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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Sudan: University student swaps jeans for niqab, joins Islamic State

Mar 28, 2015 10:59 pm By Robert Spencer

niqab4The correlation between devoutness in Islamic observance and jihad terrorist sentiments is nearly one to one, and so the mainstream media and Islamic supremacists such as Mehdi Hasan do their best to obscure it. Reality, however, keeps breaking through.

“In Sudan, an unlikely path to jihad for students,” by Khalid Abdelaziz, Reuters, March 27, 2015:

KHARTOUM, March 27 (Reuters) – Tasneem Hussein was a soft-spoken university student in Khartoum when the transformation slowly began.

After returning to Sudan from Britain to study pharmacology, she swapped her jeans for the head-to-toe niqab covering. But no one expected to hear reports of her abandoning her studies and a privileged life to help Islamic State wage jihad in Syria.

Last week, the 23-year-old told her parents she would be spending the night with relatives.

The next day she sent a Whatsapp message saying she was studying for a Masters exam at the university library, according to a person close to the family, who declined to be named due to the sensitivities of the matter.

In fact, Hussein went to Turkey with a group of other British-Sudanese medical students en route to Syria, ostensibly to back Islamic State.

To many people, the group that now controls large areas of Iraq and Syria is notorious for beheading Western captives and burning a Jordanian military pilot alive. It imposes strict Islamist rule in its fiefdoms, including repressing women. But for some youngsters like Hussein, it may have had an appeal.

She used to “join us in parties and occasions with neighbours. She use to wear jeans and then two years ago a big change happened and she started wearing the niqab,” said the neighbour, who saw Hussein the day she left for Turkey and did not detect anything unusual.

Unlike Britons indoctrinated by militant ideology in mosques in the United Kingdom, Hussein and her comrades were introduced to fundamentalist thought at religious lectures in their university.

Their journey to Syria illustrates the complex challenges Western and Arab states face in trying to contain the appeal of Islamic State, which has succeeded in attracting young European-born Muslims to their ideal of a medieval caliphate.

This group, which included both medical students and new graduates, are worlds apart from the stereotypical profile of many militants – poor, disaffected, angry, youths.

Most of them come from well-to-do families who have no connection to extremist circles in Khartoum.

Hussein’s father is well-known in Sudanese society and is the head of one of Sudan’s largest government hospitals.

Neighbours say the family lives in the elite Riyadh district in a three-storey villa with a large garden on a tree-lined street where several luxury cars are often parked in the driveway.

“Before her transformation, Tasneem was an open, moderately conservative girl like the rest of her family,” said the person who is close to the family.

When she wore the niqab, her parents apparently questioned her decision, but failed to realise she was on a dangerous path.

CONSERVATIVE SUDAN

Sudan, which hosted al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, promotes a conservative brand of Sunni Islam which may appease hardline groups.

Long-ruling President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 coup, introduced sharia law, creating an official tolerance to Islamism.

The University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST), where the group studied, was founded by Khartoum governorate Health Minister Ma’amoun Houmeyda, a known Islamist.

A walk across campus showed most students wearing Western attire, unusual in the conservative country. But UMST has also hosted firebrand clerics like Sheikh Mohammed al-Jizouli who has given sermons supporting Islamic State and called on people to “leave the bleachers and go to seats of martyrdom”.

Jizouli was arrested a few months ago and it was not immediately possible to verify whether anyone in the group had listened to his sermons, but it is likely.

Ahmed Babaker, UMST’s dean of students, said the group got together in an apartment in an upscale area of Khartoum and that it was recruited by Mohammed Fakhri — a Briton of Palestinian origin — who left for Britain after graduating from UMST and from there went to Syria and joined Islamic State.

The neighbours and friends Reuters spoke to all seemed to lay at least some of the blame on the Islamic Civilisation student organisation which brought clerics like Jizouli to deliver sermons calling for jihad.

“After two students travelled to Mali to join religious groups, we halted the activities of the clerics,” Babaker said.

While the university was not shutting down the group, it said it was starting awareness programmes.

“After the escape of this group, there’s cooperation with security and intelligence services to monitor suspicious students. We in the university are very worried about his phenomenon and we’re trying to stop it form happening again.”

It may be too late. The clerics had a deep influence on the students.

“In the beginning I did not wear the hijab or the niqab and the lectures by the Islamic Civilisation organisation used to teach us how to pray well,” said a female student who spoke to Reuters, wearing the niqab face covering.

“That was in the first stage, in the second stage the conversation was about the oppression facing Muslims in Palestine and Syria and the necessity of Jihad.”…

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Filed Under: Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Daesh), Sudan Tagged With: Tasneem Hussein


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Mar 28, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    A regular Islamic version of Patti Hearst, an example of THE ISLAMIC STOCKHOLM SYNDROME.

    Muslim women who LOVE being enslaved are examples of CAPTURE BONDING.

    Beat me until I love being enslaved and until I love to commit murder for your barbaric, bloodthirsty god.

  2. Jay Boo says

    Mar 28, 2015 at 11:41 pm

    Dancing Boys in burkas religion.
    Niqab with a hidden noodle?
    Who can tell for sure?

  3. Matthieu Baudin says

    Mar 29, 2015 at 12:56 am

    “The correlation between devoutness in Islamic observance and jihad terrorist sentiments is nearly one to one…” Very well put! And at the other end of the scale we have individuals, born Muslim, who just want to get on and live ordinary lives. Most of these people are minimally observant and generally accept infidels as human beings. These are the people to stick our necks out for, not the pious ones or religious leaders.

    • Aardvark says

      Mar 29, 2015 at 6:17 am

      But since it’s impossible to tell them apart before they commit some barbaric and murderous act, we should deport the lot.

      That is the only sane answer to Islam. Isolate it in it’s own lands until it dies out.

      Islam has no place inthe civilised West.

    • roger woodhouse says

      Mar 29, 2015 at 6:26 am

      .You sir can stick your own neck out for them if you so wish. There is no such thing as a ‘moderate Muslim’. You are either one or the other. Islamist or an apostate

      • M S case says

        Mar 29, 2015 at 6:04 pm

        FEAR is one of islams great protective covers………A muslim would not say anything against another muslim for FEAR of being killed if they have left islam. some have spoken out after they left, (apostates),. Fear is how they are kept in perpetual enslavement so If and I say If there are muslims that just want to be “citizens” of the country they have adopted then do you think they would speak out against a fellow muslim. Of course not .FEAR!!!!

  4. pumbar says

    Mar 29, 2015 at 1:14 am

    OT

    Looks like the German co-pilot who crashed the plane was a convert to islam after all;

    http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/03/breaking-german-news-germanwings-airbus-co-pilot-was-muslim-convert/

    • Joseph says

      Mar 29, 2015 at 1:24 am

      @ pumbar
      Thanks for the news & the link.

  5. Joseph says

    Mar 29, 2015 at 1:41 am

    She has on eye liner. Isn’t that a NO-NO? Isn’t makeup banned?

    • tilda says

      Mar 29, 2015 at 4:46 am

      Mohammed used Kohl, so eyeliner is probably on the okay list.

    • PJG says

      Mar 29, 2015 at 5:53 am

      You should see how thick the make-up is in Khartoum…they lay it on with a shovel.

      • Joseph says

        Mar 30, 2015 at 2:51 am

        Anything like this guy???
        https://www.tumblr.com/search/svengoolie?

  6. Richard Courtemanche says

    Mar 29, 2015 at 1:51 pm

    This epidemic is propagating rather fast which will need to be segregated by us and them, and by force.

  7. Jeffrey Hardin says

    Mar 29, 2015 at 7:24 pm

    I have said it, and will continue to say it often….There is no such a thing as a Moderate Muslim. Only Apostate ones, and they are just as dangerous if not more, for in an instant they can become Jihad active…

    • Joseph says

      Mar 29, 2015 at 10:55 pm

      HUH???
      a·pos·tate
      əˈpäsˌtāt,-tit/
      noun
      noun: apostate; plural noun: apostates

      1. a person who renounces a religious or political belief or principle.
      synonyms: dissenter, defector, deserter, traitor, backslider, turncoat; More
      nonconformist;
      schismatic;
      archaicheretic;
      rarerecusant, recreant, tergiversator
      antonyms: follower

      adjective
      adjective: apostate

      1. abandoning a religious or political belief or principle.

      Could you please clarify what you mean.

    • Mirren10 says

      Mar 30, 2015 at 3:55 am

      ”Only Apostate ones, and they are just as dangerous if not more, for in an instant they can become Jihad active…”

      As Joseph has pointed out, an apostate is one who has **renounced** a particular religion.

      Apostates include high profile people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bosch Fawstin, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina,and many more, including our own Saleem Smith and Miriam Rove.

      Are you really suggesting any of the above are about to strap on a murder vest, or plant a bomb ?

      Perhaps you meant that so-called ‘moderate’ muslims can become more pious, and display ”sudden Jihad syndrome” ? I agree with you on that, there have been many instances.

  8. Joe says

    Mar 30, 2015 at 12:07 pm

    Sadly the attitude of the west hasn’t changed at all, the governments and security services still insist on judging Islamism and its violence according to western standards. Nobody’s more aware of this than Robert Spencer. We may never find out why the west refuses to be proactive in destroying Islamism , but because it’s ordinary decent citizens like us who bear the brunt of it’s vile ideology we have to take the initiative now. For how long can we rush around putting out the fires the criminally inept leaders have started?

    The countdown to the General Election has begun here in the UK. Once again the MSM and the Westminster Village Idiots have made their campaigning about the economy and have ignored the spread of Islam in its most dangerous form. It’s scary that they still spout multi culti sh*t and practically crawl up the backsides of Muslims.

    The most despicable of all was when the families of the three Jihadi Child Brides appeared before the Home Affairs Select committee,chaired by a Muslim, and the committee obviously chosen from MP’s who leaned towards liberalism. The families were accompanied by an Islamist lawyer famous for his ties with supporters of terror. They blamed everybody and his dog for the brainwashing of the runaways, the Met, MI5, Scotland Yard – and were rewarded for their smears with.assurances that their little darlings would not face criminal charges if they returned. Then we find that the father of one of them not only is an Islamist, but a follower of Anjem “Motormouth” Choudary and the banned Al Mujaroon Islamist group.Today we heard that the Bethnal Green school they attended is being investigated by the security services. It’s like Ground Hog Day here, and getting worse. Only UKIP seems on top of the situation, and it’s definitely getting my vote.

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