Ye shall know them by their trash” could be the motto of sanitation workers and archaeologists. Both live elbow deep in other people’s garbage – and in the revelations provided thereby. Likewise the New York Times last week with its useful coverage of Taliban and al-Qaida documents abandoned in retreat. There was a grocery list, an espionage notebook and a National Rifle Association target. One other trashed item recalled my life’s work as a secondary schoolmaster.

The document, found in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, is an vow of allegiance used in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan: “I give my oath with Allah as my witness to you that I am ready to be a martyr in order to attain the high goals jihad has striven for and fight with all my heart to the last drop of my blood with a pure mind and patient resoluteness and endure every kind of difficult condition in this jihad movement.” These words, so full of an idealism which we perceive as warped, evoked a pair of teacher recollections.

First, they reminded me John Walker Lindh – at 20 barely older than my students – the American who was on the Taliban side of November’s battle for Mazar, who was captured after much privation, and who will stand trial, hastily scheduled, this August outside Washington for conspiracy to kill Americans. (Why the August haste? Because Justice Department prosecutors want to take advantage of the national outrage that will surely and understandably accompany Sept. 11.) Walker Lindh was asked shortly after capture if his experience as a Talib soldier had been what he “expected.” He looked a wreck: no sleep, smeared face, matted hair, filthy clothes. His reply, however, was clear, unrepentant, and, in its own way, idealistic: “Exactly what I expected.” Teachers (and parents) of adolescents know that no-compromise tone. It’s the voice of a young person committed, body and soul, to drastic action which elders regard as wrong-headed.

My second flashback came from the course I used to teach on Islam. We’d begin with maps (sadly unfamiliar to most students), then a historical outline (disliked and dismissed as “only history”), and then Islamic belief and practice. The kids liked this segment; it gave them a chance to talk about God and life and death. Their lives were ahead of them and death was remote, but even so – given the chance to be serious and inquisitive – my students asked much better questions than I had answers. (Note how for many of us these “deep” conversations are abandoned by early adulthood and not renewed, if at all, until retirement. Such talk is “philosophical” or “spiritual,” and thus “unproductive” for workadaddy adults. Americans are now working longer hours than ever, far longer than elsewhere in the Western world. What’s the Soul cost of our 24/7 fixation on the mundane?)

Eventually my class would get to jihad and its associated concept of Muslim martyrdom. As every teacher learns, concepts are best presented as stories, and each year I’d tell the same one: How once I observed some Afghan mujahedin going to battle in the 1980s against the militarily far more powerful Soviet Union. “No,” I’d always add, “I didn’t go with them.” Some years a persistent student would me ask why not. My truthful answer: “I was afraid.”

The mujahedin, I told the class, got their weapons together and then prayed in universal Muslim fashion: horizontal, egalitarian lines of shoulder-to-shoulder men standing, bending, kneeling, and prostrating themselves as one …without a trace of self-consciousness. Two men had been picked, despite their protests, to stay behind and guard base camp. They unrolled a turban cloth, about twenty feet long and three feet wide, and folded a Qoran in the middle. They stretched the cloth between them overhead, and each battle-bound mujahed passed underneath God’s Word. At that moment each cried “Allah-u-akbar” — God is great. They gathered once more and shouted “Allah taqdir” in acceptance of “God’s fate” as to who would live or die. It was that simple … and off they went.

As it happened that day, they all came back. I asked one particular friend if he had been afraid. “Yes,” he said, “I’m always afraid.” Why do you go? “For God.” Do you want to die? “No.” Are you ready to die? “Yes.” For what? “I told you: for God.”

My classroom story was illustrated with jihad posters that various mujahedin organizations printed in Pakistan. They all bore the inscription “Bismillah er-Rahman er-Rahim” – “In the name of God, the Merciful and the Compassionate.” One consisted of three rows of black-and-white faces, each the ID photo of a young man who’d subsequently been martyred. A river of red blood flowed from the pictures to form the map of Afghanistan. “Allah” was inscribed in the middle.

The other poster featured the drawing of a mujahed kneeling in prayer, exactly as young men pray before battle – except that this one’s head had been severed from his neck. The kneeling figure was holding his own head in his hands and offering it upward to God. Both grisly and dignified, it was the essence of martyrdom. (The word for martyr in all Muslim tongues is the Arabic shaheed, which means “one who testifies.” It comes from the same root as shahada, the Muslim testament or creed first whispered into a new-born infant’s ear and spoken, after a lifetime of repetition, as one’s last utterance before death. Word and deed are one in Islam. Martyrdom is a form of testimony.)

The story and posters usually “worked” in that students would start asking questions: How could people, especially young people, sacrifice themselves that way? Did they want to die then and there? (No, at least not the Afghan Sunnis whom I knew. But Shi’a Islam does endow martyrdom with longing, and some Iranian youths went looking for death in their 1980s war against Iraq.) Did they hope to die as martyrs “someday” in the vaguely defined future? (Not really, it seemed to me, except in a rhetorical sense, much as Osama is said to hope for an eventual martyr’s death.) Did they ever plan to die with a specific target in mind? (Still not in my experience, but – as we were reminded on Sept. 11 – militant Islamism does have a history of combat suicide.) Did they really believe they were doing it for God?

Absolutely.

Here was the least comprehensible part for my students. I’d do a survey at the start of each course: “How many of you believe in God?” Positive responses ran about 80 percent. (Of all “modern” – economically developed, life-expectant, literate, on-line – nations, America is by far the most God-talking, if not necessarily God-fearing, and my kids were representative in this respect. We pledge allegiance as “one nation, under God.” “In God we trust” is written where it “counts”: on our dollars. Other “advanced” nations are amazed at our combination of religiosity and technology … and wonder how the two can be so blithely bridged.) And yet, despite their stated belief in some sort of God, my students couldn’t identify with dying for Him/Her/It.

So I’d ask them to write an essay (moans) but to keep it “succinct” (spelled on the blackboard) – in fact, to keep it to one page. (This stipulation generated first relief, then anxiety. Some of my colleagues had urged the same kids to “express themselves” with no sense of limits. Life without limits, as I’d learned in Afghanistan, becomes chaos; it becomes buzkashi.)

“Here’s the topic,” I’d say, “due one week from today: What, at this time in your life, would you be ready – or at least willing- to die for? Be as precise as possible with respect to cause and circumstance. Emphasize quality, not quantity, of response.”

Try it yourself. And, as you do so, consider that most of our current Islamist enemies could answer this question in one word. Also consider: How did these authentically God-fearing folk become our enemies in the first place?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.