Creating Frankenstein: The Impact of Saudi Export of Ultra-Conservatism in South Asia (Part 2)


A Case in Point

The history of Tashfeen Malik is a case in point. Her experience and that of her family is indicative of the kind of tensions adherence to Wahhabism's narrow mindset can foster.  Malik moved with her parents to Saudi Arabia when she was a toddler. The two decades in Saudi Arabia persuaded the family to abandon their Sufi practices that included visiting shrines, honouring saints and enjoying Sufi trance music  - practices rejected by the kingdom's Wahhabism. The change sparked tensions with relatives in Pakistan, whom the Maliks accused in Wahhabi fashion of rejecting the oneness of God by revering saints. Syed Nisar Hussain Shah, an academic at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Malik’s native Pakistani town of Multan, whose madrassas are known as jihadist nurseries, where she studied Pharmacology, recalls Malik seeking assistance because her conservative norms clashed with more the comparatively more liberal values of her dormitory mates. “She told me, ‘my parents live in Saudi Arabia, and I am not getting along with my roommates and cannot adjust with them, so can you help me?’” Shah recalls.[i]

While in Pakistan, Malik studied Islam for 18 months at the Al-Huda Institute, a religious school with branches in Britain, the United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka that propagates non-violent Wahhabism.[ii]  Students at Islamabad’s Islamic International University, whose mosque was donated by Saudi Arabia and whose foreign liaisons are primarily Saudi universities, are encouraged to attend religious classes at Al Huda.[iii] Cultural anthropologist Sadaf Ahmad describes Al Huda as a “school-turned-social movement.”[iv] Former students of Al Huda describe a curriculum that educates them in puritan Islam, encourages them to isolate themselves from the outside world and view it as hostile, and in some cases, brings vulnerable youth to the edge of radicalism. Al Huda’s Toronto branch closed its doors in December 2015 following news reports that four of its students had attempted to join IS.[v] After enrolling in Al Huda, Malik donned a hijab, refrained from communication with the opposite sex, and spent most of her time studying the Quran.[vi]

“Women would often weep, overcome by religiosity. We were constantly taught that this path was our choice, but also that not choosing it was the way of sin. Gradually, perhaps because I was far from my family, young and troubled, and my education in Britain had provided me with little secular knowledge, I was completely sucked in… Only in retrospect do I realise that essentially I’d been brainwashed into something resembling a cult… I feel that al-Huda’s literalist, conservative interpretation of Islam, which discouraged criticism or dissent, built a fire. It laid down the kindling, the twigs, the wood, ready for a match. And the flames swept in from two directions. First, from geopolitical events: the discourse of Muslim oppression that has gained force across the world, which Islamic State, among others, uses so powerfully. Yet it also requires an internal fire, something within an individual that will ignite fundamentalist theology into violent action. Most women who leave al-Huda institute are zealous for a while, but the sheer intensity requires so much emotional energy that it invariably fizzles out… This happened to me… Yet there was a time when I was lonely, isolated, a troubled girl with nothing but my all-encompassing faith, when I know that a spark could have been ignited within me. I walked on. Tashfeen Malik lit the fire,” said Aliyah Saleem.[vii]

“All her students, who you would think after coming closer to God, would become more tolerant and at peace, have always showed the opposite result. They became intolerant, judgmental and arrogant instead… There is no real proof to back the theory that Al-Huda brainwashed Tashfeen and others into terrorism, but one thing that is for sure is that Madame Hashmi’s [Al-Huda co-founder Farhat Hashmi] institute promotes unhealthy fanaticism and an orthodox manner of thinking. And that could very well turn one into a cold blooded murderer given just the right push; all in hopes to getting in heaven,” added former student Shamila Ghiyas, who had attended several classes given by Al-Huda co-founder Farhat Hashmi.[viii]

Mosharraf Zaidi, an Islamabad-based columnist who specialises in education issues, argues that if Malik was radicalised while studying in Pakistan, “it was because she was exposed to ways of thinking that these schools have helped to promote. They require people to isolate themselves from modernity [outright] -  television is wrong, eating McDonald’s is wrong, mixing with the opposite gender is wrong.  And once you establish that isolation, then dehumanising people is easy…and if you leave someone there, you have left them on a cliff.”[ix]

For people like Malik raised in a Wahhabi environment, as well as those who were not, jihadism’s appeal is in part the absolutism that ultra-conservative strands of Islam project. Both apolitical or non-violent ultra-conservatism and jihadism see the acknowledgement of God’s oneness and His sovereignty as the prime drivers of a believer’s life. All other aspects of life, including family relationships, are secondary to that, which explains why adherents of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups often break from their families, as well as their past. Wahhabis dedicate their lives to prayer, study of religious texts and mosque attendance; jihadis add the dimension of holy war. Their dedication is rooted in Ibn Abd al Wahhab’s assertion that “worship of Allah cannot be performed until taghut (polytheism) is denounced and rejected.”[x]

Educational Vacuum

Al Huda and Malik’s example highlights the educational vacuum in Pakistan, that militant strands of Islam, including Wahhabism, Salafism and jihadism are able to exploit in a country with a poor educational infrastructure and one of the world’s lowest education budgets.[xi]  Pakistan’s some 26,000 madrassas graduate an estimated 200,000 students a year. [12] 

To be sure, the madrassas run the gamut in terms of theological orientation and quality. They also run from mud-walled structures with rote memorisation of the Quran at their core, to sophisticated institutions like Al Huda, to outright jihadi conveyor belts.  A Harvard Kennedy School study put enrolment in madrassas at only 7.5 percent of all children enrolled in Pakistani schools. It argued that enrolment had remained constant much of the first decade of the 21st century.[13] By contrast, the International Crisis Group estimated that 1.5 million students were enrolled in Pakistani madrassas in 2002.[14]

Nonetheless, a 2008 cable from the U.S. consulate in Lahore reported that “financial support estimated at nearly US $100 million  annually was making its way to (conservative) Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic charitable’ organisations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ostensibly with the direct support of those governments…”[15] U.S. diplomat Bryan Hunt estimated in the cable that up to 200 madrassas in southern Punjab, in towns like Multan as well in Dera Ghazi Khan - a juncture of all four of Pakistan’s provinces - and in the central city of Bahawalpur, served as recruitment grounds for militant Islamist groups.

The consulate’s principle officer, Hunt, reported in his cable to authorities in Washington that the funding had spawned a “network (that) reportedly exploited worsening poverty in these areas…to recruit children into the divisions' growing Deobandi and Ahl-el Hadith madrassa network from which they were indoctrinated into jihadi philosophy, deployed to regional training/indoctrination centres, and ultimately sent to terrorist training camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).” He said families with a large number of children who face financial difficulty as a result of inflation, poor crop yields, and growing unemployment are targeted for recruitment.[16]

Hunt said Gulf funding of charitable activities of charities that fronted for groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed that had been proscribed by the U.S. Treasury, had increased the local population’s dependence on extremist groups and undermined the influence of moderate Sufi religious leaders.  Hunt said that the charities targeted boys up to the age of 15. The funds, the diplomat said, had officially been transferred to Pakistan to assist victims of a 2008 earthquake in Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province. “Locals believe that a portion of these funds was siphoned to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in southern and western Punjab in order to expand these sects' presence in a traditionally hostile, but potentially fruitful, recruiting ground.  The initial success of establishing madrassas and mosques in these areas led to subsequent annual ‘donations’ to these same clerics, originating in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Hunt said”[17]

The U.S. diplomat suggested that the influence of officials in key positions in the Pakistan bureaucracy, who were sympathetic to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith, had thwarted efforts by Sufi and other religious scholars to persuade the government to crackdown on extremist funding. “The brother of the Federal Minister for Religious Affairs, and a noted Brailvi/Sufi scholar in his own right, Allama Qasmi, blamed government intransigence on a culture that rewarded political deals with religious extremists.  He stressed that even if political will could be found, the bureaucracy in Religious Affairs, Education, and Defence Ministries remained dominated by (former president) Zia ul Haq appointees, who favoured the Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith religious ideologies.  This bureaucracy, Qasmi claimed, had repeatedly blocked his brother's efforts to push policy in a different direction,” Hunt reported.[18]

Describing in detail how Saudi funds were put to work, Hunt reported that “the local Deobandi or Ahl-e-Hadith maulana (religious scholar) will generally be introduced to the family through these (charitable) organisations.  He will work to convince the parents that their poverty is a direct result of their family's deviation from ‘the true path of Islam’ through ‘idolatrous’ worship at local Sufi shrines and/or with local Sufi Peers.  The maulana suggests that the quickest way to return to ‘favour’ would be to devote the lives of one or two of their sons to Islam.  The maulana will offer to educate these children at his madrassa and to find them employment in the service of Islam.  The concept of ‘martyrdom’ is often discussed and the family is promised that if their sons are ‘martyred’ both the sons and the family will attain ‘salvation’ and the family will obtain God's favour in this life, as well.  An immediate cash payment is finally made to the parents to compensate the family for its ‘sacrifice’ to Islam. Local sources claim that the current average rate is approximately Rs. 500,000 (approximately US$ 6,500) per son,” Hunt wrote.[19]

Hunt said the children were sent to one of up to 200 madrassas located in isolated areas where they are prevented to have contact with the outside world and inculcated with “sectarian extremism, hatred for non-Muslims, and anti-Western/anti-Pakistan government philosophy. Graduates from the school are either employed as clerics and teacher or move on to jihadist training camps.[20]

The infusion of Saudi money and Wahhabism into Deobandi schools, some of which have produced many of the Taliban’s leaders, including Mullah Mohammed Omar, the group’s supreme commander and spiritual guide who reportedly died in 2013; and Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander, has changed the very nature of the movement. ‘As Pakistan’s economy and politics have moved towards West Asia, and away from an Indian history and past, its various Islams have also been influenced by these trends. Pakistan’s version of Deobandi Islam is affected by Saudi Wahhabism, and hence it becomes difficult to argue that these madrassas are still in any sense Deobandi… Islam, even Pakistani and Afghani Islam, is now globalised, Wahhabised, as well as affected by geopolitical influences, which have a far-reaching impact on local and domestic Islam,” said scholar of International Relations, S. Akbar Zaidi.[21]

U.S. Democratic senator Chris Murphy took the example of a possible parent in a small town in northwest Pakistan, to depict her/his vulnerability. “You’re illiterate, you’re poor, you’re getting poorer by the day, unemployment in your village is sky high, inflation is making everything unaffordable, your crop yields have been terrible. And one day, you get a visit that changes your perspective. A cleric from a nearby conservative mosque offers you a different path. He tells you that your poverty is not your fault, but simply a punishment handed down to you because of your unintentional deviation from the true path of Islam. And luckily, there’s a way to get right with God, to devote your son’s life to Islam. And it gets even better, because the cleric’s going to educate your son in his own school, we call them madrassas, and not only will you not have to pay for the education, he’ll actually pay you… And when your son finishes school he’ll get employment in the service of Islam,” Murphy said.[22]

“And so for thousands of families in destitute places like northwest Pakistan, it’s a pretty easy choice,” Murphy said. “But as you go on, you lose contact with your son. Gradually, the school cuts off your access to him. When you do see him, now and again, he’s changing. And then one day it’s over. He’s not the little boy you once knew. He’s a teenager, announcing to you that the only way to show true faith to Islam is to fight for it against the kafir, the infidels who are trying to pollute the Muslim faith, and against the Westerners who are trying to destroy it. He tells you that he’s going off to Afghanistan, or Syria, or Iraq with some fellow students, and that you shouldn’t worry about him because God is on his side,” Murphy added.[23]

The parents try to find out what happened at the school for their son to become a jihadist. “You discover the textbooks that he read, that taught a brand of Islam greatly influenced by something called Wahhabism… I tell you this story because, as you know, some version of it plays out hundreds of times every day in far-flung places, from Pakistan to Kosovo, from Nigeria to Indonesia - the teaching of an intolerant version of Islam to hundreds of millions of young people. In 1956, there were 244 madrassas in Pakistan. Today there are 24,000. So these schools are multiplying all over the globe. And don’t get me wrong, these schools, by and large, they don’t teach violence. They aren’t the minor leagues for extremist groups. But they do teach a version of Islam that leads very nicely into an anti-Shia, anti-Western militancy,” Murphy said.[24]

The pervasiveness in Pakistan of Saudi-backed ultra-conservative-inspired militant Islamist ideology was on full display in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad when authorities opted to shut down all cell phone coverage during Friday prayers to prevent dissemination of a sermon by Maulana Abdul Aziz, rather than detain the jihadist imam. Abdul Aziz, dubbed Mullah Burqa after he tried to escape in 2007 from Islamabad’s Red Mosque at a time that it was besieged by Pakistani military troops, has since been banned from giving sermons. Eight years after the siege in which 75 people died, Abdul Aziz has re-emerged as a seemingly untouchable figure, even if militant groups like Teheek-e-Taliban better known as the Pakistani Taliban that he supports have been significantly weakened in a military crackdown. Abdul Aziz illustrated the degree to which Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism inspired ideology had gained currency in Pakistani society.[25]

So did two events in early in 2016: mass demonstrations in February and March protesting the execution of Mumtaz Qadri,  a jihadist who was an elite Force commando who was convicted to death for killing former Punjab governor Salman Taseer because of his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,[26] and for carrying out a suicide-bombing of a park in Lahore on Easter Sunday.[27] As emergency units rushed to the park where 70 people had been killed and some 300, mostly women and children, wounded police in Islamabad sought to control a 10,000-strong demonstration against Qadri’s execution. Jammat-ul-Ahrar, an offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban said the bombing was aimed at Christians even if the vast majority of the victims were Muslims.

Taken together, the two events suggested that Pakistan’s problem went beyond political violence, to encompass a deep-seated, ultra- conservative and intolerant interpretation of Islam that has taken root in significant segments of society, and has created an environment in which oppression, discrimination and violence against the other is legitimised. The Economist noted that, “the religious hatred it (Jammat-ul-Ahrar) represents has been assiduously cultivated in Pakistan for many years. Saudi money for the building of madrassas (religious seminaries) began to flood into Pakistan during the 1980s with the encouragement of the president at that time, General Zia ul Haq, a Deobandi follower, who saw the country’s Islamisation as his main mission. There are now some 24,000 madrassas in Pakistan, attended by at least 2 million boys. Nearly all adhere to the highly conservative Deobandi sect, whose beliefs are similar to Saudi Wahhabism.” Some analysts put the number of madrassas closer to 30,000. They note that while a majority fall in the realm of the Deobandi, a substantial number subscribe to other interpretations of the faith.[28]

The magazine quoted Tahir Ashrafi, head of the Pakistan Ulema Council, as saying that 60% of the pupils at madrassas were “not involved in any training or terrorist activities.” In other words, 40 percent may be. “It’s a very complex feeder system. All the remaining 40% are not involved in terrorism or terrorist training, but they could be sympathisers, they could funnel part of their funds to terror outfits, they could aid and abet in various ways,” said Mahmoud, a Pakistani lawyer, businessman and author of a forthcoming book on Islam.[29]

In the book, Mahmoud recalls that “a bright young woman who worked with my aunt succeeded in penetrating a religious centre in the outskirts of Islamabad. The centre served as an orphanage and school for girls. It taught them a way of jihad. On occasion, young women, teenage girls, really, from the centre would be introduced to teenage boys from other centres.  If a boy was to be sent on a suicide mission, he would be married to a girl, and the couple would be allowed to consummate their marriage. The experience was intended to provide the boy a foretaste of the pleasures that awaited him in heaven, the girl an assurance of a place in heaven as the wife of a martyr.  If the boy did indeed complete his mission, the girl would be free to remarry. If the boy did not achieve martyrdom, the couple would be kept apart, in purgatory on this earth. Both boy and girl were provided strong incentives to push towards the event of suicide. The centre has been closed, but its cloistered, manipulative spirit endures.”[30]

The fallout of Deobandi philosophy – a “back to basics movement” in the words of British Deobandi Mufti Mohammed Amin Pando –   goes far beyond the realm of South Asia, embedding itself deeply in Muslim minority communities in Europe. A 2016 BBC investigative documentary traced jihadist thinking to a month-long visit to Britain in 1993 by Masood Azhar, a graduate of a Deobandi madrassa called Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town in Karachi, who headed the Pakistani militant group Harakat ul Mujahedeen. Azhar, a portly bespectacled preacher, son of a Bahawalpur religious studies teacher and author of a four-volume treatise on jihad as well as books with titles like Forty Diseases of the Jews,[31] gave 40 lectures during his fundraising and recruitment tour in Britain, and was feted by Islamic scholars from Britain’s largest mosque network. More and more scholars joined his entourage as he toured the country before moving on to Saudi Arabia. His tour included Darul Uloom Bury (Bury House of Knowledge), a boarding school and seminary that was home to Sheikh Yusuf Motala, Britain’s foremost Islamic scholar.[32] A passionate and emotive speaker, women reportedly took off their jewellery and handed it to Azhar after listening to his speeches.[33]

Deobandis, the Muslim sect with the greatest reach in the U.K., control an estimated 40 percent of all British mosques that service an estimated 600,000 people. A substantial number of UK-trained Muslim scholars are graduates of Deobandi institutions. Deobandis trace their roots to a seminary established in 1866, in the Indian town of Deoband in the state of Uttar Pradesh, that was founded in the struggle against British colonialism. The seminary is widely viewed as one of the foremost institutions of Islamic learning, although it consists of a host of departments that focus on the rejection of Christianity, Judaism, Shia Islam, Barelvism and a postgraduate course that teaches loathing of Ahmadis[34]  a sect is widely viewed by conservative Muslims as heretic, because it recognizes Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the messiah prophesied by Mohammed. .[35]  “The theology of the Deoband school…fosters social change and nurtures the ideals of political activism,” noted Islam scholar Ebrahim Moosa. Its adherents run the gamut from political quietists to moderate-minded social activists to militant Islamists like the Taliban.[36]
With Pakistan becoming a battleground in the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Deobandis, funded by Saudi Arabia, launched an anti-Shia campaign. 

The fiery Deobandi cleric Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a madrassa graduate who became head of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), a Deobandi party, is reported to have maintained close ties to Pakistani intelligence[37] until he was killed in 1990 by Shiite militants. Jhangvi, who earned his spores with his agitation against the Ahmadis, [38]  founded Anjuman Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Prophet’s Companions) with the sole purpose of combating Shiites. With Pakistani Shiites feeling empowered and emboldened by the Iranian revolution, Saudi Arabia was more than willing to generously fund the anti-Shiite campaign.[39]  As mentioned earlier, Saudi funds were largely routed through the Pakistani military and the ISI.[40] The Muslim World League also funded the prominent Indian Deobandi scholar, Muḥammad Manz̤oor Naumani, who compiled a book of anti-Shiite fatwas that included opinions of Pakistani scholars and was distributed in Pakistan.[41]

Marouf Dualibi, an Islamic scholar with close ties to Saudi King Fahd was dispatched by the kingdom to help General Zia introduce hudood, the Islamic legal concept of punishment as well as mandatory zakat, a charitable tax, and ushr, an agricultural levy that dates back to early Islam, as well as persuade the Pakistani leader to adopt anti-Shia laws.[42] A 1981 report by the Council of Islamic Ideology - an advisory body of clerics and scholars established to assist the Pakistani government in bringing laws in line with the Quran and the example of the Prophet Mohammed – reported that hudood laws were discussed by the Council and the Law Ministry “under the guidance of Dr. Maruf Dualibi, who was specially detailed by the government of Saudi Arabia for this purpose.”[43]

Pakistani security consultant Muhammad Amir Rana reported that Saudi Arabia in the first decade of the 21st century had donated US $2.7 million to the education department of the municipality of Jhang in Punjab, Jhangvi’s hometown, for the funding of madrassas.[44] The Saudi campaign aimed at pressuring the Pakistani government to designate the Shiites as non-Muslims and make Sunni Islam the basis for an Islamic state. This also served to boost the fortunes of the Deobandis, who until then had been a minor presence, at the expense of other Muslim groups, particularly the Sufis.[45]  “The Saudis injected conservative attitudes into Muslim societies. They infiltrated Muslim societies. It created many divisions and a sectarian culture. It has impacted Pakistan’s social fabric,” Rana said in an interview.[46]

Sipah-e-Sahab’s membership swelled to a million, including some 5,000 well-trained militants who waged a campaign of terror against Shiites. The group was backed by a fatwa issued by the Deobandi scholar Naumani, that declared Shiites to be non-believers and was endorsed by hundreds of scholars in India and Pakistan. Maulana Wali Hassan, the Deobandi grand mufti of Pakistan, banned Sunni Muslims from marrying Shiites, participating in Shiite funeral rites, burying Shiites in Muslim graveyards and eating meat from animals slaughtered by Shiites even in accordance with Islamic law.[47]

Saudi Arabia at the same time backed Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the internationally designated terrorist who founded Lashkar-e-Taibe, one of the largest and most of violent militant Islamist groups in South Asia, because of his longstanding ties to the kingdom and his  strong links to the Ahl-e-Hadith[48]  group that had maintained close bonds with ultra-conservatives like the Wahhabis and Salafis since its founding in the 1920s.[49] Saeed, a graduate of an Ahl-e-Hadith madrassa and the King Saud University in Riyadh, backed by Saudi money, founded Islamic schools in which potential jihadis not only studied Islam, but also acquired the computer and communication skills they would need in their militant Islamist career.[50]

Much of the British Deobandi community has in the wake of 9/11 sought to distance itself from the minority of primarily Pakistani scholars and madrassas that opt for an endorsement of violent jihad. Motala, , in an Urdu-language note to the BBC said that “during the last several decades, I have neither uttered Masood Azhar’s name in my speeches, even by mistake, nor mentioned his group, nor talked about any nihilistic terrorist action.”[51] The UK’s Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted), however, concluded on the basis of an unannounced visit to DarulUloom Bury in January 2016, that its students had a deep understanding of "fundamental British values, such as democracy, rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths."[52]




[i] Declan Walsh, “Tashfeen Malik Was a ‘Saudi Girl’ Who Stood Out at a Pakistani University”, The New York Times, 6 December 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/world/asia/in-conservative-pakistani-city-a-saudi-girl-who-stood-out.html.
[ii]Al-Huda International, http://www.alhudapk.com/, 2016.
[iii]Amna Shafqat, “Islamic University Islamabad: My education in a Saudi funded university”, Pak Tea House, 11 February 2015, http://pakteahouse.net/2015/02/11/islamic-university-islamabad-my-education-in-a-saudi-funded-university/.
[iv] Sadaf Ahmad, Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009.
[v] The Canadian Press, “Al Huda Institute Canada Shuts Doors Following Terror-Related Allegations”, 8 December 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/12/08/al-huda-institute-canada_n_8752790.html.
[vi]Sara Mahmood and Shahzeb Ali Rathore, “Online Dating of Partners in Jihad: Case of the San Bernardino Shooters”, RSIS Commentary, 18 January 2016, http://www.rsis.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/CO16006.pdf.
[vii] Aliyah Saleem, “Al-Huda school is an institute of Islamist zeal”, The Australian, 16 December 2015, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/alhuda-school-is-an-institute-of-islamist-zeal/news-story/3e71ba2b82c906211b7b3b6bc9adc64d?nk=4780091fb72330ac3e9ee1237f733a6f-1450590181.
[viii]Shamila Ghyas, Al-Huda mightn't be linked to terrorism, but Farhat Hashmi's misogynistic and Shiaphobic institute is a hub of radicalization, The Nation, 10 December 2015, http://nation.com.pk/blogs/10-Dec-2015/al-huda-mightn-t-be-linked-to-terrorism-but-farhat-hashmi-s-misogynistic-and-shiaphobic-institute.
[ix] Tim Craig, Pakistan is still trying to get a grip on its madrassa problem, The Washington Post, 16 December 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pakistan-is-still-trying-to-get-a-grip-on-its-madrassa-problem/2015/12/16/e626a422-a248-11e5-9c4e-be37f66848bb_story.html.
[x]Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Kitab Al-Tauhid, The Book of Monetheism, Riyadh: Darussalam Publishers & Distributors, 1996, p. 20.
[xi] The World Bank, Government expenditure on education as % of GDP (%), 2016, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS.
[12] Naveed Ahmad, How Pakistan’s unregulated madrassa system sows division and religious strife, Religion News Service, 22 December 2014, http://www.religionnews.com/2014/12/22/pakistans-unregulated-madrassa-system-sows-division-religious-strife/.
[13] Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, AsimIjaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc, Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan
A Look at the Data, Harvard Kennedy School, December 2005, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/FS/akhwaja/papers/madrassa_CER_dec05.pdf.
[14] International Crisis Group, Pakistan: Madrasas, Extremism and the Military: Asia Report No 36, 29 July 2002, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/pakistan/036-pakistan-madrasas-extremism-and-the-military.aspx.
[15] Dawn, 2008: Extremist recruitment on the rise in south Punjab madrassahs, 21 May 2011, http://www.dawn.com/news/630656/2008-extremist-recruitment-on-the-rise-in-south-punjab-madrassahs.
[16]Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
[17]Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
[18]Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
[19]Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
[20]Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
[21] S. Akbar Zaidi, The Ulema, Deoband and the (Many) Talibans, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 44:19, 9-15 May 2009, p. 10-11.
[22] Council for Foreign Relations, Chris Murphy on the Roots of Radical Extremism, 29 January 2016, http://www.cfr.org/middle-east-and-north-africa/chris-murphy-roots-radical-extremism/p37471.
[23]Ibid. Council of Foreign Relations
[24]Ibid. Council of Foreign Relations
[25] Rod Nordland, Pakistani Military Deals a Blow to Jihadists but not to Ideology, The New York Times, 17 December 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/world/asia/pakistan-abdul-aziz-radical-islam.html.
[26] Dawn, Taseer's killer Mumtaz Qadri hanged, 1 March 2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1242637.
[27] The Economist, Bomb in Lahore: The hard choice for Pakistan, 2 April 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21695903-country-threatened-not-just-terrorism-widespread-religious-extremism-hard.
[28] Email exchanges with the author on 2 April 2016 of Pakistani scholars.
[29] Email exchange with the author on 4 April 2016.
[30]Mahboob Mohammed, Enlightenment Jihad: The Struggle to Realize the Islamic Reformation, Draft manuscript of forthcoming book provided to the author.
[31]Pdf9.com, Molana Muhammad Masood Azhar's Books, 2016, http://pdf9.com/books-of-author-molana-muhammad-masood-azhar-aid-1220.html.
[32] Innes Bowen, Masood Azhar: The man who brought jihad to Britain, BBC News, 5 April 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35959202.
[33]Raffaello Pantucci, Maulana Masood Azhar in the British Jihad, Hurst, 24 January 2013, http://www.hurstpublishers.com/maulana-masood-azhar-in-the-british-jihad/.
[34] Owen Bennett-Jones, Deobandi Variations, Dawn, 21 April 2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1253337/deoband-variations.
[35] Owen Bennett-Jones, Deobandi Variations, Dawn, 21 April 2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1253337/deoband-variations
[36] Ibid. Moosa, p. 105
[37] Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle With Militant Islam, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 92.
[38] Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulema in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, Princeton: Princeton University press, 2002, p. 119
[39] Hassan Abbas, Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America's War on Terror, London: Routledge, 2015.
[40] S. V. R. Nasr, Islam, the State and the Rise of Sectarian Militancy in Pakistan in Christophe Jaffrelot (ed), Pakistan: Nationalism Without a Nation? New Delhi: Ajay Kumar Jain for Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2002, p. 92.
[41] Khaled Ahmed, Who killed General Zia? The Express Tribune, 7 December 2012, http://tribune.com.pk/story/476508/who-killed-general-zia/
[42] Khalid Ahmad, Can the Taliban be far behind? Indian Express, 21 March 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/can-the-taliban-be-far-behind/.
[43] Council of Islamic Ideology, First Report on Islamization of Laws contained in The Pakistan Code: Vol.1-1836-1871, Islamabad: Council of Islamic Ideology, 1981.
[44]Ibid. Sareen, p. 282.
[45]Ibid. Abbas
[46] Interview with the author, 28 June 2016
[47] Muhammad Moj, The Deoband Madrassah Movement, Countercultural Trends and Tendencies, London: Anthem Press, 2015, p. 105-5.
[48]Ibid. Abbas
[49] Stephen Tankel, Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
[50]Ibid. Abbas
[51]Ibid. Bowen
[52] Dale Haslam, Darul Uloom School in Holcombe 'promotes British values and balances secular curriculum with Islamic education' – inspectors, Bury Times, 2 March 2016, http://www.burytimes.co.uk/news/14313912.Bury_independent_school__promotes_British_values_and_balances_secular_curriculum_with_Islamic_education____inspectors/?ref=mr&lp=19.

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