Between Us and Them

Abstract

Between Us and Them Aqeel Ahmad (bio) Every day, twice a day, the clock strikes 9:11, and a feeling of horror freezes my body. Within this horror, memories arise from the ruins of long-forgotten memories and rearrange themselves. The numbers 9 and 11 hold a completely different meaning in the life of a Muslim living in a small town in a conservative state like South Dakota. The day after the 9/11 tragedy took place, I was living in the Rajan Pur district of Pakistan, and we were ordered to sympathize with the Americans. US President George Bush, declared that if we were not with them, we were against them, and the majority of Americans held the same stance. I was growing up in a town full of poverty and religious extremism. It was absurd to empathize with people seven thousand miles away from us, but our institutions coerced us into doing so. Our government in Pakistan (under Pervaiz Musharraf's civil dictatorship) came up with strategies to teach us empathy that not only governed our country's foreign policy but also defined the major events in the next two decades all over the country. Islamic studies textbooks that emphasized the significance of jihad against enemies of Islam underwent a revision and now emphasized the importance of peace and harmony. In return for all these changes, the US offered our country money and moral support. One day after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, my father brought home a newspaper. My father only bought newspapers when there was something important happening in the world. We did not have TV back then. As he set down the newspaper on a charpai, I could see an image of two buildings on fire. For six-year-old me, this was an image from some unknown reality, but it was going to change the lives of a lot of people around me. My father went to my mother, who was sitting in the kitchen preparing breakfast and whispered, "Police have taken Jamil into custody. They are taking everyone into custody who was affiliated with the jihadi movement in Afghanistan. Thank God, my brother did not accompany Jamil to Afghanistan even though he was almost convinced." Whenever something bad happened in our neighborhood, my parents whispered to each other instead of saying anything out loud. My father was talking about our neighbor who lived right in front of [End Page 68] our home. During the late 1980s, he went to Afghanistan to take part in what he called the great struggle of Islam against Russians. During his jihad training, he got homesick and came back. Jamil often narrated his miraculous journey of making it back to Pakistan over the next few years with the same story: "When I was coming back to Pakistan, I saw border police at the Pak-Afghan border. I knew they would not let me in because I did not have a passport. I prayed to Allah to take me to another side towards my home. I closed my eyes and started walking towards the police. When I opened my eyes, I was one hundred yards into Pakistan's territory. Completely safe and untouched by the police. This is called the manifestation of the power of Allah." I never understood how the police got Jamil this time, from his home in the middle of night, until after my mother told me this story. When my father left for work, my mother went to see Zahida, Jamil's wife. My mother recalled the details that she gathered from Jamil's wife, "Someone knocked on their door at night. Jamil came to the door to answer and was taken away. He informed his wife before going with the police." Unsurprisingly, he was not the only man taken into custody. Over the next few days, men who had some ties with Afghan jihad were taken. They were released after a few days with conditions to never leave the town without the police's permission and to appear every month at the local station to check-in. This was meant to control their mobility and curb the tensions against the US's...