SECONDS before meeting the Taleban’s former spokesman amid the venerable towers of Yale, to talk about his astonishing journey from Mullah Mohammed Omar’s adviser to Ivy League undergraduate, I wonder if I will recognise him.

Then suddenly there he is, walking toward me, and it is unmistakably Rahmatullah. Gone are the dark turban, flowing beard and baggy trousers in which he travelled the world in early 2001 as the Taleban’s “roving envoy”, defending the Islamic zealots’ treatment of women, their destruction of the ancient Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and their determination to retain Osama bin Laden as a guest of Afghanistan.

He is now wearing chinos and Nike trainers, with a trimmed beard and rucksack full of books, and looks worried. A man is filming him. Rahmatullah takes out his mobile to call the police.

It has been a stressful week for Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, 27, who met bin Laden in his native Kandahar in the late 1990s having just become the Taleban’s deputy foreign secretary aged 22.

After eight months at Yale, where even his closest friends did not know his past, the American press revealed all. Some of the reaction has been hostile. Rahmatullah was telephoned at midnight on Wednesday by the university police and told of threats against him. He fears for his wife and two young children living in the Pakistani border town of Quetta. “If people can chase me in New Haven then imagine what might happen back home,” he says.

Rahmatullah looks weary. “I hate to be hated,” he says. But he feels lucky to have made it to America’s third oldest university — whose alumni include the current and past two US presidents.

At first, he found the food unpalatable, but then he found kosher meat at Yale’s Jewish dining hall. He enjoys pizza and Coke. A compass on his watch tells him the direction of Mecca. He is close to completing a non-degree course as a special student, and hopes to begin a three-year degree in political science this autumn. He did unexpectedly well in English but surprisingly badly in his “Terrorism: past, present and future” class. The textbook references to the Taleban annoyed him. “They would say the Taleban were the same as al-Qaeda,” he says with disgust.

Rahmatullah spent most of his formative years in the slums of Quetta, a refugee from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. When the Taleban took control of Kandahar in 1994 “nobody opposed them, not even the United Nations,” he says. “They were seen as saviours. I wanted to join them.”

He got a job as a computer operator and translator in the Foreign Ministry in Kandahar, and fell under the wing of Mullah Muttawakil, later to become Foreign Minister. The first time he saw bin Laden was in 1996.

When President Clinton bombed Afghanistan in 1998, he went to see bin Laden speak at a house in Kandahar. “He was trying to explain his position, the presence of US troops in holy places, and he was very antagonistic toward the Saudi royal family,” he recalls.

But Rahmatullah now believes bin Laden has done more harm to Muslims than anybody else. “As a result of 9/11, 3,000 people were killed. Afghanistan has lost 20,000. We were also victims of 9/11.”

Shortly before the US invasion of 2001, he fled to Pakistan. In 2004, he returned to Kabul to clear his name with the US authorities. After several interviews, he was told he could go. Mike Hoover, a CBS cameraman who set up a charity called the International Education Foundation, suggested he applied to Yale. That October he flew to New York for a successful interview with Yale’s dean of admissions.

Rahmatullah had visited Yale before. In March 2001 he appeared there, in turban and tunic, as the Taleban’s spokesman. In one encounter immortalised by Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, he told a female Afghan heckler “I’m really sorry for your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you.”

Does he regret that now? “That woman, for your information, did divorce her husband,” he replies.

Rahmatullah blames much of the Taleban’s excesses — the amputations, the floggings, the ban on kite flying, barbers, books, radio and chess — on its Ministry of Vice and Virtue, although he defended much of them during his 2001 travels.

What about the public executions in the football stadium? “That was all Vice and Virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas.”

Rahmatullah now wants to promote understanding between the Muslim world and the West. “It’s not a good feeling to know the world is not a simple place. But people must be told that things are not black and white,” he says.

History of a religious force

• Taleban formed in Kandahar in southwest Afghanistan
• Emerged in the early 1990s as a reformist force to bring order to a country that had descended into chaos caused by rival warlords
• Despite denials, Pakistan is thought to be instrumental in its emergence, with many of the Taleban educated and trained in madrassas in Pakistan
• Leader was Mullah Mohammad Omar, a village clergyman who lost an eye while fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s
• An early aim was to restore stability and enforce Sharia (Islamic) law
• Initially known for getting rid of corruption and bringing security to areas under their control
• In 1996, captured Kabul and overthrew President Burhanuddin Rabbani. Controlled nearly 90 per cent of the country by 1998
• Established rigid rule with no toleration of opponents. Favoured punishments included public executions amputations. Television and music were forbidden
• Girls over the age of 10 were not allowed to attend school and women were ordered to stay at home and forced to wear the burqa

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