Robert Fisk on David Gosling, the British physicist who ignored Taliban death threats to teach in Peshawar
"When you have education in its totality, it enables
our students to see what should be obvious: we are all one”
NB: David Gosling taught in St Stephen's college, Delhi, back in the 1960's, which is when we became friends - he befriended many students. He was the most bohemian teacher any of us could imagine. Since he was still in his twenties, the mischievous among us found in him a kindred soul. If you wanted a Diwali cracker on a non-Diwali date, for a non-Diwali occasion, 'Gall Singh' was the man you went to. Out of consideration for his academic standing and current gravitas, I shall say no more of his numerous pranks. But his stint in NWFP was probably the most courageous stage of his long career as an educationist, and I look forward to reading his book, Frontier of Fear: Confronting the Taliban on Pakistan’s Border - All the best David, keep the flame alive! Dilip
Imagine the English principal of a famous college on the
North West Frontier, a place built by the British and founded by Christians.
Inject a few nightmares – Taliban bombs, suicide attacks, the daily slaughter
of civilians and children, and bloody US drone attacks on the surrounding
countryside – and picture how this teacher nevertheless carries on, trying to
instruct the Muslims and Christians in his class in the fundamentals of
history, physics and economics. You come up with only one name: David Lagourie
Gosling.
Although a Cambridge don and a nuclear physicist, Gosling
spent four years running Edwardes College in Peshawar, the capital of what is
now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and perhaps the most dangerous city east of
Raqqa. The college was founded by the Church Missionary Society in 1900.
Gosling received a handwritten, but decidedly ineloquent, death threat from a
“Captain Halifah”, which announced: “The principal of Edwardes College is a
non-Muslim. God says … that you don’t make friends with non-Muslims … Oh
Muslims, wake up! Shake the foundations of non-believers and uplift the name of
Islam.”
“Captain Halifah” accused the principal of closing the
college before Muslim students had had time to offer prayers. It was untrue. If
Gosling did not obey, however, he was threatened with a suicide bomber at the
college gates. The head teacher didn’t give up, even when the college
windows were broken by suicide bombers in the neighbourhood, one of whom – a
young woman – was identified only when the police found her head.
It is just over a year now since the emir of the Pakistani
Taliban, Fazle Hayat (better known as Fazlullah), claimed Taliban
responsibility for the massacre at the nearby army school in Peshawar, when
gunmen went through the college, shooting down 143 boys, girls and teachers.
Gosling had already left Pakistan but, while condemning the atrocity, he
recalls how Fazlullah had also called for social equality, more employment and
a justice system more efficient than the bureaucratic Pakistani civil law.
How on earth could Gosling account for these almost daily
bloodbaths, yet remain dedicated to running a college whose raison d’être was
peace between Muslims and Christians? I asked him this question at the end of a
year of massacres – far more in the Muslim world than in our own precious
Europe, of course. “It’s the outside interference and the historical legacy,”
he said. “Even the leaders of the local churches are the legacies of the Raj.
There are, at the college, young Muslims and Christians who get on well. It’s
the power of education. When you have education in its totality, it enables our
students to see what should be obvious: we are all one.”
Gosling came across Fazlullah’s ageing father, Sufi Mohamed,
on a prison visit with some of his college students, and he describes this
extraordinary meeting in his new book, Frontier of Fear. But since his book
does not explain why educated men and women from Europe are going to join Isis,
I thought I had better put poor David Gosling through the mill.
“Ah, they may be intelligent, but they are angry,” he
replied. “This is an angry people driven by an ideology that is incompatible
with education. These energies cannot be channelled in a positive way – which education
would want to do. In face-to-face education, you have to engage with people.
The internet doesn’t work. Education is travelling with people.” Gosling talked
of hypocrisy, of how the world remained virtually silent when 2,000
Palestinians were slaughtered in Gaza but became furious when “a handful” of
people were killed on a beach in Tunisia.
I’m not sure this is fair. Yet it is difficult to gainsay
Gosling’s contempt for US drone attacks and their civilian casualties, and the
“double tap” American missiles that are fired 20 minutes after the initial
rocket strikes to kill the rescuers. A US drone strike on a madrassa in Bajaur
in 2006 killed 85 Pakistani students, to the fury of the people of the frontier
province. A proposed visit by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall to
Edwardes College and its principal was immediately cancelled.
The targets of drone attacks come from informers – who may
have personal vendettas against the victims, or be coerced into working for the
Americans. Gosling received a chilling email from one former Edwardes college
student, originally from Waziristan, who sought advice after meeting two
Americans who offered him a lot of money to become a male model. Gosling told
him to refuse. Then came another email. “They [the Americans] were not from a
modelling agency,” the ex-student wrote. “They wanted to hire me for
information purposes (spy) and many more in Waziristan …” The rest of the email
implied that the two Americans had now threatened him for refusing to
co-operate. Gosling has no time for “the robotisation of warfare”, a view
shared by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who calls it
“gravely counterproductive”.
Lest you think the “enemy at large” is all innocence,
however, here is a quotation from a secret report on suicide bombers (sent to
Gosling in 2009) by a Pakistani intelligence officer. “After the blast,” it
says, “a few associates of the bomber move among the gathered public to deceive
them and the security guards by cursing the terrorists. From the exact place of
the incident they then remove the [decapitated] head of the bomber and any
other clue by which the bomber can be recognised, pretending that they are
shocked by the incident. They then disappear into the crowd.” Gosling, I would say, is lucky to be alive
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/meet-the-british-physicist-who-ignored-taliban-death-threats-to-teach-in-the-badlands-of-pakistan-a6780816.html
David Gosling’s book, Frontier of Fear: Confronting the Taliban on Pakistan’s Border, was published by IB
Tauris in late December 2015 and is widely available.
The troubled borderland of Pakistan and Afghanistan the
so-called AfPak region is one of the most dangerous areas of the world. Between
2006 and 2010 David L. Gosling lived in Peshawar, the provincial capital of
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where he was principal of Edwardes College, a prestigious
higher education college, affiliated with the University of Peshawar. In this
book, Gosling describes his time at Edwardes College and the challenges and
changes of his tenure. Already the first co-educational college in the
province, Gosling significantly increased the proportion of female students and
staff. The book also describes the early stages of Taliban growth in
Afghanistan, its spill-over into the tribal borderlands of Pakistan and how a
combination of Pakistan army activity and US drone strikes provoked a furious
backlash by Taliban groups against civilian targets in and around Peshawar,
including death threats against the author. Providing a personal account of the
education and politics of this frontier region, this book offers a unique
viewpoint on a part of the world which is often misunderstood."
