The time for rumination would come later. We returned to the car at a brisk pace, just short of a panic run. Then, without a word, my companion signalled, with a jerk of the head, that it was time to end this stupidity. The Karachi police would probably have guffawed at the thought that they needed to do something about an Indian held hostage in the mosque. It was impossible, however, not to sense that we were on the threshold of a different world, where a different law and a separate order prevailed. As I bent to unlace my shoes, I dismissed a slight tremor of unease, unwilling to accept that I was afraid. A few students loitered around, for it was neither time for study nor prayer, their dress indistinguishable from any Islamic seminary on the subcontinent: white pyjamas ending two inches above the ankle, white kurta, white cap taut over the scalp.
We mounted steps that opened into a spacious, rectangular courtyard surrounded by rooms. The ride was uneventful, the mosque large rather than imposing. The Taliban in Afghanistan honoured any visitor from Binori as a state guest. A little later, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, which became an international outcast after it organized the Mumbai attacks on 26 November 2008, issued a similar decree. In 1998, the then spiritual mentor of Binori, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, had issued a fatwa saying that killing Americans was justified. We were not inspired by visions of a local Taj Mahal, but by the widely held belief that this was the sanctuary of Osama bin Laden during the fallow period between the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union and his declaration of war upon America. A fellow guest, a former dignitary, offered to take me to the Binori mosque and madrasa, founded by Maulana Yusuf Binori soon after independence in 1947 it says something that he had not seen it either.
Bravado comes easily in the drawing room. It was one of those suggestions that seem perfectly sensible during a spirited conversation at the home of a dear friend in Karachi.
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