Outside the ivory ivy tower

The Freshman: Talib in Luce Hall

Chip Brown in the Times: ... Before Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi opened the Yale course catalog last summer, his education had been painfully unacademic; his reading list mixed the Koran and Persian poets with the grimmest primers of poverty and war. He was the sixth of seven children, born in 1978 in the Arghandab River valley village of Kohak, where his parents were born. They were Pashtuns — the dominant ethnic group of southern Afghanistan and parts of western Pakistan. For centuries the Arghandab valley had been the breadbasket of Afghanistan, famous for its grapes and pomegranates as well as for the fierce Pashtun clans that bloodied the armies of Alexander the Great and a litany of subsequent invaders. Rahmatullah arrived the year before the Soviet invasion, the most savage conflict of all. Many of the mud-brick homes and orchards of the family's village were obliterated by napalm; the whole region was salted with small, beguilingly shaped "bat mines" designed to blow the hands off children. Two of Rahmatullah's sisters were pulled alive from bomb rubble; an aunt was not so lucky, another of the estimated 1.5 million people killed during the 10-year Soviet occupation. ...

He did not like to dwell on the past, much less advertise it. To avoid alarming eavesdroppers, he referred to his former compatriots as "the Tangoes." But sometimes the past had a way of finding him. At the start of the fall semester, he made his way to the Henry R. Luce Hall at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. He had a 1 o'clock class — PLSC 145, Terrorism: Past, Present and Future, with Prof. Douglas Woodwell. It was a popular new offering; hardly a seat was open. As he stood in the back hunting for a place to sit, he realized that he had been in Luce Hall before. Four years earlier. March 2001. The university saved a seat for him that afternoon, down on the stage. He was the featured speaker, a "roving ambassador" from the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan. He was 22 years old. The newspapers said 24, but he had been misrepresenting his age for a long time. Twenty-two years old and a member of the Taliban — at that moment, in fact, the very face and voice of the regime in America. Per decree, his beard was full, his head swaddled in a turban. He was dressed in an Afghan tunic and loose-fitting pants. Neither he nor anyone else in Luce Hall that day could have foreseen the catastrophe approaching or what peculiar fate was in store for him. He could remember looking out at the faces of the Yale students in the audience. They were his age, his generation — after a fashion they were taliban, too, talib being the Arabic word for seeker or student — but they sat on the far side of an abyss, and not in his wildest dreams could he have imagined himself as one of them. ...

"When I first met him I was a little anxious," recalls [Richard] Shaw, who last year became dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Stanford. "My perception was, 'It's the enemy!' But the interview with him was one of the most interesting I've ever had. I walked away with a sense: Whoa! This is a person to be reckoned with and who could educate us about the world." ...

When the fall term started, he made a lot of new friends. He spoke Urdu to Fahad Khan, a Pakistani junior, and Pashto with two sophomores, Ahmed Khattak, who grew up in Pakistan, and Hyder Akbar, who was born in Afghanistan but raised in the U.S. Rahmatullah didn't mention his background, but his friends put two and two together.

"God, it's you!" he shouted when he saw Rahmatullah again.

"Shut up," Rahmatullah said. Pashtun friendships are often characterized by a certain brusqueness.

"Fahad, Hyder, Rahmatullah, me — we fight every day," Ahmed says. "We have lunch together. At 6 o'clock we meet for dinner at the Slifka Center. We sit together and eat food off one plate and talk about things. Sometimes we make fun of the Taliban. Every day we come up with something to fight about. We pretend to be only mocking, but we're genuinely angry. Friendship to a Pashtun means you have exclusive rights to abuse each other. After dinner we go back to my suite in Davenport and play foosball or stay up late playing Civilization. Rahmatullah loves the equality of how people are over here. He's very down to earth. He gets a lot of respect at Yale. If you want to test a man's character, either give him power or take it away — and see how he responds. I'm proud to be his friend."

It's another great NYTimes magazine article, they've really more interesting under their new editor, Gerald Marzorati. The piece is long, but well worth reading; does a good job of showing Hashemi in all his complexity, for better or for worth. Although I think the headline doesn't quite capture the piece, more telling is that Hashemi's name doesn't even appear until about 1/10th through the article.

Of course, this being America, there's also Alumni clash over Hashemi

Yale Daily News: Rahmatullah Hashemi '09 has become the focal point of a nationwide debate over his admission to Yale as a special non-degree student, precipitating extensive media coverage and heated conversation among University alumni.

Since The New York Times Magazine published an article last month detailing Hashemi's past as a former diplomat for the foreign minister of the Taliban and his current life as a Yale student, many alumni have spoken out publicly either against or in support of their alma mater's decision to admit him last summer.

Yale administrators have generally been silent on the issue, and President Richard Levin declined to personally comment on Hashemi's presence at the University. Hashemi has said he plans to apply for regular degree status this May.

"We acknowledge that some are criticizing Yale for allowing Mr. Hashemi to take courses here, but we hope that critics will also acknowledge that universities are places that must strive to increase understanding, especially of the most difficult issues that face the nation and the world," Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said in a statement.

Carolyn Claflin, acting director of the Association of Yale Alumni, said the Times story has elicited a spike in alumni communication with the office, with a variety of sentiments behind the contact.

I think some people are nuts--I say we should be trying to get as many willing ex-Taliban, current Taliban, al-Qaeda, etc. leaders as possible into our universities. These people exist and we're not going to be able to kill them all--far better to engage those who are interested in learning and let them see what our country is really like, then boycott them and push them back into the arms of their extremist kin.

I'm pretty confident once they've seen America and lived among us--willingly--their views will change.

Photo of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi by Reuben Cox in the Times.