The talib talked of jihad in such glorious terms that my father was captivated. He would endlessly point out to my father that life on earth was short and that there were few opportunities for young men in the village. Our family owned little land, and my father did not want to end up going south to work in the coal mines like many of his classmates. That was tough and dangerous work, and the coffins of those killed in accidents would come back several times a year. The best that most village boys could hope for was to go to Saudi Arabia or Dubai and work in construction. So heaven with its seventy-two virgins sounded attractive. Every night my father would pray to God, ‘O Allah, please make war between Muslims and infidels so I can die in your service and be a martyr.’ For a while his Muslim identity seemed more important than anything else in his life. He began to sign himself ‘Ziauddin Panchpiri’ (the Panchpiri are a religious sect) and sprouted the first signs of a beard. It was, he says, a kind of brainwashing. He believes he might even have thought of becoming a suicide bomber had there been such a thing in those days. But from an early age he had been a questioning kind of boy who rarely took anything at face value, even though our education at government schools meant learning by rote and pupils were not supposed to question teachers.

这个学长把圣战士形容得无比光荣，深深地吸引了我的父亲。他会不停地跟我父亲说人生苦短。村子里的年轻男人没有什么发挥的机会，我们的家族也仅有一小块土地，父亲不想像其他同学那样，最后不得不去南方的矿井工作。矿工的工作辛苦而又危险，一年之中，总有好几副棺材因为意外事故发生而被抬回村里。村子里大多数男孩能期待的最好的工作，就是到沙特阿拉伯或是迪拜的建筑工地工作。所以，“天堂有七十二个天使”听起来十分吸引人。父亲每晚向主祈祷：“喔，阿拉真主，请让穆斯林和异教徒打起来吧，这样我就可以在您的圣泽下捐躯，成为您的殉道者了。” 也开始留胡子。他说，当时就像是被洗脑了一样。如果当时有自杀式炸弹袭击的机会，他可能也会去参加。但他从小就是个很爱问问题的孩子，不会只关注事物的表面意义。虽然在我们的教育里，公立学校就是要你死背课本，学生也不该质疑老师。

It was around the time he was praying to go to heaven as a martyr that he met my mother’s brother, Faiz Mohammad, and started mixing with her family and going to her father’s hujra. They were very involved in local politics, belonged to secular nationalist parties and were against involvement in the war. A famous poem was written at that time by Rahmat Shah Sayel, the same Peshawar poet who wrote the poem about my namesake. He described what was happening in Afghanistan as a ‘war between two elephants’ – the US and the Soviet Union – not our war, and said that we Pashtuns were ‘like the grass crushed by the hooves of two fierce beasts’. My father often used to recite the poem to me when I was a child but I didn’t know then what it meant.

大约在他祈祷成为殉道者上天堂的时期，他认识了我母亲的哥哥法伊兹.穆罕默德，开始接触到她的家人，在她父亲的会堂出入。我母亲的家人深入参与当地政治活动，加入教区的民族主义党派，并强烈反对参战。当时拉曼.夏.萨耶写了一首很有名的诗，将阿富汗发生的事描述为“两头大象之间的战争”。意指这是发生在美苏两国之间，而与我们毫无关系的战争，还称普什图人为“两头猛兽打斗中折损的青草地”。在我小的时候，父亲常常引用这首诗给我听，但当时的我却不明白其中的道理。

My father was very impressed by Faiz Mohammad and thought he talked a lot of sense, particularly about wanting to end the feudal and capitalist systems in our country, where the same big families had controlled things for years while the poor got poorer. He found himself torn between the two extremes, secularism and socialism on one side and militant Islam on the other. I guess he ended up somewhere in the middle.

父亲深受法伊兹.穆罕默德的影响，并且认同他的理念，特别是法伊兹关于终结国内封建主义和资本主义体系的说法。当时，几个大家族已经掌权数年，富者愈富，贫者愈贫。父亲发现自己身陷两个极端之间挣扎，一边是政教分离和社会主义，一边是伊斯兰军激进分子。我想他最后决定取其中庸了。