Author: Gaiutra Bahadur

Two generations of Iraqis in Phila. long to go back.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The bus he was about to board would carry him, heart pumping, past dozens of checkpoints with a fake student ID and $7,000 in cash.

Imad Alabudi had never before left Basra, his birthplace in southern Iraq. But that day four years ago, he said goodbye casually, as though he expected to return soon.

He kissed his mother on the cheek. And with a brisk handshake for each of his brothers, he set off to ford a river on the Turkey-Iraq border in the company of a smuggler who charged $7,000.

“I was hopeless to see my family again,” said Alabudi, 28, now a truck driver living in Northeast Philadelphia. “I never believed the government of Saddam Hussein would collapse.”

For him and other Iraqis who ended up in the United States, leaving was not emigrating. It was going into exile.

But now – even for some who arrived a generation ago and have American-born children, mortgages and citizenship here – the toppling of Hussein has opened a door to reclaiming a homeland they thought they had lost.

The Pentagon is flying an elite sliver – about 150 – of the 90,000 Iraqi-born U.S. residents back to play official roles in their country’s reconstruction. Nouman Shubbar, a Philadelphia police sergeant, is among them. He was to have departed yesterday for military training on the way to Iraq to help rebuild the nation’s police force.

But for most, the homecomings will not carry the official seal of the U.S. government. Theirs will be intensely personal journeys – finally fulfilled reunions without a precise plan.

“I would like to finish my life there,” said Amar Alkaysi, 46, who fled in 1981 rather than fight in the Iran-Iraq war. “Thanks be to God, I have a good life here, but I wasn’t very happy, because I was away from my home.”

Alkaysi was working in Kuwait as a mechanical engineer in the early 1980s when his father warned him that Iraqis abroad who had ignored Hussein’s call to arms were being forcibly repatriated. Some had been executed. Others had been imprisoned. It was time, Alkaysi’s father told him, to leave.

Apart but also alike

Two decades separate that farewell from Alabudi’s. And the two men, who work for the same auto-parts company, occupy opposite ends of the spectrum for immigrants here.
Alkaysi owns the trucks that deliver the auto parts. Alabudi, because of Alkaysi’s help, drives them.

Alkaysi is a U.S. citizen. Alabudi is in limbo, appealing his denied claim for political asylum.

Alkaysi is married, with three children all born in the United States. Alabudi is single.

The gap between them mirrors one in their community – between the refugees who came after the Gulf War and the better-educated, older guard who preceded them.

Less than four miles separate Alkaysi’s and Alabudi’s apartments in Northeast Philadelphia. They hang out at the same coffee shop, al-Manar, in a Palestinian hub of North Philadelphia. They worship at the same Shia mosque in Delran, Burlington County. And both have a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the cleric who spearheaded Iran’s Islamic revolution, hanging in their living rooms.

‘I left my whole life behind’

There is a common thread of persecution – and of longing for home – in their stories.
Alabudi, too, left because he did not want to become a soldier for Hussein. A diesel mechanic in Basra, he pretended to be a student to avoid serving in the army. In addition to carrying the fake ID, he hauled books to his car every day for three years to fool informants.

In the year before Alabudi left, Hussein cracked down on those who dodged military service. If found out, Alabudi’s ears would have been lopped off, his forehead branded, and his family’s rations cut.

“The reason I came here to the U.S. has disappeared,” Alabudi said April 20 at al-Manar, where talk of a brain drain and the duty to return was as plentiful and supercharged as the cardamom-spiced coffee. “I left my brothers, my friends. . . . I left my whole life behind.”

‘Where is home?’

Alkaysi’s life – at least a big part of it – is here.

His wife, Linda, grew up in a small village in the Welsh mountains. She has never stepped foot in Iraq. She is not Muslim. And she speaks little, if any, Arabic.

His 12-year-old, Adam, reads a chapter of the Koran in Arabic every night. But he’s also crazy about Allen Iverson. His basketball is almost an appendage.

And when Alkaysi recently asked Jennah, his 3-year-old habibi, or darling, “Where is Grandma?” the exchange was revealing.

“Home,” she said.

“Where is home?” Alkaysi prodded.

“Feeel-adelphia,” she replied.

“Of course, [the children] are going to be a little confused,” Alkaysi said. “It’s not going to be easy, but I would like them to grow up there.”

“I’m not going to force them to stay,” he said. “I don’t know myself if I can stay after all these years.”

Still, at al-Manar – amid al-Jazeera TV images of Iraqis in the streets clamoring, “Where is the democracy?” – it seemed clear to Alkaysi that he had to return and help answer that question.

“The prints of those years are still in my heart,” he said of pre-Hussein Baghdad, where bars did not proliferate; the rhythm of life hewed to the Islamic worship schedule, with Fridays off; and devout men and women did not listen to music.

Tomorrow, he leaves for a monthlong vacation in the United Arab Emirates. While there, he plans to finagle his way into Baghdad, if possible.

But, like Alabudi, he will wait to make sure the country does not spiral into civil war before booking a flight for a permanent return.

Linda Alkaysi smiled when told this.

“Living there? Full time? I have to take it one step at a time,” she said. “I’ve never been there. I know nothing, really.”

Amar Alkaysi, meanwhile, just wants to lay eyes on his 76-year-old mother in the country he has not stepped foot in for a quarter of a century: “This time, inshallah, I hope to see her again – there.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Ten years ago, in a small town in north India, Ashok Singhal spearheaded the destruction of a 16th-century mosque, sparking the worst religious riots since the country won independence. His supporters tore down the Babri Masjid brick by brick.

A week ago, in a basement in suburban New Jersey, Singhal courted the hearts and pocketbooks of Hindu immigrants to the United States. This American visit and dozens before it, critics say, are part of a campaign to tear down India’s secular political structure – not brick by brick, but dollar by dollar.

The movement Singhal belongs to – Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva – is rising in India. And some say it has risen with the sometimes unwitting help of Indian Americans who have contributed millions to charities in their native country, particularly schools in tribal areas that the Hindu right views as key to its agenda.

Singhal’s visit coincided with the end of an unprecedented government-sponsored conference in New Delhi of prominent Indians living abroad. The country is trying to tap into the guilt, nostalgia and financial resources of its diaspora.

That strategy explains the unlikely spectacle of the silver-haired leader of the World Hindu Council holding forth in the basement of a Voorhees physician last Friday night. Sixty people listened to a man one called “a saint in street clothes.”

Two police officers stood sentinel, since there are some for whom Singhal, whose group has reshaped Indian politics in the last decade, conjures Hitler more than he does a saint.

The 77-year-old – an ally of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee – spoke of the ongoing effort to build a temple over the ruins of the Babri mosque, where Hindus believe the warrior god Ram was born.

“We need the Hindus to unite throughout the world,” Singhal said in an interview, “… because there is a cultural onslaught against the Hindus.”

“People can understand more because of Sept. 11,” he said. “America has suffered the first onslaught by the jihadis. We have been suffering this onslaught for the last 1,000 years.”

According to Human Rights Watch, Singhal’s group helped stoke religious riots in Gujurat state last spring that claimed 2,000 lives, as well as attacks on Christians in 1998 and 1999.
After Singhal’s speech, his host, gynecologist Veena Gandhi, made a pitch: “$365 a year for one school. A dollar a day, for which we can’t even buy a Coke in New York. Talk to your friends. This is our debt to our country where we were born.”

Gandhi is a leader in the U.S. offshoot of the World Hindu Council and a coordinator for a group devoted to starting tribal schools, the Houston-based Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA.

Since the group began, Indians in the Northeast have raised about $500,000 for 1,400 schools, most of it from the Philadelphia region, said Sanjeev Jindal, a coordinator and a Merck scientist from Lansdale.

He says the schools’ main purpose is to combat illiteracy. Critics say more is at stake.
“The schools… help to create a cadre of foot soldiers to fight against the constructed enemies of Hindutva, in this case Muslims and Christians,” said Smita Narula, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

She said more tribal people took part in last year’s Gujurat riots than ever before in the state’s history of religious tensions – a fact viewed by many as a sign of Hindutva’s success in areas where Christian missionaries once held sway.

Gandhi dismissed critics of the schools, saying, “They find this an obstacle to the spreading of their own religion.”

She said the Hindutva agenda was not meant to exclude Muslims, Christians, or other religious minorities: “Hindus have always taken a beating because we are supposed to forgive… . You cannot be tolerant to the point of being a coward.”

A report last year by a group of activists – the Foreign Exchange of Hate – revealed that the bulk of $5 million raised by one U.S.-based charity for relief and development projects in India went to a network of Hindu nationalist groups – including the Ekal Vidyalaya schools.
It came largely from unsuspecting workers with origins in India and from U.S. employers providing matching funds.

Just as many contributors did not realize how their dollars were being used, members of Hindutva groups here seem to join for reasons different from their counterparts in India.
“There’s a whole generation of people who emigrated out – sort of ‘brain drain’ types – who feel guilty for having left India,” said Gautam Ghosh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The dozens gathered in Gandhi’s basement are battling cultural loss in a nation where they are a minority. The World Hindu Council hooks them on heritage, with 14 U.S. chapters that run summer camps, cultural centers and temples.

That was how Jindal, the Merck employee, got involved.

“I thought it was a neat project, and I wanted to volunteer my time,” he said. “It would be a shock to me that these kids are being taught to hate Muslims or Christians – and to the extent that they should go and become soldiers. Nothing would shock me more if that would be the case.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.