Here is a tale of two young British Muslims who travelled to Pakistan.
Yasir is 19, comes from Rotherham, supports Liverpool FC and is studying Islam
in a Pakistani madrassa that will teach him to hate the West.
There are two reasons why he should not be in a Deobandi seminary in the
teeming, dusty backstreets of Karachi. The first is that Pakistan banned all
foreign students from its religious schools in 2005 after it emerged that
two of the bombers responsible for the July 7 attacks on London that year
had spent time in the country.
And the second? Yasir is miserable. He told The Times last month that he was
desperate to “get home”, was struggling to cope with life in Karachi and
uncomfortable with the seminary’s anti-Western agenda.
Yasir was seven months into an eight-year course of study when he met The
Times and during the brief interview his eyes were continually darting from
side to side as if in fear that his words might be overheard. He was at
first hungry for news of home — what were Liverpool’s coming fixtures, how
were England doing in the cricket? — but his strong Yorkshire accent often
dropped to a barely audible whisper.
Why was he here? “I don’t know that myself.” What was wrong with Karachi?
“It’s crap.” What did he miss about Britain? “Everything. It’s too hard for
me here. I don’t like to live here, man. You can’t do anything here. It’s
not England. It’s Pakistan.”
The former engineering student gave no explanation as to why he was at Jamia
Binoria, whose principal, Mufti Mohammad Naeem, challenged The Times to
inspect the seminary to “see if you can find any terrorists”. There were no
bomb factories, but for incendiary rhetoric there was Muhammed, a young man
from Manchester who was visiting a friend in the seminary’s fatwa (religious
edict) department.
Muhammed, who would not give his full name, teaches English to asylum-seekers
and, in stark contrast to Yasir, exemplifies Deobandis’ deep hostility
towards the West. He was eager to tell The Times that the public had been
entirely misled about the real perpetrators of the July 7 attack on London.
According to Muhammed, the Government, Mossad, assorted Jews, freemasons and
Scotland Yard had conspired to commit mass murder to demonise Muslims.
“These are not my opinions. These are facts. The aim was to create terror in
the hearts of the British people in order to control them,” he said.
The media were also part of the cover-up. “Why don’t you tell the public that
they are being brainwashed and that there is a conspiracy to destroy Islam,
as the Prophet told us? Why don’t you tell them that the media is controlled
by Jews, that the word ‘British’ is a Jewish word?
“If someone attacks your house, you have a right to defend what is rightfully
yours. We follow the way of the Prophet. We will defend Islam. We will
defend the Koran.”
Yasir and Muhammed illustrate the complex challenge that Britain’s security
services face in countering the threat posed by Islamic radicals. More than
400,000 people travel from Britain to Pakistan each year. The great majority
of them go for innocent reasons but some young Britons do go to study in
jihadi madrassas and train in terrorist camps. And then they return to
Britain. Jamia Binoria has 3,000 students, 500 of them foreigners from 29
countries, including Britain and the US. In its crowded halls children as
young as 5 sit in groups on the floor, rocking back and forth as they recite
the Koran.
Mr Naeem insisted that his seminary did not train students for military jihad,
but added somewhat ambiguously that none of his charges was allowed to fight
in Afghanistan “without permission”.
At a second Deobandi seminary, Darul Uloom Karachi, the vice-president
estimated that 20 to 30 British Muslims were among his 4,000 students,
although The Times was not allowed to meet any of them.
Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani said that his seminary “extended some help to
those who fought in the jihad” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but
denied aiding the Taleban in its fight against the US and Britain.
Mr Naeem and Mr Usmani insisted that Sir Salman Rushdie should receive the
death penalty for writing the Satanic Verses, and said that his knighthood
could only be interpreted as a calculated insult to Muslims.
Both seminaries were named this year in a report that describes Karachi as “a
haven for violent extremism”. The report, by the International Crisis Group,
notes that “the vast majority of Karachi’s sectarian, jihadi madrassas
follow the Deobandi sect”. It says that the leaders of Jamia Binoria have
“publicly adopted a pro-jihadi, anti-Western stance”.
Millions of pounds are raised by British mosques and sent to support terrorist
groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir. One, Jaish-e-Mohammed, is
thought to get £5 million a year from British donors. Close ties also exist
between JuB, the representative body of Deobandi scholars in Britain, and
JuI, a powerful Deobandi political party whose leader has been called
Pakistan’s “patron of jihad”.
The JuB (Jamiat Ulama e Britain, or Council of Muslim Theologians in Britain)
claims to have 500 affiliated institutions, including mosques and schools.
Its general council includes Deobandi scholars from Bradford, Leeds,
Dewsbury, Rotherham, Wakefield, Oldham, Burnley, Nottingham, Birmingham,
Wolverhampton, Cardiff, Crawley, Luton and London.
The JuB’s general secretary, Sheikh Mohammad Ismail, who lives in Sheffield,
is a graduate of Jamia Uloom Islamia, in Binori Town, the same Karachi
seminary that spawned Jaish-e-Mohammed. The International Crisis Group calls
it “the fountainhead of Deobandi militancy countrywide” and says that “a
generation of former students has spread a web of similar jihadi madrassas
across Karachi and beyond”.
Several young Muslims from Bradford are students at the Binori Town seminary,
which has close ties with the Taleban and has fuelled internal sectarian
violence.
The JuB’s website has links to both of the Karachi seminaries visited by The
Times. It also carries speeches by Fazlur Rehman, who heads the most
powerful faction of the JuI (Jamiat Ulema e-Islam), the Deobandi political
party in Pakistan. In one speech, Mr Rehman responds to the Danish cartoons
of the Prophet Muhammad with an impassioned attack on the West. Muslims will
only satisfy the West, he says, “when we give up our Islamic teaching,
civilisation, morals, worship and religion”. He also laments Pakistan’s
support for America and Britain in Afghanistan. “They have turned Pakistan
into a dog. They have become our masters and we are their slaves . . . if
they attack our civilisation then we will attack them back.”
Mr Ismail told The Times that the JuB, founded in 1962, was an independent
organisation, opposed to “any kind of political violence”. But he said:
“You’re trying to link us with terrorism. What about all those masonic and
Zionist organisations? What about Palestine, what about Iraq? Where are
those weapons of mass destruction? You never, ever talk about that.”
Deobandis run 8,350 of Pakistan’s 13,000 madrassas, which educate 1.5 million
children, mostly from poor, rural families. More than a third of the
Deobandi seminaries are directly affiliated to Mr Rehman’s JuI.
Mr Rehman, a regular visitor to Britain, told The Times that although his
party and the JuB were not affiliated organisationally, “we have a unanimity
of thought and ideology”.
Khalid Masud, the chairman of Pakistan’s widely respected Council of Islamic
Ideology, despairs that medieval thinking still dominates Islamic discourse
and acts as a rigid barrier against integration in Britain.
He was “saddened but not surprised” to read a sermon in which Riyadh ul Haq, a
leading Deobandi preacher, urged British Muslims not to make friends with
Jews or Christians.
“This is a very normal thing that you hear in sermons here as well. He is not
in a minority. They \ are in the Koran and in our literature, but the
historical circumstances have changed,” he said.
“These are medieval teachings, yet even for people living in Europe they have
not become irrelevant. That is what surprises me. These are worrying times
for all of us.”
