This memoir from an ex-Taliban fighter is astonishing

Telegraph

19-04-2025

'When I was 16, I wanted to become a suicide bomber for the Taliban in Afghanistan.' This must be the strongest opening sentence of any memoir of the 21st century, and the following 300 pages do not disappoint. Delusions of Paradise is the story of how and why Maiwand Banayee was brainwashed into believing that the rewards of martyrdom were preferable to life on earth.
Banayee was born in a slum in western Kabul in 1980, the year the Soviet Union invaded his country. He does not know the date of his birthday, but he was named after a pivotal battle that took place during the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1880. 'Maiwand is a heavy name,' his father told him. 'You must live up to it.' A less burdensome name might have made his inner life a little easier.
The conditions of his childhood were medieval. Through the frozen winter of 1991, he shared a single blanket with three of his sisters. A fourth sister had developed a malignant lump on her forehead that soon covered her right eye and extended down her cheek. Eating into her brain, it left her paralysed. Bed-bound and doubly incontinent, she could not leave the house. 'God is a gangster,' cursed Banayee's father, an atheist, a communist and now his daughter's carer. Then, when Banayee was 12, the mujahideen took over the country, bringing famine and a civil war that reduced Kabul, once the Paris of Central Asia, to ashes.
Banayee, who belonged to the Pashtun tribe, grew up to be bookish and sensitive in a culture obsessed with masculinity. Ali, the boy next door, was a Hazara, and the local bully; Banayee became his principal victim. For years, Banayee was kicked, beaten, spat at, pelted with mud and sewage, called a 'sissy' and a 'faggot'. His failure to defend himself, despite taking lessons in martial arts, led to taunts from his father and elder brother; an elderly aunt even mocked him, making him eat whole chilli peppers in order to prove he wasn't 'a girl'. Once, while Ali and his gang tried to choke him, Banayee's trousers fell down. In Afghan culture, a 'pantsing' is – short of rape – the ultimate humiliation. The incident brought shame on his entire family and became a trauma from which he could not recover.
Aged 14, Banayee fled with his mother and younger sisters over the border to the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden recruited his soldiers. 'This world is nothing but a mirage,' he was taught by his mullah in the mud-hut that passed as a school. 'A home that perishes is not a real home. A life that falls to death is not a real life.' Because anything seemed better than real life, these words 'sent a pleasant hum through my blood'. Dying a hero was the only thing worth living for. As a martyr, Banayee looked forward to an eternal youth spent partying in palaces with 72 big-bosomed virgins whose beauty would increase each time they had sex.
With his hormones running wild, this was the closest he came to imagining a relationship with a woman. The closest he came to being in the Taliban was when, as a madrasa (student) Talib, he spent two weeks with a group of soldiers in Maidan Shar, a city in central Afghanistan. Parading around with a gun on his shoulder, he 'felt that the world was at my feet'.
Banayee initially embraced everything the mullahs told him: the earth was flat, for example, and male sperm was produced between the ribs and the backbone. But his mind was instinctively scientific, he had a tendency to 'overthink', and he had not, like his fellow pupils, been raised on tales of miracles. His secular doubts soon overcame his religious fervour. By the time he was 22, he decided that instead of joining the Taliban, whose violence now sickened him, he would train as a doctor in Europe.
He therefore paid a team of people-smugglers $5,000 to get him out of Afghanistan. 'It all happened so fast,' Banayee says of his escape to the UK, and it does in the book as well: it's covered in two swift paragraphs, and we learn little about the journey besides the fact that he was imprisoned for three months in Lahore for travelling on a false passport, released only when his smugglers paid a bribe. Other writers would have described their adventures in detail, but Banayee's focus throughout is his internal hell. Barely aware of the outside world, he is haunted not by the corpses of his neighbours killed by the mujahideen, the men's castrated penises stuffed into their mouths, or the Taliban's weekly decapitations. It is the memory of Ali that he cannot expel.
After working as a pizza cutter in Cardiff, Banayee was granted asylum in Ireland, where he learned English, married an Irishwoman, had a daughter, opened his own surgery treating back pain (which he still runs today), and wrote this vivid and courageous book. His privileged new life is something to celebrate, but 'life was not about what you had. It was about what you felt.' The marriage failed after 14 years because Banayee found intimacy too difficult. 'Fourteen years dripped away,' as he puts it in one of his startling images, 'like slow-melting ice.'
Delusions of Paradise is described by its publisher as 'inspirational', but there is little to lift the soul in this tale of traumatised obsession. What began as a generalised description of the brainwashing of thousands of impoverished Afghani teenagers turns into the magnificent and deeply personal story of one man's ongoing struggle to find meaning in suffering, against all odds.