雙語暢銷書《我是馬拉拉》第2章5:聖戰士

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.

這個學長把聖戰士形容得無比光榮，深深地吸引了我的父親。他會不停地跟我父親說人生苦短。村子裏的年輕男人沒有什麼發揮的機會，我們的家族也僅有一小塊土地，父親不想像其他同學那樣，最後不得不去南方的礦井工作。礦工的工作辛苦而又危險，一年之中，總有好幾副棺材因爲意外事故發生而被擡回村裏。村子裏大多數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築工地工作。所以，“天堂有七十二個天使”聽起來十分吸引人。父親每晚向主祈禱：“喔，阿拉真主，請讓穆斯林和異教徒打起來吧，這樣我就可以在您的聖澤下捐軀，成爲您的殉道者了。” 也開始留鬍子。他說，當時就像是被洗腦了一樣。如果當時有自殺式炸彈襲擊的機會，他可能也會去參加。但他從小就是個很愛問問題的孩子，不會只關注事物的表面意義。雖然在我們的教育裏，公立學校就是要你死背課本，學生也不該質疑老師。

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.

大約在他祈禱成爲殉道者上天堂的時期，他認識了我母親的哥哥法伊茲.穆罕默德，開始接觸到她的家人，在她父親的會堂出入。我母親的家人深入參與當地政治活動，加入教區的民族主義黨派，並強烈反對參戰。當時拉曼.夏.薩耶寫了一首很有名的詩，將阿富汗發生的事描述爲“兩頭大象之間的戰爭”。意指這是發生在美蘇兩國之間，而與我們毫無關係的戰爭，還稱普什圖人爲“兩頭猛獸打鬥中折損的青草地”。在我小的時候，父親常常引用這首詩給我聽，但當時的我卻不明白其中的道理。

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.

父親深受法伊茲.穆罕默德的影響，並且認同他的理念，特別是法伊茲關於終結國內封建主義和資本主義體系的說法。當時，幾個大家族已經掌權數年，富者愈富，貧者愈貧。父親發現自己身陷兩個極端之間掙扎，一邊是政教分離和社會主義，一邊是伊斯蘭軍激進分子。我想他最後決定取其中庸了。