MTV or the Muezzin

By Tim McGirk

Just home from school on an ordinary afternoon, Sana Shah, 16, plops down her books, shakes out her hair and heads upstairs to watch some TV. She switches the set in her parents' bedroom to Roswell and kicks her younger brother and sister off the couch. "Teenage aliens with identity crises," grumbles her mother, who is trying to nap on the bed. "What nonsense."

This comforting after-school scene could be happening anywhere in America, but outside the bedroom window, wild green parrots are feasting on berries in a jamun tree, and from a distance comes the scratchy voice of a muezzin revving up his loudspeaker for the afternoon prayer call. Sana and her family live in a wealthy suburb of Lahore, Pakistan, where her satellite television pulls in the standard Pakistani and American fare: MTV, Friends, syrupy Pakistani romances, a few minutes of Oprah until something better comes along. But a year ago, the images stopped being such a laugh.

On Sept. 11, Sana and her mother watched the little TV by the bed in numb horror. First the dissolving towers, then the furious retaliation: Muslim-owned shops in the U.S. being trashed and burned, Arab-looking cabbies dragged from their cars and beaten. "We were both in shock," recalls Sana, who telephoned her brother, a student in Ann Arbor, Mich., that first night to make sure he was O.K.

Sana believes she has earned the right to think of herself as a citizen of the world--she has been to the U.S. and has an expansive, tolerant outlook on global affairs. But it has been sorely tested this year. She comes from a line of Punjabi soldiers (her mother is the daughter of a famous army general, her father an economist), and she inherited the dark, piercing eyes of a hunter, and a stoic determination she would need in the months after Sept. 11, when she felt caught between Islam and America, the two worlds she loves. Rising Islamic militancy in Pakistan made her question the roots of her faith, but America's military response to the New York City and Washington attacks made her profoundly disillusioned. "America wanted vengeance by killing Afghans," she says, her voice quavering at first--as if she is uncertain how forthright to be with an American visitor--then gaining strength and fluency. "That was wrong. Those Afghans were just as innocent as the poor people who died in the World Trade towers," she says.

The day after Sept. 11, Sana wanted to wear something special--something defiant--to school. So she pulled on a T shirt that said SEEDS OF PEACE. An essay she had written in the spring of 2001 about the plight of Lahore's street kids had won her a trip in August to a Maine camp sponsored by a New York group called Seeds of Peace, which brings together young people from war-torn regions around the world.

"Before going to camp, I was scared. I didn't want to associate with Jews and Hindus," recalls Sana. "But we all became good friends." Swimming in the lake and talking around the campfire late at night, they found that the anger they had brought with them from the war zones seemed to melt away. When she returned home, not many of her classmates sympathized with her change of heart. In Pakistan, Jews and Hindus were supposed to be the enemy. On Sept. 12, it was even worse: Sana still believed in peace, but few others in her school did. "They'd grab at my T shirt and say, 'Is this the peace you made at that fancy camp?'" she says. "They kept throwing that in my face, and it made me want to cry."

It was pandemonium that day inside the all-girl Lahore Grammar School, one of the country's most prestigious places of learning. Its curriculum is liberal and Western oriented; its students, the daughters of Pakistan's elite, look upon the U.S. as a second home, a place where relatives routinely find success. These are kids who should love America but don't. After the towers fell, their loyalties were firmly with Osama bin Laden. "There were girls in my class who loved him," says Sana. "We all thought Osama was a champion of downtrodden Muslims."

Between classes, the girls passed around magazines with bin Laden photographs. Some swooned over his "soulful" eyes. They saw him as a man who had walked away from an air-conditioned palace to live in a cave in Afghanistan and avenge the wrongs committed against Muslims. "He was our Robin Hood," says Sana. "Some of my friends defended bin Laden because they thought he carried out the bombings, while others defended him because they thought the U.S. was accusing him unjustly." Sana belonged to the latter camp.

In October, as the U.S. began its Afghan-bombing campaign, public opinion in Pakistan turned against America. Sana did too. At stoplights near the Lahore bazaar, she saw vendors hawking bin Laden shirts and posters. She watched protesters spill into the streets, and though she didn't buy the bin Laden paraphernalia or attend the bin Laden demonstrations, she found herself agreeing with him. "This was hypocrisy. Why is an Afghan's life worth any less than an American's?" she asks. She felt revulsion at the U.S. air strikes, which left hundreds of Afghans dead and thousands more wounded. One of Sana's classmates, Naomi Jamal, told how her mother, a doctor, had tended an Afghan woman in labor who had a piece of shrapnel the size of a spear tip lodged in her neck from an exploding U.S. bomb. The doctor was able to save the mother but not her newborn baby.

Suddenly, to Sana, America went from being the "next best thing to home," as her mother put it, to being an arrogant bully. Lahore Grammar School was buffeted by the wave of Islamic radicalism. More girls appeared in the classroom wearing a hijab, the Islamic head scarf, and a few even donned the full head-to-toe burqa. "Imagine," says Sana, "a burqa in this heat." In the commons room, far from the teacher's eye, these girls tried to draw other students to their strict interpretation of the Koran. They jeered at girls who wore nail polish. Sana bridled at these wannabe jihadis. "Religion's something personal to me," she says. "I don't like it when people tell me what to do--or what to believe." Sana's parents are tolerant but pious, and their example kept her grounded and helped her resist the radicals' taunts at school. Her parents, she says, "don't force me to pray, but if I let it slide for a week or don't read the Koran, I feel like I'm losing my connection with God."

Even now, Sana and her friends remain angry at the U.S. for its treatment of Muslims since 9/11. "Once the shock began to subside," Sana says, "a lot of us thought the Trade Center bombings would make the U.S. more aware of what is going on in the world, of the frustrations that Muslims feel over Palestine, Kashmir, Kosovo." She is sitting with some of her friends in the quiet of the school library, surrounded by the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson. "And what's so great about these American values that they're trying to impose on us?" says Amara Maksood, a vivacious prelaw student. "Is it really liberty? I watched Oprah the other day. She was talking to pregnant 13-year-old girls who were unmarried. I'm glad I don't have those complications in my life."

"That's right," says Naomi, who wants to study medicine. "Americans talk about protecting women's rights. But have you seen that George Michael video where he has these women on leashes like dogs? Give me a burqa any day."

As the students talk, it becomes clear that nearly everyone in the group has a relative or friend who crossed into Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Americans. Their accounts shatter the impression, widely held in the U.S., that it was only ill-educated fanatics who propped up the regime. Though many Taliban fighters were like that, among the recruits were also droves of Pakistanis who knew America firsthand, wore American jeans, listened to American rap music and had American friends--but nonetheless saw Afghanistan as Islam's battleground against the dark forces. One student says she knows an M.I.T. graduate who signed up with the Taliban. "Last I heard, he was in the trenches around Mazar-i-Sharif," the student says. "That was many months back. His family is worried sick."

In November, Sana was invited back to New York by Seeds of Peace, and, reluctantly, she decided to go. "On CNN and Fox News I kept hearing how Islam was a violent religion, but it's not, and I felt I had to explain that," she says. She felt apprehensive landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. At Customs, which she had always sailed through before, she was herded into a line with people who, she says, were "a little darker. They made the men stand with their hands in the air, and they checked every little thing in the bags--and in mine too." White people were being waved through. "I felt bad. Fine, let them search. But search everybody, no matter what their skin color is," she says.

Sana's group visited the attack site in lower Manhattan. "The remains looked like withered old flowers," she remembers. "It was scary. I kept looking at these giant cranes lifting away the rubble and thinking that there were bodies inside, all mangled up. I couldn't take it any longer. I ran away, crying." Sana wept again, and couldn't stop her tears, at a religious service where she met Connie Taylor, whose son, an equity trader, had died in the attack. Later, in a long, soulful e-mail, Sana tried to describe her experiences to other Seeds of Peace alumni: "I just hope and pray that in light of what's happening in the world, someday we can materialize this dream of peace for the whole world." But the battle lines had been drawn. "I got such angry responses," she says. "An Egyptian boy said America deserved it. And an American kid insulted us Muslims."

After Sana saw ground zero with her own eyes, her romantic view of bin Laden began to harden. "At first I couldn't believe that he was behind these gruesome attacks," she says. But the video released in December, which shows him gloating over the destruction, turned Sana against him. "He thought he was a savior of Muslims, but he was warped and wrong," she says.

Sana still feels trapped between worlds. Her green SEEDS OF PEACE T shirt has faded, but she still wears it stubbornly. During those days in Maine before the fall, when she laughed and swam with Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Christian kids, peace seemed to shimmer just above the lake. She can't see it so easily anymore. She is still a moderate citizen of the world, and she still believes in peace, but as Islamic militancy spreads in Pakistan, she feels she is being forced to take a side. And she doesn't think she can choose America's.