Newsweek introduces to the Jamia Uloom Islamia religious academy in the mountains of Pakistan, where students as young as nine years old "spend most of the day reciting the Qur'an; memorizing every one of its 6,666 verses is the main requirement for graduation."
This is the sort of thing we should encourage, right? Because surely an immersion in the teachings of the Qur'an will "leave no doubt," as the Muslim scholar Dr. Jamal Badawi says, that "Islam is a religion of peace and nonviolence."
Well, unfortunately, Dr. Badawi isn't an instructor at Jamia Uloom Islamia religious academy. Instead, students "learn civics from a white-bearded scholar named Amanullah, 65, who teaches them about the Taliban. 'There was a real Islamic regime,' the old man says. 'They fixed 25 years of problems in no time, using Islamic laws.'
Another faculty member, Mullah Taj Mohammad, 40, gives a current-events lesson, warning of the evils that lurk in non-Islamic lands: 'I've heard that many Muslim girls have infidel boyfriends--and clink glasses of alcohol with Jews.' That's not the worst of it, he says: 'Americans are killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they are busy trying to poison Muslim minds everywhere with films, music and television.' Abdul is an eager learner. He dreams of enlisting in the jihad against Afghanistan's U.S.-backed president, Hamid Karzai. 'Karzai is a killer of Muslims,' the boy says. 'When I grow up I'll fight him, and then we'll see who's a man and who's a woman.'
The article also notes that religious appeals are sounded constantly in Afghanistan and in schools like this one in Pakistan:
...two weeks ago, in the old Taliban stronghold of Spin Buldak, a new audiotape was released, purportedly of the group's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, rallying his followers. 'If you claim to be among the faithful, why can't you be ready for sacrifice?' the voice on the tape demands.Abdul hears such calls to arms incessantly. Hardscrabble madrassas like his, in the north Waziristan town of Mirali, are where many Taliban leaders got their start two decades ago during the CIA's war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Nice dig, but the CIA didn't invent the jihad ideology. Nor was this ideology dormant until the CIA came around. For details, see a man named Khomeini.
Today, those jihad academies continue to indoctrinate new generations of holy warriors, passionately loyal to the banner of radical Islam and inured to lives of hardship. Such schools pose a grave challenge to the Bush administration's plans for the region. 'How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?' asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a recently leaked memo. 'Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get?" ' More than a year ago Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, promised to defang the madrassas. Instead, he formed a political alliance with the schools' radical Islamist supporters against the mainstream secular opposition. 'Musharraf talks a lot, but nothing happens,' says Maulana Abdul Qadr, principal of the Darul Uloom Zuberia madrassa, near Peshawar.Indeed. For the article tells us that
...last week Musharraf's security forces went after six previously banned militant groups, closing down dozens of their affiliated madrassas and promising to deal harshly with any that tried to defy the order. Musharraf's Interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, announced that new regulations on religious schools will be issued this week, at the end of Ramadan. 'There will be no compromise,' Hayat told NEWSWEEK before the announcement. 'We are totally committed to madrassa reforms and will not be deterred by political expediency.' Nevertheless, Musharraf's Islamist partners of convenience are threatening to organize street protests against him, and the country's leading hard-line schools, such as the Darul Uloom Islamia in Karachi, swore to resist any moves to control them.
And what's more, even Hamid Karzai is now complaining that Pakistan isn't doing enough to stop the Taliban. "We cannot stop this terrorism as long as Pakistan doesn't co-operate," says Karzai. "That is the key issue."
Opines Newsweek:
Musharraf's job often seems hopeless. Not even the mullahs know how many madrassas Pakistan has. The government's latest guess is 27,000 or more. Many are peaceable institutions wishing only to train devout Muslims, not warriors or terrorists. But others steep their students in the doctrine of holy war and function openly as jihad enlistment centers.
I would like to know the basis on which the distinction is made between the schools that want to train devout Muslims and those that want to train warriors -- in light of the fact that the madrassa featured in this article, the Jamia Uloom Islamia religious academy, seems to place a great emphasis on Qur'anic study. And this same article also tells us that a student of Islamic law is one of the staunchest warriors:
Zahidullah, 31, a grad student in Islamic law at the Bahrul Uloom madrassa in Pakistan's northern mountains, boasts of how many recruits he has gained for the outlawed Kashmiri guerrilla force Harkatul Mujahedin: 'Many youths here are anxious to join the jihad when I tell them stories of our heroic Islamic resistance against Indian aggression.'
Also,
...some schools provide far more than recruitment services, providing safe havens, supply depots and clandestine meeting sites. Last summer, according to Pakistani intelligence sources, a group of senior Taliban leaders secretly gathered to discuss strategy at a madrassa some 20 miles south of Peshawar.
Yet if this school were to become the recipient of a missile, we would hear about American troops zeroing in on civilian targets.
The Afghans told their local contacts that Mullah Omar was calling for new recruits to intensify the war against America. In September Pakistani security forces raided another madrassa in Karachi, hauling in more than a dozen Indonesian and Malaysian students, including Rusman Gunawan, younger brother of the notorious Qaeda lieutenant Hambali. Gunawan remains in custody without charges under Pakistan's antiterror laws.In recent months, thousands of young Afghan men have swarmed to madrassas just inside Pakistan. In Baluchistan's Chaman district, directly across the border from the Taliban's home province of Kandahar, at least 300 madrassas are filled to bursting. Pakistan's Army has lined the desolate frontier with high earthen berms, concertina-wire fences and watchtowers, but nothing stops the traffic of fighting-age Afghans--in either direction. 'There is a constant stream of them,' says Hafiz Hameedullah, head of a seminary in the town of Chaman, right on the border. 'It's hard to find accommodations for all the newcomers.' On the Afghan side, meanwhile, the influx of madrassa students and graduates has helped to produce Taliban battle units as large as 100 fighters, where a year ago the guerrillas were mustering squads of barely a half-dozen men.
Meanwhile, Musharraf's new law for madrassas "will ban the teaching of sectarian hatred and violence."
I expect that this will be slippier than it might seem. Radical Muslims do not consider themselves to be teaching sectarian hatred and violence. Jihad for them is not violence or mayhem or anarchy; it is a holy struggle for Allah. So they might consider that this new law, however it may be worded, doesn't apply to what they're doing. The key will be in how it is enforced.
But mostly it lays out a program for the voluntary registration of madrassas, offering financial aid to schools if they submit to financial audits and accept a government-recommended curriculum that includes secular courses like English and computer science. Even many militant schools have begun offering those subjects already, to help their students find jobs after graduation. They still draw the line at letting their pupils use the Internet. 'Weak students could look at pornography,' Qadr explains. Any effort to combat radical teachings is complicated by the fact that Pakistan desperately needs its madrassas. Without them, an estimated 1.5 million young Pakistanis would get no formal education at all. . . . And Pakistan's jihadis are more than ready for a fight. 'If Musharraf tries to crack down on madrassas, there will be a flood of blood in the streets,' says Maulana Anwar Ali Shah, principal of one of Pakistan's biggest schools, the Jamia Islamia Taalemulqiran madrassa in Peshawar. A far greater worry, at least in the West, is the blood that will be spilled if the madrassas keep on teaching violence and hate. Sitting below a poster of --himself holding the Qur'an in his right hand and a Kalashnikov in his left, Samiul Haq says he fully supports what he calls 'the real freedom fights' in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir. He's the principal of the Darul Uloom Haqqania mad-rassa, 20 miles east of Peshawar, one of the biggest religious schools in Pakistan. He and his 3,000 students proudly call it 'the University of Jihad.' Its alumni include at least eight senior Taliban leaders, and Mullah Omar sent a personal message to every graduating class until his regime's collapse two years ago. Without a trace of irony, Haq denies that his school teaches extremism. 'I challenge Musharraf to find any extremism here,' he says. 'This madrassa is not a military base. It has no guns or tanks.' He adds: 'We teach jihad because the holy Qur'an teaches jihad, which is the defense of Islam.'
Precisely. This is why condemnations of terrorism and extremism by Muslim spokesmen can sometimes be deceiving. Radical Muslims are not (in their own view) extremists, terrorists, or thugs; they are holy warriors, obeying the will of Allah.
A NEWSWEEK reporter attended the school's commencement ceremony a few weeks ago. About 1,000 white-turbaned graduates and thousands of relatives jammed the madrassa's courtyard under banners depicting AK-47s and antiaircraft guns. The crowd seemed uncontrollable until Haq's eldest son, Rashidul Haq, took the microphone and announced: 'If you are a friend of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, please sit down. But if you are a friend of Bush, keep standing.' Everyone immediately sat, and a mullah delivered the invocation. 'I request that almighty Allah protect the Taliban and our popular leaders Mullah Omar and Osama,' he prayed. 'They are living in caves and suffering. We pray for their assistance and health.'Ten miles closer to Peshawar, in the tiny village of Qumber Khen, tribesmen recently greeted a homecoming student with jubilant bursts of AK-47 fire in the air. Talawat Shah, 28, was arriving from his graduation at the Darul Uloom Sapia madrassa, not far from the Khyber Pass. Shah told the crowd that he was dedicating the day to Mullah Omar. 'If we forget the jihad, God will forget us,' Shah said. 'But if we return to jihad, God will lift us up.' His first priority is to start a madrassa in Qumber Khen. He's eager to spread the message of jihad to his students.
(Thanks to LGF.)
RSS Feed
Dear Sir/Madam:
First of all, let me congratulate Robert Spencer for this project, and also for the extremely valuable contribution he made to an accurate understanding of Islam in his work "Islam Unveiled." It's a superb book, and one of its chief virtues was Mr. Spencer's decision to make the ideas expressed as accessible as possible to a broad readership. There is no movement on earth as important for Americans to understand as Islamism, and, sadly, it is only a hair's breath away from classical Islam. This movement represents as great a danger to the survival of our civilization as did Nazism and Communism in the last century. Unfortunately, those of us that recognize the threat must pursue our work in a society in which the prevailing political correctness and extreme forms of multiculturalism popular in much of the "literate" public and certainly within the university world will label our work "bigoted," "xenophobic," or "racist." We must simply ignore the nonsense and continue.
Is there is a way to receive "Jihad Watch" on a regular basis, I would very much like to be added to the list. I have lectured all over the country on the danger of Islamism, and this publication will be a very rich source of additional ammunition.
I am also deeply engaged in what I believe is an undeclared global culture war -- that also expresses itself in military conflict and certainly in violence worldwide -- between the West and Islamism, or, if one prefers, between Judeo-Christian values and those of classical Islam. I am contributing to the cause in the context of the immigration reform movement (I am a Fellow of the Center for Immigration Studies and have also been funded by FAIR (Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform). Though I am concerned about the insanity of current immigration policy overall, my greatest concern is the dramatic rise in the Muslim population in the United States, a product of the irrational policy of extended family reunification, one that will ultimately create a situation here in the United States such as exists in France and Britain, with a large Muslim presence that will have a hugely negative impact on both domestic life in this country and also on US foreign policy. I want to see legislation passed that will end family reunification and thus provide a cut-off mechanism of this chain-immigration, and also see that any person with Islamist associations be permanently barred entry to the United States.
Demography plus money equals political power, and this community is growing fast, it votes at a 65% level, far above that of almost all other Americans, it is financially solid; it also has access to limitless funds from overseas Islam (as you know Saudi Arabia alone spends some 6-7 billion a year on "Islamization" around the world, 600 million alone last year in Bosnia.) If there is one thing our politicicans know how to do it is count, count votes and money. There is every reason to believe that US politicians will become increasingly responsive to a growing constituency with money, no matter what its views.
While the excellent article above does not cite this fact, I am sure that Mr. Spencer knows that when General Zia ul Haq staged his coup and helped radicalize Pakistani Islam and empower it everywhere in the governmental system and all through what passes for "civil society" in that benighted country, that ALL postgraduate students in universities studying science and engineering, especially those in fields with "dual use" capability, that is to say, military applications, were summarily dismissed and Islamists were given their places. These students were then sent to the US and Europe to build Pakistan's military machine and technology, including the technology that led to its "Islamic nuclear bomb." Thus, the giving of visas to such "students" or, more generally, the immigration of certain cohorts of Pakistanis to the US might, according to my dissident Muslim friends from South Asia, more aptly be termed "infiltration" than immigration. And this at a time when EVERY "American" national Muslim organization (CAIR, ICNA, AMC, MSA, etc) with one exception -- the Sufi Islamic Supreme Council of America -- are Islamist political entities aiding and abetting the enemies of the US and, more generally, Judeo-Christian and Western values.
I have many friends and colleagues who are dissident Muslims (Khalid Duran -- now sadly incapacitated -- Jamal Hasan, Tashbih Sayyed, etc.) and know this community well. I am also an amateur scholar of Islam, but one that has read the Koran under the guidance of dissident Muslim thinkers. I am well-informed in terms of Islam as a religion, Arab history, and current politics across many parts of the Islamic patrimony.
As I said previously, I would very much like to find out if there is a way to receive this report regularly, and I would also like to know how I might be able to be in touch with Mr. Spencer more direclty.
Thank you the opportunity to write, and I'd appreciate your prompt attention to these queries.
Best wishes.
Yours faithfully,
Dr. Stephen Steinlight
Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies
Fellow, US Center for Strategic Study of South Asia
Fellow, Timothy Dwight College, Yale University