ALF, I couldn't have begun to talk about all the ideas this book brought to mind in
just two weeks. You were definitely right to make it a full month. Seems to me it will
be finishing up just about right.
I looked up 'Wahhabism', meaning, literally, ‘generous giver’. That is their strength,
of course, the endless funds pouring out of Saudi Arabia, buying adherents from among the poorest. It’s happened before; the ‘rice bowl’ Christian converts of China, for example. The Jesuit missionaries, however, did not turn their converts into militant extremists. To his credit, Mortenson does say that not all the Wahhabi are bad, and that many of their schools and mosques were going genuine good work to help the poor. Many others, however, existed only to teach a militant jihad.
And the students at the madrassas were “the rootless, the jobless and the economicallydeprived with little self knowledge”.
It would seem the best thing the West could do is to help with education for
‘self-knowledge’ and jobs for the jobless, both of which relieve the economically
deprived.
It was such relief to read of the ‘bloodless’ coup that removed Mawaz Sharif from
office and replaced him with a government, even one of martial law, that cracked
down on corruption and actually begun getting some funds to needy villages
in the countryside. Not to mention one that promised to act against the Islamic
extremists. How fortunate it was for Mortenson and the McCown’s that Musharraf
was in control of Pakistan on 9/11, and prepared to assist them.
I find compelling the image of Faisal Baig, with his AK-47 in one hand and the other
clenched into a fist, staring at the peaks that separated them from Afghanistan.
“Your problem in New York village comes from there. From this Al Qaeda shetan , Osama.” (I leave it to your imagination to translate ‘shetan’. I have my own.)
“It would take months and millions of dollars poured into the flailing serpentine arms of the U.S. Intelligence apparatus to untangle for certain what this illiterate man who lived in the last village at the end of a dirt road, without an Internet connection or even a phone, knew instinctively.”