He phoned in early September and told me to come. He said, “If you are standing, run. If you are sitting, stand and run.” He didn’t explain, but I went the next day. He was my Commander.

The speaker is Masood Khalili, Afghan ambassador to India and a man of many parts. Two of these – poet and warrior – combine to represent the Afghan male ideal. The poetry was inherited from his father, Afghanistan’s foremost 20th century man of letters.

The war part was forced upon Khalili – as a Muslim and an Afghan I had no choice – by communist coup (1978) and Soviet invasion (1979). The ensuing jihad lasted a decade. Khalili spent some of that time on the front lines, some in Pakistan as chief political officer of Jamiat-i-Islami, his Resistance party. He befriended and followed Jamiat’s military commander, Ahmad Shah Masood.

When “my Commander” was assassinated in northern Afghanistan two days before 9-11, Khalili – because of that satellite telephone call – was sitting next to him. Hence this story.

Versions of it have appeared before, most fully in the Los Angeles Times (Sept. 11, 2002). What follows is still more extensive, thanks to long talks with Khalili in Barcelona and now New Delhi. I’m here to translate poetry, which the ambassador much prefers to war and diplomacy, but his life remains punctuated by that awful moment. I listen as friend, admirer… and, incorrigibly, as anthropologist.

Fazl-i-khoda (by God’s grace), Khalili survived the horrific explosion. Likewise alive and well – and central to the story – are two medieval Persian poems and a folk belief that predates Islam. Together, these place a hero’s death within a living tradition.

The folk belief deals with fortune telling. Prophet Mohammed believed that such power genuinely exists among humans, and thus condemned it. He understood that being told the future – especially the circumstances of one’s death – would make life psychologically impossible.

True, but Afghans (like Americans) can’t resist tea leaves. When confronted by sudden mystery, even the most prominent citizens resort to fortune tellers. Khalili’s father, the great poet, was a close companion of ex-King Zahir: As I was with Commander Masood, so my father was with the king. Once they were on a hunting trip, hundreds of kilometers from Kabul, and the king began feeling bad, crying one for no apparent reason. My father tried to reassure him, but the king felt worse by the moment and asked if a fortune teller lived nearby. His servants found a shepherd who had this power. The king hid in the shadows when the shepherd arrived. The shepherd said that he felt the presence of a powerful man who felt sad because his young son had died that day in Kabul. People abused the shepherd for what he said. But next morning a man on horseback arrived with bad news for the king.

Back to early September 2001. At first Khalili was mildly puzzled by the Masood’s unexplained summons. His friend and commander had always signaled clear purpose, ever since the day they met 23 years earlier. In the fall of 1978 Afghans were beginning to organize their anti-Soviet struggle from Peshawar, Pakistan. Professor [later President] Rabbani invited me to come to his very poor, small room. Some intellectuals were sitting there and talking. I saw a young boy in the corner of that room. Quiet. He barely spoke two sentences. Distinguished nose. Eyes kind of Mongolian, but larger like almonds. A special forehead. I talked a little with him and someone told me that his name, like mine, was Masood. He was taller, thinner than me. As I left the meeting he approached me and said, “Tomorrow I’m going to buy some hand grenades and go to Afghanistan.”

Even then, Masood must have been compelling. Khalili, while older than Masood in a culture that defers to age, heard himself saying, “I’ll go with you.” The next day – it was good weather – we went together on a crowded bus. We talked a lot, and I could tell that this man knew good grenades from bad ones. I had $80 with me. I said, “I have only $80. You can use it to buy grenades.” He was very happy, extremely happy. He knew of me from Radio Afghanistan [where Khalili as a teenager had starred in his own poetry recitation program], and he knew of my father. He showed me a grenade and said, “Touch it.”

History followed, then legend. For two dozen years Ahmad Shah Masood persevered against all opponents: Russian and Pakistani, Taliban and al-Qaida. American officials, taking their cue from Pakistan, mostly shunned him. “Never mind,” the Commander kept saying, “we have the people.” Khalili recalls that Masood was a deeply religious person. Always in the middle of the night he’d get up and pray for

10, 15 minutes.

In the coldest mountain night when it was minus 20, he’d go to the river to wash and then pray in a cave and then come back to where we were lying, trying not to wake me up. He’d lie beside me very slowly and cover himself with his blanket. Critics sniped from the safety of Peshawar and Washington. Rivals stockpiled weapons in places like Tora Bora. Ahmad Shah Masood simply kept going. More than any other single person, he saved Afghanistan. A Wall Street Journal article labeled him, “The Man Who Won the Cold War.”

Khalili, the poet’s son, served a dual purpose for Masood. We’d talk politics but more than politics. I’d go to him in Afghanistan for other reasons – things about the war – but I was also there to talk about poetry and spirituality. I personally felt that he needed that. I used to think, “He’s my leader. He’s a brilliant man, much better than me in every way, but he needs some spiritual comfort. He has that right.” Hence the two men developed a custom. Whenever Khalili visited Masood – crossing the border from Pakistan on thin mountain trails strewn with landmines – they’d stay awake and read poetry long after midnight.

Poetry is larger than life in Muslim culture. Epitomized by the Holy Qur’an, it serves as a spiritual touchstone, mesmerizing and energizing generations of listeners. Despite low literacy rates, many village men in Afghanistan know thick sections of the Qur’an by heart … in a language (Arabic) otherwise incomprehensible to them. And the whole population is familiar with its own medieval Persian poets, a tradition famously extended by Khalili’s father. To use the son’s phrase, poetry is “comfort,” a resonant, interior way of remembering truth and celebrating beauty – no matter what the external circumstances. To recite well, as Khalili used to do professionally, is to send both self and listeners into an altered state.

So Khalili, upon arrival, was flattered rather than alarmed when his close friend Masood finally explained the summons from Pakistan. “Really, it’s nothing serious,” he told me, “nothing grave. I simply wanted you to be with me in these days.” The day was Sept. 7, 2001. Masood was cornered by the Taliban, but he’d been cornered before. He and Khalili resumed their habit of late evening poetry.

And, since theirs was a quintessentially uncertain world, who can blame these two good Muslims for using poetry to tell fortunes in the night? It’s an old, accepted, if not quite orthodox practice. You think of a person or topic or question. Then you take some classic of Persian poetry. You open the book at random and let your eye fall to some passage on the right page. You read that segment aloud. Then you sit together and speculate on what the words could mean.

What words were read by Khalili to Masood in the early morning of Sept. 9? How did Masood respond? What happened next, and how does Khalili feel now?

We deal here with two remarkable men. Their story will be told for decades, maybe centuries, across this region of Asia. Masood’s tomb in Afghanistan is becoming a saint’s shrine. Khalili, the miraculous Muslim survivor, is regarded with quasi-religious awe here in Hindu Delhi. More of it next week in the Bangor Daily News.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.