Ahmad Kamal was an American, and probably a convert to Islam. Johnson under the Freedom of Information Act retrieved Kamal’s FBI file, which states that he was born on February 2, 1914, in Arvada, Colorado. His name was Cimarron Hathaway. His mother was Caroline Grossmann Hathaway, his father, James Worth Hathaway. According to an interview Johnson obtained with a daughter, James was a stepfather and Cimarron’s biological father was Qara Yusuf, a Uyghur from Turkestan who was much older than Caroline – he was sixty-four and she sixteen when they married. Yusuf had other wives in his homeland, to which he returned when Cimarron was very young.
Johnson suggests Land Without Laughter was a novel, in part by pointing to several obvious falsehoods in the back cover text of the 2000 paperback reprint edition, prepared by Ahmad Kamal’s son, such as the claim that Kamal “commanded” the Basmaci rebellion against the Soviets, which ended when he was ten years old. The version published in 1940 when Kamal was alive makes no such claim. The Kirkus review when it was first published treats it as nonfiction. It is true that, despite the plethora of authentic sounding detail, Land Without Laughter rates an extremely high score on the improbability index.
The book lists its author and protagonist as Ahmad Kamal and includes no suggestion that it is fiction. It makes no mention of the name Cimarron Hathaway. “Ahmad Kamal” says his father died when he was an infant and that he was raised on Indian reservations, where his mother, never named, was writing histories of the various tribes. While living in Houston, Texas, his mother had him home schooled, hiring a “disinherited son of a Prussian nobleman,” Lothar von Richter, as his tutor. Von Richter happened to be a student of ancient Turkish and fortuitously taught the young “Ahmad” this obscure language, as well as military tactics. The family moved on to Tucson, Arizona, where his next tutor was one Musa Jan, a Muslim scholar from Kazan, who continued his education in the same vein.
Coming of age knowing nothing but military tactics, the Uyghur language, Islam, and the history of Tartary, Ahmad finds himself unfit for anything but a military career in Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan, present-day Xinjiang). So in late 1935 he sets sail from the Los Angeles port at San Pedro for India, landing first in Bombay. According to his FBI file he had turned twenty-one earlier that year. In his book he claims he was twenty-three. From Bombay he treks across the subcontinent to Delhi, then northwest into what is now Pakistan, and finally to Kashmir. Here, as he tells it, he hires several servants and horses, and, defying a prohibition by the British authorities, sets off in the dead of winter to cross the Himalayan passes into Tibet.
He finds the high passes littered with the corpses of dead pack animals and human travelers, some frozen to death, others killed and stripped by bandits. After many hardships his small party emerges into western Tibet. They travel on by horse and mule into Xinjiang. His goal was to connect with the Chinese Muslim garrison that controlled most of southern Xinjiang from their fortress in the town of Khotan (now Hotan).
Even today Xinjiang’s Muslim people maintain a tumultuous opposition to Han Chinese rule, staging frequent riots, bombings, and acts of sabotage against the Beijing government. In the 1930s the situation was far more chaotic and complex. China was weakly governed by the corrupt Kuomintang (KMT) of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao Zedong’s Long March (1934-1935) established the Communists permanently in Shaanxi in north central China. The northwest provinces of Gansu and Qinghai were ruled by Muslims, three families of Hui (Muslim) Chinese known by their enemies as the Ma Clique (Ma is the Chinese rendering of Muhammad). The Mas offered ostensible allegiance to the Kuomintang. Adjacent Xinjiang to the west was ruled until 1928 by an independent warlord. After his assassination he was succeeded first by Jin Shuren (1928-1933), then Sheng Shicai (1933-1944). Though nominally representing the KMT, both Jin and Sheng were de facto puppets of the Soviet Union.
Chiang Kai-shek in 1933 authorized the formation of the 36th Division of his national army, an all-Muslim corps in Gansu, to invade Xinjiang to overthrow Jin Shuren. The unit was commanded by Ma Zhongying, seconded by his half brother, Ma Hushan. As these troops entered Xinjiang, a Muslim Tatar uprising broke out in the south, known as the Kumul Rebellion. Jin’s main troops were White Russians who had settled in north Xinjiang to escape the Russian Revolution. In a bizarre turn, Stalin sent regular Soviet troops in disguise to secretly join the White Russian units to reinforce Jin Shuren’s position. Ma’s forces defeated Jin Shuren in a series of pitched battles in 1933 and early 1934, culminating in Ma’s capture of Kashgar in February 1934. The USSR responded with a full-scale invasion.
Ma Zhongying retreated into Xinjiang’s southern prefectures, where he confronted the First East Turkestan Republic, the product of the Kumul Rebellion, a breakaway effort by the local Turkic people to establish an independent state. The locals made a sharp distinction between Turkic Muslims and the Hui Chinese Muslims. Ma mercilessly crushed his fellow religionists and established his own stable base at Khotan in the far south. Then, inexplicitly, Ma Zhongying is said to have defected to the Soviet Union, after having battled the Russian troops for more than a year. He was never seen again. The Khotan base was thereafter commanded by Ma Zhongying’s half brother, Ma Hushan.
This was the situation when Ahmad Kamal, as I should now call him, rode into town in 1936, eight months after he left Los Angeles. Ahmad for some reason refers to Ma Hushan as Ma Hsi Jung, but it is clear from everything in his text, including a specific identification of the two names in an appendix, that it is Ma Hushan he claims to have met. (He says he was first told the general’s name by a Mongol in Ladakh on the Indian side of the Himalayas, and that may have permanently tainted his sonic spelling. Alternatively, many Chinese have multiple given names bestowed at different times in their lives and used in different contexts.)
Ahmad Kamal claims that at their first meeting “Ma Hsi Jung” appointed him an officer in the Tungan (Chinese Muslim) 36th Division army. Almost immediately he was dispatched with a squad of thirty-five men to capture or kill a group of 181 deserters. Two battles with machine guns, rifles, and grenades ensued, in which Kamal’s second-in-command was killed along with several others of his unit. A few days later he took part in the storming of Kizil Kurgan, a fortress two hundred miles southeast of Khotan that had been occupied by the Russians and their Chinese allies. This involved storming the walls on siege ladders and hand-to-hand combat with scimitars.
A few weeks after this encounter, Ma Hsi Jung meets with Kamal, telling him he is appointing him to go back to America to buy airplanes for the Tungan army. When the planes arrive, General Ma says, he “will take all of Sinkiang. First, Kashgar, then north to Urumchi, and when he is ruler of all of Sinkiang, he will conquer Kansu and Tibet. And then the balance of Asia!” No megalomaniac he! But his ambition did not stop at the borders of Asia. He dreamed the same dream as Gerhard von Mende and the American CIA, of calling forth a rising of the oppressed Turkic peoples of Soviet Central Asia, and still more broadly, the old Muslim goal of submitting the entire world to Islam. General Ma imagined, erroneously as it turned out, that he held in his hands the match that could set off the Second World War, which fit nicely into his plans of conquest:
“While the bulk of the Russian army would be occupied with the millions of Muslim fighting men besieging their frontiers, other governments would probably take advantage of the moment to throw an army into the field. Ten of every hundred men in Siberia and Russian Turkistan could be relied upon to revolt against the Soviet regime . . . Then, God willing, Ma Hsi Jung would march into the Kremlin!”
In fulfillment of these fantasies Ma Hushan sends Ahmad Kamal up the northern string of towns in western Xinjiang to begin a journey back to America to purchase his air force. Ahmad got as far as Aksu (Aqsu) before being arrested. Jailed under appalling conditions, he was eventually transferred to Urumqi, Sheng Shicai’s capital. There he spent four months in a dungeon, where he lost forty-three pounds. His three traveling companions, casual acquaintances, were executed, apparently solely because they could testify that the pro-Russian government was holding an American citizen. Finally he was ordered released. On his way out of the city a counter order was received when some spy had discovered Kamal was in fact working for Ma Hushan. The telegram was garbled and Kamal succeeded in convincing the commandant that it didn’t apply to him. He was out of the province before the truth caught up with him.
Ahmad Kamal crossed the Gobi desert, Mongolia, then China, and finally returned to the United States. He hints in closing that he intends to secretly purchase the aircraft he had been commissioned to buy.
Ma Hushan staged a new offensive in June 1937. He captured Kashgar and held it until October. Defeated, he fled to British India. In 1939 he returned to China. In his native Gansu he fought alongside the Chinese Communists against the Japanese invaders. Then, in 1950, he led an uprising in Xinjiang against the new Chinese Communist government. This lasted until 1954, when the redoubtable general was captured. He was executed by the Chinese at Lanzhou. He never marched in glory into Moscow’s Red Square at the head of a Tatar host.
How much, if any, of Cimarron Hathaway’s swashbuckling tale is true? It is filled with images of barbaric cruelty: floggings, beheadings, rapes. He says he is speaking mainly in Uyghur, which may or may not explain why every conversation comes through as flowery and stilted. His companions – soldiers, merchants, travelers – quote more quaint proverbs than Sancho Panza. And his own bravery often seems over the top, from cutting off men at the ankles with his scimitar from the top of a scaling ladder to throwing a bowl of slops he had been given to eat back in a guard’s face or tossing a cup of hot tea into the face of an interrogator who could easily order him shot.
Ian Johnson cites Hathaway’s FBI file, which confirms that he did go to Central Asia in 1935, and that he was arrested by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang and escaped. It also states that he was married while in Xinjiang and his seventeen-year-old wife died of some act of violence during the turbulence there. In Land Without Laughter one of the author’s soldier companions without his knowledge negotiates an arranged marriage for him, but it is with a fourteen-year-old and he manages to get out of it the same night, unconsummated, returning the girl to her parents. Whatever passport he was carrying in that adventure would have borne the name Cimarron Hathaway, as he did not officially change his name to Ahmad Kamal until he was back in the United States, in a Hollywood court in 1938.
In 1941, Ahmad Kamal returned to China. There he did marry a Tatar woman named Amina, who had worked as a linguist and correspondent for Russian newspapers. They were both imprisoned by the Japanese in the Weihsien internment camp in Shandong, where they spent almost four years. On their return to the United States after Liberation the Los Angeles Times ran an article with their pictures. Kamal said he had gone back to Chinese Turkestan to retrieve his notebooks from his 1935-36 trip. He told the Times that at the time he and Amina were detained by the Japanese he had three manuscripts, a novel, a history, and a political study. Prohibited from keeping anything but a Bible, he and Amina transcribed the three manuscripts into ornate Turkic script and passed them off to the Japanese guards as a copy of the Koran. ( LA Times , November 11, 1945)
There is yet another curious side tale here that Ian Johnson did not pick up. This one involves the mystery of Amelia Earhart, the famed woman pilot who during an around-the-world flight disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937 with her copilot Fred Noonan,. One theory was that she had been spying for the United States and was captured by the Japanese. On August 21, 1945, as the Weihsien camp was shutting down, a radiogram was sent from there to Earhart’s husband, the publisher George Putnam, in North Hollywood, California. The telegram read:
“Camp liberated; all well. Volumes to tell. Love to mother.”
It was unsigned. Forty-two years later, on June 28, 1987, the Los Angeles Times reported that a State Department employee had found a copy of this message in the Earhart files in the National Archive. This sparked a renewal of the theory that Earhart had been captured by the Japanese and interned in the Weihsien camp. “Love to Mother” was widely assumed to be some kind of secret code, and the conspiracy literature soon abounded with the abbreviation for it: LTM.
A recent post by Ron Bright and Laurie McLaughlin clears up the mystery. The sender of the mysterious unsigned message was our Ahmad Kamal. It seems that one more of the improbable claims about Cimarron Hathaway that appear on the back cover of the 2000 edition of Land Without Laughter was true, or partly so. This was the claim that he had been a combat pilot. Ron Bright and Laurie McLaughlin in 2001 located his son, who confirmed that Ahmad Kamal had been a licensed pilot and that he kept a plane at the Burbank airport, also used by Amelia Earhart. The son added that Kamal knew both Earhart and her husband, George Putnam, and that when he left for his trip to China in 1941 he had asked Putnam to regularly look in on his mother, who lived nearby. Beyond these facts this account is full of misinformation, claiming, for example, that Ahmad Kamal served as a guide for the famous dinosaur hunter Roy Chapman Andrews, the purported model for Indiana Jones. But Andrews’ expeditions in the Gobi Desert and Central Asia took place between 1922 and 1930, when Cimarron Hathaway was still a boy. It appears that Kamal’s son has a thin grasp of his father’s history and has expanded his legend into myth. (
Love to Mother)
There is always something uncertain surrounding everything claimed about Cimarron Hathaway/Ahmad Kamal. His Jami’at al-Islam charity, which he invented while living in Indonesia in the 1950s, issued brochures claiming it had been founded in Turkestan in 1868-69 to promote revolution against tsarist Russia. Ahmad’s son, the source of the information about Amelia Earhart, was born in 1950 so events in 1937 took place long before he was around. Cimarron had left for Xinjiang the first time when he was only twenty-one. He had been back in the United States only a few months when Amelia Earhart left on her fatal flight. Surely he was not a licensed pilot then, much less with his own plane in a hangar at the Burbank airport. In the years after her disappearance he became an author and sought out contacts with various publishers, including Scribners, who published his Land Without Laughter in 1940. Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, was also a publisher. As the Weihsien camp was shutting down in 1945, Kamal sent two messages, not just one. The second was to Maxwell Perkins at Scribners.
Ahmad Kamal lived in Los Angele between 1945 and 1951. During that period he wrote and published three novels: Full Fathom Five , about Greek sponge divers in Florida, One-Dog Man about a boy and his dog, and The Excommunicated , a romance thriller set in pre-Communist Shanghai. He marketed a number of short stories and worked in Hollywood as a screen writer. Then he abandoned literary work and turned to Islam in a serious way, publishing The Sacred Journey: A Pilgrimage to Mecca in Arabic. Thereafter his life was bound up with intelligence work for the United States on behalf of Islamic, and in particular, Turkestani causes.
In the early 1950s he moved to Indonesia, where he lived in Bandung. The U.S. government lent him the money for his passage, and Johnson says that Kamal told a friend he would be working for the U.S. government. Kamal established the world headquarters for his Jami’at charity in Jakarta. Von Mende’s files claim Kamal was working for the Americans in providing support to an anticommunist minister in the Indonesian government. After two assassination attempts Kamal fled to Barcelona. Von Mende’s files also record that Ahmad Kamal refused to work for the CIA, because he claimed it was heavily infiltrated by Soviet spies. Instead he was paid by the National Security Council, at the personal request of Richard Nixon, then Eisenhower’s Vice President. Kamal tried to have the famous 1955 Bandung nonaligned nations conference canceled, and when that failed he returned from Spain to attend for a day, but left for fear of a physical attack. Throughout all of this his primary goal remained what it had been in Xinjiang in 1936: to inspire Islamic opposition to Communist rule.
There were unproven claims that Kamal’s Jami’at charity supplied funding for arms for Islamic insurgencies, including the Algerian revolution for independence from France and the Palestinians in Jordan, from which the Jami’at offices were expelled in 1961. Then in October 1961, at a conference at the New York Sheraton hotel, the Jami’at began to fall apart. It issued a declaration that it was withdrawing its pledge to refrain from “extreme methods” because of the failure of Western governments to support the Islamic cause. It also fired its principal representative in Munich, Ahmet Balagija, who, like von Mende’s operatives, was a former Muslim soldier in the Wehrmacht.
The Americans now regarded Ahmad Kamal as too troublesome. They retaliated by ordering an audit of the funds they had been supplying to the Jami’at charity. Jami’at was being paid to care for some 4,000 refugees. On inspection it proved there were only 400 and the money was being used for its general propaganda work. In March 1962 Jami’at al-Islam International, to use its full name, announced that it was leaving Germany to do work in sub-Saharan Africa. It was never heard of again.
According to Johnson, “A few years later, Kamal would move back to California to continue his covert work.” He is said to have traveled extensively in Burma. Johnson adds, “In 1969, he offered the Burmese opposition leader U Nu $2 million if he would depose the country’s dictator, Ne Win.” The back cover text of the 2000 edition of Land Without Laughter , repeated in reprints of his three novels, say that Ahmad Kamal was the “commanding General of the Muslim liberation forces of the Union of Burma into the 1980′s.” Searches trying to confirm this turn up only the back covers of the reprint editions of his books. Ahmad Kamal died on October 13, 1989, in Santa Barbara, California.
