Fighting Islamic Radicalism through comics in Pakistan
“Pakistan was born from a lot of pain, Afeef.” Fawzia Naqvi, a Pakistani-American working on impact investments at one of the largest Foundations in the U.S. graciously begins our few-hour discussion on the history and context of modern Pakistan.
I went to her first to get a foundation. She is a proper expert and I needed to understand the country’s plethora of complexities before I attempted to opine on anything that was going on there while I visited. How its neighbors Afghanistan and India affected its livelihood or how China’s 60 billion economic upgrade in the country made it more geographically relevant than ever before. Maybe most relevantly, how the diversity,the poverty and the current uptick in Islamism in the region operated in Pakistan. Naqvi was absolutely fascinating to learn from — she ended our long conversation by telling me that if she had a graph she could literally graph the progress of the youth and future of Pakistan. She had hope for her country. I left to Pakistan weeks later with one goal in mind: to interview an ex-jihadi whom I had gotten in touch with through a friend I had made years earlier in my Masters program at the University of St. Andrews. I wanted to understand how the old school recruitment method of Islamic extremists compared to the new school methods we are witnessing everyday. I wanted to know what being recruited was like. I wanted to start with this story and its happy ending despite the context of Pakistan still seemingly so bleak.
The truth is, my journey has to be checked through the acknowledgement of an undeniable privilege. Flying into Lahore in December meant I would be paraded into wedding parties and regular parties and underground parties. I would have the opportunity to see museums and art exhibits and mosques like the Badshahi, a 15th century mosque that’s beauty first captivated me when I attended my best friend’s wedding in 2013. Lahore gave me the chance to get acquainted with a rather green and beautiful city. One where walking around as a westerner only got me friendly confusion and smiles. There, I met and interviewed Gauher Aftab — a 30-something-year-old visionary who was fighting Pakistan’s major problems through comic books. The kicker is that Gauher was a jihadi at the age of twelve. “Back then it was so glamorous,” he explained. Gauher detailed his Islamic instructor’s charisma. “To fight the Russians in Afghanistan they would take drugs and be up for days,” Aftab regaled. He described himself as a nerdy kid who had trouble finding himself. “All I did was read — I wasn’t good at sports — my teacher preached everyday about being a ‘real’ Muslim and about Jihad.” Gauher explained that his teacher would encourage Gauher to pay rupees so he could help them secure the bullets they needed. “He explained that a rupee would help kill those that were oppressing Muslims worldwide and that I would receive blessings from Allah because of my monetary sacrifice.” Gauher was a pre-teen at the time, 12 going on 13 years old, so he remembered the entire thing looking like a video game formulating his identity. He would listen to his teacher who wore a flowing white shalwar kameez and had a red-dyed beard. He was slowly becoming brainwashed. Gauher, like many disenfranchised Muslim youth, like marginalized youth in general worldwide in fact, was an easy target for a gang, or cult, or a group that thrives on naive people to do their bidding.
Gauher was meant to give his teacher 700 rupees or roughly 7 dollars in order to catch a bus to Kashmir, write a farewell letter to his ‘sinful’ yet Muslim parents and journey into the darkness that was Islamist extremism. After months of slow and effective manipulation, Gauher was ready to be a soldier of Islam and to fight against the injustices the world was causing his devoted peers. Whether it was because of Kosovo or Palestine, the pre-teen version of Gauher was taken by the idea of wielding a weapon and having a purpose in his life. “I just didn’t trust my parents or my schoolmates to tell me what being a good Muslim looked like,” Gauher explained to me informally. As the months drew on, he became increasingly distant from those around him only to get closer to the teachings of an Islam he admits today he can’t find in the Quran. “You see,” Gauher reveals, “they simply recount the Prophet Mohammad’s war efforts and manipulate the Hadith to ingrain a sort of justification for heinous acts.” For the first time, I began to understand the process of radicalization. It wasn’t this idea that you were born into, sometimes it was a club you were told would help you survive whatever thing you were going through. Gauher felt alone and in some ways he felt existentially (a rather normal thing to feel as a pubescent teen). The people that loved him didn’t understand that his piety was turning violent. No one in his family felt similarly about Islam and revenge, but the cause was crystallizing for Gauher. It was imperative that he make meaning of his life. As he paid his teacher with whatever money he could scrounge, he prepared for a journey he didn’t intend to come back from.
An adult man, I sit across from him as he smokes countless cigarettes, seemingly carrying the weight of Pakistan’s vicious cycles of violence on his shoulders. “I was lucky, Afeef. My grandmother got sick and I basically just missed that bus. My parents had also slowly caught wind that something was up.” Gauher was literally put on lock down for months, and used the time to read and re-read the particulars of the faith only to come up short for explanations of his teacher’s beliefs. He had intended to finally get on that bus which would lead to a camp where he would be trained to fight with other boys for the great cause of Islam. His violent jihad ended, however, in order to sprout a more beautiful version of itself. Gauher is now proudly pushing comic books all over Pakistan with political messaging that directly opposes the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and, of course, ISIS. He explains that even the poorest families share cellphones with Internet access nowadays. “Teleco has over 70 percent penetration in Pakistan, there are 120 million subscribers in Pakistan and growing” he expertly instructs. Recruitment and Islamism are accessible on all streams of media. In fact, on a ride home one night I caught snippets of a preacher on the radio calling for an uprising. Gauher explains that the only way to push back is to give an alternative space for messaging.
The comics are varied, some cover domestic corruption while others hit Islamic extremism head on. “The point is to give the Muslim or Pakistani child other kids to identify with that do good.” One of the collections called Paasban, or “The Guardian” translated from Urdu, is an assertive attempt to fight the spread of terrorism in young minds by basically taking the reader through the same steps that Gauher experienced and researched himself. The protagonists go to the camps, have to make hard choices and have to reject violence. The process is emotional and real and it illuminates the darkness that children are manipulated into. The vulnerability of families to sell their children off to Islamist groups who promise a beautiful life, or for the kids themselves to be charmed into a lifestyle that eventually ruins theirs — radicalism has become a major opiate for the angry disenfranchised Muslim the world over.
Gauher was recruited and manipulated face-to-face, but he realizes that the problem is now online. He has distributed his stories in schools around the country, for free on the Internet and is attempting to take back what jihad really means: the internal struggle to be better. “My jihad is ongoing, and these comics are a way to do good in this world,” Gauher says genuinely. We left the conversation praying for blessings and peace upon each other — as Muslims often do — and let the Quran play above as we shared more cigarettes. He explained that my version of Pakistan would shift slightly as I moved on to Karachi. The danger relative to Lahore would be almost incomparable.
In Karachi, guards who held AK-47s constantly flanked me. They were ex-Taliban and were recruited to guard the homes of the financial elite in the city. My friend never let me off of her grounds without at least one guard and a family member in dark tinted cars. Although I looked Pashtun, we were traveling with Europeans who had a harder time “passing.” In Karachi, we were given illegal alcohol to drink while we danced with each other in beautiful venues for beautiful weddings. In between long family board games, we would take the guards with us wherever we were allowed to go. We even got to ride camels on the Arabian Sea; the guards on a camel with their weaponry locked and loaded. Karachi felt dark, but the good Taliban/bad Taliban distinction seemed to die in the wake following the Peshawar school shootings. The country seemed to be unifying against violent Islamism as a legitimate philosophy to battle the ills that had befallen the country. After days of lazily spoiling myself with the elite of Karachi, challenging myself to visit Korangi where a traffic jam could turn into a gun shoot out, was a move I would not regret.
Amidst some of the poorest slums in the whole world, I walked through and learned about AmanTech. The institution is modeled after Georgia Tech, a university I had grown up miles from in Atlanta. When I got there, I realized Fawzia had been right. Scores of young men were working hard with goggles on their face and machinery under their control. They were learning carpentry or plumbing or some other vocation that would ignite them and their families into a middle class; a middle class that would destroy the point of violence: survival. They were formerly lost boys who had dropped out of high school, roaming around the slums totally vulnerable to recruitment. Poor and disenfranchised, these teenagers were prime targets for ISIS or Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. They still are and so are their friends. The promise of money for loyalty or food for commitment was knocking on their fate and it traditionally seems to knock more temptingly than education knocks. Somehow, though, AmanTech was breaking through. There weren’t as many females as one would hope, but I had been vigorously encouraged that women were entering the middle class through various different outlets as well. The experience was uplifting to say the least. The intelligentsia of Pakistan had created a model to potentially turn their most at-risk youth into a prosperous middle class.
I left Pakistan with an attachment I can’t seem to put into words, but that attachment came from a very clear place. The familial closeness I experienced in the home, at the table and at a party made it obvious that the country’s resilience and faith in itself starts in the Muslim home that isn’t necessarily extremely religious but certainly nods it’s head to conservative practices and community over individualism. With the Taliban and ISIS continuing to threaten the safety and prosperity of Pakistan, the country certainly seems to be surviving and fighting for itself, and with itself, to thrive.
