1. The ten parties I refer to were all associated with the Sunni sect of Islam. There were also a number of Shi’a parties that represented the 10 percent of the population that professed and practiced Shi’a principles. These Shi’a parties were headquartered in the central Hazarajat region of Afghanistan and received most of their assistance from Iran. See Canfield 1973, Edwards 1986b, Roy 1986, and Mousavi 1998.

2. Although the Peshawar refugee settlements contained representatives of all the major Islamic traditions, they contained relatively few Shi’a and Ismaili leaders. Shi’a leaders in particular tended to gravitate to Iran, while Peshawar remained the center of the Sunni majority, and it is the Sunni leadership with which I am primarily concerned here.

3. My information on Maulana Faizani has a hagiographic quality to it because it comes primarily from two of his disciples (Mirajan Saheqi and Rohullah), whom I interviewed in Peshawar in 1983–1984.

4. Faizani’s disciples recounted a number of Faizani’s miracles and told of the strange occurrences and premonitions that accompanied his birth. Rohullah also noted that Faizani received his instruction in tasawuf directly from the saints (awaliya) and four companions of the Prophet (char yar kubar) and that the Prophet himself “tied his waist” and “selected him for an important task.” Interview, September 4, 1983.

5. From a photocopy of the introduction to Faizani’s “Why Do We Read the Books of the Koranic School,” by Mirajan Saheqi (Shah 1983, 10).

6. The three parties that joined together were Madrasa-i Qur´an, under Faizani; Paiman-i Islami, under Mir ‘Ali Gauhar; and Qiyyam-i Islami, under General Mir Ahmad Shah Rizwani. Hizb-i Tauhid, the united party, was also known as Madrasa-i Tauhid.

7. Although Faizani himself was a Sunni from Herat in western Afghanistan, he was close to Sayyid Ismail Balkhi, a prominent Shi’a spiritual figure and political activist who had been involved in an attempted coup d’état against Prime Minister Shah Mahmud Khan in 1949. Balkhi was arrested for his role in this plot and remained in prison until the advent of democracy in 1964, but many of his followers continued their political activities, a number under the leadership of Faizani. On the evolution of Shi’a political protest through the mid-1980s, see Edwards 1986b and Mousavi 1998.

8. In explaining Faizani’s popularity with military officers, one informant indicated that because they often lived in isolated, out-of-the-way bases and had to spend long hours in the middle of the night on watch, officers had plenty of time to practice zikr. Another informant argued that most officers were politically neutral (bi-taraf) and found Faizani’s tendency to prioritize spirituality over politics to be a more sympathetic approach than the more militant orientations of other groups.

9. Interview with Sur Gul Spin, May 25, 1986.

10. Interview with Rohullah, September 4, 1983.

11. Interview with Mirajan Saheqi, October 3, 1983. See also Edwards 1986b.

12. Most of the miracle stories told of the contemporary period involved signs of special grace associated not with leaders but with devout mujahidin killed in battle. A common theme was the perfumed smell arising from the corpse of a martyr, and sometimes it was said that angels had been seen hovering around the grave of a martyr.

13. Olivier Roy has noted that a number of Sufi commanders were prominent in the jihad inside Afghanistan, particularly in the western and northern regions of the country less closely associated with the situation in Peshawar; Roy 1986, 112–116.

14. Among those captured were Saifuddin Nasratyar in Herat, Khawja Mahfuz in Panjshir, and Dr. Umar in Badakhshan.

15. Though he is referred to as “Engineer,” Hekmatyar never completed his studies because of his involvement in political activities.

16. As is discussed in a later section, the other Afghan with a claim to being the first to import the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood was Hazrat Sibghatullah Mujaddidi.

17. Interview with Wasil Nur, October 8, 1983.

18. Another, more important point of dispute between Hekmatyar and Rabbani involved Hekmatyar’s arrest and execution of Jan Muhammad, an ally and friend of Rabbani’s. Few people would discuss this matter with me, in part because it was so controversial and also because few people knew much about it. However, the version of events that appears most reliable to me is as follows. Following the failed attacks of 1975, several factions developed in Peshawar, one of which was led by Hekmatyar and the other by Jan Muhammad. Jan Muhammad was from Kunar and part of a group known as the Council of Kunar, which included Maulavi Hussain from Pech Valley and Kashmir Khan from Shigal. Hussain, the story goes, wanted to send an antigovernment night letter (shabnama) inside Afghanistan, a move that Jan Muhammad and other members of the council opposed. However, Hussain went ahead with the plan, and two of his relatives were captured with the night letter in their possession. Hussain accused Jan Muhammad of having informed the government of the plan. Jan Muhammad was taken into custody by Hekmatyar’s group, confessed under torture, and was later executed.

19. Interview with Qazi Amin, April 23, 1984.

20. Other members of the executive council included Maulavi Nasrullah Mansur, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, Maulavi Hussain (Jamil-ur-Rahman), and Haji Din Muhammad (brother of Commander Abdul Haq and later the deputy to Maulavi Yunus Khales).

21. Qazi Amin told me that Hizb-i Islami planned “three or four coup d’états” against Daud prior to the Saur Revolution (interview, April 23, 1984).

22. Hekmatyar claimed in an interview with me in 1983 that Khyber’s assassination was the doing of Hizbi guerrillas. This claim has not been confirmed, and others claim that Daud himself ordered the killing.

23. For an example of one of these publications, see Edwards 1993b.

24. Interview with Wasil Nur, October 8, 1983.

25. According to one informant, after the establishment of Harakat, Nabi insisted that the leaders of Jamiat and Hizb turn over to him all party documents, information about fronts, and other materials. Both Hekmatyar and Rabbani refused, however, and approximately two months after the initiation of Harakat, Hekmatyar’s faction staged a coup d’état, occupying the Harakat offices and confiscating safes containing the financial resources of the alliance. Some say that Nabi was also briefly held prisoner until the Pakistan government intervened and ordered his release. Thereafter, Nabi remained at home, deciding on his course of action, while the separate offices of Hizb-i Islami and Jamiat-i Islami were reorganized, both sharing in the spoils taken from Harakat. Interview with Wasil Nur, October 8, 1983.

26. Interview with Qazi Amin, April 23, 1984.

27. Interview with Yunus Khales, April 22, 1984.

28. Interview with Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, April 25, 1984.

29. Interview with Yunus Khales, 1983.

30. Khales’s contact with the Muslim Youth was initiated through Engineer Habib-ur Rahman as well as through his own son, Muhammad Nasim, a madrasa teacher and organization member who was arrested about the same time as Habib-ur Rahman and, like him, is presumed to have been executed.

31. Interview with Yunus Khales, April 22, 1984.

32. Interview with Zemarak Abed, Muslim Youth member from Wardak Province, May 5, 1984.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. See Trimingham 1971.

36. Interview, September 12, 1983.

37. See Edwards 1993a, 171. The name “Mujaddidi” derives from Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi’s honorific title, mujaddid-i alf-i thani (renewer of the second millennium).

38. Most family members and loyalists would not discuss the apparent rivalry between the two Mujaddidi cousins. However, reasons did exist for bitterness between the two wings of the family, especially considering that the leadership of the family had been assumed by the descendants of Fazl Umar (Ibrahim’s father), even though Sibghatullah’s grandfather (Fazl Muhammad, the elder brother of Fazl Umar) was the senior member of the family. Although he did not confirm my suspicion that there was bitterness over this usurpation, Sibghatullah did tell me in an interview on September 12, 1983, that his cousin was jealous of him and had founded his party simply to prevent Sibghatullah from encroaching on his position with the ulama. He also expressed the belief that his cousin’s murder and his own survival were not accidental: “Because I was pure, my heart was pure and I was sincere in my purpose, God protect[ed] me, save[d] me with all my children, family, I came here from abroad, and they were all captured. Some may be killed, some may be in jails up to now. This was really a great fault of family policy. I advised them; I requested them when I started my activities here in Peshawar; I told them, ‘Please, I am secretly coming here.’ Nobody knew I was here. I sent a man [to tell them], ‘You must emigrate to Pakistan because I must start. I can’t stop for you.’ They said, ‘No one will tell us anything. We are happy.’”

39. According to the family history, Naqib refused these gifts because they were public property (bait ul-mal) and insisted on paying for them from his own resources. Whether true or not, the account echoes a similar story told of the Mulla of Hadda when he was offered land by Habibullah a few years earlier. It also tells us that Naqib had both independent resources to draw on and the wisdom to realize that dependence on the government would likely compromise his position.

40. Girardet 1985, 115.

41. Interview, September 12, 1983.

42. The parties worked their separate wiles after this until the summer of 1979, when the garrison at Asmar was looted by Hizb-i Islami. This incident created a stir among the other parties, which joined together under the name Paiman-i Islami, but this alliance was also short-lived, breaking up within three months.

43. Interview, September 12, 1983.

44. In a strange reversal for Babrak Khan, who gave his own life to preserve the state, one of his two sons was held responsible (the circumstances and reasons remain murky) for the assassination of Pakistani Prime Minister Liaqat ‘Ali Khan. His involvement in this episode has never been adequately explained.

45. Interview, June 12, 1984.

46. One of the decisions of this initial council was to call the proposed jirga a momasela (provisional) rather than a loya (“great,” or national) jirga since it would be convened outside the country and circumstances prevented the holding of formal elections to decide who should sit on the council.

47. Interview, January 1983.

48. Kakar 1995, 100.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 101.

51. Ibid., 103. In fairness, Zahir Shah was also not welcomed by the Pakistani authorities, and some of the Islamic parties in all likelihood would have done anything in their power to prevent him from setting up a base of operations in Pakistan. Both the Pakistanis and the Afghan resistance parties recognized Zahir Shah’s popularity within the refugee population and inside the country.

52. Ali 1963, 16.

53. Roy 1986, 73.

54. It is also said that after Amin’s own death members of his family emigrated to Peshawar and took up residence with Sayyaf, proving perhaps that even among the more zealous ideologues blood and honor retained some meaning.

55. This alliance included all the parties except Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami.

56. Qazi Amin, interview, April 23, 1984.

57. Roy 1986, 123.

58. Khan 1981.

59. While Sayyaf had relatively few fronts, he did attract some first-rate commanders, including Abdul Salam Roketi from Zabul, Amir from Khanabad, and Saznur from Ningrahar.

60. Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 9, January 1982, 10. Sayyaf took the notion that Afghanistan should provide “a school of Islamic jihad” quite literally; he established for Afghan refugees an Islamic university in exile that also included Arabs in its student body.

61. Hussain, like Sayyaf, changed his name during this time. Known widely in Kunar as Maulavi Hussain or as Panj Pir Maulavi, for his advocacy of Panj Piri doctrines, he came to be known as Maulavi Jamil-ur-Rahman because the name Hussain was associated with Shi’a Islam and was not popular in Arab circles.

62. Most people assume that Hizb was behind Hussain’s assassination. However, some well-placed informants expressed the view that Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, which coordinated most aspects of Pakistan’s involvement with the Afghan resistance, was behind the killing because Hussain had announced the formation of an Islamic state in Kunar and had clashed with Pakistani militia groups along the border.

63. Personal communication, Dr. Zahir Ghazi Alam, 1986.

64. Yousaf and Adkin 1992, 105.

65. Ibrahim Mujaddidi had been the pir-i tariqat of the Mujaddidi family, while Nur Agha Gailani had been most actively involved in his family.

66. The advantage that accrued to both Mujaddidi and Gailani was that each began with a loyal following, mostly in the tribal areas, but both had difficulty moving beyond this initial base of support, especially since they were given a smaller percentage of total funds than the other parties were. Mujaddidi’s problems were also compounded by the fact that many of his family’s disciples were Ghilzai Pakhtun from Logar, Ghazni, Zabul, and Qandahar; this area had a high concentration of mullas and maulavis, many of whom joined Harakat, particularly when it became clear that Mujaddidi’s party had relatively little in the way of resources. By contrast, Gailani’s strongest support was in Paktia, where clerics as a rule had less influence.

67. Roy 1986, 135.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., 131. The Afghan Information Center Bulletin noted in 1983 that while Rabbani was “one of the prominent figures of the young revolutionary Islamic movement,” he had established his reputation as a leader “in a traditional way,” and his doing so had encouraged some local Sufi leaders and brotherhoods in the northern provinces to join his movement; Afghan Information Center Bulletin, nos. 32–33, November–December 1983, 18.

70. Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 21, December 1982, 14.

71. The Afghan Information Center Bulletin cites a number of examples of Hizb conflicts or noninvolvement (or both) with other fronts in Tagab (no. 26, May 1983, 7), Wardak (no. 26, May 1983, 7), Panjshir (no. 27, June 1983, 7), Maidan (no. 34, January 1984, 14), Kunduz (no. 34, January 1984, 15), and Kabul (no. 35, February 1984, 10).