Authors: Jason Burke
When Pakistan came into being in 1947, it was unclear whether it was an Islamic state, to be constructed entirely on principles laid down in holy texts, or merely a state for Muslims, somewhere where the religion and society of the subcontinent’s Muslim population would be safe from the threat of Hindu demographic, cultural and political dominance. The latter does not necessarily imply the former. Indeed, many of Pakistan’s founders looked to Western democracies as a model, not the examples of the early Muslims. This lack of definition made the country vulnerable to periodic attempts by domestic religious radicals to enforce a greater degree of ‘Islamicization’.
Pakistan is rarely considered to be part of the Middle East and is often ignored by those analysing that region. However, when the recent histories of Pakistan and of those to its west are compared many illuminating parallels emerge. After a short and unstable period of democracy, in which an inexperienced and fractious elite completely failed to deal with the profound problems bequeathed by British colonial rule, the military took power. For the best part of the 1950s and 1960s Pakistan was governed, like so many countries in the Islamic world, by a secular, Westernizing, economically liberal, post-colonial elite composed of senior generals and the civilians who were successfully co-opted by the regime. Pakistan’s military rulers also failed to
cope with their country’s growing social and economic problems, caused as elsewhere by, among other factors, rapid population increase, migration from rural areas to the cities and their own clumsy attempts at reform.
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New cultural influences and a vastly expanded educational sector, as in Afghanistan, also raised aspirations which could not be fulfilled. In 1971, the Pakistani army failed to stop the eastern half of the country peeling off to form Bangladesh. Like the 1967 Six Day War in much of the Arab world, the defeat destroyed the legitimacy of the first generation of post-colonial rulers in Pakistan and opened the way to power for the brilliant, opportunistic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto with his quasi-socialist slogans. Like President Anwar Sadat in Egypt, Bhutto was a deeply cynical if charismatic politician and unable to deal with the profound problems he faced. Social, economic and cultural tensions were exacerbated by the impact of the oil boom in the Gulf. Much as the political Islamists were to do in Egypt and elsewhere, Maududi’s Jamaat Islami party, committed to a gradual but comprehensive Islamicization of society, was able to capitalize on growing discontent in Pakistan. As in so many countries in the region, both nationalism and socialism had been found wanting, traditional rural Islamic practices were no longer relevant and the certainties of political Islam, with its promise of a just social order attainable through non-violent activism that would not threaten a social revolution, were profoundly attractive to the new middle classes. By 1973, Jamaat Islami had 100,000 members.
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The huge wealth and cultural dominance of the Gulf states seemed evidence enough that greater Islamicization was the answer to Pakistan’s problems. When Bhutto finally moved to co-opt Pakistan’s growing numbers of political Islamists it was too late, and the violence surrounding rigged elections in 1977 gave the army, under General Zia ul-Haq, the chance to step in. Zia had Bhutto hanged in April 1979, two months after the Shah had been deposed in Iran.
Zia took power by military means but quickly co-opted the new force that had so weakened Bhutto, inducting several senior Jamaat Islami figures into his cabinet and announcing that Pakistani law would be based on the Shariat. Zia also established Shariat courts to try cases under Islamic law and ordered Islamic punishments for drinking
alcohol, theft, prostitution, fornication, adultery and bearing false witness. Tens of thousands of Jamaat Islami activists were given jobs in the judiciary, the civil service and the education system. Many more, from the urban middle classes who provided Jamaat Islami’s core constituency, were recruited into the army, fundamentally changing its nature. Externally, Zia, whose own faith was both pragmatic and profound, turned to the Saudis and other Gulf states as natural allies, lending troops to Riyadh to quell Juhaiman’s revolt of 1979 and receiving significant financial assistance by way of recompense. The $50m Shah Faisal mosque in Islamabad and the new International Islamic University beside it were the most visible manifestations of Pakistan’s new orientation. This shift from secular nationalism to political Islamism, via demagogic socialism, was by no means unique to Pakistan. Indeed it is part of the recent history of much of the Islamic world.
However, despite the apparent strength of the political Islamists of Jamaat Islami in the late 1980s, radical neo-conservative trends had already begun to undermine them. During the 1980s, when Jamaat Islami dominated Islamic activism in Pakistan, Deobandism was growing exponentially.
It is easy to confuse political Islamism and the strand of Islamic thought derived from the early Deobandis, yet the two are very different. Where political Islamism is focused on the Islamicization of the state through what are effectively political channels, the Deobandis reject politics altogether. The emphasis placed by the Deobandis on a rigid observance of a literal reading of Qur’anic injunctions is very different from the relative flexibility of the political Islamists. And where political Islamists like Maududi or Hekmatyar reject the authority of the ulema, the Deobandis venerate the clergy and recognize their monopoly on textual interpretation.
The Deobandis were formed in the mid nineteenth century in reaction to the challenge posed by British power and Hindu demographic superiority to Indian Muslims. In this they follow the pattern of revivalist and reformist movements within Islam reacting to external threats. Though they believed that Indian Muslims could preserve their separate identity by carefully following the exact ritual and personal behaviour
prescribed in the Qur’an and the hadith, the early Deobandis learned from the threat they confronted. Medressas, or religious schools, were reorganized in imitation of European educational institutions. They were staffed by a paid faculty who ran classes offering a sequential curriculum.
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The medressas, and the ulema who taught in them and were charged with interpreting the external world by the texts, thus became the central focus of the Deobandi movement. Though their early attempt to learn from the West was genuine, over time the Deobandi ulema became increasingly reactionary, with their fatwas encouraging a retreat from, rather than an adaptation of, the innovations of their colonial rulers. The medressas became an isolated ‘Islamicized space’ and their inhabitants became an idealized ‘Islamic society’, islands in a sea of kufr and barbarism. The students at the medressas were known as
taliban
, a Persianized plural of an Arabic word meaning seekers of knowledge or students. It was these students who were to form the foot soldiers of the eponymous movement in Afghanistan in the mid 1990s.
In 1879, there were twelve Deobandi medressas. By 1967 there were 9,000 across south Asia, including nearly a thousand in Pakistan.
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Many had been established in the more conservative Pashtun areas of the North West Frontier Province and attracted a considerable number of Afghan students. Their growth accelerated during the 1980s, and by 1988 nearly 400,000 boys and young men were being educated by Deobandis in Pakistan.
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The key to the growth was the huge funds that had flowed into the Deobandi medressas from the Gulf when governments and donors there had decided that the Deobandis were the closest local equivalent to the Wahhabis and thus should be sponsored as part of the global push to encourage the spread of hardline Salafi strands of Islam. The Deobandis’ limited involvement in the war in Afghanistan had also allowed them to concentrate on building up their school system. For the millions of destitute Afghan refugee children, as well as poor Pakistanis, the free education, board and lodging offered by the Deobandi medressas was very attractive. With Pakistani government schools lacking funds, teachers and often buildings, the medressas effectively became a parallel, and very popular, education system catering particularly for the impoverished rural
classes. Significantly, most of the graduates from Deobandi seminaries in the NWFP came from villages with less than 10,000 inhabitants.
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This rural stress reinforced the crucial ideological differences between the Deobandis and south Asian political Islamists, who tended, as we have seen, to come from urban backgrounds. There is a strong sense here of a wider shift too. The medressa boys and their teachers were drawn from the huge swathe of Pakistani society that had not benefited from the economic growth since independence. They were not the sons and daughters of lower-middle-class intellectuals denied what they see as a fair share of the profits of the nation’s steady, if deeply uneven, economic growth, but those entirely failed by the modern Pakistani state. Over the next decade the recruits to the broad movement of Islamic militancy throughout the Muslim world would be drawn from increasingly poorer social groups. Increasingly too, militants would subscribe to the anti-rational, millenarian worldview already prevalent by the early 1990s among many ‘Arab Afghans’.
The huge volume of young men educated in the medressas had a rapid and obvious impact, playing an important part in creating and propagating the narrow, dogmatic worldview that is a mark of the modern militant. Through the Deobandis, that ideology broke out from its ghetto among the foreign ‘Arab Afghans’ in Peshawar or attached to certain Afghan mujahideen groups and began to spread among the Pakistani population more generally. Teaching methods in the medressas were basic, relying largely on rote learning, and discipline was often poor. In a fascinating study of language in the medressas, Tariq Rahman, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, demonstrates how language teaching was a part of the process of indoctrination, supporting, reproducing and reinforcing the philosophical import of other doctrinaire subjects.
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The worldview it created is entirely religious. The true believer is defined against the ‘other’, the non-Muslim, the heretic, the blasphemer or even the follower of another sect or a Westernized non-practising Muslim. The emir must be obeyed. Rahman points out that many of the texts used in medressas date back to the fifteenth century and that even the more recent textbooks include exercises involving sentences like: ‘These girls have been ordered to put on the veil and they have been
stopped from going to the bazaar,’ ‘You women are really ungrateful to your husbands,’ ‘Tariq bin Ziyad conquered Andalusia’ or ‘The English were always the enemies of Islam.’
The medressas provided the foot soldiers for both the sectarian terrorists and the more international, Kashmir-focused Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. At first, fighters were trained in the medressas themselves. Many were taught basic skills in the huge religious complexes, such as that at Akora Khattak, 40 miles east of Peshawar. By the early 1990s, the sheer number of recruits from Deobandi schools meant that most military instruction of sectarian terrorists had to be done in the camps or at other specialized locations within Pakistan. One of the biggest such facilities was at Khalid bin Waleed camp in Afghanistan, where Omar Saeed Sheikh arrived in late 1993.
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Khalid bin Waleed consisted of several low stone-walled, wood and mud-roofed single-storey barrack-like buildings, where instructors and administrators lived, and a series of large tents for recruits, stores and ammunition. The camp is off the main road between Khost and the big complex at Zhawar Khili.
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Sheikh was put on the standard six-week basic training course in rudimentary military skills. Recruits would be woken before dawn to pray and then would exercise until the sun rose. After a breakfast of tea, bread and yoghurt, there would be instruction in basic infantry tactics, movement on the battlefield, unarmed combat and some weapons training. Occasionally the recruits would get to fire their guns but ammunition was short. The afternoon and often much of the evening would be spent on religious studies.
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The training corresponds closely to that described in exercise books I found in camps run by bin Laden and his aides in the late 1990s, right down to the lack of live rounds, and to that described by mujahideen who were trained by Pakistani instructors during the mid to late 1980s.
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Having done well at the basic skills, Sheikh was selected by his instructors for more specialized training. The syllabus of the special course was exactly the same as had been taught in the mujahideen camps for nearly a decade. This was not surprising. Many of Sheikh’s instructors were from the Pakistani army’s elite Special Services Group, the same unit that had trained Hekmatyar, Massoud and Rabbani for
their abortive uprising in 1975. The specialized course taught the recruits the techniques needed for irregular warfare. They learned about mines, sabotage, covert surveillance techniques and secret communications.
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Alongside the Pakistani cadres in the camps were HUM volunteers from the Maghreb, Saudi Arabia and even the Philippines. When K. K. Muhamed, who was involved in the bombing of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998, was asked by the FBI where he had trained, he told them, according to the FBI agent who repeated his testimony in court, that he had been taught bomb-making in 1994 and 1995 in a camp run by ‘Har Qatar’, meaning ‘Harkat-ul-Ansar’, the name HUM were using at the time.
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