Guardian, Saturday July 16, 2005
Madrasas mix football with support for jihad
Luke Harding in Lahore
It is a long way away from Leeds. The only similarity was perhaps the washing, hung out to dry on the balcony of the mosque's upper storey.
Down below, hundreds of students gathered yesterday afternoon for Friday prayers. The mellifluous chanting of Allahu Akbar floated into a hot white sky.
Jamia Naeemia madrasa is a religious school like the one that Shehzad Tanweer - one of the four London bombers, from Beeston, Leeds - visited last year. According to his uncle, Tanweer arrived in Lahore last December. His family believed he studied at a madrasa for two months.
Attention was turning last night to a radical school run by a banned Sunni group, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in Muridke, 20 miles north of Lahore. One Pakistani intelligence source told the Associated Press that Tanweer had spent time there. Locals deny this.
More than a week after the bombings there are still more questions than answers about Tanweer's trip to Pakistan. British authorities have revealed little of his movements. The Pakistanis have merely confirmed that he visited Pakistan twice. But the suspicion remains that Tanweer's experiences at a religious school transformed him from disaffected student to extremist killer.
At one of Lahore's more radical madrasas yesterday there were several tantalising clues. The students at Jamia Naeemia were happy to share their views on global jihad, and the Muslim world's perceived struggle against the US and Britain. "If it's been declared that society is at war, and non-Muslims are killing Muslims, then Muslims have the right to kill non-Muslims," said 20-year-old Hafiz Abdul Rehman.
"We have the right to defend our brothers if they are being killed, whether it's in Afghanistan, Iraq or Kashmir," he added. Like many in Pakistan, though, Hafiz condemned the London bombings.
Hafiz shares a bedroom just next to the mosque with three other students. As well as studying the Qur'an and getting up at 4.30am, they play frisbee, go jogging, and discuss football. "I like Zidane. I think he's a lot better than Beckham," Nadeem Rabbani, Hafiz's roommate, said.
Officials say there are 8,000 registered religious schools in Pakistan and up to 25,000 unregistered ones, especially in the no-go tribal areas close to the Afghan border.
Yesterday Ahsan Siddiqi, director of another Lahore madrasa, the moderate Jamia Ashrafia, said it would be wrong to suggest Pakistan's madrasas were all breeding grounds for terrorists. Pakistan's public education system was dreadful, he said, and for many poor families madrasas were the only hope that their sons could get an education.
"We have 2,500 students studying here. They get food, lodging and education all free," he said. "We survive on charitable donations." What did he think of the London bombings? "The very first lesson we teach here is about love, affection and tolerance," he said.
Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence linking Pakistan's madrasas to the Islamist militant struggle in several places - Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia and central Asia. Many mujahideen who fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, studied at Pakistani madrasas in the 1990s. A new hardline movement, the Taliban, emerged from the dusty roadside mosques in Pakistan's frontier provinces.
Yesterday Mr Siddiqi agreed that someone had "caught" Tanweer during his time in Pakistan, "flicking a switch inside his head". He had no idea what precisely had happened to him. "We are talking about a tiny minority involved in terrorism here - one or two per cent," he added. "But the reason terrorism exists is because of injustice. If you take away injustice all these problems will disappear."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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