the windows. I just think about all the laborers out in the sun, and think man I have it easy.”
I had a 5:15 pm flight to Egypt via Dubai. I had had two beers the previous night and missed my 3:30 am wakeup, so I was thirsty. I sat next to a non-English-speaking Jalalabad Pashtun. We were traveling west, so Iftar would be delayed (some say that simply sitting in a top-floor Dubai Tower office adds three minutes to your Iftar). The stewardess handed out special box meals of dates and water to be stowed until sun-down. I asked for one. “Are you Muslim?” “No, but I’m fasting.” “Really?” Pleasantly surprised, she handed it over. Eventually, an older man, satisfied with the sunset, dug in, followed rapidly by others. To my horror, Jalalabad Dimmesdale put down his prayer beads to wag a finger at me. After ten minutes I ask him to reassess. He approved, and we had our dates and water. Then he pulled out a peach from some mysterious stash and gave me half. No grimy half-peach had ever meant so much to me, and I thanked him for his Ramadan charity.
Ramadan in Egypt: I arrive in Alexandria too late for a proper meal. I spend the following Iftar with a cab driver in the airport parking lot, where I am waiting to retrieve a lost bag. The next day, having found the bag and forgiven the airline (‘tis the season), I continue to Israel via Cairo, where my 3 hour bus-layover gives me a chance to stroll the bustling tea-alleys near Tahrir Square. An Egyptian family eagerly invites me to join them for a generous Iftar of dates, chicken, and rice. The teens next to me brag about having fought Mubarak’s police months earlier.
Ramadan in Israel: I’ve heard it said by mischievous Muslim-American friends, “Allah does not see what happens in Las Vegas.” If that’s so, then he probably does not watch over the “Zionist entity” either. Still, I must now confess: on Day 15, having lost ten pounds on the Ramadan diet, I eliminated myself from the Ramadan Challenge with a falafel. But it was damn good falafel. As it turns out, summer in party-hard 24/7 Tel Aviv presents a unique Ramadan challenge due to its many temptations: this is one of the few cities, for example, where the daylight romance clause cannot be taken lightly. Glimpsing a few Israeli Muslims during my trip as I ate falafels, I felt like Cool Hand Luke on-the-run, destined to soon return to them, my prison-mates.
Back in Kandahar with a week to go, I resumed the fast. By now, thanks to my nightly studies, I was well versed on the posthumous torments awaiting infidels such as me: For the Infidels we have got ready chains and collars and flaming fire…We will brand him on the nostrils…Then pour on his head the tormenting boiling water… And thereupon shall ye drink boiling water. Tea, anyone? The Koran, I’d concluded, was a nightmare from which few Kandaharis were trying to awake.
Prayer value inflates dramatically over the final three days of Ramadan. Friday was “Quds Day,” so I asked the staff about praying at the mosque. Amin, eager to collect my bounty perhaps, consented. Noor was grave: “They will ask you if you are Muslim. They will ask, ‘why don’t you know how to kneel and pray like us?’ That is not good for you.” Amin offered to teach me the basics, noting that the whole world will become Muslim by 2013 anyway according to science. I yielded to Noor.
Saturday was Lailat-ul-Qadar. As my morning security text put it: “You are advised to stay more alert tonight and tomorrow than the previous times, due to the 27th of Ramadan which all people do not sleep on this special night continuing prayin and reciting the holly Quran, might insurgents use this opportunity for their target execution.” Indeed, two suicide bombs shook our office that afternoon, with Iran’s Press TV giddily reporting 64 Americans killed (the toll was actually 4 Afghans). The next day, I asked the staffers if they had stayed up all night reciting. Amin gushed that yes it was wonderful. Noor, for his part, had successfully watched John Cena until 2 am, and then fallen asleep.
Finally, the morning of Eid-al-Fitr (literally, “Festive breaking of the fast”). The compound was quiet, the staffers home celebrating three days of “picnics” (the Kandahar euphemism for parties), and Ali Baba off to his native Ghazni Province, having stocked the fridge with a lifetime supply of sheep’s organs. Yet it felt obscene to eat even a grape, so I went out to the gruff custodian Khaliq, who confirmed via translator that on Eid, it is haram not to consume. Khaliq, who has placed a flower sprig in his ear, is slurring his words and balancing his eyes, for this is his first full day since July of naswar, the rank, olive-colored powder placed on the gum like a tobacco pinch, but with ten times the effect. "It is Eid!" he reiterates with a finger in the air.
Even the most protective staffers had told me that on Eid I could take my Chinese bike anywhere, as no one would fight on that joyous day. To my surprise, the streets had been transformed into a block party of gaudily-crowned urchins in diamond studded shalwar kameeses and priestly jerkins, all heavily armed with RPGs, AKs, and klobbs. On closer inspection, these were just “toy” guns, the Tickle-me-Elmo’s of Eid-in-Kandahar. Sons were gathered with fathers near the mosques, reminding me of Salman Rushdie’s “Snotnose” Sinai, who rarely prayed, “except on Eid-ul-Fitr, when my father took me to the Friday mosque to celebrate the holiday by tying a handkerchief around my head and pressing my forehead to the ground.” In one bustling market, giant subs were blaring tunes, and even the women in their new exactly-the-same burkas looked like they might be smiling under their veils.
As Noor once melodramatically put it, “I think there is no happiness in Kandahar. Everyday there is blast. Everyday there is attack.” Indeed, for now in Kandahar, “peace on earth, goodwill to men” is delusional. But I can say that both have been given to me in generous portions by many Muslims – whether Kandahari, Kabuli, Egyptian, or Palestinian – who perhaps appreciate those gems as I an Iftar chicken’s liver. Until that day of peace and goodwill, may my gracious hosts’ days be merry and bright, and may all their Ramadans be short, wintry, and white.
1 comment:
This video sums it up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4emfUVrFHzA&feature=youtu.be&a
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