The federal religious affairs minister, Ijaz ul Haq, repeated his view on a private TV channel on September 9, that there was no evidence that the madrassas were involved in terrorism. He said a mistake was made in Pakistan, and outside, in associating the banned jihadi-terrorist organisations with the madrassas. He said the Uzbeks in South Waziristan were the people who came as the vanguard of the Soviet troops to fight the 1979-88 Afghan war, but went back to Uzbekistan to demand their rights from “the worst dictator in the world”, President Karimov of Uzbekistan. They were savagely treated and pushed into Afghanistan where the Taliban gave them asylum. They took no part, he said, in the war against America but had to flee to Pakistan after 9/11. (This is the most hypocritically disingenuous account of the movement of Qari Tahir Yuldashev that one has ever heard. It also contradicts the position taken by Lt-General Safdar Hussain, the Peshawar corps commander, on the same TV channel, a week earlier.) The pro-MMA-madrassa flurry of statements by Mr Haq has encouraged others to use private TV channels to obfuscate the issue of the isolationism and rejectionism of the madrassas and their exploitation by terrorist organisations, including Al Qaeda. Thus we had a former chief justice of the Sindh High Court shocking us out of our wits by stating on a private TV channel on September 10, that the madrassas were the central education system of the Muslims in India till the British got one man willing to serve them (he was referring to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan) to open a parallel system of education to outflank and destroy the madrassas. He said the 9/11 and 7/7 incidents were stage-managed to justify plans to destroy the Muslims. He said he did not believe that Muslim youths were capable of the terrorism of 7/7, leaving behind telltale evidence to implicate them. It appears that Mr Haq’s rhetoric is catching on with private TV channels, where the hosts or anchorpersons either do not know the background to the growth of terrorism in Pakistan or are a part of the “Islamic reply” to the “accusations” of the West. On September 9, Maulana Abdul Maalik of the MMA was so emboldened by Mr Haq’s presence that he announced that the madrassas would teach jihad as qitaal and needed no permission from the state for starting a war. Mr Haq remained quiet, even though he knew well that Sufi Muhammad of Malakand had ordered a private jihad in favour of the Taliban and had got 8,000 Pushtuns to populate the prisons of the Afghan warlords. He pretended not to see the implications of madrassas deciding when and with whom to go to war without asking the nation-state in which they were located. Indeed, Mr Haq got a discussion so skewed in favour of those who would depose President Pervez Musharraf in the name of Islam that an “unofficial” discussant, Mr Javed al-Ghamidi, had to say that mistakes were made by the madrassas as well. The fact is that most top madrassas are directly or indirectly involved in breeding militant Islamists who are inclined to become terrorists. This has been proved beyond doubt, unless you want proof of nothing less than actual military training grounds on their premises. Pakistan’s most notorious terrorist wanted by India together with Ahmad Umar Sheikh, the murderer of Daniel Pearl in Karachi, is Maulana Masood Azhar, a graduate of the Banuri Town madrassa in Karachi. The director of the madrassa, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai — target-killed last year –arranged the first meeting between Osama bin Laden and Mullah Umar, the self-styled “caliph” of the Taliban. The South Waziristan terrorist still on the loose in his area, Abdullah Mehsud, went straight to Banuri Town madrassa after his release from Guantanamo Bay and declared war on the Americans and “their allies”. After his mentor Mufti Jamil of the madrassa was killed in Karachi, he struck in South Waziristan, kidnapping two Chinese engineers, with horrible consequences for Pakistan. On June 24, Mufti Rehman and Maulana Irshad, new heads of the Banuri Mosque madrassa in Karachi, were also target-killed. Before the world pressured Pakistan into banning them, some of the jihadi organisations boasted the highest number of madrassas in Pakistan. Those organisations have changed their names, but still exist — and so do their madrassas. One private TV channel exploring the world of madrassas (and finding them clean!) last month visited a very well appointed “university” in Karachi run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned terrorist organisation. Another TV channel visited another madrassa in Islamabad — this time a women’s seminary called Dar al-Hafsa — and was bombarded with rhetoric of rejection of the state, which begins a young Pakistani’s journey into extremism and violence. The TV host wanted to know if the seminary did not take them away from the mainstream of society and expose them to a discourse that made them reject the state. One woman seminarian said that General Pervez Musharraf had blasphemed by saying that women should not be behind the veil. The women said wahi was their command; the state was not. One said she rejected the state. On the other hand, Mr Ijaz ul Haq said on TV that the government had apologised to Dar al-Hafsa and had punished the police officer who had tried to force his way into the madrassa looking for a terror suspect. President Musharraf has said many things on TV that his religious affairs minister is trying to negate through his own gloss on the madrassas. For instance, the president said that the men who tried to kill him had been trained and equipped with explosives in South Waziristan where, he said, he had hunted down and killed some Uighur terrorists from Sinkiang at the request of China. New research is available on the presence of Uighur terrorists in Pakistan, if Mr Haq is interested in the latest information. President Musharraf had also complained of the terrorists of Southeast Asia getting their ideological training in the madrassas of Karachi — the largest Deobandi concentration including madrassas belonging to Sipah-e-Sahaba. He even named Hanbali, the Indonesian terrorist linked to Al Qaeda. The man he got arrested from Dubai on the charge of trying to kill him in Rawalpindi, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, is a graduate of the Banuri Town madrassa. The problem with all madrassas is that they nurse a mind that adopts isolationism as a way of looking at the world. The total lack of realism following World War I that inspired the Khilafat and Hijrat Movements and the Reshmi Romaal Conspiracy tells us that the madrassa is and has always remained a politically dangerous fool’s paradise. This isolationism breeds rejectionism of the world in general and the nation-state in particular. It is the incubator of personalities that later lead Muslim society to extremism and violence. Therefore, Mr Ijaz ul Haq should have the guts to either denounce President Pervez Musharraf and leave his cabinet or admit that the president is pulling a fast one on the world and the people of Pakistan.
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