August 2, 2005

Jihad Generation

Reputed to be incubators for terrorists, Islamic schools in Pakistan claim they are innocent – and are still waiting for long-promised Western aid

Eric Ellis, Akora Khattak

IF PRIME MINISTER JOHN HOWARD feels like breaking ranks with his allies in George W. Bush’s coalition of the willing to begin a dialogue with those Islamists who might wish to harm us, he could do worse than meet the Pakistani Islamic theologian, Maulana Sami ul-Haq.

That’s not as glib as it sounds. The Maulana (an honorific denoting his high Koranic studies) runs Pakistan’s most controversial madrassa, Darul Uloom Haqqania, which sprawls over three hectares of the hot dusty plain at Akora Khattak, 40km east of the wild Pakistani-Afghan frontier town of Peshawar. Haqqania is where Pakistan’s poor and unemployed study to be pious, to become mullahs and constituents of the Maulana (a senator who heads a leading faction of Pakistan’s Islamist political party, the Jami'at-e Ulama-e Islami, or ‘Islamic faithful’). Haqqania is known in Pakistan as Jihad University, a name not bestowed on it by a sensationalist media but by the Maulana and his charges themselves.

The biggest of an estimated 20,000 madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Haqqania directs its 3000-odd students (or taleb) from the first pre-dawn prayers to bed at 10pm to memorise the Koran, in its original Arabic, and attend lectures. The regime is strict; parents are banned and so, it seems, is laughter. Around the nodding faithful are banners of tanks and Kalashnikov rifles, scenes from Afghan wars and Palestinian struggles. Two photographs hang over the door to the Maulana’s residence, next to the madrassa; one showing him addressing a massive rally in Lahore, the other flanked by allies, with him wielding a Kalshnikov.

The Maulana is a close friend of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and is an old comrade-in-arms of Osama bin Laden. Eight of Mullah Omar’s cabinet when he ran Afghanistan were schooled at Haqqania. In 2001, when the US-backed warlords of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance began their assault on the Taliban, the Maulana sent 2000 of his Afghan alumni back home to fight Americans and their allies.

I meet the Maulana two weeks after the London bombings that three Britons of Pakistani origins are believed to have perpetrated. Later this same day, four more Muslims launch copycat attacks in London. A common link among several attackers seems to be that they have studied in a Pakistani madrassa, perhaps not unlike this one. Pakistani security forces have raided several madrassas in Islamabad 100 km from here and rounded up 300 alleged extremists.

Haqqania appears an austere, forbidding place but as The Bulletin waits to interview the Maulana in an ante-room, his bearded aides light up on learning I’m from Australia; most foreigners sighted round here are assumed – correctly – to be hated Americans and probably intelligence spooks. “You must like cricket?” I’m asked. “Of course, Australia is world champion,” I respond, to be told that cricket is popular at Haqqania and indeed encouraged as exercise by the Maulana and his staff. One bemused aide launches into lurid detail about Shane Warne’s British sexploits as if he’s just put down a London tabloid, while another encyclopedically details Test captain Ricky Ponting’s averages. I’m asked if Australia will win the Ashes series against England. That’s easy to answer but not so the next question. “Why is Australia against Islam?” I wimp out by explaining that as a journalist I don’t make government policy but I believe that most Australians are not against Islam, just terrorism and, officially, the corruption of Islam by extremists. “But why do they kill Muslims in Iraq?”

The charismatic Maulana sweeps into the room. A rotund 69 awash with henna and festooned with a magnificent turban, he presents as an avuncular figure. We exchange introductory pleasantries over sweet milky tea and biscuits. My mind’s eye flicks back to the press clipping pointing out that he’s known as “Malauna Sandwich”, a nickname given him in 1991 when he resigned from an alliance campaigning for sharia law, including the stoning of adulterous women, after being outed by an Islamabad brothel-keeper as a regular client who preferred doing it with two partners – hence the sandwich sobriquet. He denied the madam’s claim as a character assassination by his “political opponents”.

The Maulana has often been controversial. He spent some of the 1970s under house arrest at the order of President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father, for his religious activities before helping organise the anti-Soviet mujahadeen in Afghanistan, where he first met Osama. Current president Pervez Musharraf locked him up in 2001, just after 9/11, for being chairman of the pro-Taliban anti-Western Pak-Afghan Defence Force but today he’s back in charge of a powerful Jami'at-e Ulama-e Islami faction, and a respected MP. Mindful of the turbulent forces swirling around today’s Pakistan, silky Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, in an interview with The Bulletin later that day in Islamabad, diplomatically says: “I think he’s genuinely rational and open-minded. On many issues he agrees with the government and on some he doesn’t.”

The Maulana also seems pleased that I am not an American or European. Washington’s foreign policy, he says, promotes Islamist jihad because it “attacks Muslims”, while Brussels is “narrow-minded” because Europe’s parliamentarians refused to meet the Pakistani Senate’s visiting foreign relations committee because the Maulana was one of them. Unlike his young charges, he says he doesn’t have a view about Australia, if he’s thought of it at all. He does have an opinion about the London bombings, and the Iraq invasion.

“Every living thing when they are targeted and under attack, they have to fight back. When countries attack, people have the right to make an uprising, defend themselves. These bombings are only because of Western policies, the policies which anger the Muslims. I am not surprised by London.”

The Maulana denies he’s nurturing terrorists in the Jihad University. “I am against suicide bombers who target civilians, people who are innocent. Under Islam, you cannot kill civilians, only the one who is fighting you.” Do any of his teachers espouse extremist views in class? “We keep an eye on every teacher and student and I have never experienced this.” He apologises that I am not allowed to tour Haqqania – “it wouldn’t be appropriate” – but then I am suddenly spirited away to a smaller madrassa, of 1200 students, closer to Peshawar, where he’s to address a meeting of his party’s youth wing, to be held in the madrassa’s mosque, al-Islamiyah.

A guest lecturer today is Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence, the military’s intelligence agency. A hardliner and today something of a marginal figure, Gul is widely regarded as being Islamabad’s and Washington’s paymaster in creating the anti-Soviet mujahadeen of the 1980s, which today has “blown back’” in terrorism on both. Today, he sprays liberally at Musharraf for being the West’s poodle. “They are besieging the madrassas without any reason,” he says. “This is only going to increase this problem. Why don’t they understand that dialogue is necessary?”

At the madrassa conference, in actuality a series of fiery lectures from heavily bearded clergy and Islamist politicians, the rhetoric suddenly ratchets up; Jews, Bush, Blair, the West are all responsible for the crisis facing Islam, the West want to make Muslims its slaves. It’s similar to what one sees at Indonesia’s Ngruki school, Abu Bakr Bashir’s ascetic pesantren in Java where several of the Bali bombers were schooled. In Pakistan it’s poorer, in Indonesia the rhetoric nastier.

In this madrassa, the scorching oratory is matched by confronting banners in Urdu hung around the mosque but the conduct towards me, the sole Westerner in the room, is anything but hostile. I am immersed in hospitality and kindness – Pakistan’s contradiction in a single room.

SHAUKAT AZIZ is popular and well regarded, popular partly because his background is not in Pakistan’s treacherous politics. For much of the past 30 years, he was one of US bank Citibank’s most senior international executives, mostly based in New York. And he is well regarded because he is seen as a cleanskin. For much of his Citibank career, he was earning a seven-figure salary. Traditionally, high political office in Pakistan is a fast-track to huge family riches as in the examples the disgraced administrations of the democratically elected former leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

Aziz was hand-picked to be finance minister by Musharraf after his 1999 coup and was made PM a year ago. Aziz , 56, is credited with having reformed Pakistan’s economy. Last year, it grew at 8.4%, Asia’s second-highest after China. Aziz may not have been a politician but he’s a quick learner. Interviewed a week after the London bombings, amidst much fingerpointing at Pakistan by the West, he has his Pakistani constituency in mind when he describes the attacks as “unfortunate developments that relate to people born in Britain, in British society”.

“They have their own reason for doing what they did and they should be addressed and I think their government is very capable of dealing with it.” Aziz insists the madrassa system is not the problem, just some extreme element within it, “like any society”.

“We want to mainstream madrassas,” he says, pointing out that only 1% of Pakistan’s youth study at madrassas. “This 1% number is important, the world doesn’t know that. There may have been some people who may have studied in madrassas and then when they graduate they could be influenced by elements in society who have extreme views, but that is a really tiny number of people. Islam is a religion of peace, understanding, accommodation and inter-faith harmony.

“Most people [in the West] don’t understand what madrassas are, what they do. We think madrassas have an important role to play in our society, they offer various types of education, including religious education, which is good, learning to read and understand the Koran is very much part of it.”

Madrassa reform has been a hot-button issue in Pakistan since even before 9/11. Vast sums of aid and considerable professional resources, promised by the Pakistan government and its Western allies, have been allocated to “mainstreaming” them. But little of it seems to have seeped through. “Where’s the nine billion rupees ($200m) the government has promised?” complains Maulana Sami ul-Haq. “We’ve not seen any of it.” Indeed, the same day I interview him and Aziz, a Pakistani newspaper published a report that showed less than 1% of Pakistan’s madrassas had received any state assistance.

Aziz makes no excuses about this apparent inertia. “The reform program did not move ahead because the madrassas did not register in the way it was desired, so now we are looking at the whole thing again. There’s a small committee of myself and various ministers; we’ve met once, we’ll meet again and we’ll get to the bottom of it. I think we need to understand this better.”

There are millions of terrified Westerners who would agree.