Eid Card From A Terrorist

By Rafia Zakaria

24 August, 2012

Should we look at Hakimullah Mehsud’s greeting as a sign that he is normalising the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan? Or should we weep that a man chased by two armies can send mass email like a spam marketer?

On August 1, 2012, Hakimullah Mehsud, Amir of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan rallied his supporters asking them to step up attacks on military installations in southern Punjab. He made the statement at a budgetary meeting for top Taliban commanders at which Rs.25 million were allocated for the purpose. On August 13, 2012 he signed a publicity statement for markets in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reminding Muslims that downloading pornographic materials and ringtones on cell phones is forbidden in Islam. On August 14, Hakimullah oversaw an attack on an army patrol in Orakzai that killed 35 people. On August 16, 2012, his followers attacked Kamra Air Base, home to Pakistan’s nuclear installations.

And then, on August 18, 2012, the day most of Pakistan and the Muslim world awaited the appearance of the Shawwal moon that signals Eid ul Fitr, Hakimullah Mehsud took a minute to show the world his softer side. In a mass email received by thousands of members of the Pakistani media, Mehsud sent Eid Greetings. Under a shrewd letterhead of crossed swords, that particularly Talibanesque mix of the martial and the medieval, the wording of the message was poetic: part affirmation and part rallying cry, it acknowledged the suffering of poor hapless Muslims around the world and rallied them to abandon the shackles of ideological slavery. The Urdu was astute even if the announcement of the impending arrival of the Caliphate predictable. All of it was on stationery exclusive to Hakimullah Mehsud, signed in blue pen and written in black, the loops and whorls of the Urdu letters of his name emblazoned at the bottom of the page over the title “Amir of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.”

PECULIAR TERROR

Even falling between the mass emailed greetings from friends and relatives and department stores and magazines, an Eid card from a terrorist, I discovered, pulls at the most perverse of human curiosity. Like the bloody mess of a grisly car wreck that compels us to gape, or the days long coverage of earthquakes and hurricanes and downed planes we regularly digest, the email exerted its own dark magnetism that wouldn’t allow the process of deleting and moving on that we award to so much else. I could not but stare at the signature, imagining the mass murdering maniac now with fingers clasped around some sinister pen, typing at some secret keyboard just like ones that live beneath all our fingertips.

In the act of looking at something he looked at, reading something a terrorist wrote and so recently, lies a novel and peculiar terror.

Shock is short-lived even when it is birthed by an Eid card from a terrorist; but horror remains, whetted and coddled by the helplessness of those at the receiving end of anything the Taliban have to give. In the aftermath of the Taliban’s Eid greetings and Eid carnage, there are only horrific conundrums that all of us — agonised Pakistanis or war mongering Americans or questioning Indians — are stumped by. Could we look at the Eid card as some hopeful epithet, a clue to the normalisation and mainstreaming of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, who now have budgetary meetings, whose leaders have official letterheads and whose media department drum up appropriately warm and cuddly greetings to scatter among supporters? Or should we weep at the ease with which a man chased by two armies and a decade long war can now leisurely hop from place to place and circulate mass emails with the untouched ease of a spam marketer selling cheap computers? If militaries and governments and tribal militias and policy analysts have been unable to decide how to respond to the military overtures of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, their attacks and beheadings and floggings, then how indeed can I or any other journalist squirming before the screen, figure out how to respond to Eid Greetings from the Taliban?

Rafia Zakaria is a PhD candidate in Political Theory/Comparative Politics at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3812689.ece

URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/eid-card-terrorist/d/8425