Salon.com > Asra Q. Nomani

Who really killed Danny Pearl?

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 16:16:00 +0000

Last Thursday, a senior White House official called Mariane Pearl and Paul Steiger, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, to report a new, key development in the investigation into the death of Mariane's husband, Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. "We have now established enough links and credible evidence to think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" -- the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks -- "was involved in your husband's murder," the official told Mariane.

"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 crush on Musharraf

Sat, 10 Nov 2001 23:06:00 +0000

Uzma Asim, 35, is a modern Muslim woman, a vice president of operations of Anmar Associates, a garment exporter. Her office is replete with glass tables, leather sofas, just ordered-in Kentucky Fried Chicken and a quiet room for women to pray, with rugs folded neatly on the floor. She sweeps before me, a burst of energy in a modest white cotton shalwar kameeze with black block print.

A mane of curly, raven black hair descends upon her shoulders, a thin line of kajal flutters upon her upper eyelid and her eyes sparkle when she talks about her president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Asim is an international globetrotter, touching down in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Dubai in her travels. Fine works by Pakistani artists hang on the walls and a Louis Vuitton bag sits open at her side as she taps at her keyboard. And who stares back at us from her screensaver? Musharraf.

She salutes him, flicking her hand against her forehead. Then she stands and opens a long closet door that conceals locker-like shelving. Musharraf is looking over his left shoulder, wearing a purple tie, white shirt and gray suit that falls well-sculptured on his shoulders. Asim has glued this photo of the general onto the inside of the door.

Anthrax? Big deal

Tue, 06 Nov 2001 22:42:00 +0000

During his radio address over the weekend, President Bush urged the American public to remain calm in the face of current anthrax attacks.

For a lesson in calm, I met four uniformed sixth grade girls from Miss Saeeda's class, 6A, at Karachi Public School. It's Saturday afternoon, and they're standing outside the school library, where Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" sits on the shelves. News broke here about the first discovery of an anthrax-laced letter delivered outside America, and it was delivered just down the road from these children's school to the office of the country's leading Urdu newspaper, the Daily Jang.

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.

The Taliban’s ladies auxiliary

Fri, 26 Oct 2001 00:41:00 +0000

Thabasum Mufti sits in her tidy sitting room in a middle-class neighborhood and pulls out a neatly folded jersey velvet fabric in rich red and black colors from a black leather suitcase labeled "Carlton International." A tag is stuck into the green velvet fabric with a straight pin: "1,000 rupees" ($15.87).

With her collection of fancy fabrics for sale, Mufti is a sitting-room soldier in the cause to raise rupees for the mujahedin fighting in Afghanistan. Beside her is another suitcase filled with fabric, donated by a friend from her "jahaze," a trousseau of sorts meant to keep a new bride in high fashion for many days.

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.

Journalist or bride?

Fri, 19 Oct 2001 19:40:00 +0000

It's been almost a month here. A war began. Children here have already thrown a Halloween party two weeks early. I ordered the No. 1 special at McDonald's in Lahore. Today, I applied for an extension on my visa, and am again reminded there is a war across the border. War, what war? While interviewing this very lovely family, which includes a very eligible 34-year-old son, I have to try to explain that I won't be a good bahu, daughter-in-law. I don't know how to knead dough to make roti. The teenage son will learn, the mother responds, her jaw stiff and earnest. They give me a cloth, hand-embroidered by the youngest daughter. "Lazy Daisy," it reads, in Urdu.

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.

A would-be martyr

Fri, 19 Oct 2001 19:23:00 +0000

"Seventy-five paisa," the soft-spoken, bespectacled young man says from behind the photocopy machine.

At first he claimed it was a rupee a page, but after I gently raised my eyebrows, he immediately lowered the price. I later confirmed that 75 paisa is at the bottom end of what's charged around here for a decent photocopy, using the thinner, Pakistani A4 paper (imported paper starts at one rupee a page).

I'm making photocopies to show my stories to some of my sources and family here. He observes a photo of Sohail Mohammad Shaheen, the Taliban's deputy ambassador in Islamabad, on a story I wrote about a recent visit with Shaheen and his two wives at their house.

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.

At home with the Taliban

Thu, 11 Oct 2001 00:03:00 +0000

Welcome to the other White House.

It sits here at the intersection of two narrow dirt lanes, pocketed with bumps and jolts, very different from the wide, tarred streets in the posh neighborhoods diplomats call home. There are no chokidars, guards, sitting outside the squat attached houses virtually atop each other. There is a tin shack, a khoka, at the corner with a sign for Al-Asif Paints on one side, sundries for sale inside, including 3-rupee packets of Pantene hair conditioner attached to each other like a necklace from the low ceiling.

The house at the corner has its name carved onto the front wall, much like many houses in this part of the world: White House, in curling Urdu script. Inside lives the No. 2 diplomat representing the Taliban government here in Pakistan. Mohammad Sohail Shaheen, burly, bearded and wearing a turban, has frequently stood at the right hand side of Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan, as both have denounced the U.S.-led coalition's attacks on Afghanistan as an act of terrorism. Surely for many Western viewers, after Osama bin Laden, these men have represented the faces of 21st century caveman barbarism.

“Now, jihad has begun”

Tue, 09 Oct 2001 02:39:00 +0000

"Ub jihad shur-u hoe-ah." Now, jihad had begun.

"All Muslims will be all out for jihad," he says."Inshallah." God willing.

These words don't come from a fringe bearded man with a turban and AK-47 next him, speaking on a video from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. They come from a man, Khalid Khawaja, who is a friend and longtime advisor to Osama bin Laden. A retired Pakistani Air Force squadron leader, Khawaja fought with the mujahedin beside bin Laden to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan. In July, CBS News quoted him as saying, "America is a very vulnerable country," and that "Your White House is the most vulnerable target. It is very simple to just get it." To the world, he surely looked like just another scary dhari walla, bearded man.

But sitting here in his sweeping Greco-Roman style home with Corinthian columns, gold-gilded bedroom furniture and a poster of a grinning Garfield in his teenage daughter's room, Khawaja and his family can be sure that there are many others in Pakistan who might not take the street in protest Monday but feel the same way. For if you think there is universal support for what appeared to the entire world as harmless-looking green flickers of light on CNN, then peek into the homes of this city. Walk through these streets where the sweet scent of a flower called rath ke rahni, queen of the night, seeps deep into you.

Hate — and love — for the USA

Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:31:00 +0000

The men gathered in the living room of a man whose family lived by my father's childhood home in the neighborhood of Nampalli, near Abid Road, in the city of Hyderabad, India. Abdul Kareem Abid is now senior editor at Daily Insaaf, which means "justice." It is an Urdu newspaper that supports the party platform of Jamaat-i-Islami, the conservative religious party that has driven thousands of protesters onto the streets to protest Pakistani President General Musharraf's political friendship with America.

The newspapers here are calling President Bush by the moniker "Sheriff Bush."

Abid's newspaper is writing about the "Bush mafia," Bush administration officials like Vice President Cheney, whom they consider war hawks.

"They need an enemy," he says.

I am the only woman in the small room, feeling increasingly odd as more and more men filter inside from the street. On the adjacent wall hangs a wall-size photo of millions of Muslims packed around the Kaa'ba sharif in Mecca for the holy pilgrimage Haaj. Outside, the muzzein had called the azan for magrib namaz, the prayer when the sun sets, but the men remain seated.

Return to Pakistan

Sat, 29 Sep 2001 00:46:00 +0000

"Allah hafiz."

"God keep you in his protection."

My bure abu sits in the early morning in his home here in the historic city of Lahore, as the sun warms the new day with its light. He is my father's eldest brother and he says goodbye to his 31-year-old son in Dover, N.H., through a skinny microphone that broadcasts his voice over the continents and oceans through Microsoft's Hotmail. They have discussed the latest about America's potential partnership with the Afghani Northern Alliance, plus, as static buzzed between them, whether to chat on Yahoo or Hotmail.

Raised in Pakistan, my cousin came to my hometown of Morgantown, W. Va., seven years ago to earn his master's degree in engineering before starting work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then moving not long ago to a new job on the East Coast.

This is the reality of the new war that looms over the world. It is no longer a day like the reconquista when Queen Isabella slaughtered anonymous Muslims and Jews in Spain if they refused to convert to Christianity. It is no longer Us versus Them. Or, in this case, U.S. versus Them. We are them. They are us.

Bad blood

Wed, 09 Aug 2000 18:54:00 +0000

Jason Loyal Shoemaker was the sort of 15-year-old you would expect to find riding in the back seat of the school bus. He regularly flipped his middle finger at Fred the bus driver and called him "dickhead" under his breath. When one of the little girls would get off at her stop, he liked to yell "bitch" out the window, according to neighborhood children, who recall Jason's antics with raised eyebrows, wide eyes and a great deal of exasperation.

Several of the kids who rode bus No. 11 to and from Fairview Middle School in Fairview, W.Va., remember Jason for his droopy Tommy Hilfiger pants and Korn T-shirt, and how he bragged to the other boys on the bus of sneaking into the girls' bathroom at school. Not long ago, Jason went before a local juvenile judge for dropping his pants long enough to "moon" a schoolbus.

Jason was trouble. That alone is not too surprising: An examination of local court records shows an extensive history of trouble with the law by Jason's immediate and extended family. And that history may very well have played a part in the development of Jason's latest identity: as a key character involved in the alleged murder by white teenagers of a young, gay black man that has drawn intense national media attention.