A would-be martyr

Qaiser Nadeem, 20, longs for the day he is called to leave his video store and join the jihad -- fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

By Asra Q. Nomani

Oct 19, 2001 | "Seventy-five paisa," the soft-spoken, bespectacled young man says from behind the photocopy machine.

At first he claimed it was a rupee a page, but after I gently raised my eyebrows, he immediately lowered the price. I later confirmed that 75 paisa is at the bottom end of what's charged around here for a decent photocopy, using the thinner, Pakistani A4 paper (imported paper starts at one rupee a page).

I'm making photocopies to show my stories to some of my sources and family here. He observes a photo of Sohail Mohammad Shaheen, the Taliban's deputy ambassador in Islamabad, on a story I wrote about a recent visit with Shaheen and his two wives at their house.

To most patrons of this store, he would just be the "photocopy walla," the photocopy guy. But he has another identity. "I trained in Kandahar," he tells me softly, in Urdu. Oh. "I'm ready to go now to become a 'shaheed,'" he says. He doesn't know, or prefers not to say, who ran the camp he attended -- was it al-Qaida? -- though when he went, in 1998, the area was firmly under the control of the Taliban, so it surely had its stamp of approval. He says he's ready and wants to go back to fight the U.S.-led coalition. "Insha'allah," he says. God willing.

But for now, the imam at his mosque told the congregation gathered for jummah, Friday prayers, that the Taliban didn't need afraad -- manpower -- yet. (They did, however, request blankets.) So he waits. (The Pakistani government has warned mullahs to refrain from rallying mujahids.)

Qaiser Nadeem is just 20, with only the slightest bits of mustache and beard sprouting from his young face. He is wearing a simple monotone-colored cotton shalwar kameez when I first meet him at a video store where he works, surrounded by what are likely bootleg copies of "Mulan," "Alice in Wonderland," "Small Soldiers" and a whole row of "The Little Mermaid," along with, of course, the copy machine behind which he stands. He's somewhat difficult to speak with because he averts his eyes from mine. The Quran warns against mixed-gender eye contact with anyone other than a relative, lest it create lustful thoughts. But he does talk to me, this Western Muslim woman journalist, and after a while I let my eyes drift to the copy paper as I speak, hoping to make him comfortable enough to keep talking.

It would be easy to portray Nadeem -- an aspiring mujahid willing to cross the border and battle the U.S.-led forces in the name of Islam -- as the product of the zealotry that sways uneducated youth into a blind hatred for the West. He doesn't hate the West, he says. He doesn't like its culture and doesn't like selling it from the shelves of the store where he works. It's a job, though, he says. He looks down upon what he sees as a decadent lifestyle. Most of all, he hates its foreign policy, particularly its support of Israel.

"If they did the right thing, then nobody would hate America," he said.

The next time we meet, we sit curbside in front of Toy Land 2 at Jinnah Super Market, a toy store with a stack of toy boxes piled outside, including the Just Start Scooter. I have a sense of irony about the place; the last time I was here in 1992, my cousins had arranged a secret meeting with the man I was about to marry on the eve of our wedding. As in other cultures, it's considered unlucky over here for a husband and wife to see each other before their wedding (and in many arranged marriages that's the the first time they're meeting), and I guess it turned out to be unlucky. Though this was a "love marriage," it was supposed to follow the same rules as an arranged marriage. But when we both showed up at Jinnah Super Market, escorted, of course, by our battalion of cousins (all of whom have insisted on anonymity in these dispatches), we broke one of the key rules.

Now I sit next to this young man, both of us looking off in other directions to avoid eye contact. He explained that his transformation began after a cousin came back from Kandahar several years ago a more religious man, preaching against music, television and those who didn't pray the requisite five times a day. Nadeem was living a modern life, watching Bollywood movies, not very religious, mostly a troublemaker, he says. But he was intrigued, and crossed the border around this time of the year in 1998 to train in Kandahar.

Next Page: Hoping for a chance to die

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