Asra Q. Nomani

“Look at him,” Asim says, punching her fist in the air. “Confident. Certain. Determined.” Her raves continue: “He’s a magnetic person.”

“I love him,” she gushes. Asim doesn’t want there to be any confusion. “I’m happily married,” she says. But as the rest of the world sees many of the furious turban-wearing fundamentalists burning Musharraf in effigy in the streets (they will likely be out in full force now with Musharraf out of the country, preparing to meet with President Bush and address the United Nations in New York) another part of the population feels quite differently.

There are no Gallup polls measuring public opinion here — approval is best measured by silence in the streets, which for Pakistan has largely been the case, even since U.S.-led forces began bombing Afghanistan a month ago. And for modern Muslims here who eagerly seek to embrace a global culture, Musharraf incongruously manages to be a military dictator and yet also a symbol of modernity. He breaks taboos with his pet dogs and consumption of alcohol — not to mention his penchant for Armani suits and golf.

Now, with his measured support of U.S. strikes on the neighboring Taliban — a government he had supported up until Sept. 11 — he has made a dramatic pro-West shift in his polices, most notably ditching hard-line elements from the country’s powerful intelligence agency. And his most avid followers are modern Muslims.

OK and fine, I’ll be honest. I was relieved to find Asim, because I, too, have developed a thing for Musharraf. When we realize our shared interest, we squeeze each other’s hands like soul sisters. I knew I couldn’t be the only one who watched him on television, playing host as a parade of world leaders took turns across from him while he sank into a nicely upholstered sofa, like a new Homecoming King. He is Muslim and a man of the world. At a time when the world sees images of crazed Muslims who not only want segregation from, but to decree violence on, nonbelievers, Musharraf is reassuring, inclusive and strong.

The photo that Asim has in her closet was shot from an unusual tour he took in July to India and the city of the Taj Mahal, where he and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee politically arm-wrestled over the disputed territory of Kashmir. It was on that tour that Musharraf won a special place in many a heart. He proved to be aggressive politically, personally sentimental and thoroughly hypnotizing. He ditched his usual military uniform to wear a cherwani, the trousers matched with a long coat and high collar that many have associated with the jacket popularized by Jawaharlal Nehru.

At the time, he made a side trip to visit his ancestral haveli (“big house”) in the Old Delhi neighborhood of Daryaganj where he was born. Early in his childhood, his family left it behind and called Pakistan their new home after India won independence from the British in 1947 and its north was sliced out to create a nation for Muslims. During the trip, he reached out to the people, Clinton-like, and hugged a very elderly woman servant who said she remembered him as a child. He showed none of the restraint of the most conservative of Muslim men, who try to avoid touching a woman unrelated to them, no matter what the age. “He was so sympathetic to the old lady,” remembers Asim fondly.

Then, when he faced off with India’s journalists, they wanted to ask him questions about anything other than Kashmir, so they could at least get to know the man on friendlier terms. He responded that they could, but it wouldn’t make much of a friendship. He proceeded to answer each journalist’s questions so precisely, viewers back home were impressed. A critic in an Indian newspaper complained that India’s tough journalists had turned into “salivating puppies and purring kittens.” (Musharraf manages to turn up on TV quite frequently. When he does, Asim says, her husband calls her over with an eager shout: “Your boyfriend is on TV!”)

Musharraf made an impression on me in an interview last spring when he admitted that he had trouble with an expanding waistline since taking office (just like Clinton), a sweet tooth (ditto) and with security detail — because he appreciates spontaneity. He said: “I think my natural self is the best. I just behave normally, what I like, I like. Whatever I don’t like, I don’t like.”

He said he didn’t really like pop bands (“I find them very stupid and silly”), but admitted liking Sufi music and ghazals, poetic Muslim songs (like the ones my mother used to hum at the kitchen sink when I was growing up) and a band called Junoon. What? I first saw Junoon, a Pakistani rock band inspired by Sufism, in a Central Park concert a few years back when very cute and hip teenage Pakistani-American boys from New Jersey moshed in Tommy Hilfiger shirts to the band’s Urdu chants of “Allahu, Allahu, Allahu” — belief in only one Allah.

And when Musharraf made his tour through India, I had just returned from visiting India and staying in my ancestral haveli, a sweeping white palace of a home called Latif Manzil in the village of Jaigahan in Jaunpur District in Uttar Pradesh. To be in your ancestral home is to feel the pulse of ancestors who seem very much alive, if only in the clouds that pass overhead from the courtyards. Maybe it seems, in the West, typical, perhaps calculated, for him to travel to his ancestral haveli during his short diplomatic mission. But to me and others at the time, it seemed to speak wonders about his soul.

He is a Rudy Guliani figure whose fans fear will leave office at some point (no problem there — as a military dictator, he could be dislodged only by a junta, although he has promised an election that many of his fans wish wouldn’t happen). While he hasn’t quite reached the sex symbol status of the shaggy-haired prime minister of Japan, he has become a bit of a fashion icon. A retired senior army officer recalled running into him at the Islamabad Marriott before the war and admiring his Armani suit. (Though it’s not so rare here, or even imported from Italy; Armani suits that get stitched here for export, like Bally shoes, are very inexpensive.) And, like some Western pols, he’s followed by rumors in higher society circles linking him with starlets and other ladies.

Musharraf is known among the younger set as a gentle uncle figure, tapping his daughter’s friends with a gentle touch on the shoulder. Years ago, Musharraf, his wife and two children used to visit his very progressive mother, who lived in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of F-7/1 in Islamabad, and was known to neighborhood children as mother dado, (a play off dadi, grandmother), who played traditional Indian subcontinent music with harmoniums and tabla instruments while Musharraf’s daughter bicycled around the neighborhood free as a kite. By listening to music, and caring for a pet dog inside her house, she openly violated taboos on two things that the strictest of Muslims abhor: music and dogs.

The dog issue, in fact, seems to hound Musharraf. In India, a columnist refers to Musharraf as “a dog-loving nattily uniformed general.” Musharraf boldly posed holding his two dogs for his photo-op after taking over the country. Go figure. The man knew that many Muslims go running when a dog starts approaching them, even with its tail wagging, especially with its slobbery pink tongue hanging out of its mouth. We have to do something called wuzu, a ritual washing, before doing namaz. We’re taught that touching a dog makes you dirty for namaz, so that you shouldn’t keep a dog in the house. Others interpret what is said in the Quran more liberally, though.

I had Pluto, the Majumdars’ Pekinese, to initiate me; when I was 11, the Majumdars, who practiced Hinduism, gave me something like $5 a week to walk him in Morgantown, W.V., when they were on vacation. My mother was trained early as a Muslim girl to distrust dogs (she claims because they were wild in India). She refused to get near Pluto, backing away from the reach of his chain when he would scamper toward us when he visited for dinners with Majumdar Aunty and Majumdar Uncle. Then there was Nikita, a beautiful Samoyed with soft white fur that moved in across the street, leaping whenever he could on Denise Pickle and me, both of us thrilled by his eager soft self. But my Athar Chacha, my father’s brother, here in Karachi goes running even when a little dachshund approaches him. Among Muslims here, that’s quite common.

Not surprisingly, Musharraf’s dog antics don’t play well with many people. But they do play well with moderate Pakistanis. One liberal woman repeated with glee seeing Musharraf allowing one of his furry companions seats at the breakfast table. They’re tired of the hypocrisy in a nation where people hide behind a veil of piety. They see it with the mullahs, who are often uneducated religious leaders who rally those in the lower class to despise modernity.

To understand how Musharraf fits into Pakistan is to understand the disenfranchisement of middle-class families from mullahs and political leaders. Many Pakistanis have gotten only false promises from political leaders who somehow manage to build their wealth and bank accounts.

This is the history as they tell it: Musharraf joined the Pakistan Military Academy in 1961 and was commissioned in an elite artillery regiment in 1964 while Ayub Khan was in power. The Pakistani armed forces were modeled after the British military, and Pakistani military culture had with the same values of dancing, drinking and dating found in its Western counterpart.

In 1965, Pakistan went to war with India. That war marked a turning point; the military became more conservative as more religious generals came into power. But Musharraf was part of the more liberal earlier graduating class. The very liberal Zulfiqar Bhutto came to power after Pakistan fought another war with India in 1971. Pakistanis remember his proud declaration that he drank alcohol at a public meeting as the natural end to an exhausting day. Society turned more conservative with the 1977 coup d’état of General Muhammad Zia-ul Haq, who presented himself as a religious man, shutting down nightclubs and raiding parties where alcohol flowed.

With Zia’s death in a mysterious plane crash, the liberal Benazir Bhutto came to power after elections in 1989, loosely drawing a dupatta over her head to appease conservative Muslims though it wasn’t the liberal image of her days studying in the West. To this day, I remember a friend of mine, an aide in the U.S. Congress, shocked at how U.S. congressmen and senators fell over themselves in front of the seductive image of this woman with a dupatta. But she left many in the middle class of Pakistan disenfranchised after growing evidence of corruption drove her from office. She was eventually followed by Nawaz Sharif, another leader hounded out of office amid findings of corruption, this time in the coup that blasted Musharraf to power.

In this highly polarized country where immigrants from India have formed a political party to demand more immigrant (mohajir) rights, it’s a coup of sorts for this group that Musharraf, himself a mohajir, has risen to power. Even Musharraf’s wife, Sehba, is nothing like a mullah’s wife. Unlike Bhutto, she doesn’t feel the need to drape a dupatta over her head, wearing it over her shoulders instead in elegant outfits. She is considered loyal and devoted — and the woman behind this man’s success. Even bolder, he’s known to prefer Johnny Walker Black Label scotch.

By all accounts, the Musharrafs lived a modest life, not filled with fancy upholstered sofas. At one time, according to a family friend, their furniture included a simple padded low wooden platform with a red fabric over it and big pillows upon which to rest. Their furniture often had “MES” printed on the back, standing for government-issued stock from the Military Engineering Services. His eldest daughter, Ayla, pursued an unconventional field in Pakistan for women — architecture — going to National College of Art in Lahore. There, she was courted by a man she eventually wed in a “love” marriage, as opposed to an arranged one, also not the norm in this culture. Even more surprising: The Musharrafs are Sunnis, and their daughter married a Shiite. By accepting the marriage, they also transcended many of the hangups of families who don’t allow their children to marry out of their specific group.

Friday’s much-hyped “strike,” organized by religious extremists against Musharraf’s alliance with America, was all about those who take issue with Musharraf’s modern lifestyle. I hopped behind my cousin Ali on his beat-up Honda CD-70 and sped off to the protests. This is what I noted: A young man tossed a ball menacingly in his hand as he crossed the street before us. Would he throw it at us? Not quite. No, he was crossing the street to get to the park where hundreds of young men and boys already had converged. My cousin brother Ali explained: “Today is a nice day. No school. No work.” It was a national holiday, the first in years, for Pakistan’s great poet Allama Iqbal.

Flatbed trucks passed us with flags unfurled. A truck full of police followed quickly behind. A juice walla stood at the roadside spinning sugar-cane juice. The windows of a Subway sandwich shop on I.I. Chandigar Street were covered with black fabric, a trick businesses use to somehow disguise their windows from rocks flung by mobs. As if they wouldn’t just aim at the sheets instead. We glided through the empty streets at Fresco Chowk Roundabout, known for the famous Fresco food store a few stores down from the corner. A boy was picking his nose.

Ali surveys the crowd. He knows what most Pakistanis know. The crowd is mostly filled with Afghan refugees, Pathans (the Pashto speakers, many of them with relatives across the border in Afghanistan) and boys driven in from the madrasas of the religious right that supports the Taliban. The voice over the loudspeaker trashes Musharraf, and welcomes a leader from one of the madrasas outside Karachi.

I’m the only woman there. I chose to keep my dupatta off my head today so I draw plenty of stares, though I spread it modestly over my tunic-like kurta. There is Taj Mohammad, a white-haired elderly man. He’s carrying a big plastic bag filled with smaller plastic bags of salty snacks, and reminds me of the peanut vendor at a Yankees game. A young man with bleary eyes comes toward us as we take pictures and tries to act menacing, saying someone is following us. Whatever. Ultimately, it’s a less than menacing turnout, even though images on TV will look frightening.

When I come back to my hotel I see Musharraf on TV, and admire his stylish frameless glasses, such a departure from the OSHA-approved-style safety glasses more common with men his age. I wonder what he should do with his hair. And I know that in a living room in the other side of Karachi, a husband is saying to his wife, “Your boyfriend is on TV.”

“What do you mean ‘involved’?” Mariane asked.

“We think he committed the actual murder.”

To those following the case closely, this is not a huge surprise. “We’ve known all along that al-Qaida was involved,” Mariane told me Wednesday. “We just didn’t know how.” After initial relief at having Mohammed’s involvement confirmed, her reaction shifted back to impatience at the slow pace of unraveling the ties between the shadowy figures responsible for Danny’s kidnapping and murder. “We have worked so hard to find the truth,” Mariane says. “We have to continue.”

My interest in the investigation is more than a professional one. At the time Danny was kidnapped, he and Mariane, then pregnant with their first child, were staying with me at a house I had rented in Karachi, Pakistan, while writing a book. I had traveled to Pakistan for Salon, to cover the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and was happy to host the Pearls when Danny came to Karachi to interview a local Muslim cleric who was said to have ties to alleged “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid. He was pursuing other investigative threads, as well. When he didn’t return from the interview on Jan. 23, 2002, Mariane and I alerted U.S. officials and his Wall Street Journal editors, from the desk where Danny had left his laptop. We transformed my home into the investigation’s headquarters. For five weeks, we worked closely with U.S. and Pakistani investigators to find Danny; after investigators discovered he had been murdered, I left Pakistan, and moved to Paris to welcome Danny’s son, Adam, into the world, and later returned to the United States. I have remained close friends with Mariane, and have helped her follow the investigative threads in the case, talking with investigators and gathering information.

The confirmation of Mohammed’s involvement, make no mistake, is a serious breakthrough. According to American officials, Mohammed was one of three Arab men known to have arrived with video equipment and knives at the location where Pearl was held after his abduction in Karachi that day. We all know what followed: They videotaped him answering questions about his Jewish ancestry as he kept his composure, showing his classic irreverence for authority. A final image of the video showed him having his throat cut.

Mohammed’s bleary-eyed image was splashed across newspapers worldwide after he was captured by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agents this past March. Although American officials first denied that Mohammed had anything to do with Pearl’s killing, this week they confirmed that they now believe he was responsible. But that revelation raises more questions than it answers. The full investigation into Danny’s death could well proceed in directions that will make both Pakistan and U.S. investigators uncomfortable.

Until now, Omar Saeed Sheikh, the young Pakistani London School of Economics dropout who was sentenced to death in July 2002 for organizing the Pearl kidnapping, had been identified as the ringleader of a carefully assembled alliance of extremist Muslim militants working in at least four different terrorist cells. Mohammed would link Omar Sheikh more explicitly to the wider and more sinister al-Qaida network. The question, though, is whether this will lead to an even more troubling connection: between al-Qaida and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, which has been linked to Omar Sheikh.

As Mariane says, “When the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed name first came up, the obvious questions were what was his link to Omar Sheikh and what was his link to ISI? Those are the questions we have to answer now, and there are more. What is the direct link between Omar Sheikh and 9/11? Is Omar Sheikh a main player in 9/11? Should there be more charges against him? How much was al-Qaida involved in planning Danny’s kidnapping? What was the role of Saudi Arabia?”

Pakistan’s possible link to terrorism is already an extremely volatile subject. Pakistan, struggling to maintain its position as an ally of the U.S., bristles at any suggestion that the Pearl kidnappers had relations with the ISI. The allegation by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy that Sheikh was an ISI agent, contained in his book “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” sparked a harsh rebuke from Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last month. “ISI involvement in the killing of this young man is unthinkable,” the president insisted.

But of course it is quite thinkable, because of the shadowy way the ISI operates. Musharraf himself struggles constantly against the former generals who run the intelligence arm, which has historically maintained close relations with many of the country’s rogue terrorist groups, and seems to operate independently of the president’s authority. U.S. officials, because of their own need for a close ally in Musharraf, also struggle to hide their frustrations with his unruly intelligence arm. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, during a meeting a few weeks ago with members of Congress, implied as much when he said he did not believe “affection for working with us extends up and down the rank and file of the Pakistani security community.”

And no one symbolizes the ISI’s shadowy relationship with terrorist operatives better than Omar Sheikh.

A judge in an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan sentenced Sheikh to death for his role as the ringleader in Danny’s kidnapping and murder last July. An appeal has been pending ever since with countless postponements. Throughout his trial last year, Omar Sheikh maintained that — although he knew how, and by whom, Danny had been killed — he was not himself responsible. The judge sentenced three other young Pakistani men to life sentences for their roles in facilitating the kidnapping and disseminating hostage letters, including digital photographs of Danny in captivity, via the Internet.

When Pakistani police investigators traced the kidnapping plot to Sheikh on Feb. 5, 2002, Sheikh reportedly turned himself in to the custody of a former ISI official, who was then home secretary of the state of Punjab, based in Lahore, where Sheikh’s family lived. He remained in the protection of intelligence agents for one week, until Feb. 12, when he was handed over to Pakistani police. But his connections to the ISI didn’t begin or end there.

Sheikh was arrested in 1994 in New Delhi, India, for kidnapping American and British tourists, and was imprisoned pending trial in India’s maximum-security Tihar Prison. But Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, was one of three militants horse-traded for the hostages of an Indian airline hijacked to Afghanistan in December 1999, by the terrorist group he previously belonged to, Harkat-ul-Ansar. The Indian government released Sheikh to Afghanistan. From there, and reportedly under ISI protection, he went back to Pakistan before returning to London to reunite with his family. He remained involved in the activities of militant Muslim groups in Pakistan, but stayed out of the news until his arrest for Danny’s kidnapping and murder. Sheikh laid the trap for Danny in Karachi, but left for Lahore before the actual abduction, by all accounts. It isn’t clear if Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was in the loop by then.

The trail for Mohammed included a Sept. 11, 2002, raid on a Karachi hideout. During an exchange of fire lasting about four hours, Mohammed allegedly escaped, but Ramzi Binalshibh was allegedly captured and airlifted out of Pakistan for interrogation. German and U.S. investigative and intelligence agencies had been hunting for Binalshibh since September 2001; U.S. officials identified him as the 20th hijacker who couldn’t join the 9/11 attack because he was unable to secure a visa into the United States. He was a member of the so-called Hamburg cell, which played a leading role in the planning, financing and execution of the Sept. 11 attack. Binalshibh is believed to have handpicked Mohammad Atta to lead the group of hijackers that flew planes into the World Trade Center.

Speculation about whether Mohammed was involved in Danny’s kidnapping and murder began immediately after his capture. The three men who arrived on Danny’s last day of captivity had been described to police as being of Yemeni origin. (There is some confusion about Mohammed’s nationality, however; he has been described as a Kuwaiti-born and U.S.-educated Pakistani.)

Yet the news that Mohammed killed Pearl doesn’t explain his motive. What would make al-Qaida target the Wall Street Journal’s Asian bureau chief? There are several theories. Robert Baer, a former case officer with the CIA’s directorate of operations, believes Pearl had begun to pursue Mohammed as a story for the Journal. Baer says Pearl called him the day after the Sept. 11 attack to talk about possible culprits, and that he told the reporter about Mohammed’s role as a key aide to bin Laden going back to 1997. He also told Pearl, Baer says, that the government of Qatar protected Mohammed and would have information about his activities. After Danny’s murder, Baer said that an official in the Qatar government told him that Danny had called the Foreign Ministry for information about Mohammed.

But Mariane and I weren’t aware that Danny was pursuing a Mohammed story at the time of his kidnapping. He had come to Karachi to interview a Muslim cleric called Sheik Mubarek Gilani. He was investigating whether there were any ties between Gilani and Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber, who was seized on a Boston-bound American Airlines jet from Paris allegedly trying to ignite explosive in his shoes. But there is always the possibility that Danny was reporting on additional leads he gathered about the shadowy networks with al-Qaida ties. The French philosopher Lévy claims in his book that Danny was killed for reporting that Pakistan was sharing nuclear secrets with North Korea. But there is no evidence he had made any such links between the two countries.

Mohammed’s involvement, however, does renew questions about possible links between Saudi Arabia and the kidnapping and murder because of well-known ties between individuals in Saudi Arabia (including, of course, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers) and al-Qaida. At one point, U.S. investigators were pursuing leads that linked a mobile phone number in Riyadh to phone calls to the web of militants involved in the plot to kidnap and kill Danny. In addition, law enforcement investigators traced the first known public distribution of the video in May 2002 on the Internet to Riyadh. (At the time, Mariane and I received a phone call in Paris. “It’s bad news. The video is on the Internet,” said the voice on the other end. For two days, Mariane and I maneuvered between officials from Lycos U.K. to Scotland Yard to track the source of the video’s posting. “An office building in Riyadh,” we were told. We couldn’t get any more information, and the investigation seemed to reach a dead end.)

But for the time being, the immediate questions that need to be answered are in Pakistan. And getting straight answers from anyone in ISI — protected by proxies in the press — will be difficult.

Inside Pakistani media circles, journalists refer to “agency reporters” who loosely work for two bosses: their editors and Pakistani intelligence agencies. In her book, “A Mighty Heart,” Mariane Pearl singled out Kamran Khan, a journalist for the English-language News in Karachi and a Washington Post stringer, who wrote the first story that identified Danny as a Jewish reporter, information that Mariane has equated to a “death sentence” in Pakistan. Khan recently told the Washington Post that he was simply pursuing the story aggressively and didn’t mean any harm.

Khan also published intelligence agency efforts to link India to the kidnapping by raising the possibility that I was a spy for India, claiming that I was Danny’s “full-time assistant,” identifying me as an “Indian journalist” (I was born in India, but have a U.S. passport and was raised a Muslim in the United States since the age of 4) and reporting falsely that Danny had brought me into Karachi to work with him. He also raised questions about why Danny would travel to Karachi from India, where he was based, saying “officials” were “intrigued as to why an American newspaper reporter based in Bombay would also establish a full-time residence in Karachi.” Anyone familiar with the fractured relations between Pakistan and India can understand how this sort of characterization could tarnish Danny’s reputation in Pakistan and weaken public outrage about his brutal killing, a goal some ISI officials might have wanted.

After Danny originally went missing, Mariane and I hunted through the house looking for clues. I found a photo on Danny’s computer of us, shortly after we all met up in Pakistan. He had a particularly befuddled look on his face, and had created an appropriate caption for the photo: “Clueless in Karachi.”

It turned out to be an apt description of all of us in Karachi, and of the complicated nature of relationships between Muslim extremists and their political and financial sponsors that Danny stumbled into. That is what must be explored further in order to learn who planned, financed and pulled off the kidnapping and murder of Danny. Even with the apparent admission of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the job is not done.

Is all this talk about anthrax frightening these young girls?

A refrain of “No!” “No!” “No!” “No!” comes stumbling out of the mouths of 10-year-old Arfa Khan and 11-year-old Quratul-Ain Nasir and their classmates, Kainat Akra and Mehak Sohail.

Why not? Quratul-Ain, in the spirit of her famous namesake (eclectic, cutting-edge Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder), explains from behind her spectacles: “Our God is with us.” Of course, she believes that’s the same God who happens to be watching over America. But Pakistanis, from elementary school-aged children to the reporters in the Daily Jang office, are taking the news of this scare with a calm that doesn’t seem to be the case in America — partly, they say, because this is a society that is unprotected by EPA clean-air regulations, Transportation Department air bag rules or Agriculture Department poultry farm requirements. They’re not used to having their health monitored and protected.

It’s a reaction that’s maybe a bit macabre considering the four deaths linked to anthrax in the United States. But to understand it in this Muslim society is to understand that the Quran spells out that death is predestined, so to fear it is essentially pointless. “Every soul shall have a taste of death,” says sur’ah Ali Imran. It’s a mantra I’ve heard much as a child of Islam. Our deaths are written before we are born. Live wisely, but fear not that which is an inevitable consequence of birth.

Back on Oct. 23, one of the commerce desk reporters here for the Daily Jang opened an envelope that spilled out white powder. Last Friday, the contents were announced to contain anthrax spores, according to tests at the very posh Aga Khan University Hospital, a Western-style campus that could have been dropped here from Southern California (students shouting to each other, “Yo! Where ya been?”).

Now, on Sunday night, in the midst of this anthrax scare, I go to see how the newsroom is reacting. The office is down a narrow lane usually crowded with reporters’ motorcycles and scooters. A rusty beat-up vehicle, a cross between a van and truck, sits outside with “PRESS” emblazoned on its front. On the way over, my dapper driver Gul Hussain shrugs off the anthrax scare. “The people of America fear death,” he says in Urdu. “The people of Pakistan do not fear death.”

Indeed, this is a place where the face of death and despair stares at you during even a simple drive, in the sunken faces of beggars who knock their knuckles on your window at intersections, the child who tries to sell you cummerbunds (the white cotton cords tied to keep shalwars up) for five rupees outside the Taj Medical Complex, the men piled without helmets on motorcycles, the teetering buses barreling by, threatening to tumble upon you.

A gentle-looking, middle-aged, uniformed guard sits on a stool inside a grilled gate pulled shut except for a narrow passageway. I slip up the stairs at the end of the lobby as if I belong there, without pausing at the guard desk. Nobody stops me. Nobody asks to check my little Samsonite Royal Traveler purse.

During a visit earlier in the week, there was a “PUSH” sign at the front door that somebody had altered to read “BUSH.” CNN played on the Sony TV in the Karachi editor Mahmood Shaam’s office. The air conditioner blasted away. Now, the PUSH/BUSH sign has been taken down. Highlights from Pakistan’s cricket match against Sri Lanka fill the TV screen in Shaam’s office (the World Series has no audience here). On his Philips computer screen, Shaam has the wire story about arrests in the anthrax mailing to his office. With his salt-and-pepper beard and spectacles, he is as good-humored and philosophical as he was almost a week earlier.

“We are not scared,” he says, laughing lightly. “We enjoy these things. They’re excitement for us. We know it’s part of our life in Third World countries.”

Ever since a Muslim, Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman, started the newspaper in New Delhi under British colonial rule during World War II (thus the name “Jang,” which means “war”), Daily Jang reporters have survived imprisonment, kidnapping threats and raids on their offices by disgruntled political parties (thus, the numerous metal grill gates outside the offices). Shaam spent two months in prison during the military dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq, bunking in a cell with criminals his newspaper had helped send to jail (they were forgiving, he says). The jailing of journalists here is so commonplace an occurrence that it’s hardly a badge of honor.

A Boston Globe reporter calls from Islamabad. Shaam cradles the phone to his ear. “Hello? Yes?” He answers her questions with a trademark chuckle here and there. He asks her a question with another chuckle: “How are you finding time” to care about this anthrax scare “when your defense minister” — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — “is in Islamabad?”

CNN, BBC, the Associated Press, Reuters all call Shaam. There is little news, though the police have arrested two suspects. In the newsroom, a man with a Sindhi topi (hat) fiddles with his moustache; another man sips a cup of tea; another flicks his cigarette on the blue tiled floor.

“Europeans, Americans have protected lives,” says Shaam. “We think environmental protection is a luxury. We have bigger problems.”

No one has yet tested positive for anthrax exposure, Shaam says. The offices were closed for one day to be decontaminated. Everyone in the office has been offered Cipro; some have taken it, others have not.

Education and health reporter Arif Ishaq, a senior journalist here, slips into a black chair with the factory plastic still covering it. “I can’t say why Americans are so afraid. We are not. There are so many problems we are facing. Social, health, economic,” he says. “This is nothing.” Garbage here is dumped on the side of roads, not tossed into Hefty garbage bags that are then stuffed into neat garbage cans. Recycling? Ha.

So the reporters relish taking a brave pose.

“Civil society has not developed that much here,” says Shaam. “The water we drink, if it is drunk by an American, they will get sick. When there is a sun eclipse, a moon eclipse, people here run to the roofs to see it. You protect your eyes. When there is a cyclone here, people rush to the ocean.” In America, by contrast, we’ve got beeps interrupting TV broadcasts for warnings about hurricanes like Michelle, now raging in the Caribbean.

Haroon Leghari, director of Jang’s London operations, draws on a Swiss Villiger No. 7 cigar. “If anthrax germs were exposed to the germs around us,” he says, “they’d run for their lives. They’d come out and they’d say, ‘This ain’t New York!’”

Around the office, they joke about getting anthraxed. “Have you been anthraxed?” laughs Faisal Jamal Ayoob, group director of productions, who works next door to the “anthrax zone” — the area possibly exposed to the contents of the spilled envelope.

In this parlance, I get anthraxed. I sit in a dingy chair at the commerce desk where the reporter opened the letter. The chair wobbles on its wheels. An “Urdu Keyboard Layout” is taped to the CPU sitting on the top ledge of this long, two-tiered desk. The desk is empty right now, but not from fear. The reporters just aren’t around. A plastic trashcan (without a liner) is filled nearby with red betel nut juice from the men here who chew it and spit it out like chewing tobacco.

Abrar Bahtir, news editor, sits a few desks away. He just got the photo captions for Monday’s paper, a photo of a banner from a World Trade Organization protest on his computer screen (“Make World Trade Work for the WHOLE WORLD”). He is on Cipro, but he isn’t worried about this disease that is said to come from animals, even if the anthrax is now produced in laboratories. “Pakistan may jahnwar kay sath zindaghee guzarthahay.” In Pakistan, we spend our lives living beside animals.

It’s true. On Ma Jinnah Road here in Karachi — just like on nearly every other road in Pakistan, including the motorways (as highways are called) — donkeys and horses leading wagons gallop beside auto rickshaws and yellow taxis with rusty doors.

My phuppa (the husband of my father’s sister), M. Qamaruzzahaman Khan, a homeopathic doctor now retired from a bank, flips through a homeopathic manual and stops at “Anthracinum,” a homeopathic drug used to fight anthrax. He hasn’t had any customers lining up outside his door. Americans are “nazook,” he says. That means weak. He doesn’t mean to be insulting; it’s just that this is a culture without free-flowing pasteurized milk or filtered water — the best most people do is boil their milk and water on stoves.

Look, he admits, he was impressed with the toilet seat liners he remembers from the Greyhound bus station in Chicago. But that’s a thing of fantasy in this country, where folks cover their faces, Taliban woman-style, just to protect themselves from the clouds of diesel fumes that follow beat-up motorcycles. “Americans are over-spoiled. Pakistanis are under-spoiled,” says Qamaruzzahaman Phuppa.

And as a result, the deadly anthrax spore, regardless of its potency, has yet to rattle Pakistan, and has created an even greater cultural distance here when the public watches reports of the anxiety seeming to take hold of America.

One of my cousins watches a BBC profile of a U.S. postman fearful of getting anthrax. But the postman’s dangerous working conditions don’t catch his attention. Instead, he is impressed by the fancy dining-room table the postman and his family sit around for the interview.

“Look at how well postmen live in America!” he yells to his wife.

It’s a picture-perfect middle-class home. On a sofa nearby, one of her two children, Anum, has left behind a copy of the children’s book series “Goosebumps.” Visiting women feel the cotton of a black fabric with big white polka dots (“2 single bed sheets, 200 rupees”), a shocking pink fabric with little flowers (“suit piece, 200 rupees”), a green fabric with shocking pink flowers (“suit piece, 200 rupees”) and a fuchsia fabric (“suit piece, 200 rupees”). Mufti’s young son, Mustafa, pulls out a CD from his collection to sell for the mujahid cause.

Housewives and grandmothers as well as doctors and women of the educated urban elite are becoming soldiers of the jihad from their sitting rooms, as living rooms are called here, using prayer and tag sales in their artillery of weapons. They consider themselves each a mujahida, the female version of a mujahid, a freedom fighter, part of an Islamic revival over the last 15 years that has even converted thoroughly modern women — women who used to flash bright shades of Revlon lipstick, their slick, highlighted hair flowing over their shoulders, chic hand-embroidered shalwar kameez suits with sleeveless kurtas (risqui in Islam, which requires women to cover their arms down to their wrists with long sleeves)To be modern was to be called “Mod Squad.”

To fight in a jihad, these women believe, doesn’t mean simply running to the front lines with submachine guns and anti-artillery weapons. That’s a specific type of jihad, jihad bil qital, fighting with actual combat. Strictly speaking, jihad means “a struggle for Islam” and can be waged on many fronts. The mujahida here is part of a battalion of women quietly maneuvering around town in shapeless navy gowns, headscarves tightly pinned at their chins and, often, partial veils (niqab) drawn up over the bridge of their nose as their battle armor. They wield Nokia mobile handsets while driving mostly shiny white Honda Preludes through the quiet streets of Islamabad’s F and G sectors, the middle-class through upper-class neighborhoods where they live with servants, microwaves and Paknet Internet connections. And in their own way, they definitely feel they are waging their own unique jihad.

Some take the gold bangles off their arms to donate to the cause, a jihad bil mal, with money, using wealth to fund the fight, they believe, for the cause of Islam. And, like the American women who rallied behind the soldiers during World War II, donating their silk stockings to the armed forces to make parachutes, these women see their activities as simply the ordinary, obvious way to support the war effort.

To them, the U.S.-led coalition attacks on Afghanistan is truly an attack on Islam, and these fundamentalist Pakistani cricket moms’ sympathies lie mostly with the Taliban and even Osama bin Laden.

These mujahida come from the generations of women from their 20s through their 60s who have rediscovered Islam. In “Clash of Civilizations,” a much quoted book here in these times, author Samuel Huntington chronicles the “Islamic Resurgence” in countries from Algeria to Afghanistan over the last three decades. Students and intellectuals made up the militant “shock troops,” he says, but urban middle class people composed the bulk of the movement. Here in Pakistan, that includes the housewife mujahida.

From her sitting room in a cozy Islamabad neighborhood, with wide gates that swing open into driveways, Amira Ahsaan, a veteran political leader, has a special vantage point from which to observe this activity. A mother of four children, she chose not to work after earning her master’s degree in biology from Qaid-e-azam University, studied Western society during several years living in New York and now spearheads education about Islam among women. She watches the jihad work now being done by housewives and women professionals and says it’s modeled after the historical story of Hazrat Khansa, a mother and poet at the time of the Prophet Mohammed, who urged her four boys to fight for Islam in jihad. She extolled them: “Go into the midst of the thickest of the battle, encounter the boldest enemy and if necessary embrace martyrdom.” They died “shaheeds,” martyrs.

“Our maternal expression is for Islam. It’s not just for men. This is our special role in jihad,” she says. “In Islam, women are not prophets. They are the mothers of prophets. This is the role of women. She prepares men for jihad. She is not Jesus. She is Mary.” The hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed and a guide for Muslims, she says, assigns the reward of jihad to a mother from conception to weaning. She is considered a ribat, one who guards the frontier of Islam. A woman who dies in childbirth gets the reward of a shaheed, a martyr.

Here, men who reach a certain religious discipline are called “mullahs.” These women are sometimes called “mullanis,” though there really isn’t such a thing. They’re also sometimes called “chaddar laynay wallee,” those who wear a chaddar, yards of usually cotton fabric under which they cloak their heads and bodies to remain modest, as the Quran tells both men and women to be. They glide across town here, gathering in sitting rooms and bedrooms for durs, Quran study groups, sometimes eating dates afterwards. (Many Muslims have traditionally mostly read the Quran in its original Arabic without translations; durs meetings include thurjomah, translations). These women don’t give themselves any clever name. They simply call themselves “Muslims.” Like Christianity’s born-again Christians, these women are something like reborn Muslims.

I have seen something of this evolution in the women of my own family. When one of my sister cousins started becoming a more observant Muslim, my Islamabad phuppi, my father’s sister, at first discouraged her. Islamabad phuppi also discouraged a neighbor, Aunty Sultan, from allowing her daughter to cover herself with her dupatta. She was still unwed; covering herself up would make it too difficult to attract a proposal (The daughter got married anyway).

But about three years ago, my Islamabad Phuppi started changing, too, slipping into durs sessions held in the sitting rooms of neighbors. Now, she quietly regrets encouraging one of her daughters to enter a professional field where she works with men.

Another phuppi rediscovered Islam through an Islamic educational organization aimed at women, Al-Huda International, the hub of Muslim rebirths over the last decade. I always felt a special kinship with this phuppi because I look so much like her, down to the mole on our necks, between our clavicle bones. She was always modern, gregarious and “smart,” as they like to say here about a well-dressed woman with style. But Islamabad phuppi also discouraged her, arguing, “Your husband won’t like it.” Still, she moved forward, not hosting the festive mehndi ceremony — in which the bride has henna ornately drawn onto her hands and feet — when her eldest son was married, and not allowing mixed gender seating at the wedding. (My wedding in 1992 was the last family wedding to have my younger sister cousins dancing at the mehndi ceremony.)

And at a cousin’s wedding not long ago, my smart phuppi’s older brother, my bure abu in Lahore, didn’t even recognize her when he saw her sitting in full hijab, the flap of a partial veil across the bridge of her nose, so only her eyes were visible. “Assalamalaikum,” he said to her, respectfully, as if she was a stranger to him.

Indeed, the return to conservative Islam in Pakistan isn’t only coming from men, says political activist Ahsaan. “It’s not a matter of a male-dominated society. We have women struggling with their husbands for their right to cover themselves up. It is not a symbol of male chauvinism. We are seeing women who do purdah and hijab” staying primarily at home, and remaining covered up, from head to toe, when they go out “by choice.”

Why? It reserves the sanctity of a woman’s sexuality for only her bedroom, not for a colleague with whom she might flirt with the flick of her hair. Ahsaan knows the argument that the women of Afghanistan don’t have a choice under edicts by the Taliban that they must cover up. It doesn’t much disturb her. For one thing, she says, it is part of the culture for the majority, anyway. Two, she says, Afghanistan was a culture of terror and exploitation for women before the Taliban took over. Covering up, she says, brought a safety and security to women that they are entitled to as a right in Islam.

“In Islam, we are given all the confidence of being a woman. We are proud to be women. We’re absolutely feminine. We’re proud of being feminine. In Islam, a woman is too precious to be shown around,” she says. “It’s the beautiful mansions that are guarded. A poor man’s hut has no door and nothing to guard it. In the West a girl loses her virginity at such a young age. She is like a poor man’s hut. Anyone can walk in any time of the day or night. She has nothing to lose.”

For the most part, these women are sympathetic to the Taliban, believing that they cleaned up the country’s chaos of rapes, robberies and kidnappings following the Soviet pullout from Kabul. They are annoyed by the constant rebroadcasts on CNN of “Beneath the Veil,” the documentary that lays out allegations of human rights abuses against the Taliban, particularly women. They claim it is unbalanced footage shot by Afghan Muslim women who belong to an urban elite minority — women who lack a connection to most of Afghanistan’s traditional rural majority.

At Karokoram Apartments, a luxury apartment complex here, about 30 of these bourgeois mujahida gather one recent morning for durs. One, a lecturer in chemistry at a women’s college here, leads them through a dua, a prayer, at this time of war. She learned it one recent afternoon when she sat with her daughter in a class at Colours of Islam, a Sunday school of sorts on Jumma, Friday, the Muslim holy day. In class, Madam, as teachers are called here, stuck several paper soldiers into a tray of soil. They were Muslim. Facing them were many more enemy soldiers.

This was the Battle of Bad’r, described in the eighth sura of the Quran, in which pagan tribes launch a war against a ragtag Muslim army with only three camels and hungry soldiers. Madam sprinkled water upon the soil and explained to the children, listening eagerly: Allah answered the prayers of Muslims and hurled rain upon the enemy, making them fall over each other in the mud. The history books say Prophet Mohammed’s army won in Islam’s first important battle, transforming it from a religion to a state-religion.

The children repeat the dua that the Prophet Mohammed is said to have recited during the war, following Madam’s lead: Oh, Allah, protect us from our enemy’s plans and misdeeds.

The prayers of many of these women include asking Allah to lead all people, Muslims and non-Muslims, on “the straight path.” There is another dua, “Qunoot-e-Nazala,” recited recently in a durs, the women holding their open palms before them. It’s repeated in other homes and during private prayers said as women prostrate themselves before Allah on the janamaz, prayer rug, they lay out in a corner of their bedroom. It has a more ominous message. It can alienate someone from the West. It frightens me. “Dua for invoking a curse,” reads the translation of this prayer.

Prophet Mohammed is said to have recited this prayer after he sent 70 learned men to teach Islam to a tribe of non-Muslims. The non-Muslims, it’s said, slaughtered 69 of the learned men, with only one escaping to relate the story. It begins, as do many a dua in times of calamity, seeking forgiveness for Muslims’ transgressions, and it asks for Muslims to clear their hearts and join together. “O Allah! Forgive us and all believing men and women and all Muslim men and women and put off actions between their hearts and reconcile between them and help them against your enemies and their enemies.”

Then, “O Allah! Curse the disbelievers, those who stop from your way and belie your messengers and fight your friends. O Allah! Put differences between them and make them falter in their footsteps and send upon them your punishment, one that you would not turn away from a transgressing and criminal people.”

The “silent majority” Pakistan’s president Gen. Pervez Musharraf talks about includes these housewife mujahedin praying this “Dua for invoking a curse.” To them, the West is the source of the “criminal people” who are raining death on Afghan civilians, and sending hungry Afghans with hollowed cheeks rushing across the border into Pakistan to flee the war. There is also a Salvation Army effort of sorts that women are spearheading. The night the bombing of Afghanistan began, I went into the house of former Pakistani intelligence officer Khalid Khawaja, a friend of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Now, there’s no room to sit on the ornately carved upholstered sofa in the sitting room. It’s filled with bags of used clothes, sweaters, frocks (as girls’ dresses are called here), pillows and a red-checkered baby sleeping bag. They are the donations of two women who dropped them off for distribution in Afghanistan. Winter is setting in; people there will be cold.

This groundswell is coming from an elite crowd: A first-class PIA (Pakistan International Airlines) baggage tag dangles on the handle of a Skyflite garment bag packed with donations. Inside is a flannel pajama suit with a pink rabbit on the front, a frilly pink frock. “It is our ‘farz,’” our duty, “to help,” says Khawaja’s wife, Shamama.

Back in the Mufti house, a daughter pulled out a lime green shalwar kameez suit with sleeves made of a tissue fabric with gold sequins, sitharo ke kam, star work, good for wearing at weddings. One of the household servants, 11-year-old Nazia, plucks the outfit to buy for herself, at a steal, 50 rupees (79 cents). She looks eagerly at a fuchsia outfit with a brocade work kameez. Why does she want her money to go to mujahedin?

“They are Muslim like me,” she says.

Another night, 10-year-old Farzeen Tariq, a gregarious, articulate aspiring journalist (if she doesn’t become a banker), negotiates 30 rupees (47 cents) for one of Mustafa’s CDs, “Read With Me Games.” “I’m so happy the money is going for the mujahid,” Farzeen says later, beaming with twinkling eyes. “They will have support from me.” Last night, young Farzeen saw the Afghan man who sells French fries in F/10 Markaz (market) crying. She overheard why: The man’s daughter had died in Kabul as a result of the bombing. “I feel so depressed,” says Farzeen.

One morning recently, about 100 women gather in a two-story house off a neat lane. They wear head scarves and sit cross-legged as they listen to a woman guiding them through a translation of a Quranic surah. Inside a small room off to the side, about a dozen organizers of this Islamic educational organization sit on the floor, listening to a woman cross-legged above them. They are impassioned, like others, about the U.S. decision to bomb Afghanistan without first showing clear proof that bin Laden is behind the Sept. 11 attacks. They too pray the duas against the enemy in time of war.

Among them is Bushra Najib, a doctor in her 30s. She chose to stay at home to raise her children and live in purdah, covering her face with a partial veil and gown when she glides around town doing her work as a nazima, organizer, spreading the teachings of Islam. Tooling around Islamabad, talking into her mobile phone to check the address of her next appointment, she talks about her rebirth.

She went to Mecca for haj, the holy pilgrimage of Islam, about six years ago. It’s said that Allah will fulfill any sincere prayer said when a Muslim first sets eyes on the Kaa’ba “sharif,” the all-black place that’s considered the house of Allah. At that time, Bushra said, “Dear God, set me on the straight path.”

She started going to durs when she returned home and is now an organizer of this women’s movement.

It’s a woman known as “Dr. Farhat” who has gotten many educated women to cover up by choice. She is Dr. Farhat Naseem Hashmi, 43, a Quran scholar who started the non-political foundation called Al-Huda International Welfare Organization in 1994, not long after she earned a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She specialized in “Hadith Sciences,” a study of how the Prophet Mohammed said pious Muslims should live their lives. Her Web site biography mentions her “learned husband” and Al-Huda as “their brainchild.”

From its headquarters in a sweeping house in the upper class neighborhood known as F8, the organization runs one-year diploma programs, summer “crash courses” and regular programs such as a recent discussion of “The Muslim Marriage Guide,” a provocative book by Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood that lays out a Muslim wife’s rights in a marriage, including the right to “imta,” fulfillment in the bedroom. With the support of its well-to-do students and, they would say, Allah’s blessings, the house is now under construction with upgrades and freshly applied new concrete. A Nissan Sunny with a Karachi license plate sits outside with a Rutgers University bumper sticker on the back window and another sticker above it: “Smile! Allah Loves You!”

Inside the office, a large room cordoned off with a couple of desks and a sitting area, a binder sits on a shelf with “THINGS DONE” printed on the side in English. A young woman in a black gown and blue-gray scarf taps names and numbers into a spreadsheet. Another young woman whispers to one of the senior officials that a man is coming in to fix the photocopier. The women pull their veils over the bridges of their noses, as the photocopier man tinkers with the machine, his back to them. This is a touchy time. They want it to be known that they aren’t a political organization. Simply educational and charitable.

In the organization’s first year, they had 47 graduates from their one-year program. Last year, they had about 200 graduates. This year, they expect about 300 graduates. That doesn’t include the thousands of women who spill into its regular classes and durs gatherings. There is a tension: One Islamabad psychiatrist calls this revival the “al-Huda terror,” because he sees teenaged girls as patients, in conflict with reborn mothers over such things as mothers wanting to pull them out of the private coed schools they’ve been attending for years and enroll them in government girls’ schools.

Pakistanis are well aware of this revival movement. Last December, during the holy month of Ramadan, the national English-language newspaper Dawn reported the popularity of “Fehme-Quran” classes taught by Al-Huda’s Dr. Hashmi among “the beautiful begums,” married women.

“There are the usual … beautiful begums, dressed to kill, who fumble with their dupattas for the umpteenth time in an attempt to cover themselves, while sitting on these amazingly comfortable folding black chairs, a Quran clutched close to their hearts. Even their walk is a pace faster, one notices, than the one at the ‘aunty park,’ lest they miss out any discourse.” (“Aunty park” refers to parks where women and men walk after the morning’s fajr namaz prayers, the sun just rising, their lips often moving as they silently recite words that are part of “zikr,” the remembrance of God, their fingers moving the beads on a “thuzbi,” a Muslim’s rosary beads.)

Dawn also points out: “You’ll find the middle and lower middle class women, too, disembarking from rickshaws and cabs, seeming every bit as enthusiastic as their more modern counterparts alighting from Civics and Corollas.”

My Islamabad phuppi is with me as I visit Thabasum Mufti, the mujahida raising money in her sitting room, whose son is selling his CDs. A while back, I know, Mufti was wearing sleeveless kurtas, praying irregularly, often only on Friday. Then a friend invited her to durs led by Dr. Hashmi. At the time, Mufti admits: “I didn’t go for ‘ilm,’ knowledge. I just didn’t want my friend to be mad at me. I thought I’d go late and leave early.” She sat right in front of Dr. Hashmi, thinking she could outsmart her teachings. Dr. Hashmi started reading from the Quran: “We were born only from one person.” The lesson was to love others because of a devotion to God, not in exchange for love received or expectation.

“This was the first day that I loved God,” Mufti says now.

She started studying the translation of the Quran. Four years ago, she started making the rounds more regularly at durs gatherings. Two years ago, she took the al-Huda year-long course. She started living her life differently, pulling her veil up over her nose when she readied to go outside, putting new importance on Jumma (Friday) as a special day when she changes the bed sheets and puts daal (lentils) and masala (spices) in bottles. Now, she sweeps into houses to teach the translation of the Quran.

“Now, my life has begun,” she says.

During this past Saturday afternoon’s durs, Mufti sits on an upholstered chair and reads from a thick Quran with words highlighted in pink, blue, yellow and green, writing in the margins. She wears a white dupatta that frames her face snugly, spreading over her shoulders with a pattern of white tulips and a tan-colored pin under her chin. Today’s topic: the Quranic teachings about women’s rights in a separation or divorce. She lays out the long process of separation, mediation and reconciliation required before a couple can get divorced.

My phuppi asks the question on the tip of anyone’s tongue when they discuss the issue of women’s rights in Islam: What about “Thalak. Thalak. Thalak.” That a man can divorce his wife if he only says: I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.

Mufti smiles. Allah says don’t make it “mazak,” a joke. She speaks in Urdu, sprinkling her lesson with humor, smiles, tales from her own life and banter about breastfeeding, children, husbands and gift cards now available with ‘hadiths,’ sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, printed on them. “Allah gave women protection.” It’s best for a woman to marry a man with a good knowledge and practice of Islam. She jokes, “If he looks like Anil Kapoor,” a Bollywood actor, “it isn’t enough.”

Mufti talks about the Prophet Mohammed’s return from al-Miraj, the timeless “Night Journey.” He found women swapping complaints about their husbands with each other. The women murmur among themselves that swapping stories lightens the heart. Mufti offers a religious weapon she uses in times of dispute with her husband, whom she is quick to add is a wonderful man. She recites a part of a surah in which it’s said “Allah stands beside you as your friend.” He can’t argue with her then. The women smile and ask her to repeat the words. Slowly.

Islamabad phuppi asks Mufti what she calls herself after becoming a student of the Quran. “Musilman.” A Muslim. She says she isn’t yet a “mohman.” That is a grade higher, a term much batted around in these circles as an ideal: a true follower.

Now it’s time for maghrib namaz, the prayer at sunset. Mufti slips onto the white bed sheet and crosses her legs beneath her. She opens her hands before her to guide the group through a dua. They are the prayers of women around the world: Dear Allah, you know everything. Make our husbands and children “tundah,” cool. Make cold the graves of our ancestors. Forgive them.

“Ameen.”

Make good matches for our children. Wherever Muslims are suffering, help them.

“Ameen.”

Allah, help the mujahedin. Keep me on the straight path.

“Ameen.”

In her prayer is one more request: “Give us all the strength to do jihad.”

Maybe Azaz Hussain, a young Pakistani journalist for an Urdu newspaper, Khabrain, my cousin and I had given a ride to some nights earlier, had been on to something. As we dropped him off at his newspaper office, he asked me, “Are you here for journalism or matrimonial?” Perhaps, it would seem, a little of both?

I do my best to discourage the mother. “This potential bahu is seriously thinking of buying a motorcycle to ride around Pakistan,” I say. “You wouldn’t like that, no?” The mother insists she doesn’t mind. In fact she had slaughtered a chicken for me, knowing I would be coming today.

“I did Isthikhara and saw in my dream that I would be going to report in Afghanistan. You don’t want a bahu running off to Afghanistan, do you? Why don’t you first see if I return or become a ‘shaheed’” — a martyr, I joke.

No, that’s OK, says the mother. We’ll marry both of you together first, she says, and then you can both go off to Afghanistan together. Great.

Who will take care of you in 10 years if you fall sick, the eligible boy asks; he’s 34 years old, a year and a half younger than I am, but still called a boy until he gets married. “But I might become a ‘shaheed’ tomorrow,” I say, joking, sort of. “What is the purpose of worrying?”

As I leave he stands at the top of the stairwell and asks, “Should I tell my family to bury their expectations?”

Yes, I think, perhaps.

Isthikhara is a Muslim act of faith in divine revelation, which reveals itself in the subconscious of dreams. I write as I bounce on the highway past trucks painted elaborately with peacocks and paisleys. The other day, on this same route, I saw a lorry, as the big trucks are called, with a larger-than-life Osama bin Laden airbrushed onto the back, a machine gun on his side. My would-be husband’s younger brother, beside me, repeated what has become a refrain over here: “Osama bin Laden, the hero of the Muslims.”

The driver of this slightly beat-up Suzuki taxi has a purple velvet “Allah” written in Arabic dangling off a suction cup attached to the front window, a graduation tassel swinging with each bounce. A small black-and-white photo of bin Laden from a newspaper sits in the right corner of his rearview mirror tucked below a watch. A reporter from South Africa took a photo of this driver, Mullah Abdul Hafiz Pirzadah, as he glanced his gentle eyes into the rearview mirror. He wishes he could remember the reporter’s name. It was a very difficult name. You know, one of those foreign names. Not as easy as a Muslim name.

A horse grazes on the side of the road, tied to a post. The sun blazes deep on this late afternoon carrying with it a thin layer of sweat. Men sit piled atop buses where luggage would normally rest. We circle around an exit ramp. Islamabad, nine miles away.

My cousin Arina had written the instructions for me to the Isthikhara, which Muslims are taught to recite when they want to make a decision. I know I want to go to Afghanistan. It is, after all, the birthplace of one of my Sufi spiritual inspirations, Rumi, when Afghanistan was part of the Persian Empire. The rest of the world has to get the blessing of the Taliban Embassy. Me, I had to e-mail my father two nights ago to pass his blessing onto my bure abu (my father’s eldest brother) and my phuppi (my father’s sister) who feel responsible for my safety here in Pakistan. (Dad, thanks for calling.)

My cousin Arina has gotten some 42 marriage proposals (really, only a slight exaggeration) and turned to Isthikhara to sort them all out. The instructions are simple: two rakats Naf’l prayer (that’s two sets of specific prostrations in the direction of Mecca, the holy city for Muslims), after which you read a prayer in which you think about the question before you. Then, you’re supposed to sleep without speaking to anyone. (I woke up and used AOL Instant Messenger without speaking a word. I don’t know if that counts.)

Sure enough, a message came to me in the moments before I awakened this morning. In the dream, I, a friend who is here as a journalist and another woman were having our papers surveyed by Sohail Shaheen, the deputy Taliban ambassador whom I recently wrote about. (I got reams of critical e-mail after I wrote of my visit with Shaheen and his two wives in his house, which is called the White House. One reader equated me to “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, who was ridiculed for being sympathetic to the Communists during the Vietnam War. I can only believe that some readers were made uncomfortable by any information about the Taliban, the monsters of the free world, that could make them seem remotely human. Islamabad Asra? Fine. And perhaps, one day, Afghanistan Asra, too.)

In this dream, the three of us were cleared to go to Afghanistan. I woke up from the dream with a smile, knowing the mandate. In the dream, I saw on TV CNN-like graphic flames on the northern four-fifths of Afghanistan with the southern one-fifth the only part left in Taliban control. That’s OK. We’d still go.

I go to the Taliban Embassy. It’s a right turn at the white sign with black lettering, “Embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” There’s a Pakistani journalist escorting a Western reporter in for an interview with Sohail Shaheen, the sort of tag-team reporting that’s coming with a price tag during this war coverage. Some Afghans shuffle in and out. A guard puffs on a cigarette. The driveway is cracked. It’s not a posh place. A man known as Abid Saheb, one of the English-speaking officials inside, comes out barefoot. He hands out a press release photocopied on cheap Pakistani paper. The headline: “American Terrorist Attacks on Afghanistan Continue.”

A Western journalist puts his right hand over his heart as he approaches Abid Saheb. “Could I have one?” he asks gently.

“It is the last one,” says Abid Saheb.

“Visas?” the journalist asks meekly.

“Monday,” comes the response.

I have to return my application tomorrow, but I already got my answer in my dream. I hope. Now just that little matter of a stamp.

I come home, tell my phuppi about my day. I got the Pakistan visa extension (they’re only giving 14 days right now). Then, there was the small matter of the marriage proposal.

“Thoba. Thoba. Thoba.” Loosely translated: What a shame. What gall. Howcouldtheybesobold?

I guess that’s a no.

To most patrons of this store, he would just be the “photocopy walla,” the photocopy guy. But he has another identity. “I trained in Kandahar,” he tells me softly, in Urdu. Oh. “I’m ready to go now to become a ‘shaheed,’” he says. He doesn’t know, or prefers not to say, who ran the camp he attended — was it al-Qaida? — though when he went, in 1998, the area was firmly under the control of the Taliban, so it surely had its stamp of approval. He says he’s ready and wants to go back to fight the U.S.-led coalition. “Insha’allah,” he says. God willing.

But for now, the imam at his mosque told the congregation gathered for jummah, Friday prayers, that the Taliban didn’t need afraad — manpower — yet. (They did, however, request blankets.) So he waits. (The Pakistani government has warned mullahs to refrain from rallying mujahids.)

Qaiser Nadeem is just 20, with only the slightest bits of mustache and beard sprouting from his young face. He is wearing a simple monotone-colored cotton shalwar kameez when I first meet him at a video store where he works, surrounded by what are likely bootleg copies of “Mulan,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Small Soldiers” and a whole row of “The Little Mermaid,” along with, of course, the copy machine behind which he stands. He’s somewhat difficult to speak with because he averts his eyes from mine. The Quran warns against mixed-gender eye contact with anyone other than a relative, lest it create lustful thoughts. But he does talk to me, this Western Muslim woman journalist, and after a while I let my eyes drift to the copy paper as I speak, hoping to make him comfortable enough to keep talking.

It would be easy to portray Nadeem — an aspiring mujahid willing to cross the border and battle the U.S.-led forces in the name of Islam — as the product of the zealotry that sways uneducated youth into a blind hatred for the West. He doesn’t hate the West, he says. He doesn’t like its culture and doesn’t like selling it from the shelves of the store where he works. It’s a job, though, he says. He looks down upon what he sees as a decadent lifestyle. Most of all, he hates its foreign policy, particularly its support of Israel.

“If they did the right thing, then nobody would hate America,” he said.

The next time we meet, we sit curbside in front of Toy Land 2 at Jinnah Super Market, a toy store with a stack of toy boxes piled outside, including the Just Start Scooter. I have a sense of irony about the place; the last time I was here in 1992, my cousins had arranged a secret meeting with the man I was about to marry on the eve of our wedding. As in other cultures, it’s considered unlucky over here for a husband and wife to see each other before their wedding (and in many arranged marriages that’s the the first time they’re meeting), and I guess it turned out to be unlucky. Though this was a “love marriage,” it was supposed to follow the same rules as an arranged marriage. But when we both showed up at Jinnah Super Market, escorted, of course, by our battalion of cousins (all of whom have insisted on anonymity in these dispatches), we broke one of the key rules.

Now I sit next to this young man, both of us looking off in other directions to avoid eye contact. He explained that his transformation began after a cousin came back from Kandahar several years ago a more religious man, preaching against music, television and those who didn’t pray the requisite five times a day. Nadeem was living a modern life, watching Bollywood movies, not very religious, mostly a troublemaker, he says. But he was intrigued, and crossed the border around this time of the year in 1998 to train in Kandahar.

What was the training camp like? He broke into a grin.

“Bahoth acha laga.” I liked it a lot.

“Bahoth maza atha tha.” It was lots of fun.

“Bahoth suhkoon hoe thah hay.” There is lots of peace of mind.

In his daily life, he says, he has to squeeze time out of a day in which he works from 10:30 a.m. to midnight in this video store that belies his religious convictions, only to eke out a monthly salary of about 2,000 rupees (about $30.76).

At the camp, “dhimagh saf hoejah thah hay.” Your mind gets cleansed.

The camp lasted three months, and was attended by about 2,000 others, like himself, he said. They woke up around 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. for a special namaz, prayer, called “tahajjud,” which isn’t one of the day’s five required prayers, but falls between the night’s isha prayer and the predawn fajr prayer, earning special sawab, blessings. (I’m familiar with the prayer because my dadi, my father’s mother, often falls asleep in her chair praying this namaz, battling sleep to earn those extra blessings.)

They would go back to sleep and then rise again before dawn at 5 a.m. for fajr namaz. Then they had thalawath, reading of the Quran and durs, lectures about the Quran.

That was followed by light exercise, he said, to get the blood circulating, including jumping jacks. Around 8 a.m., they’d eat breakfast that always included roti (bread) and chai (which he considered “first class”).

Military training would begin afterward, learning to shoot a firearm — pistols and Russian-made Kalishnikovs — many of which were provided by the CIA to the Afghan mujahedin during its war against the Soviet Union. The trainees, for the most part, took aim at a bucket or a rock, making fun of each other when any of them missed the target. Then they broke for lunch, the afternoon’s zoh’r namaz and a two-hour nap until 4 p.m.

They awoke for the day’s third prayer, as’r namaz. There would be more durs, until around 6 p.m. or 6:30 p.m. They would pray the sunset magrib prayer, eat dinner and gather again for taleem, study. And, then, the night’s last prayer, isha, before going to sleep.

He knows the stereotype about students like himself being the blind followers of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. He says, in Urdu, with a couple of English words parachuting into his thoughts, “Onkee guidance hay.” I have their guidance.

“May tho kodh say soch kur kurthah hu.” I do it with my own thinking.

And becoming a martyr for Islam is something he has thought about a lot. “My most important thing is my life. If I can give that then I will give my life,” he said. What would he accomplish? “If I was successful for Islam, then Taliban will survive.”

That’s all he has time for, so he gets up and returns to work, where he reluctantly pulls “Little Mermaid” down from the shelf for a customer. But all the while, awaiting orders to move across the border.