The madrassa reform campaign launched by General Musharraf in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in January 2002 has largely failed and hardly a few cosmetic changes could be introduced in the existing madrassa system. The federal government’s plan for madrassa reform is a classic example of the one-step forward two-steps backwards approach. Musharraf’s rhetoric to modernise the religious schools has met with little success mainly due to a lack of political will to enforce any of the much-trumpeted policy decisions that were supposed to be taken by his administration to reform the madrassas by bringing them into the educational mainstream. Subsequently, signs of Talibanisation are quite evident in all parts of Pakistan, especially in the heart of the federal capital where hardline religious leaders and hundreds of men and women activists from local madrassas continue to challenge the writ of the government by trying to force their brand of Islamic justice.

The March 30 raid by a group of burqa-clad madrassa students on a brothel in Islamabad and subsequent hostage taking of the alleged brothel owner was the second provocation by the Jamia Hafsa girl students in a short span of three months. Since January 2007, other than this incident, the violent students have occupied a children’s library adjacent to their madrassa after the Capital Development Authority began demolition of two mosques that were constructed on state land without permission. Several hundred girls of the Jamia Hafsa armed with bamboo sticks and weapons seized the only library in the federal capital, chiefly meant for children and refused to vacate it until the government reconstructed the mosques. At one stage the government did start reconstruction but the girls upped the ante and made extraneous demands including enforcement of Shariah laws in the country.

Strangely, the children’s library stand-off continued for nearly two months without any resolution in sight. The Islamabad administration made several plans to raid the library and get it vacated but then caved in for fear of a possible bloodbath in a fight with girls and their extremist supporters threatening to conduct suicide attacks all around and even beyond. As the library standoff was yet to be resolved, the girls of the Jamia Hafsa and their jihadi mentors from Lal Masjid launched yet another campaign to impose morality on the people by taking rounds of the nearby city markets and threatening video and music shop owners to close down their business or face the consequences. Encouraged by the soft pedalling by the government on their earlier actions, the girls carrying batons raided a house in a nearby locality and arrested a woman along with her daughter and daughter-in-law, accusing them of running a brothel. They tied their victims with ropes and dragged them to the seminary.

As Islamabad police intervened to rescue the women and arrested some girl students of the madrassa in the process, the girls retaliated by attacking a police vehicle and capturing two policemen and the vehicle. To the utter humiliation of the law enforcers, the police authorities had to swap the detained girls to secure the release of their men in uniform. To add insult to injury, the police authorities took away their men without even securing the release of the detained women. The three kidnapped women and a six-month-old baby were finally released after they had confessed their running a brothel at a news conference arranged inside the four walls of the madrassa. However, soon after their release, the ladies disowned their confessions, saying they were made to do so under pressure.

As if all these actions were not enough, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the prayer leader of Lal Masjid and the patron of the Jamia Hafsa, gave the government a one week deadline to enforce Sharia in the country, saying: “Otherwise the clerics will Islamise society themselves.” While delivering a Friday sermon on March 30, the Maulana further gave a one week deadline to the Islamabad administration to shut down brothels, asserting: “Otherwise the seminary students will proceed against them on their own. If we find a woman with loose morals, we will prosecute her in Lal Masjid.” The same day, on March 30, Umme Hassan, the principal of Jamia Hafsa, told newsmen that her students were maintaining a crime register of their own and keeping an eye on all illegal activities in Islamabad. “There are 22 brothels in Sector G-6 alone.” One wonders if the primary job of the madrassa was to impart religious education amongst students or maintain a record of the brothels.

These significant developments that are taking place in the centre of the federal capital have raised many awkward questions about the authenticity of the repeated claims being made by the Musharraf regime to have taken concrete measures to uproot extremism and contain fanatical elements in Pakistani society. The three violent actions of the burqa-clad girl students of the madrassa within a short span of three months has caused both embarrassment and shame to the Musharraf regime besides questioning its ability to establish the writ of state on a small band of religious fanatics. The fact that Talibanisation is flourishing right under the nose of an enlightened and moderate General Musharraf further reflects the yawning gap between rhetoric and reality. However, opposition circles say the Jamia Hafsa issue was in fact a ploy of the Musharraf regime to deceive the international community and make it believe that the menace of Talibanisation has spread to Islamabad and the choice was between a military dictatorship and religious fanatics.

Jamia Hafsa is adjacent to Lal Masjid, which lies in the heart of Islamabad and close to the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The mosque and the Jamia Hafsa seminary are run by two prominent religious personalities, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz, the sons of slain religious leader Maulana Abdullah, who was close to President General Ziaul Haq. He was a well-respected but highly politicized Deobandi mullah who remained critical of all the governments except that of General Zia’s. Lal Masjid gained a unique position with the start of the US-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan in the early 1980s when it became a centre for Deobandi jihadis going to fight the Soviet occupation troops. Militant circles say Lal Masjid also became a centre for the Deobandi sectarian groups such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and, later, the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, which were particularly patronised by Maulana Abdullah. Later, in the 1990s, he started patronising Deobandi jihadi groups such as the Harkatul Mujahideen, whose leaders frequently came to deliver sermons and raise funds in the mosque.

Maulana Abdullah was a devoted supporter of the Taliban and the al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, with whom he had reportedly developed special ties. In a newspaper interview, Maulana Abdur Rashid Ghazi, the younger son of the late Maulana Abdullah, confessed that his father had special ties with Osama bin Laden and the two had met on several occasions. Two affiliated madrassas of the Lal Masjid also flourished during the Zia martial law; Jamia Hafsa for girl students was situated just next to the mosque while Jamia Fareedia for boys was situated in the stylish neighbourhood of E-7 of Islamabad. Currently, 5,000 students study in these two madrassas alone. Maulana Abdullah’s Friday sermons were popular among the military and the civilian bureaucracy, and he often preached the cause of jihad, till his murder in 1998. His two sons, namely Khateeb Maulana Abdul Aziz and Vice Khateeb Maulana Abdur Rashid Ghazi, have kept his legacy alive, both his calls for jihad and his mysticism.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Maulana Abdul Aziz delivered some of the most biting sermons from the platform of Lal Masjid while Maulana Abdur Rashid Ghazi led some massive anti-government and anti-US processions in Islamabad. They were the driving force behind a religious decree issued in 2005, saying that the Pakistan army personnel being killed while fighting their fellow Muslims in the Waziristan region should be denied a Muslim burial. The decree was signed by 500 clerics and scholars and led to open defiance within the Pakistani armed forces, which eventually contributed to their withdrawal from Waziristan. Under US pressure, Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior has officially declared the brothers ‘wanted’, but several efforts to nab them have petered out. Every bid to capture them only adds to their popularity, and they have emerged as the real leaders of the religious hardcore of the country. Subsequently, Lal Masjid has become known to the outer world as a symbol of radical Islam, often described by its students as a fort of Islam.

Amidst all these developments comes the latest report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) titled, “Religious Pakistan: Karachi’s Madrassas and Violent Extremism”. Released on March 28, 2007, the report says that the prospects for breaking the link between the madrassa sector and violent extremism would increase if the 2007 national elections are democratic, free and fair. If they are, says the ICG report, it is likely that the religious parties will be marginalised and the national-level moderate parties, with much greater political will to enact meaningful reforms, returned to power. “Exploiting the military government’s weakness, the religious parties and madrassa unions have countered all attempts to regulate the madrassa sector. By backtracking, the Musharraf government has further emboldened sectarian and extremist forces, resulting in a significant contribution to the violence that plagues Karachi and indeed the rest of the country,” the ICG report adds.

While making public its findings, the International Crisis Group says: “More than five years after General Pervez Musharraf declared his intention to crack down on violent sectarian and jihadi groups and to regulate the network of madrassas on which they depend, his government’s reform programme seems in shambles. Banned sectarian and jihadi groups, being supported by networks of mosques and madrassas, continue to operate openly in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, and elsewhere. The international community needs to press General Musharraf to fulfil his commitments, in particular to enforce genuine controls on the madrassas and allow free and fair national elections in 2007. It should also shift the focus of its donor aid from helping the government’s ineffectual efforts to reform the religious schools to improving the very weak public school sector.”

According to the ICG report, Karachi’s madrassas that have trained and dispatched jihadi fighters to Afghanistan and Held Kashmir, offer a valuable case study of the government failures and consequences for internal stability and regional and international security. “In 2006, the city was rocked by high-profile acts of political violence. Not all madrassas in the city are active centres of jihadis, but even those without direct links to violence promote an ideology that provides religious justification for such barbaric attacks. Given the government’s half-hearted reform efforts, these unregulated madrassas contribute to a climate of lawlessness in numerous ways — from land encroachment and criminality to violent clashes between rival militant groups and the use of the pulpit to spread calls for sectarian and jihadi violence. The Pakistan government has yet to take any of the overdue and necessary steps to control religious extremism in the country. Musharraf’s periodic declarations of tough action, given in response to international events and pressure, are invariably followed by retreat. Plans are announced [by the regime] with much fanfare and then abandoned,” says the ICG report.

Keeping in view the findings of the International Crisis Group, one is constrained to say that like his predecessors, the priority of Pakistan’s fourth military dictator too hasn’t been reforming madrassas and eradicating Islamic extremism, but the legitimization and consolidation of his despotic rule, for which he is dependent upon the religious clergy. And the mushroom growth of extremists in madrassas like Jamia Fareedia and Jamia Hafsa will continue unabated until and unless the Mullah-Military alliance is effectively put an end to.

The writer is the former editor of Weekly Independent.

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