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.”
Following are reasons to this problem:
1)What Indians are sufferring for the last one century, due to colonial divide and rule policy and its after effects, is being felt by you all only now. That policy assisted an already "eager to hate" mentality to blossom rapidly.
2)You may now informally agree that it is difficult to live with some people due to their ideology of exclusivity or rather they find it difficult to live with us due to their exclusivity theories. In India they buy properties from others but will not sell it to other religious people with the ultimate aim of carving out a separate country at different parts of India and they are assisted by middle east oil money. You in your country will face this demand for a separate autonomous area in the near future.
3) The politicians in a country like yours and ours depend on votes to survive and hence will take to minoritism and you can never in your life time control them bring them to the national mainstream.
So they thrive.
Rajesh, Tvm, India
The last thing that the whole of the non Islamic world can allow to happen is that al-Qaeda succeeds in getting a foothold, followed by a take-over of Pakistan. This would give al-Qaeda access to what they want, ie nuclear weapons, which they will use to try to achieve their goal of world domination of their religion. It seems to me that Bush and Blair understood this but the rest of the free world leaders, with the possible exception of a few countries like Australia, Canada, Holland and a handful of others, just do not get it or are indifferent to the situation. Iran will probably be a nuclear power by then due to the passiveness of the worlds powers who, despite the warnings of the USA, UK and a few other countries, with the inevitable result being a world nuclear war. Unless al-Qaeda and Iran are stopped and relieved of any nuclear capability, I can see no other outcome and it will happen within 5 to 10 years unless the world wake up and stand with the few brave leaders against evil
michael pickles, bournemouth, england
The last thing that the whole of the non Islamic world can allow to happen is that al-Qaeda succeeds in getting a foothold, followed by a take-over of Pakistan. This would give al-Qaeda access to what they want, ie nuclear weapons, which they will use to try to achieve their goal of world domination of their religion. It seems to me that Bush and Blair understood this but the rest of the free world leaders, with the possible exception of a few countries like Australia, Canada, Holland and a handful of others, just do not get it or are indifferent to the situation. Iran will probably be a nuclear power by then due to the passiveness of the worlds powers who, despite the warnings of the USA, UK and a few other countries, with the inevitable result being a world nuclear war. Unless al-Qaeda and Iran are stopped and relieved of any nuclear capability, I can see no other outcome and it will happen within 5 to 10 years unless the world wake up and stand with the few brave leaders against evil
michael pickles, bournemouth, england
The last thing that the whole of the non Islamic world can allow to happen is that al-Qaeda succeeds in getting a foothold, followed by a take-over of Pakistan. This would give al-Qaeda access to what they want, ie nuclear weapons, which they will use to try to achieve their goal of world domination of their religion. It seems to me that Bush and Blair understood this but the rest of the free world leaders, with the possible exception of a few countries like Australia, Canada, Holland and a handful of others, just do not get it or are indifferent to the situation. Iran will probably be a nuclear power by then due to the passiveness of the worlds powers who, despite the warnings of the USA, UK and a few other countries, with the inevitable result being a world nuclear war. Unless al-Qaeda and Iran are stopped and relieved of any nuclear capability, I can see no other outcome and it will happen within 5 to 10 years unless the world wake up and stand with the few brave leaders against evil
michael pickles, bournemouth, england
Afzal, USA.
We know the history,in fact I am tired of hearing who did what 1400 years ago !
The crux of the argument is here & now, we in the nonmuslim world have moved on, why in Gods name [ literally ] can't the muslims ?
Until they draw a line in the sand we will never move forward.
No amount of wars & killings can change the past, when will these bitter individuals see it ?
Britain has sheltered & been very good to many Muslims who are still flocking into the country, if they want to insult, change us, don't come to our country they should stay where they can have the life they say they want.
The ones coming from the Madrassas are coming with their heads filled with totally untrue things, which is why they shouldn't be allowed into the UK.
Parents who send their sons to them should also be made to answer to the law as to why they want their children educated in them.
Eight years is a long time to be in a hostile [ to Britain ] environment, is it any wonder they come back radical?
Maggie Millington, Brittany , France
Britain ought not to be apprehensive of Deobandis and their allies. After all it was 'good' policy for the British to sponsor the partition of India. The British did not internalize the fact that, after more than thousand years of co-existence with the Hindus, the Muslims - who mostly were converts from the Hindu community - suddenly discovered they were a separate nation. Churchill slapped his thigh and giggled when Jinnah's jihad initiated the massacre which followed the division of the sub-continent. He exclaimed: "We are in the end having the last laugh!" René Grousset, the French historian, has correctly observed that, as majorities, Muslims are intolerant, and, as minorities, they are turbulent. In 14 centuries Muslims have not been able to develop an ideology of co-existence, within the same space, with communities belonging to a different cultural persuasion. And the media and the politicians in the West, and in India, are afraid to say it. It is a pity. British support of Mus
Dr. Dad Prithipaul, Edmonton, Canada
The two good quality reports clearly mark out the serious threat faced by the world posed by militant obscurantism.
It will be futile to go into a blame game. However, it is necessary to examine some historical facts in order to understand why and how this cancer is spreading in Muslim societies and then examine available choices.
Let us not go into the crusades though they are relevant. However, the Picot Sykes agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the division of the remains of the defeated Ottoman empire, the creation of kingdoms of Saudi Arabia,Transjordan and Iraq, the overthrow of the secular, liberal Govenment of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh,the Afghan Jihad,the support to Muslim dictators including the ultra Wahabi Deobandi Zia and the pseudo moderate Musharraf,always hand in glove with the Deobandi leader Fazlurrehman etc. may be relevant for diagnosis of the disease and selection of available treatment.
This is essential for restoration of civilizational harmony.
Afzal A. Neseem, Lincoln Nebraska, U.S.A.
bogus article....please dont create hatred ...find a solution....
adnan, london, uk
Pakistan is a failed state. It serves as an incubator for global Islamic terrorism and it has made the World a more dangerous place. Thanks to Pakistan nuclear weapons technology has been sold to enemies of the West and it continues to act as a safe house for the Taliban and any other Islamic Jihadi outfit. The time has come for the international community to go on the offensive. The US and the EU should ban all flights and travel connections with the country. Visiting the country should be a criminal offence and all aid should be stopped. Until Pakistan stops behaving as Terrorist Central it should be treated as an international pariah. Those voices who spoke out against Apartheid should unite in isolating this maverick country. If Pakistanis want to support the global Islamic JIhad against Christians. Hindus, Jews or any other non-believers let them pay the price of isolation.
John white, harrogate,
While there are several Deobandi and Barelvi madrassahs in PAkistan and perhaps in other countries as well these days, it would be appropriate to note that the original Dar ul Uloom (Islamic seminary) at Deoband is located in India and it is funded entirely by the Indian govrnment. Most of the hatred of non Muslims and the new fanaticism that we see these days emanates from India and Pakistan etc are only conduits for this hatred from an Indian sponsored institution.
Mehul Kamdar, Des Plaines, IL, USA
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