“You must understand that Pakistan and Islam are synonymous.” Misunderstanders of Islam growing ever more assertive and confident in Pakistan; where is the vast majority of moderates to explain to them that they are getting their religion all wrong? We saw the anti-Sharia demonstrators recently, but they were unable to stop the government’s capitulation to the hardliners. Apparently the Musharraf regime knows which group is the Tiny Minority of Extremists, and which is the mainstream.
By Ziauddin Sardar for the New Statesman, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
Pakistan is reverberating with the call of jihad. Taliban-style militias are spreading rapidly out from provinces in the far north-west. The danger to the country and to the rest of the world is escalating
“You must understand,” says Maulana Sami ul-Haq, “that Pakistan and Islam are synonymous.” The principal of Darul Uloom Haqqania, a seminary in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), is a tall and jovial man. He grabs my hand as he takes me round the seminary. Maulana ul-Haq laughs when I ask his views on jihad. “It is the duty of all Muslims to support those groups fighting against oppression,” he says.
The Haqqania is one of the largest madrasas in Pakistan. It produces about 3,000 graduates, most from exceptionally poor backgrounds, every year. The walls of the student dormitory are decorated with tanks and Kalashnikovs. A group of students, all with black beards, white turbans and grey dresses, surrounds me. They are curious and extremely polite. We chat under the watchful eye of two officers from Pakistan’s intelligence services. What would they do after they graduate, I ask. “Serve Islam,” they reply in unison. “We will dedicate our lives to jihad.”
Pakistan is reverberating with the call of jihad. For more than two months, the capital, Islamabad, has been held hostage by a group of burqa-clad women, armed with sticks and shouting: “Al-jihad, al-jihad.” These female students belong to two madrasas attached to the Lal Masjid, a large mosque near one of the city’s main supermarkets. I found the atmosphere around the masjid tense, with heavily armed police surrounding the building. Though the students were allowed to go in and out freely, no one else could enter the mosque. The women are demanding the imposition of sharia law and the instant abolition of all “dens of vice”. Away from the masjid, Islamabad looked like a city under siege.
A new generation of militants is emerging in Pakistan. Although they are generally referred to as “Taliban”, they are a recent phenomenon. The original Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan briefly during the 1990s, were Afghan fighters, a product of the Soviet invasion of their country. They were created and moulded by the Pakistani army, with the active support of the United States and Saudi money, and the deliberate use of madrasas to prop up religious leaders. Many Taliban leaders were educated at Haqqania by Maulana Sami ul-Haq. The new generation of militants are all Pakistani; they emerged after the US invasion of Afghanistan and represent a revolt against the government’s support for the US. Mostly unemployed, not all of them are madrasa-educated. They are led by young mullahs who, unlike the original Taliban, are technology- and media-savvy, and are also influenced by various indigenous tribal nationalisms, honouring the tribal codes that govern social life in Pakistan’s rural areas. “They are Taliban in the sense that they share the same ideology as the Taliban in Afghanistan,” says Rahimullah Yusufzai, Peshawar-based columnist on the News. “But they are totally Pakistani, with a better understanding of how the world works.” Their jihad is aimed not just at “infidels occupying Afghanistan”, but also the “infidels” who are ruling and running Pakistan and maintaining the secular values of Pakistani society. “They aim at nothing less than to cleanse Pakistan and turn it into a pure Islamic state,” says Rashed Rahman, executive editor of the Lahore-based Post newspaper.
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