Married to the Al Qaeda

The Mother of Mohammed by Sally Neighbour tells the unlikely story of Rabiah (Robyn) Hutchinson, an extraordinary white Australian woman, who lived on the frontlines of the jihadist movement after first marrying an Indonesian leader of Jemaah Islamiyah (the group responsible for the Bali bombings), and then a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle. Known in CIA circles as the Elizabeth Taylor of the jihad, and among her fellow fugitives as Umm Mohammed or the mother of Mohammed, Rabiah did not actually participate in acts of terrorism but was for long not too far away from those who did.

Born and raised in Mudgee, New South Wales, in a lower middle class Australian family of the outback, in and out of Christian schools and the 1960s counter-culture, “a country girl turned marijuana-smoking beach bunny and hippy backpacker”, Rabiah Hutchinson, lost faith in Christianity, migrated to Bali, Indonesia, converted voluntarily to Islam and soon became a veteran of the global holy war.

In Jakarta, she worked as an English teacher and married a party boy and a drug addict from a Javanese family. She was left by her husband when she delivered her second son Mohammed. She lived in poverty and her desperation forced her to return to Australia for a while. Rabiah returned to Indonesia in the early 1980s but her reconciliation with her husband was short-lived as he refused to become a “true” Muslim. She learned about Islam from Ustadz Abu bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar. She then went to Afghanistan to join the global jihad movement along the Pakistan-Afghan border in 1990. Although she endured primitive conditions with very limited facilities to survive, Rabiah felt she was living a meaningful life by providing education and health services for women and children in her community.

Rabiah married Abu Walid, Osama bin Laden’s military strategist and a leading al Qaeda ideologue, as his second wife. Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, personally selected Rabiah to run a women's hospital in Kandahar near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. She spent four years working as a doctor in the mujahidin hospital and orphanage. When the US bombed Taliban and al Qaeda compounds in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attack, Rabiah fled across the Iranian border with her four children and became a fugitive until she reluctantly surrendered to the Australian embassy at Teheran.

Rabiah Hutchinson's story provides an insight into the conditions under which terror networks take shape. Woven through the narrative is the tale of jihad and the tools of terror employed to wage the so-called holy war in the rugged terrain astride the Durand Line. The al Qaeda cadre’s quest for power and pelf, the rivalry for leadership positions and quarrels and intrigues come across clearly, although that is not what Rabiah may have intended when she agreed to tell her story for, as a devout Muslim, even today she believes in the righteousness of the cause.

Rabiah Hutchinson is among one of the most watched women in the world. She claims she is under 24-hour surveillance and her home and telephone have been bugged. She has been officially designated as “a threat to national security” by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and her passport has been impounded because she might “destabilise foreign governments”. She is still nostalgic about the life she has left behind. Pointing to the susburban surroundings around her house in Sydney, Rabiah says, “This is not reality to me; it’s not real. Those mud houses and no electricity in Pakistan or Indonesia or Afghanistan – that’s reality to me.”

Sally Neighbour, an investigative journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Company's programme Four Corners and a writer for The Australian newspaper, spent two years trying to gain the confidence of Rabiah Hutchinson. She let Rabiah tell her story through extensive interviews.  She recounts the process through which Hutchinson became a trusted insider to the Jemaah Islamiyah, Taliban, and al Qaeda leaderships and reached Osama bin Laden's inner sanctum. In the process, Neighbour discovers a world of converts and true believers and provides the reader a rare glimpse into the world of jihad and the magnetism of the Islamist cause for many women who are not born into Islam.
Neighbour has recorded a mass of information about every stage of Rabiah’s life and reconciled it with her own historical research. The toughest compositional challenge, she writes, was telling Rabiah’s story in a way that was faithful to her own beliefs and experience.

She grew to respect and admire Rabiah and it was a challenge for Neighbour to sustain her professional objectivity and scepticism, which are so necessary for a project of this nature. It could not have been easy to focus on staying detached, keeping a critical mind and adopting a rigorous academic approach. "I did not want to be accused of being too close to her or too soft on her," she writes. Sally Neighbour has done a remarkable job.

Courtsey: Mail Today, 31 January 2010