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The Mother of Mohammed: A Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad JIHAD is an Islamic term, meaning "struggle" in Arabic. A person engaged in jihad is called Mujahid. Therefore, it is important to answer the crucial questions: Who are these people? Where do they come from? What is it they believed in? What do they want? Sally Neighbour, after researching terrorism extensively in the past, believes that the personal stories of the people who have become involved in the jihadist movement either on its periphery or its core would help us to understand their journey.
Deeply disillusioned after the troubled childhood and wild adolescence during the 1960s, Rabiah (then Robyn) was in search of fulfilment. She had no idea what Islam was. She says, "Never in her strangest dreams could she have imagined how different from that idyllic vision her future would be." It was never a religion she thought of looking into. As she began to delve into Islam, she was struck by its simplicity. She related the story of how she had first been woken by the azan (morning prayer) and how her initial irritation had been replaced by curiosity and finally devotion. As she began to delve into Islam, she was struck by its simplicity and discovers it intellectually satisfying. She was eager to make a new life. In Indonesia, she married a non-conformist good-looking Javanese boy and this is when the story starts. In order to marry, Robyn had to formally convert to Islam. She had envisaged a career, a stable home life and a big happy family. But life was not going according to plan—she was separated from her drug-dependant husband, bringing up children alone and working but determined to take control of her life. With a deep-seated yearning to find her place in the world, she joined the Islamist uprising in Indonesia in the 1980s and became a follower and a friend of the radical cleric, Abu Bakar Baasyer. With unflinching certitude and all-consuming sense of mission, she was captivated by the magnetism of the Islamist cause. Embolden by her new found conviction and Muslim identity, Rabiah without thinking of long-term consequences swept up in the revolutionary fervour. For her, being just a Muslim was not enough. She put all her efforts and worked for the establishment of an Islamic state. She lived in Afghanistan during the Jihad against the Russians and she was there during the time of the Taliban. In 1990, she took her five children to Peshawar in Pakistan to join the global Islamic jihad. Despite the rugged conditions, it didn’t matter to her because she thought after all this hardship in Afghanistan would bear fruit of an Islamic state and fulfil her quest for the Islamic ideal. During this time, she moved to Afghanistan to join what was seen as a holy struggle, worked in a Mujahideen hospital and orphanage and remained largely cut off from the outside world. By this time, she was a well-known member of the jihadist elite and was popularly known as Umm Mohammad Australia. It was rumored that she had received a proposal for marriage from Osama Bin Laden. She went on to become a trusted insider of the Al-Qaida leadership, married a senior Al-Qaida ideologue and member of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle, Abu Wahid, and was also picked up by Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man Ayman Al Zawarhiri to set up a new women’s hospital in Kandhar. After 9/11, she and her children spent several months on the run in Afghanistan as US cluster bombs fell around them, before escaping the border into Iran where they were put under house arrest and deported to Australia. Today, she is one of the most watched women in the world. She is officially declared a threat to Australia’s national security and banned from traveling abroad because she might destabilise a foreign government. But she carries on with her unflinching faith that "Allah will always provide a way and does not use us beyond our capabilities". To sum up, Sally
Neighbour unfolds the fascinating adventurous story of Rabiah and the
episodes within it in an entirely accurate historical contexts and has
shed light on many of the major events and turning points in recent
history: emergence of the Islamist movement in Indonesia, the
Mujahideen struggle in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1990s, life in
the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the split in Al-Qaida leadership over
the 9/11 attack on the US and the subsequent US-led bombardments of
Afghanistan.
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This
remarkable story of a woman jihadist, a
Muslim convert Rabiah Hutchinson, tells us what makes an Australian
ex-hippy chick to go on a jihad and directly associate with the inner
circle of the most dangerous international terrorist network.
Intrigued how on earth a country girl from Mudgee, New South Wales,
could reach that position on
the frontline of the global Islamist struggle. Sally Neighbour
persuaded Rabiah to tell her story, which she would tell in a way that
is faithful to her beliefs and her experience.