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Muhammad Hashim appears much younger than he is. Wearing a light blue salwar kameez and a white skullcap, he looks boyishly innocent. Sporting a trimmed brown beard, he can speak only broken Urdu and converses mostly in Pashto, despite having lived in Karachi since his birth in 1989.
He, as well as his six brothers, received their education from Jamia Farooqia, a Deobandi seminary in Shah Faisal Colony, Karachi, where around 3,000 students are enrolled in courses ranging from the memorisation of the Quran to specialisation in Arabic literature and Islamic jurisprudence. After his graduation, Hashim decided to open a madrasa inside his house in Haider Chali, a mostly Pakhtun working-class neighbourhood in Karachi’s north-western Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (Site) area. The two-storey house was purchased in 1992 by his father, Haji Karim, originally a resident of the Swat valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Hashim shifted his family upstairs and turned the small bedrooms on the ground floor into classrooms. This is how Al-Karim Islamic Academy – named after Hashim’s father – came into being in 2007. The madrasa provides basic religious education to around 200 boys and girls who mostly live in nearby houses and streets, and pay a monthly fee of 150 rupees each. Being a teacher of the Quran, Hashim is known as Qari Hashim among his students and their families.
A small room that serves as the office of his madrasa has bare brick walls and cemented flooring. The only furniture in it is a tattered sofa and a small wooden table, a copy of the Quran placed on it. On the dusty afternoon of March 23, 2016, Hashim is sitting in this office, explaining how he does not have anything to do with his elder brother, 33-year-old Shakirullah. “He has a mind of his own,” Hashim says of Shakirullah, whose wife and children live upstairs along with the rest of Haji Karim’s family.
"We have never stopped the authorities from examining our premises or questioning our students and teachers. We have nothing to hide."
Shakirullah is on the run. Also known as Mufti Shakir or Mufti Shah, he is reported to be involved in terrorist activities. Al-Karim Islamic Academy is seen as his sanctuary. The police and the paramilitary rangers have repeatedly raided the place since 2014 for his capture. “He is not a mufti, but his friends call him mufti,” says Hashim. Shakirullah received the title while studying at Jamia Farooqia. “He was taking a two year course there in 2006 and 2007,” says Hashim. But Shakirullah dropped out before completing the course and, according to his younger brother, became “reserved and did not share much with the family about his activities”.
In the next few years, Shakirullah allegedly became a major facilitator of terrorism in Karachi. The data maintained by Karachi’s Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) shows him to be associated with the Swat chapter of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). He is also alleged to have provided suicide bombers to the anti-Shia militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Naeemullah, one of the suicide bombers Shakirullah is reported to have mentored, assassinated Superintendent of the Police (SP) Aslam Khan, known for carrying out deadly anti-Taliban operations in Karachi, on January 9, 2014.
Students of Al-Jamiatul Asaria during their lunch break | Ghulam Dastageer
Eight men who attacked a police picket in 2013 near a factory on 3rd Street in Site and injured a police official are known to have links with him, too. Syed Tahir Shah, an assistant sub-inspector at a Site area police station, says “we arrested three of the suspected attackers and they named Shakirullah as the provider of weapons and money to carry out the attack”.
A few months after the attack – on January 24, 2014 – a large contingent of the Sindh Rangers surrounded Al-Karim Islamic Academy at around 11:30 pm. They were looking for Shakirullah but he was not there. “None of us knew where he was,” says Hashim.
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Two days later, the rangers raided the seminary again and made Shakirullah’s other brother, Muhammad Akbar, call him. Shakirullah returned home immediately after receiving the call and was instantly arrested. A court in Karachi released him on bail in September 2014 and, according to Hashim, he “stayed with us for a week”. Since then, he has not seen his brother, Hashim says, speaking slowly.
Shakirullah left for some unknown destination and also took his younger brother, Muhammad Usman, with him. “We have not heard from the two since then,” says Hashim.
In the first week of October 2015, law enforcement agencies conducted a third raid on the seminary. Hashim heard his name being announced that day from a loudspeaker and stepped out of the madrasa. He saw a police contingent asking questions from the local residents. The police then probed him, inquiring about Shakirullah. Before calling off the raid, they took another brother, Muhammad Ahmed, into custody. A few weeks later, Ahmed was released but was rearrested soon in a fresh raid at their house.
Syed Imran Ali Shah was seven years old when his father was murdered. Another seven years later, in 1999, he managed to secure admission at Mercy Pak School – an Arab-funded orphanage-cum-madrasa on the outskirts of Peshawar – thanks to one of his relatives who once taught there.
Shah says there was nothing in the madrasa syllabus that preached jihad, yet he was so radicalised by the time he passed his matriculation exam in 2003, that he wanted to join a jihadi organisation. He blames his passion for jihad on a teacher at the Mercy Pak School who used to deliver regular sermons on the importance and the need for it.
After completing his matriculation, Shah met someone associated with jihad in Indian-administered Kashmir. He received guerilla training at a camp in Oghi area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Mansehra District. He claims he could not cope with the rigours of life in the camp and returned home after 35 days to his native village of Wadpagga, situated in the semi-rural periphery of Peshawar.
Many similar stories have appeared in memoirs of jihadi fighters, academic analyses, research reports, and journalistic exposés. Beginning with the leaders and the cadre of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who are known to have received education in Pakistani madrasas, a large number of suicide bombers and sectarian killers have proven links with madrasas. Just to cite one example, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost – a former detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and reportedly one of the main leaders of the Pakistan-Afghanistan chapter of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) – is a graduate of Al-Jamiatul Asaria madrasa in Peshawar’s Chamkani area, acknowledges Umer Bin Abdul Aziz, the head of the madrasa.
Feroze Shah, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in Karachi’s District West, tells the Herald that his department has identified five madarasas in his jurisdiction that help militants procure money and other logistics to carry out acts of terrorism.
Al-Jamiatul Asaria, founded in 1977, is a large complex of buildings stretched over 10 acres of land. Half of its 535 male students and about 200 of its 530 female students are natives of neighbouring Afghanistan.
Law enforcement officials in different parts of the country verify that some madrasas do not just radicalise their students to wage jihad against their religious and sectarian opponents, but also provide financial resources and logistic support to known religious and sectarian assassins. Feroze Shah, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in Karachi’s District West, tells the Herald that his department has identified five madarasas in his jurisdiction that help militants procure money and other logistics to carry out acts of terrorism. 12 madrasas in Karachi’s District Central are alleged to be doing the same thing, says a Sindh home department report, seen by the Herald.
In Sindh, 46 madrasas were found in 2015 to be either institutionally linked with militant groups or were facilitating terrorist activities, according to the home department report. In the first three months of 2016, the number of madrasas with “leniency towards militants” has risen to 53. Out of these, 30 are in different parts of Karachi, 12 in Hyderabad, four in Larkana, six in Sukkur and one each in Ghotki and Sajawal.
Some of these madrasas are considered so dangerous that the home department has requested the paramilitary rangers to send out heavily-armed mobile units in aid to the police to conduct raids inside them. These are located in such Karachi areas as Gulshan-e-Maymar, Surjani Town, Mominabad and Orangi Town — mostly in the north-west of the city.
In Punjab, the provincial authorities have found that 200 people, required to notify their movements to the police if and when they need to leave their place of residence – a provision under the Fourth Schedule of antiterrorism laws that restricts the movement of those allegedly linked to banned militant organisations — were working either as teachers or as the administrators of various madrasas in the province. “We have forced them to leave their jobs,” says a home department official in Lahore, seeking anonymity.
The Punjab government has also shut down three seminaries linked to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a militant organisation that India alleges was involved in a recent attack on its air force base in Pathankot. The closed down madrasas were located in Sialkot, Rawalpindi and Gujranwala — but the JeM headquarters, in a madrasa called Usman-o-Ali in Bahawalpur, remains functional.
A view of one of the hostels of Darul Uloom Haqqania, Akora Khattak | Ghulam Dastageer
Jamia Manzoorul Islamia, a sprawling semicircular complex of multistorey classrooms and hostel blocks with a courtyard in the middle, is located in Lahore Cantonment’s Saddar area. A Pakhtun gunman greets the visitors as they enter the madrasa and directs them to an office block to the east of the imposing entrance. Some 1,000 students of different ages get free education here. About 700 of them come from places outside Lahore and get free boarding, lodging and meals.
Pir Saifullah Khalid, the madrasa’s founder administrator, came to Lahore from Islamabad and set up the madrasa in 1986. As a visitor hears chants of children reciting the Quran in a large hall, his nine-year-old son, Imdadullah, enters the room and whispers something in his father’s ear. “Shake hands with uncle and tell him your name in English and also tell him where you study if you want me to give you money,” he commands the boy. Imdadullah obliges. “He studies at a private English-medium school,” Khalid says proudly.
Jamia Manzoorul Islamia is one of the four madrasas in Lahore that the provincial CTD believes to have “militant leanings”. The other three are Jamia Madnia Jadeed on Raiwind Road, not very far from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s sprawling estate; Farooq-e-Azam, also in Lahore’s Cantonment area; and Mohammadia Masjid near Chauburji.
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“Prove it,” says Khalid when asked about his seminary’s links with militancy. In the last 12 months, he says, the law enforcement agencies have raided the madrasa three times, late in the night on each occasion. “We have never stopped the authorities from examining our premises or questioning our students and teachers. We have nothing to hide,” he says.
Raids are not restricted to madrasas which focus on providing religious education alone, as Jamia Manzoorul Islamia does. Far from being an average madrasa where students sit on prayer mats and pore over medieval texts, the modern-looking Jamia Qadria in Rahim Yar Khan was raided in January 2016. Equipped with computers and close-circuit cameras that keep a watch on every nook and cranny of its premises, the seminary appears to be more like a posh private school than a religious education institution. It does not offer religious courses alone — more than half of its students take board and university examinations under the government education system, pursuing their religious studies alongside.
Apart from large-scale operations, small contingents of law enforcement personnel visit madrasas in the region once or twice every month for updated information on the students and the teachers and to keep a watchful eye on the money coming in and going out.
During the raid, over 20 armed police and intelligence agencies personnel barged into Jamia Qadria and closed down its main gate. They searched the premises thoroughly, says Jawadur Rahman, the madrasa’s vice principal. They examined hostel rooms, where students were taking a nap during the afternoon recess, and selected some students randomly and questioned about their antecedents and daily routines. “During the one-hour long search operation, the law enforcement personnel also went over the books in the library and examined the documents at the administration office,” says Rahman.
Since the early 2015 announcement of the National Action Plan (NAP) to eliminate terrorism, such raids have become a matter of routine, especially in the southern parts of Punjab. Apart from large-scale operations, small contingents of law enforcement personnel visit madrasas in the region once or twice every month for updated information on the students and the teachers and to keep a watchful eye on the money coming in and going out.
Qari Muhammad Tahseen, administrator of a Multan-based madrasa, claims intelligence personnel often visit the seminaries, looking for information on whether a madrasa is involved in sectarian violence and whether it is getting funding from abroad. More worrying for him than these queries is another official measure: phones of the administrators and senior teachers are being tapped these days, he claims.
Background interviews with police officials and madrasa administrators in Multan, Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan suggest that the official attitude towards madrasas has shifted from benign indifference in the past to intrusive watchfulness — after the killing of LeJ chief Malik Ishaq, in a reported encounter with the police in July 2015. Government officials feel that Deobandi sectarian elements and their supportive madrasas have been considerably weakened with his death, which the law enforcement departments are using as a helpful development to tighten the security and surveillance noose around madrasas.
“The government is probing all those madrasas that sectarian militants such as Ishaq and his affiliates used to visit,” says Hasan Ahmed Darkhwasti, the administrator of Jamia Abdullah bin Masood in Khanpur town of Rahim Yar Khan. His madrasa itself had hosted Ishaq on several occasions before his arrest and murder because, he claims, the intelligence agencies would advise Deobandi seminaries in the region to keep close contact with people like Ishaq.
Another murder in another part of the province – of Punjab’s home minister Shuja Khanzada at his Attock residence in 2015 – has also forced the government to start looking into the activities of madrasa students, teachers and administrators. Officials in Lahore say the crackdown against madrasas was launched after the militants linked with Jamaatul Ahrar, a splinter group of TTP, claimed to have assassinated Khanzada through the logistic support allegedly provided by some seminaries.
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“We have raided 450-500 madrasas since then. Some raids were intelligence-based while others were random,” says a senior Lahore-based police official. He does not want to be named because he is not authorised to speak publicly on the subject. “We have checked their records, probed their links with militant groups and impounded whatever suspect material we found such as computers, weapons and hate literature,” he says.
Though the raids against madrasas have been discontinued in recent weeks due to the apprehension that those might be seen as being conducted to please the western donors, the official adds, “we continue to do surveillance and carry out intelligence-based action”.
In Karachi, raids are selective and targeted, and are carried out as part of the NAP implementation, officials say. Many madrasa administrators verify that they are regularly questioned about the numbers and the identities of their students as well as the names and the institutional affiliation of any guests that they ever have.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a list compiled by the Special Branch of the provincial police, 76 madrasas have been put under highest official surveillance. Only two of these are in Peshawar.
Yet most of them see these measures as a routine exercise which is yielding no tangible results. “I do not know if any madrasa has been shut down in Karachi as a result of search operations,” says Maulana Umer Sadiq, a local leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam—Fazl (JUI-F), which runs many madrasas in the city’s District West. Abdul Kareem Bukhari, another madrasa administrator in the same district, is also not convinced that the operations are effective. “I can assure you that the police have not arrested a single person in District West,” he claims.
The government officials dismiss these claims as propaganda meant to portray that nothing sinister is going on inside the madrasas. They cite a recent home department report to claim that at least one person, Ismail Shah, was arrested from a madrasa inside Mustafa Masjid in Site area for possessing and distributing jihadi literature in the neighbourhood.
Another report, prepared last year by the same department, says around 167 madrasas have been forced to close down across Sindh for their suspected links with militancy and sectarianism. None of these sealed madrasas, however, happen to be in Karachi. The authorities also refuse to reveal the names, locations and sectarian identities of the sealed institutions.
The officials have compiled a detailed list of all the madrasas in the province and have geotagged a large number of them so that the coordinates of their location are precisely mapped in the government records and a photo or another visual of their premises is available in the official files. The following is a division-wise breakdown of the madrasas as per the list which puts the total number of madrasa students in the province at 517,695:
Division-wise breakdown of the madrasas
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In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a list compiled by the special branch of the provincial police, 76 madrasas have been put under high-level official surveillance. Only two of these are in Peshawar. The highest number of madrasas under the strictest surveillance (18) is in Lakki Marwat; the second highest number (13) is in Dera Ismail Khan; and the third highest number (10) is in Bannu.
In Punjab, authorities claim they have geotagged all the 14,000 or so madrasas in the province, although a large number of them are not even registered with any government department. “We have collected complete data on the number of children enrolled in these madrasas. We also know how many foreign students are enrolled and in which madrasa,” says a Lahore-based official, who does not want to be named.
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The way the Punjab government is moving towards the seminaries is causing a lot of discomfort among the madrasa administrators. “We are fine with the collection of information and any other queries, but the government officials must conduct those exercises in a decent way; they should not humiliate and harass the people in seminaries through unnecessarily aggressive actions,” says the administrator of a madrasa in Multan. “The law enforcement agencies mostly treat the teachers and students of the seminaries as criminals,” he claims.
Others complain the government treats madrasas as hatcheries of terrorism, even when there is only circumstantial evidence of it. “Intelligence agencies came to know that a man named Umar, who happened to be a close aide of LeJ’s deceased chief, was once a student at our madrasa. The officials came to us and started questioning us about him as if we are responsible for all the acts of all our former students,” says Azizur Rahman Darkhwasti, the administrator of Jamia Arabia Makhzanul Uloom, a prominent Deobandi madrasa in Rahim Yar Khan’s Khanpur town.
Mohsin Rahmani, a teacher at the same madrasa, recounts how the law enforcement personnel registered a case for promoting sectarian hatred against the administrator of a local seminary over the possession of a book of Deobandi beliefs which, he claims, did not incite any hatred towards anyone.
Administrators of madrasas in Rahim Yar Khan also like to cite the case of Shafiqur Rahman, a khateeb (scribe) at a local mosque, to claim that the cases against people linked to madrasas are being registered on whim. Rahman himself claims to have been victimised for publicly opposing a ban imposed by the district police officer on the collection of donation for madrasas. “The officer was so displeased that he booked me for violating the Punjab Sound Systems Regulation Act during the Friday prayers,” he says.
Shafiqur Rahman was able to secure an acquittal from a court but the police have still put his name in a list of people whose movements are governed by the Fourth Schedule, due to alleged links with terrorist organisations. “I have never attended any public meeting by any sectarian or extremist organisation,” Shafiqur Rahman says in his defence.
The intensity of government actions has forced some madrasas to take unprecedented precautionary measures. Jamia Qadria, for example, checks the personal belongings, mobile phones and hostel rooms of the students every month to ensure that they are not doing anything that may land their institution in trouble with the government. Three students were expelled a couple of months ago after badges supporting Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, an outlawed anti-Shia organisation, were found in their bags, says Vice Principal Jawadur Rahman.
Some senior law enforcement officials in Lahore believe that madrasas are not “directly involved in terrorism” and, therefore, must not be punished for the individual acts of their graduates.
Government officials in southern Punjab claim they have solid reasons to conduct raids. “Terrorists apprehended recently were once linked to certain madrasas. That is why the police are probing the seminaries they had been associated with,” says SP Irfan Samo in Rahim Yar Khan. He denies being harsh or selective, let alone personal, in these probes. “No specific sects or persons are our targets, and madrasas belonging to all sects and schools of thought are being treated equally.”
Many madrasa administrators protest that the official measures are aimed at nothing else but maligning the institutions of religious learning. “Midnight raids, sieges of madrasas and harassment [are meant to] please the Western countries,” says Mufti Attaur Rahman, principal of Jamiatul Madina, a madrasa in Bahawalpur. “Countless criminals and terrorists have studied at schools, colleges and universities but the government never raids their educational institutions. Why then does the government harass madrasas for the individual acts of their former associates?” he asks.
Some senior law enforcement officials in Lahore echo his concerns. They believe that madrasas are not “directly involved in terrorism” and, therefore, must not be punished for the individual acts of their graduates. Their argument: most suspects involved in acts of terrorism at home and abroad come from mainstream educational institutions and reputed Pakistani and foreign universities. “Should those universities and colleges also be shut down?” asks one senior police official.
He, therefore, opposes “stereotyping” madrasas as “breeding grounds of militancy and militants” and insists that “we, as society, have massively been radicalised over time”. This situation, he says, “cannot be reversed by demonising madrasas and their students alone”.
A mega class room at a madrasa |Ghulam Dastageer
Continued........
Muhammad Hashim appears much younger than he is. Wearing a light blue salwar kameez and a white skullcap, he looks boyishly innocent. Sporting a trimmed brown beard, he can speak only broken Urdu and converses mostly in Pashto, despite having lived in Karachi since his birth in 1989.
He, as well as his six brothers, received their education from Jamia Farooqia, a Deobandi seminary in Shah Faisal Colony, Karachi, where around 3,000 students are enrolled in courses ranging from the memorisation of the Quran to specialisation in Arabic literature and Islamic jurisprudence. After his graduation, Hashim decided to open a madrasa inside his house in Haider Chali, a mostly Pakhtun working-class neighbourhood in Karachi’s north-western Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (Site) area. The two-storey house was purchased in 1992 by his father, Haji Karim, originally a resident of the Swat valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Hashim shifted his family upstairs and turned the small bedrooms on the ground floor into classrooms. This is how Al-Karim Islamic Academy – named after Hashim’s father – came into being in 2007. The madrasa provides basic religious education to around 200 boys and girls who mostly live in nearby houses and streets, and pay a monthly fee of 150 rupees each. Being a teacher of the Quran, Hashim is known as Qari Hashim among his students and their families.
A small room that serves as the office of his madrasa has bare brick walls and cemented flooring. The only furniture in it is a tattered sofa and a small wooden table, a copy of the Quran placed on it. On the dusty afternoon of March 23, 2016, Hashim is sitting in this office, explaining how he does not have anything to do with his elder brother, 33-year-old Shakirullah. “He has a mind of his own,” Hashim says of Shakirullah, whose wife and children live upstairs along with the rest of Haji Karim’s family.
"We have never stopped the authorities from examining our premises or questioning our students and teachers. We have nothing to hide."
Shakirullah is on the run. Also known as Mufti Shakir or Mufti Shah, he is reported to be involved in terrorist activities. Al-Karim Islamic Academy is seen as his sanctuary. The police and the paramilitary rangers have repeatedly raided the place since 2014 for his capture. “He is not a mufti, but his friends call him mufti,” says Hashim. Shakirullah received the title while studying at Jamia Farooqia. “He was taking a two year course there in 2006 and 2007,” says Hashim. But Shakirullah dropped out before completing the course and, according to his younger brother, became “reserved and did not share much with the family about his activities”.
In the next few years, Shakirullah allegedly became a major facilitator of terrorism in Karachi. The data maintained by Karachi’s Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) shows him to be associated with the Swat chapter of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). He is also alleged to have provided suicide bombers to the anti-Shia militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Naeemullah, one of the suicide bombers Shakirullah is reported to have mentored, assassinated Superintendent of the Police (SP) Aslam Khan, known for carrying out deadly anti-Taliban operations in Karachi, on January 9, 2014.
Students of Al-Jamiatul Asaria during their lunch break | Ghulam Dastageer
Eight men who attacked a police picket in 2013 near a factory on 3rd Street in Site and injured a police official are known to have links with him, too. Syed Tahir Shah, an assistant sub-inspector at a Site area police station, says “we arrested three of the suspected attackers and they named Shakirullah as the provider of weapons and money to carry out the attack”.
A few months after the attack – on January 24, 2014 – a large contingent of the Sindh Rangers surrounded Al-Karim Islamic Academy at around 11:30 pm. They were looking for Shakirullah but he was not there. “None of us knew where he was,” says Hashim.
Also read: Islamic Republic versus Islamic State
Two days later, the rangers raided the seminary again and made Shakirullah’s other brother, Muhammad Akbar, call him. Shakirullah returned home immediately after receiving the call and was instantly arrested. A court in Karachi released him on bail in September 2014 and, according to Hashim, he “stayed with us for a week”. Since then, he has not seen his brother, Hashim says, speaking slowly.
Shakirullah left for some unknown destination and also took his younger brother, Muhammad Usman, with him. “We have not heard from the two since then,” says Hashim.
In the first week of October 2015, law enforcement agencies conducted a third raid on the seminary. Hashim heard his name being announced that day from a loudspeaker and stepped out of the madrasa. He saw a police contingent asking questions from the local residents. The police then probed him, inquiring about Shakirullah. Before calling off the raid, they took another brother, Muhammad Ahmed, into custody. A few weeks later, Ahmed was released but was rearrested soon in a fresh raid at their house.
Syed Imran Ali Shah was seven years old when his father was murdered. Another seven years later, in 1999, he managed to secure admission at Mercy Pak School – an Arab-funded orphanage-cum-madrasa on the outskirts of Peshawar – thanks to one of his relatives who once taught there.
Shah says there was nothing in the madrasa syllabus that preached jihad, yet he was so radicalised by the time he passed his matriculation exam in 2003, that he wanted to join a jihadi organisation. He blames his passion for jihad on a teacher at the Mercy Pak School who used to deliver regular sermons on the importance and the need for it.
After completing his matriculation, Shah met someone associated with jihad in Indian-administered Kashmir. He received guerilla training at a camp in Oghi area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Mansehra District. He claims he could not cope with the rigours of life in the camp and returned home after 35 days to his native village of Wadpagga, situated in the semi-rural periphery of Peshawar.
Many similar stories have appeared in memoirs of jihadi fighters, academic analyses, research reports, and journalistic exposés. Beginning with the leaders and the cadre of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who are known to have received education in Pakistani madrasas, a large number of suicide bombers and sectarian killers have proven links with madrasas. Just to cite one example, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost – a former detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and reportedly one of the main leaders of the Pakistan-Afghanistan chapter of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) – is a graduate of Al-Jamiatul Asaria madrasa in Peshawar’s Chamkani area, acknowledges Umer Bin Abdul Aziz, the head of the madrasa.
Feroze Shah, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in Karachi’s District West, tells the Herald that his department has identified five madarasas in his jurisdiction that help militants procure money and other logistics to carry out acts of terrorism.
Al-Jamiatul Asaria, founded in 1977, is a large complex of buildings stretched over 10 acres of land. Half of its 535 male students and about 200 of its 530 female students are natives of neighbouring Afghanistan.
Law enforcement officials in different parts of the country verify that some madrasas do not just radicalise their students to wage jihad against their religious and sectarian opponents, but also provide financial resources and logistic support to known religious and sectarian assassins. Feroze Shah, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in Karachi’s District West, tells the Herald that his department has identified five madarasas in his jurisdiction that help militants procure money and other logistics to carry out acts of terrorism. 12 madrasas in Karachi’s District Central are alleged to be doing the same thing, says a Sindh home department report, seen by the Herald.
In Sindh, 46 madrasas were found in 2015 to be either institutionally linked with militant groups or were facilitating terrorist activities, according to the home department report. In the first three months of 2016, the number of madrasas with “leniency towards militants” has risen to 53. Out of these, 30 are in different parts of Karachi, 12 in Hyderabad, four in Larkana, six in Sukkur and one each in Ghotki and Sajawal.
Some of these madrasas are considered so dangerous that the home department has requested the paramilitary rangers to send out heavily-armed mobile units in aid to the police to conduct raids inside them. These are located in such Karachi areas as Gulshan-e-Maymar, Surjani Town, Mominabad and Orangi Town — mostly in the north-west of the city.
In Punjab, the provincial authorities have found that 200 people, required to notify their movements to the police if and when they need to leave their place of residence – a provision under the Fourth Schedule of antiterrorism laws that restricts the movement of those allegedly linked to banned militant organisations — were working either as teachers or as the administrators of various madrasas in the province. “We have forced them to leave their jobs,” says a home department official in Lahore, seeking anonymity.
The Punjab government has also shut down three seminaries linked to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a militant organisation that India alleges was involved in a recent attack on its air force base in Pathankot. The closed down madrasas were located in Sialkot, Rawalpindi and Gujranwala — but the JeM headquarters, in a madrasa called Usman-o-Ali in Bahawalpur, remains functional.
A view of one of the hostels of Darul Uloom Haqqania, Akora Khattak | Ghulam Dastageer
Jamia Manzoorul Islamia, a sprawling semicircular complex of multistorey classrooms and hostel blocks with a courtyard in the middle, is located in Lahore Cantonment’s Saddar area. A Pakhtun gunman greets the visitors as they enter the madrasa and directs them to an office block to the east of the imposing entrance. Some 1,000 students of different ages get free education here. About 700 of them come from places outside Lahore and get free boarding, lodging and meals.
Pir Saifullah Khalid, the madrasa’s founder administrator, came to Lahore from Islamabad and set up the madrasa in 1986. As a visitor hears chants of children reciting the Quran in a large hall, his nine-year-old son, Imdadullah, enters the room and whispers something in his father’s ear. “Shake hands with uncle and tell him your name in English and also tell him where you study if you want me to give you money,” he commands the boy. Imdadullah obliges. “He studies at a private English-medium school,” Khalid says proudly.
Jamia Manzoorul Islamia is one of the four madrasas in Lahore that the provincial CTD believes to have “militant leanings”. The other three are Jamia Madnia Jadeed on Raiwind Road, not very far from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s sprawling estate; Farooq-e-Azam, also in Lahore’s Cantonment area; and Mohammadia Masjid near Chauburji.
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“Prove it,” says Khalid when asked about his seminary’s links with militancy. In the last 12 months, he says, the law enforcement agencies have raided the madrasa three times, late in the night on each occasion. “We have never stopped the authorities from examining our premises or questioning our students and teachers. We have nothing to hide,” he says.
Raids are not restricted to madrasas which focus on providing religious education alone, as Jamia Manzoorul Islamia does. Far from being an average madrasa where students sit on prayer mats and pore over medieval texts, the modern-looking Jamia Qadria in Rahim Yar Khan was raided in January 2016. Equipped with computers and close-circuit cameras that keep a watch on every nook and cranny of its premises, the seminary appears to be more like a posh private school than a religious education institution. It does not offer religious courses alone — more than half of its students take board and university examinations under the government education system, pursuing their religious studies alongside.
Apart from large-scale operations, small contingents of law enforcement personnel visit madrasas in the region once or twice every month for updated information on the students and the teachers and to keep a watchful eye on the money coming in and going out.
During the raid, over 20 armed police and intelligence agencies personnel barged into Jamia Qadria and closed down its main gate. They searched the premises thoroughly, says Jawadur Rahman, the madrasa’s vice principal. They examined hostel rooms, where students were taking a nap during the afternoon recess, and selected some students randomly and questioned about their antecedents and daily routines. “During the one-hour long search operation, the law enforcement personnel also went over the books in the library and examined the documents at the administration office,” says Rahman.
Since the early 2015 announcement of the National Action Plan (NAP) to eliminate terrorism, such raids have become a matter of routine, especially in the southern parts of Punjab. Apart from large-scale operations, small contingents of law enforcement personnel visit madrasas in the region once or twice every month for updated information on the students and the teachers and to keep a watchful eye on the money coming in and going out.
Qari Muhammad Tahseen, administrator of a Multan-based madrasa, claims intelligence personnel often visit the seminaries, looking for information on whether a madrasa is involved in sectarian violence and whether it is getting funding from abroad. More worrying for him than these queries is another official measure: phones of the administrators and senior teachers are being tapped these days, he claims.
Background interviews with police officials and madrasa administrators in Multan, Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan suggest that the official attitude towards madrasas has shifted from benign indifference in the past to intrusive watchfulness — after the killing of LeJ chief Malik Ishaq, in a reported encounter with the police in July 2015. Government officials feel that Deobandi sectarian elements and their supportive madrasas have been considerably weakened with his death, which the law enforcement departments are using as a helpful development to tighten the security and surveillance noose around madrasas.
“The government is probing all those madrasas that sectarian militants such as Ishaq and his affiliates used to visit,” says Hasan Ahmed Darkhwasti, the administrator of Jamia Abdullah bin Masood in Khanpur town of Rahim Yar Khan. His madrasa itself had hosted Ishaq on several occasions before his arrest and murder because, he claims, the intelligence agencies would advise Deobandi seminaries in the region to keep close contact with people like Ishaq.
Another murder in another part of the province – of Punjab’s home minister Shuja Khanzada at his Attock residence in 2015 – has also forced the government to start looking into the activities of madrasa students, teachers and administrators. Officials in Lahore say the crackdown against madrasas was launched after the militants linked with Jamaatul Ahrar, a splinter group of TTP, claimed to have assassinated Khanzada through the logistic support allegedly provided by some seminaries.
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“We have raided 450-500 madrasas since then. Some raids were intelligence-based while others were random,” says a senior Lahore-based police official. He does not want to be named because he is not authorised to speak publicly on the subject. “We have checked their records, probed their links with militant groups and impounded whatever suspect material we found such as computers, weapons and hate literature,” he says.
Though the raids against madrasas have been discontinued in recent weeks due to the apprehension that those might be seen as being conducted to please the western donors, the official adds, “we continue to do surveillance and carry out intelligence-based action”.
In Karachi, raids are selective and targeted, and are carried out as part of the NAP implementation, officials say. Many madrasa administrators verify that they are regularly questioned about the numbers and the identities of their students as well as the names and the institutional affiliation of any guests that they ever have.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a list compiled by the Special Branch of the provincial police, 76 madrasas have been put under highest official surveillance. Only two of these are in Peshawar.
Yet most of them see these measures as a routine exercise which is yielding no tangible results. “I do not know if any madrasa has been shut down in Karachi as a result of search operations,” says Maulana Umer Sadiq, a local leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam—Fazl (JUI-F), which runs many madrasas in the city’s District West. Abdul Kareem Bukhari, another madrasa administrator in the same district, is also not convinced that the operations are effective. “I can assure you that the police have not arrested a single person in District West,” he claims.
The government officials dismiss these claims as propaganda meant to portray that nothing sinister is going on inside the madrasas. They cite a recent home department report to claim that at least one person, Ismail Shah, was arrested from a madrasa inside Mustafa Masjid in Site area for possessing and distributing jihadi literature in the neighbourhood.
Another report, prepared last year by the same department, says around 167 madrasas have been forced to close down across Sindh for their suspected links with militancy and sectarianism. None of these sealed madrasas, however, happen to be in Karachi. The authorities also refuse to reveal the names, locations and sectarian identities of the sealed institutions.
The officials have compiled a detailed list of all the madrasas in the province and have geotagged a large number of them so that the coordinates of their location are precisely mapped in the government records and a photo or another visual of their premises is available in the official files. The following is a division-wise breakdown of the madrasas as per the list which puts the total number of madrasa students in the province at 517,695:
Division-wise breakdown of the madrasas
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In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a list compiled by the special branch of the provincial police, 76 madrasas have been put under high-level official surveillance. Only two of these are in Peshawar. The highest number of madrasas under the strictest surveillance (18) is in Lakki Marwat; the second highest number (13) is in Dera Ismail Khan; and the third highest number (10) is in Bannu.
In Punjab, authorities claim they have geotagged all the 14,000 or so madrasas in the province, although a large number of them are not even registered with any government department. “We have collected complete data on the number of children enrolled in these madrasas. We also know how many foreign students are enrolled and in which madrasa,” says a Lahore-based official, who does not want to be named.
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The way the Punjab government is moving towards the seminaries is causing a lot of discomfort among the madrasa administrators. “We are fine with the collection of information and any other queries, but the government officials must conduct those exercises in a decent way; they should not humiliate and harass the people in seminaries through unnecessarily aggressive actions,” says the administrator of a madrasa in Multan. “The law enforcement agencies mostly treat the teachers and students of the seminaries as criminals,” he claims.
Others complain the government treats madrasas as hatcheries of terrorism, even when there is only circumstantial evidence of it. “Intelligence agencies came to know that a man named Umar, who happened to be a close aide of LeJ’s deceased chief, was once a student at our madrasa. The officials came to us and started questioning us about him as if we are responsible for all the acts of all our former students,” says Azizur Rahman Darkhwasti, the administrator of Jamia Arabia Makhzanul Uloom, a prominent Deobandi madrasa in Rahim Yar Khan’s Khanpur town.
Mohsin Rahmani, a teacher at the same madrasa, recounts how the law enforcement personnel registered a case for promoting sectarian hatred against the administrator of a local seminary over the possession of a book of Deobandi beliefs which, he claims, did not incite any hatred towards anyone.
Administrators of madrasas in Rahim Yar Khan also like to cite the case of Shafiqur Rahman, a khateeb (scribe) at a local mosque, to claim that the cases against people linked to madrasas are being registered on whim. Rahman himself claims to have been victimised for publicly opposing a ban imposed by the district police officer on the collection of donation for madrasas. “The officer was so displeased that he booked me for violating the Punjab Sound Systems Regulation Act during the Friday prayers,” he says.
Shafiqur Rahman was able to secure an acquittal from a court but the police have still put his name in a list of people whose movements are governed by the Fourth Schedule, due to alleged links with terrorist organisations. “I have never attended any public meeting by any sectarian or extremist organisation,” Shafiqur Rahman says in his defence.
The intensity of government actions has forced some madrasas to take unprecedented precautionary measures. Jamia Qadria, for example, checks the personal belongings, mobile phones and hostel rooms of the students every month to ensure that they are not doing anything that may land their institution in trouble with the government. Three students were expelled a couple of months ago after badges supporting Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, an outlawed anti-Shia organisation, were found in their bags, says Vice Principal Jawadur Rahman.
Some senior law enforcement officials in Lahore believe that madrasas are not “directly involved in terrorism” and, therefore, must not be punished for the individual acts of their graduates.
Government officials in southern Punjab claim they have solid reasons to conduct raids. “Terrorists apprehended recently were once linked to certain madrasas. That is why the police are probing the seminaries they had been associated with,” says SP Irfan Samo in Rahim Yar Khan. He denies being harsh or selective, let alone personal, in these probes. “No specific sects or persons are our targets, and madrasas belonging to all sects and schools of thought are being treated equally.”
Many madrasa administrators protest that the official measures are aimed at nothing else but maligning the institutions of religious learning. “Midnight raids, sieges of madrasas and harassment [are meant to] please the Western countries,” says Mufti Attaur Rahman, principal of Jamiatul Madina, a madrasa in Bahawalpur. “Countless criminals and terrorists have studied at schools, colleges and universities but the government never raids their educational institutions. Why then does the government harass madrasas for the individual acts of their former associates?” he asks.
Some senior law enforcement officials in Lahore echo his concerns. They believe that madrasas are not “directly involved in terrorism” and, therefore, must not be punished for the individual acts of their graduates. Their argument: most suspects involved in acts of terrorism at home and abroad come from mainstream educational institutions and reputed Pakistani and foreign universities. “Should those universities and colleges also be shut down?” asks one senior police official.
He, therefore, opposes “stereotyping” madrasas as “breeding grounds of militancy and militants” and insists that “we, as society, have massively been radicalised over time”. This situation, he says, “cannot be reversed by demonising madrasas and their students alone”.
A mega class room at a madrasa |Ghulam Dastageer
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