Free American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson

of slave trade, and forcing “unity” on Muslims from different cultures by “marrying” Afghan girls and widows, we gingerly asked Hudaifa about intermarriages. “People are very different,” he replied. “With such disparate customs and mentalities, it is not easy to live together. But the jihad has brought Arab brothers from different countries together and made them marry from each other’s families.” The practice, of course, goes back to the Prophet Muhammad. In fact, a sister of Hudaifa’s had been given in marriage to an Algerian, a loyal lieutenant of Azzam and a veteran of the Afghan war and the FIS war on Algeria, now in London. We tried to suggest to Hudaifa that the large-scale population movement among Muslim countries—the influx of hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti Palestinians into Jordan in the outwash of the Gulf War, for example—would unsettle many of these countries. He did not see the point and was obviously unaccustomed to sociological explanations. In his Manichean vision, the world is divided into good and bad, Islam and the infidels. All Muslims are good, therefore they should get along with each other.
    We were ready now to head from Islamabad to Peshawar and the Afghan border. Hudaifa offered to drive us in his black Toyota, his only self-indulgence, and we happily accepted. Hudaifa turned out to be an aggressive driver, but he delivered us safely.
    The journey was a historical treat. The Gandhara region was originally conquered by Alexander the Great, who built the city of Taxila, leaving behind a contingent of soldiers. Maintained for three hundred years, the kingdom was eventually swallowed by the local population, which had adopted Buddhism. It is now the home of some of the oldest Buddha statues in the world—although none as large as the rock statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, which the Taliban destroyed in March 2001. We passed a memorial pillar where our highway crossed the Grand Trunk Road, which once crossed the entire Indian subcontinent. Hudaifa declared that the pillar had been built by Muhammad bin Qasim, the Arab general sent from Baghdad to conquer India in the eighth century. Khalid rolled his eyes and quietly informed me that the pillar was erected by the British in the nineteenth century.
    As we passed through Wah, Pakistan’s most important center of arms production, Khalid explained that it was a favorite hangout for bandits, who attacked travelers and disappeared into the rugged countryside. I was skeptical. But the next morning the papers reported that robbers had attacked a bus and made off with 200,000 rupees only minutes after we passed through the area.
    We arrived at Azzam’s family residence in the dark of night. We were greeted at the gate by the night watchman, a ubiquitous figure in Pakistan. From his looks, he was probably a former mujahid. The house didn’t look like a fortress or guerrilla headquarters. Inside there was virtually no furniture, just some mattresses spread over a richly embroidered Oriental rug. After being introduced to Hamza, Hudaifa’s seventeen-year-old brother, we all squatted on the floor. Hamza, who was attending high school in Peshawar, seemed to think of little else but getting married. Premarital sex is a capital sin in Muslim society, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. He enquired seriously about the daughters of Abu Ayman, his uncle in Chicago who had arranged the visit for us. His questions were so solemn and serious that it was hard not to laugh. We could only tell him that the two daughters we had met were both married. But there was a third daughter, Hamza insisted, who was supposed to be very pretty. (Back in the United States several months later, we actually relayed Hamza’s interest to the uncle, who expressed unmistakable approval. Our matchmaking efforts may not have been entirely in vain.)
    In Peshawar, even going to the bathroom in a sex-segregated society is difficult. When we informed our host