My take on lessons identified from 15 years of the war on terror
I am from Turkmenistan.
I come from generations of warlords and horse-breeders, of our famous desert hot-blooded horse, the Akhal Teke.
When I was young, Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union. Scoring high on national intelligence testing, I was recruited into the elite Special Operations, Spetsnaz, for foreign intelligence (then the First Chief Directorate of the KGB). I was sent into Afghanistan undercover to infiltrate the band of fighters, mujahidin – who went on to become Al Qa’ida.
His Soviet training to go undercover with the mujahidin had prepared him
for dissimulation, for interrogation and torture, for survival in extreme terrain.
But it left one flank exposed. He had no defences against real spirituality. No
Soviet understood enough to warn him of it. When the force of it hit him, he had
no techniques of resistance.
His Muslim grandfather had taught him how to pray as a child. He revived it
to go undercover amongst the foreign volunteers in the Afghani mujahidin. To
Atamar’s surprise he found it restful.
Until one day he sat back on his heels and the world burst open.
The band of mujahidin were thousands of feet up a mountainside. The little
valley which had been their previous camp, with its brutally cold stream twisting
between gnarled trees and ageless rocks, lay far behind as they bounced over icegnawed
unmade tracks. At high altitude they spread out coarse rugs and prayed.
While his eyes were still closed he was ambushed by Absolute Being. It burst
out from behind the cover of ritual and captured him. Like the whiteness of
an explosion, it had no qualities and he could not describe it, only its effects
on him; how he imploded into waves of awe and adoration. His hands resting
on his thighs went numb, and soon he lost his body. While captive he knew or
wanted nothing else. Then it ceased. He had no idea how much time had passed.
He became aware of his legs which were as dead, then tingling, then discovering
countless sharp rocks that had been pressing into them through the blanket. He
found himself murmuring the ninety-nine names of God over and over. He had
never memorised them.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that the others were looking at him silently.
They moved away to pick up their weapons, check them over and clean them. He
shifted himself to mimic them, his legs still unresponsive, his actions still dazed.
Now he saw that the whole of his experience had been lived within a shell.
The world inside it had been technically functional, and even now all the wiring
and devices of scientific explanation were still intact. But the casing around his
universe cracked open to reveal an undisclosed dimension all about it. He could
never conjure up this awareness; it broke in on him when it chose. It came as
often outside formal prayer as within it. Most often it disclosed little glimpses
when the world parted like clouds to reveal Infinite Being beyond it. His only
description likened it to the sharp, bracing air of high altitudes: pure, austere,
magnificent.
From that point on, Soviet atheist materialism could no longer satisfy me.
*