Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [5]
Because I insisted on hearing even more about the mujahideen, one day Ammi took me to a bookstore and bought me a children’s magazine that contained part of a serialized novella about a boy named Mahmud who lived in Kabul. His father fought against the Soviets while his mother tended to injured mujahideen. His little sister was mutilated when she picked up a land mine that the Soviets had disguised as a teddy bear. Mahmud wanted everyone to know that all around Afghanistan the Soviets had placed land mines that looked like toys and were causing all the little boys and girls in the country to lose appendages and eyes. He also described helicopter gunships that sprayed fire, and talked about how he dreamed of owning a missile that would allow him to take the gunships down. He wanted to liberate his land in the name of Islam. I wished I could help him.
When I was done reading that story, I desperately wanted to go and get the next part in the series, but whenever I appealed to Ammi to take me back to the bookstore, she said it was too far and there was no use getting khajjal in all the traffic. I went back to the story of Mahmud and read it over and over until I nearly had it memorized. Eventually I grew bored and started reading another action story in the magazine. It was about a black South African rebel living under apartheid. Whites spat on him and segregated his people and insulted his family so that eventually he had no choice but to stand up for his dignity and take matters into his own hands. One day the white governor, under whose rule the rebel lived, was throwing a party on a lake, and the rebel, having read about the pending event, decided that he would drive a boat laden with explosives into the governor’s yacht. The story of his resistance ended with a blaze that consumed the yacht and the rebel and the governor. This story didn’t interest me so much because it wasn’t about Islam.
It was then that I discovered Aakhri Chataan—“The Last Mountain”—a long-running serial produced by Pakistani TV. The series was based on the novel of the same name by a Jamaat-e-Islami journalist, Naseem Hijazi. The drama, set between the years AD 1220 and 1226, at the height of Genghis Khan’s invasions of Islamic Asia, and thirty years before the fall of the caliphate in Baghdad at the hands of Hulagu Khan, was lavish and star-studded.
The protagonist, the proverbial last mountain, was Sultan Jalalud-din Khwarezmi, a prince of Persia, bereft of his kingdom when his father was killed by the Mongols. He waged a long-standing series of battles against Genghis, raising armies and chasing him from Armenia and Azerbaijan to India and back again. The serial was a tragic-romantic recounting of the major military and political events in Khwarezmi’s life, interwoven with the exploits of his allies.
In the final episode, one of Khwarezmi’s cohorts gave a rousing speech to the leaders of Baghdad about making a call for jihad—which only the Caliph had the power to do—and sending troops to Khwarezmi’s assistance. He told them to believe in Khwarezmi because he was the only Central Asian leader who had defeated the Mongols in open battle. The speech caused the leaders to break out in spirited debate, because they didn’t want the Caliph to declare jihad. Meanwhile, the scene shifted to Khwarezmi, standing atop a cliff with his men near the front against the Mongols. At a distance he saw riders bearing Baghdad’s colors. The sight of the riders prompted him to break into a monologue in which he thanked the heavens for Baghdad’s support and lambasted the skeptics among his crew for doubting Baghdad’s mettle: “I told you that Allah would hear our prayers and they would come.” Once the riders came closer, however, Khwarezmi realized that they were simply messengers carrying a letter of decline from Baghdad. The Caliph had shown his cowardice.
It was here that the tragic climax of the series occurred. Intermixed with scenes of dance, wine, and women—symbols of a Muslim warrior’s failure