Dawn

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 13 — A thousand years ago, in the days of the camel caravans, storytellers gathered here in the tea shops and brought the outside world and all its thoughts and ideas to the bazaar. As the vendors hawked silk, spice and rich tapestries and traders herded beasts through streets thick with smoke from cooking fires, travelers from distant lands and differing religions told stories about moguls, magic, wit and wisdom. In time, the bazaar came to be known as Qissa Khwani — the Bazaar of the Storytellers.

Now, the streets are still choked with donkey carts, and meat still sizzles on open pits, but the vendors are poor men selling simple things. Blaring car horns drown out all other sound, just as the teachers and students in the Islamic seminaries that surround this bazaar have drowned out all conflicting ideas, all unacceptable thoughts.

The storytellers no longer come. There is just one story now, at least one acceptable story. It is the one taught in the seminaries, called madrassas, that have become incubators in Pakistan for the holy warriors who say they will die to defend Islam and their hero, Osama bin Laden, from the infidels. In many of the 7,500 madrassas in Pakistan, inside a student body of 750,000 to a million, students learn to recite and obey Islamic law, and to distrust and even hate the United States.

"Jihad," shouted a little boy, from a high window in a madrassa just steps from the Khwani Bazaar. He grinned and waved as foreign journalists snapped his photograph, but, on the streets below, older students had massed for demonstrations that would end in clouds of tear gas and smoke from burning tires, as young men jumped through fire to prove their faith and ferocity.

President Bush and diplomats from the West have taken great pains to point out that the war on Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban of Afghanistan is not a war on Islam, but in many madrassas here in Pakistan — especially those near the border with Afghanistan — militant Muslims lecture students that the United States is a nation of Christians and Jews who are not after a single terrorist or government but are bent on the worldwide annihilation of Islam.

The madrassas' sword is in the narrow education they offer, and the devotion they engender from students from the poorest classes who, without them, would have nowhere to go, or go hungry.

At the Markaz Uloom Islamia madrassa in Peshawar, Muhammad Sabir, 22, motioned to the eerily quiet compound, devoid of students. Final exams are over, he said. The scholars, many of them, have left to fight against the United States. "They have gone for jihad," said Mr. Sabir, a student there. "It is our moral and religious duty." He said the words automatically, woodenly, as if repeating his elder's recitation of the Koran.

"There is no practical training of terrorists here," said Asif Qureishi, an Islamic scholar and the son of Maulana Mohd Yousaf Qureishi, who heads the Darul-Uloom Ashrafia madrassa in Peshawar. There are no weapons, no knives or guns, no weapons training. The madrassas hone only the mind, he said.

"We prepare them for the jihad, mentally," said Mr. Qureishi, whose duties at the madrassa include the call to prayers. In a small room at the madrassa, students nodded appreciatively at his words. Some were no more than 10.

"The minds are fresh," he said. In his tiny office, a bag of rice rests against a wall. Outside the door, a student hefts the carcass of a slaughtered goat.

What the students hear, in compounds that range from spartan to squalid, is a drumbeat of American injustice, cruelty and closed-mindedness — the United States is just that way, the elders say.

"They send cruise missiles against gravestones," said Al-Sheikh Rahat Gul, the stick-thin, 81-year-old maulana who heads Markaz Uloom Islamia in Peshawar, a madrassa with about 250 students.

The Americans kill only innocents, said the maulana, a large pair of thick-lensed, black-framed glassed sitting crookedly on his head. "The Koran forbids the killing of females, children, elders and cattle," he said. "That is war. That is not holy war." Sons of Islam must answer that tyranny with holy war, he said.

He condemns the World Trade Center attack but dismisses any connection to this part of the world. "The Jews have done this," he said, calling the attacks a plot by Israel to draw the world into war. "And the Hindus are just like them." It is repeated madrassa by madrassa, the company line of the militants and the poorer classes from which they come, spreading out from the student body to the shops and foot traffic.

Maulana Gul proudly points to a cartoon on the back of a pamphlet at his madrassa that shows Afghanistan encircled by a chain, and the chain is secured by a padlock that is labeled "United Nations." Inside the chain are weeping children. Hands reach from all directions with offerings of food, money and grain, hands are grabbed at the wrist by other hands labeled "U.S.A.," preventing that aid from getting to the starving people.

In the madrassas, students ranging in age from 7 or 8 to men over 20 are taught a strict interpretation of the Koran, including the duty of all Muslims to rise up in jihad. There are no televisions and some madrassas do not even allow transistor radios. There are no magazines or newspapers except those deemed acceptable by the elders. The outside world is closed to them, and many of the students seem puzzled when asked if they mind that. Their teachers, most of them respected elders, tell them what they need to know, the students said.

Almost all the leadership of the Taliban, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, was educated in madrassas in Pakistan — most of them in a single madrassa, Jamia Darul Uloom Haqqania in Akora Khatak in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. The anti-American protests that have filled the streets in Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi have been planned in madrassas — their maulanas, the elders who run the schools, are the spiritual hub of the protests.

In Quetta, after the United States began its missile attacks on the Taliban, 300 Afghans who had attended madrassas in Pakistan crossed the border to join the jihad. Every day, said madrassa students, Pakistanis slip over the border to join them.

The West is in denial over Islam's bloody past and dangerous ambitions

To American and British politicians, the week’s events in Afghanistan have been triumphs. To the Northern Alliance warlords, and the Pakistanis, they have been another chapter in the history of their region’s inter-tribal, and inter-Muslim, conflicts that is being written. But the impoverished statements of our leaders since September 11 reveal that historical knowledge plays no significant role in their thinking, despite the perilous venture upon which they are engaged.

In consequence, we are being led to battle by those who give every sign of not being sufficiently aware of what they are doing, and who are not, therefore, fit to be our guides.

Tomahawks in hand, they have promised us that “terrorism” will have “nowhere to hide”. But we are not engaged in a war against terror. It is a war provoked by Islamism, directed against it, yet which dare not tell its name, and in which there cannot be the “victory” the politicians promise. The Northern Alliance carries the Koran in its knapsacks, too.

The outrages against the US were seen as bolts from the blue, but are different only in degree from earlier Islamist attacks. Yet there had already been millions of lives lost in the Islamic world’s past decades of war. At least since 1947, the year in which Arnold Toynbee warned of the “sleeping giant”, or since 1952, when the Egyptian revolution brought Nasser to power, Islam, waking from three centuries of torpor, has been astir with internecine struggle and assertion against the West. Since then its internal and external conflicts have raged, drawing in Islamic and non-Islamic nations alike.

Iran and Iraq have fought an eight-year war; Syria has occupied much of Lebanon; Iraq has sought to ravage Kuwait. Sudanese, Egyptian, Nigerian, Pakistani and other Islamists have been killing Christians; Egyptians and Algerians have each battled to protect themselves against fellow Muslims; the Chinese, Indians, Russians and now Americans have faced local Islamic attack. Today, the cry of jihad against the kuffar, or infidel, is on the lips or in the hearts of young Muslims the world over, while Western relativists consider how “pluralism” can be reconciled with the aims of those who would see our very societies fall.

Postwar and post-colonial Islamism, revived and still to revive much further, has expressed itself in different ways. It has taken political form in Arab nationalism, as in the seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956; economic form, as in the use of the oil weapon against the West in 1973; religious form, as in the Iranian-inspired arousal of worldwide Islamic fervour. In such context a bin Laden, important as he is, is not of greater historical significance than a Nasser or an Ayatollah Khomeini.

All of them, including the suicide bomber, are apostles of the Islamic resurgence, as historians of Islam’s modes of warfare (and conquest) know. In these past decades, a cat’s cradle of links has been woven across the Islamic world. Ahmed Shah Massood, the Taleban’s then leading opponent, was assassinated in September by Algerians with Belgian passports and with visas to enter Pakistan issued in London.

Armouries have been amassed by the more dangerous Islamic states with the help of the historically unseeing West. Such filiations and weapons are the instruments of no abstract “terror” or “unreason” but of an insurgency of faith, cruelty, pride and anger that in intention would master the globe. Even if bin Laden were killed tomorrow, or Israel disappear from the face of the earth, this insurgency would continue.

It has occurred at a time when the West’s knowledge of Islam, and even of its own history, has never been less. The only truly historical question asked in America since September 11 has been the vacuous “Why are we so hated?” It is a question, which the Americans have been unable to answer. Muslims with a long memory have no such problem.

In the light of its battles with medieval Christianity and with varieties of modern imposition, Islam’s “anti-Americanism”, “anti-Westernism” and “anti-Zionism” are as we ought to have expected. In the First World War, the Ottoman Empire readily joined the Axis powers; in the Second, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was Hitler’s de facto gauleiter in the region. No one in their (historical) senses should be surprised that today’s Palestinian Islamists would uproot Israel, a nation conceived with the West’s support as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated.

Turn back the pages of the record and the century-old voices of premonition, including those of Jews, about Israel’s uncertain fate as an “island in an Arab sea” can already be heard. “Most Jews are no longer Oriental,” the early Zionist Theodor Herzl confided to his diary; a “transplantation” to Palestine would be “difficult to carry out”.

Israelis have always had a fight on their hands. Yet knowing so is to be better armed than are Americans — for all their firepower — as they try to square up to foes whom they cannot name, and of whose faith and past they know too little. Clio, the goddess of history, is not likely for this reason to be on the side of the West, which is more blind than it can afford to be or than its peoples deserve, while Muslims now walk with a spring in their strides. They have good reason to do so, even as the Taleban falls. For the sharp end of a resurgent Islam is a more powerful and long-term adversary of the Western democracies than was Nazism.

When I was in the US in September, I offered the New York Times Magazine an account of the post-1945 decades of Islam’s upheavals. One of its editors told me it was “interesting, but we don’t do history”. But if the Americans (and British) “don’t do history”, history will do for us.

David Selbourne is the author of The Spirit of the Age and The Principle of Duty

THE HINDUSTAN TIMES, DECEMBER 14, 2001

INDIA PAYING FOR ITS SOFT RESPONSE TO TERROR

Brahma Chellaney

The terrorist assault on the symbol of Indian democracy at a time when jehadis are on the run elsewhere in the world reflects the widely perceived softness of the Indian state and the costs it is paying for its compromises with the forces of terrorism.

India's talk-tough-but-act-meek approach has emboldened transnational terrorists, who pick their targets carefully to get maximum propaganda value and show that they can strike anywhere, anytime. Earlier, they struck at the Red Fort, which symbolises Indian authority, as India has been ruled since the 17th century by those who occupy it.

When the terrorists attacked the Jammu and Kashmir legislature, Vajpayee wrote to President Bush that India's patience was wearing thin. Now that the Indian Parliament has been attacked, citizens are awaiting the answer whether, in Vajpayee's view, the government's patience has run out or there is still room for forbearance.

Vajpayee needs to think over why fidayeen attacks have occurred only under his prime ministership and why even today, when jehadis look such a beaten lot elsewhere, major acts of terrorism continue to occur in Kashmir and New Delhi. Empty brave words against terrorism mean nothing. India has to fight its own war on terrorism and not expect that the United States will fight for it.

Successive Indian governments have treated terrorism essentially as a law and order issue. To treat terrorism as a law and order problem is to do what the terrorists want - sap your strength - and bring the republic under a self-imposed siege. No amount of security can stop terrorism if the nation is reluctant to go after terrorist cells and networks and those that harbour, encourage or fund terrorists.

Western policy-makers should be concerned over the Parliament attack because India is a sort of laboratory where major acts of terror are first tried out before being replicated in the West. The logic is that if India, the world's largest democracy, can be shaken, so can other democracies.

For example, the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing replicated the midair bombing over the Atlantic of an Air-India flight from Canada in 1985. Similarly, the 1993 World Trade Centre attack was modelled on the bombings weeks earlier that killed many inside high-rise buildings in Mumbai in a terror campaign designed to disrupt India's financial market. Parallels also have emerged between the 1999 hijacking
to Kandahar of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 and the September 11 suicide hijackings, including the similar use of box-cutters and the terrorists'
knowledge of cockpit systems.

If any state strikes deals with terrorists, it not only encourages stepped-up terrorism against its own interests but also creates problems for other nations. A classic case is India's ignominious surrender to the hijackers of flight IC-814. One freed terrorist hand-delivered by the foreign minister is the suspected financier of Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader in the September 11 terrorist strikes. Another released terrorist founded a group in Pakistan that has claimed responsibility for major Kashmir strikes.

Exactly a decade before this surrender, India spurred the rise of bloody terrorist violence in Kashmir by capitulating to the demands of abductors of the then home minister's daughter, Rubaiya Sayeed. Under Vajpayee, India has held secret negotiations with terrorist groups, including the Hizbul Mujahideen and the ISI-funded Hurriyat Conference. Terrorists see India as a soft target because it imposes no costs on them and their sponsors.

Terrorism has to be fought with a prudent, comprehensive strategy that employs diplomatic, economic, political, military, and legal instruments. But the only instrument India has sought to employ since the 1980s is a domestic anti-terrorism law, which cannot yield results by itself. Can anybody who looks at the bloated size of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi get the impression that India treats Pakistan as the sponsor of cross-border terrorism?

Just before the Agra summit, the Foreign Secretary hosted a small lunch for editors and columnists in her South Block office. The idea, presumably, was for the mandarins of the Foreign Office to tell us what to expect in Agra. But because Chokila Iyer is such a gracious, well-mannered hostess, the mandarins never really got a chance to say very much at all.

Instead, the journos hijacked the lunch and told the diplomats how to do their job. (Do not be surprised. This happens all the time). For the most part, this consisted of familiar peacenik advice — it is up to us to make Agra a success, to give poor dear General Musharraf something he can take back to his people etc. — so the foreign office mandarins, who had a more realistic assessment of what to expect, switched off.

During a brief lull in the lectures from the lunching journos, our High Commissioner in Islamabad, Vijay Nambiar, did manage to get a word in edgewise. It proved to be the most perceptive thing that anybody said at the lunch.

The big revelation for him during his stint in Pakistan, he said, was that Pakistanis and Indians had very different attitudes. For the Pakistanis, truth was simple and one dimensional. For Indians, truth was a complex commodity. We always accepted that there were many points of view and many dimensions to the truth. Pakistanis, on the other hand, regarded the truth pretty much as what they wanted it to be.

The consequence, he suggested, was that the Pakistani position always came across as straight-forward and forthright. But ours came across as too complex for simple arguments.

I have thought a lot about Vijay’s distinction over the last week. Every newspaper and every TV channel has been considering India’s response to the attack on Parliament. There have been notable exceptions (chiefly Brahma Chellaney whose piece in the HT five days ago appears to have become the basis of government policy) but most Indian journos have spent their time hemming and hawing.

Yes, of course, terrorism is bad, they say. But you know, we need to understand Musharraf’s compulsions. Perhaps we should give him another chance. Or: Bush is really on our side, you know, but he’s got this Afghan operation going so we need to understand his compulsions. Or: the international community is united in the war against terrorism but, you know, we are both nuclear powers. So naturally they will be concerned and we need to understand those compulsions.

Curiously, nobody talks about the need to understand India’s compulsions.

Contrast this it-is-a-complex-issue-and-we-need-to-consider-everything approach with the Pakistani position on the Parliament attack. It is as straight-forward as ours is complex.

Basically, all the Pakistanis are saying is this: we didn’t do it and let’s see if you can prove otherwise.

As usual, it is the Pakistani position that is more effective. Of course we can’t provide proof of the kind that will satisfy Pakistan. Even when the
terrorists themselves go on TV and say that they were backed by Pakistan, these confessions are dismissed by the Pakistanis as being secured through torture.

The point is that nobody can ever provide strong legal proof of the kind that the Pakistanis are demanding. Even the Americans, who have now taken up the share-the-evidence-with-Pakistan position, had no proof at all of Osama bin Laden’s involvement when they began bombing Afghanistan. They didn’t even have the kind of confessions that we have now secured. But they launched their attack anyway — and Pakistan supported them.

The understand-everybody’s-compulsions-except-our-own position embraced by the Indian intelligentsia demonstrates a fundamental weakness in our view of the world, at least in relation to terrorism. Two examples will show what I mean.

In December 1999, when the hijackers took IC 814 to Kandahar, it should have been staggeringly obvious to everybody that the Taliban were hand in glove with the terrorists. To be fair to our security services, they reported as much to their political masters and pointed out that no commando rescue mission was possible because the Taliban had placed stinger missiles on the runway to blow up any Indian plane that attempted to land such commandos.

Despite all this, our Foreign Minister decided to go to Kandahar to take custody of the hostages. He was humiliated even before he got off the plane. Maulana Masood Azhar, the terrorist we released in return for the passengers, was the first to alight and the Taliban received him with hugs and kisses. By the time Jaswant Singh descended from the aircraft, the Taliban reception party had departed, taking Azhar away in a huge carcade. Jaswant was left to cool his heels on the tarmac for a quarter of an hour.

No matter. He still managed to hold hands with the Taliban Foreign Minister for the TV cameras and paid fulsome tributes to the Afghan government for its ‘help’ during the hijacking. Those pictures — of Jaswant and the Taliban hugging each other — will haunt the Vajpayee government forever.

Why did he do it? Well, he thought that once he was there, he should be nice to his hosts. And why was he there in the first place? Ah, well, that’s a complex question to which there is no simple answer.

A second example. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, it was clear that the Americans would have to retaliate. It was as clear that they would ask the countries of South Asia for help. The sensible thing to have done would have been to express sympathy for those who lost their lives in the attacks (including hundreds of Indians) and to have waited for the American request.

Instead, Jaswant Singh (yes, him again) shot his mouth off and told the press that India was ready to offer operational assistance — even before it had been requested. Of course, the Americans didn’t need our assistance. But in their minds, we became the kind of country they could take for granted.

Contrast our over-eager foolishness with the shrewdness of General Musharraf’s response. He expressed sympathy but offered nothing. Instead, he engineered anti-American and pro-Taliban demonstrations. When the American request came, he said that he would like to help but the public mood was against it. At this, the Americans offered him billions of dollars and began an extensive courtship that persists to this day.

You don’t need to be a genius to work out which approach has yielded the better result. We understood America’s compulsions and eagerly offered assistance. Our reward is to be isolated in our fight against terrorism. Musharraf made America understand Pakistan’s compulsions. His reward is to be America’s new pin-up boy.

I mention these two examples because it seems to me that we are in danger of making a third mistake. Instead of concentrating on what steps we will take to stop the menace of cross-border terrorism, our intelligentsia is busy finding reasons to do nothing. Understand Bush’s position, they say. Give poor Pervez another chance. Let the world community finish with Afghanistan, then maybe they’ll have time for us.

Contrast this it-is-a-complex-situation response to the position taken by the American intelligentsia after September 11. Did the US media say “we should wait till we get proof against bin Laden”? Did intellectuals say, “if we attack Afghanistan, we will turn the world’s Muslims against us”? Did the intelligentsia warn, “wait a while because if we attack now, we may destabilise Musharraf”?

Of course, they did not.

It was not as though the Americans were blind to these considerations. They knew they were short of proof, they knew they risked alienating Muslims and destabilising Pakistan. But they also knew that these were risks worth taking.

When a country is attacked by foreign terrorists, it must first fight back and defend itself. Everything else is secondary.

Our problem is that Pakistan — and perhaps the rest of the world — sees us as a soft state. We give the impression of having a mouth of steel and a fist of plasticine. We will not consider any compromise on Kashmir, but we will not go to war to defend it. We say we will fight all terrorism but Jaswant Singh will fly to Kandahar to cuddle the Taliban. We will condemn cross-border terrorism but we will not cross the border to fight it.

If we are to act firmly against the terrorist menace then we must abandon our humming and hawing. We must stop thinking about other people’s compulsions and worry about our own. If we believe that Pakistan is behind the terrorists, then we must treat it as the enemy. We must forget about confidence building measures, about poor Pervez’s problems and about candles on the Wagah border.

It is not my case that we should necessarily go to war. All war is bad and should be avoided as much as possible. But it is also true that if you rule out war even before you begin taking any kind of action, then nobody will take you seriously. For your protests to make any difference, your enemy must know that you are both willing and able to fight.

On Friday, our government was so angered by President Bush’s clean chit to General Musharraf that it recalled our High Commissioner from Pakistan. It only took a few hours for the message to hit home. By that same evening, Washington had changed its stance and asked Musharraf to take action against terrorists operating from Pakistan.

The way ahead is to keep up that kind of pressure. The lesson of the US’s Afghan operation is that finally, you don’t need summits and you don’t need bus rides. If you are to fight terrorists, then the only things that work are courage, might and determination.

It is time for India to show that we will not be pushed around any longer.

(Editors' comment: Mr. Vir Sanghvi, who wrote this article was himself the kind of 'intellectual' that he is condemning now. At the heart of the problem is the education system, especially in the humanities, that produces an elite that still carries a colonial mindset-- that the first duty of an Indian is to please others.)

PAKISTAN'S JIHAD FACTORIES

Ben Barber

Afghanistan's Taliban studied in the madrasahs-the Islamist religious schools-of Pakistan, where some 1.75 million students are currently preparing to fight for Islam around the world.

It was hard to imagine that the smiling children playing a quick game of cricket on a rooftop courtyard in the heart of Pakistan's ancient cultural capital of Lahore were learning to be killers.

The head of their madrasah (religious school), a portly man with a white turban and white Pakistani clothing, had invited me to see for myself how his students were treated and what they had learned. So I'd climbed some steps in the Khuddamuddin madrasah, one of perhaps 7,000 such religious schools in Pakistan, and found the boys at play, taking a break from classes.

In a few moments chatting with them, I quickly learned that their major topic of study was jihad, or holy war. The nearly 2,000 students expect to fight infidels in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Palestine, or Indian Kashmir once they complete their studies at the madrasah, located inside the walls of the old city of Lahore.

This school and others like it have prospered in recent years, in part because of the failure of the state-run educational system. In Pakistan, the illiteracy rate among adults is estimated at 70 percent.

About 1.75 million students are enrolled in the schools, though it is not clear how many of the academies are devoted to preparing their students for jihad. Some may focus only on religious studies. It is certain, however, that each time the repressive Islamic Taliban regime in Afghanistan needs to mount a spring offensive against its rebel opponents, tens of thousands of students from Pakistani madrasahs pour over the border in trucks to join the jihad, according to reports in the Jane's defense publications. Thus, the system of madrasahs has become a hatchery for tens of thousands of Islamic militants who have spread conflict around the world. Incidents in the Philippines, Indonesia, Russia, Central Asia, and at New York's World Trade Center have all been linked to graduates of the madrasahs. Indeed, Pakistan is terrorism's fertile garden.

Khuddamuddin is run by Mohammed Ajmal Qadri, leader of one of the three branches of the fundamentalist Jamiat Ulema Islam party, who told me that nearly 13,000 trained jihad fighters have passed through his school. At least 2,000 of them were in or on their way to Indian-held Kashmir.

Converting the World to Islam

Qadri, polite and well spoken in the British-accented English of South Asia, offered an American guest tea and then calmly disclosed that the modern concepts of tolerance and cultural understanding have not made inroads into his thinking.

"Eventually, all people must become Muslim, including the Christians and Jews of the United States," he said in an interview. "The world has to go the way we want. It's our divine right to lead humanity." He apologized for a lack of time to spend with a visitor, saying he was preparing for yet another of his frequent visits to the United States. There, he preaches in the hundreds of new mosques built in the last decade by Muslim immigrants and raises money for his school--where he teaches his children to kill those who stand in the path of Islamic dominance in the world.

Up on the stone rooftop courtyard of his 110-year-old school, the students were taking advantage of a free period to hit a cricket ball, run, and wrestle like children anywhere in the world. But one slightly built boy explained how he and his classmates were being directed toward a life of violent struggle.

"Most kids here go for jihad, and I will too, God willing," said 14-year-old Obeidulla Anwer, speaking in Urdu through a translator. "Jihad is to fight for Islam and the pride of Islam."
Mullah Omar

Like most of his classmates, he will leave the school at about age 18 and go to a military training camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, Afghanistan, or some other secret location. After that training, he said, "We go to fight in Kashmir, Chechnya, Palestine, Afghanistan."

Asked whether he was prepared to hurt or kill, the delicate, dark boy said: "I will hurt those who are enemies of Islam. And I know that I could be hurt or killed."

The chances that Obeidulla will die violently are high. A 23-year-old fighter with another Islamic militant group, Hizbul Mujahideen, said that five of the eight young men in his squad had died during his 18 months of fighting against Indian troops in Kashmir, where an estimated 30,000 people have died in civil strife since 1989.

Obeidulla was asked how he would recognize the enemies of Islam. "If I greet them with 'Salam Aleikum' and they won't say it back," he answered.

The boy was asked: "Since most Americans do not know Arabic and cannot know how to respond to the traditional Muslim greeting, are they enemies of Islam?" The boy looked confused. "I don't know," he said, looking expectantly at his hovering teachers, who also appeared confused by the question. Asked directly whether all non-Muslims were anti-Muslim, he did not need to check with his teachers. "No," he said firmly.

The school is preparing Obeidulla and his classmates for the hard life of soldiers with an experience that provides little comfort or privacy. The
children all sleep on the floor of the school's mosque in sleeping bags, which they roll up each morning. They rise at 3:00 a.m. for study and prayers with a break for play around 4:30 a.m. At 7:30, they have breakfast and then study until 11:00, when they sleep for two hours. They pray, study, have lunch, pray, study, and pray again until dinner at 9:30 p.m., after which they go to the mosque to sleep. They have no room or even a bed of their own.

Why the Madrasahs Thrive

Parents choose this hard life for their children for a variety of reasons, with religious conviction and the poverty of village life both playing major roles.

Religion dominates life in Pakistan, where the national airline begins its flights with a reading from the Qur'an or a prayer. Politicians, even those
educated in London or Boston and living apparently Westernized lives, vie in calling for stricter Islamic laws.

Poverty is the other goad. A half-hour drive from Lahore and just a stone's throw from the Indian border crossing at Wagha, farmer Mohammed Shaffi explained why his 13-year-old son attends the local madrasah and not a public school. In the madrasah--many are funded by donations from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations or groups in wealthy countries--he memorizes the Qur'an in Arabic, which he cannot understand. But he is not being taught to read and write the national language, Urdu.

"How can a poor man educate his son?" asked Shaffi, leaning for a moment over the mud wall he was building around his tiny rice paddy in the village of Dayal, about 30 miles southeast of Lahore. "Even if the school is free, the books are not. And the paper."

Shaffi, whose younger son was playing nearby stark naked, did not even mention the cost of school clothes. As he spoke, a herd of cows ambled by his naked child, who scratched at the muddy earth with a sharp stick. Another son, 13-year-old Maratab Ali Shaffi, wore a filthy, torn pair of shorts as he helped his mother and father pack mud upon a brick wall to increase its height.

The farmer said it was too early to make a decision about letting the boy go and join a jihad. But with the drumbeat of resurgent Islam in the air and hopes of a good job slim for an illiterate youth from the countryside, jihad is not an unlikely choice.

The family has two acres of land, on which six-inch-tall rice plants waved above the flooded paddies. They have electricity but can afford only two lightbulbs. They have no radio or television. No one in the family can read or write. The local madrasah, by contrast, will provide Maratab a free daily meal and sometimes a free shirt.

In Lahore, Qadri said he is proud that his school is able to direct youths like Maratab into holy war in places like Chechnya and Kashmir. But it is America that seems to be his ultimate target, one he hopes to defeat through converting its people to Islam.

"There are now over 3,000 mosques and madrasahs in America, and they are a divine gift for Americans. American civilization is a Monica Lewinsky civilization," he said with a hearty laugh. "It is empty and hollow from inside. Islam is the only cultural system that could bear the load of life for the times to come."

He was similarly dismissive of Hinduism, the religion of about 900 million people in neighboring India, describing it as nothing more than a system "of fashions and traditions."

Roots of Anti-U.S. Feeling

Qadri said he would defy attempts by Pakistan's military government to regulate the madrasahs, beginning with a requirement that they report on the numbers and names of students and teachers, types of facilities, educational programs, and financial details.

The government, stung by charges from U.S. officials that it allows Islamic terrorism to breed under the guise of religious education, has also called for the schools to begin offering practical subjects such as math and science as well as memorization of the Qur'an. In addition, the government is asking the schools to report to local police the names of any foreign students and to list any religious rulings (fatwas) they issue.

"We believe our rules are perfect, and we will not allow any ruler, military, or so-called elected representatives to change them," Qadri said. The News, an English-language national newspaper, quoted several madrasah heads claiming the data were being collected on the instructions of anti-Islamic Western forces, particularly the United States and Israel. While such claims seem far-fetched to better-educated Pakistanis, they are widely believed by others. Many Pakistanis already feel abandoned by the West since U.S.-backed rebels expelled the Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, leaving their country to cope with a huge refugee problem.

Pakistanis also feel it is unfair to blame them for supporting terrorism when veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan turn to jihad in Kashmir or Chechnya.

Americans are particularly angry with Pakistan for helping the Taliban gain power in Afghanistan in 1995. Islamabad's military helped organize a guerrilla force from the Islamic students in Pakistani madrasahs. They were at first well received in Afghanistan, because they offered hope of ending the five years of bloody warlordism that had followed the Soviet withdrawal in 1990. But once the Taliban secured control over 90 percent of Afghanistan, it imposed draconian Islamic rule--preventing women from working, ordering all men to wear beards and turbans, banning music and television, and imposing harsh punishments such as amputation and stoning for theft or adultery.

The Taliban also allowed accused Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden to remain in Afghanistan despite a U.S. and UN demand for him to stand trial on charges of bombing two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, as well as other anti-American attacks.

Pakistani diplomats say they cannot control the Taliban even if Pakistan is the only country that recognizes the Kabul regime. The United States keeps asking Pakistan to pressure the Afghans to hand over bin Laden, and the Pakistanis say they are unable to do so.

As Pakistan, once a staunch U.S. Cold War ally against the Soviet Union, slides into Islamist extremism, continued military control, and economic chaos, its rival to the east, India, has become America's good friend. India's half-century of democracy has long been admired in America and, since 1990, it has abandoned its socialist central planning and anti-Western rhetoric. India's software boom, along with the $60 billion a year earned by Indian Americans in California's Silicon Valley, has pushed Washington closer to New Delhi--further angering and
isolating Pakistan.

A group of Pakistani journalists recently asked some American journalists why their country gets such bad press in the United States. But when queried about Pakistan's Islamic revival, tolerance of extremism, lack of schools for the poor, military control, and other problems, the Pakistani journalists ruefully agreed it was all true.

The root of everything, say several analysts, is that the well-educated leaders of the country have failed to create a system of adequate public education for Pakistan's 140 million people. Without that, parents increasingly turn to the madrasahs, where the fiery mix of fundamentalism and intolerance is creating cannon fodder for future religious wars around the world.

Ben Barber is State Department correspondent for the Washington Times.

[TOP OF THE PAGE]

ATTITUDES AND PERSPECTIVES

A selection of articles and viewpoints from different parts of the world

ONLY IN THEIR DREAMS

Why is the "Arab street" silent? Because a radical Muslim fantasy has met reality.

BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Time, Monday, Dec. 24, 2001

Editorial comments

Nurturing Young Islamic Hearts and Hatreds

By RICK BRAGG, The New York Times

The West is in denial over Islam's bloody past and dangerous ambitions

November 18, 2001 (The New York Times)

What the Muslim World Is Watching

By FOUAD AJAMI

The 'New Wahabi' movement By Sue Lackey, MSNBC

Increasingly, Saudi-funded sect viewed as central to U.S. war on terrorism
Sunni Muslims watch as anti-American demonstrators chant slogans supporting Osama bin Laden in the Lebanese town of Tripoli last Friday.


BEIRUT, Lebanon, Oct. 17 — In a middle-class neighborhood in West Beirut near the squalor of the Shatila refugee camp, Palestinians live side by side with Shiite Muslims who fled the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. Graffiti and banners reflect the local sympathy for the “martyrs” of their respective causes: the fight for a Palestinian homeland and the Shiite Hezbollah movement, considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government. Nestled among these militant groups, however, are religious schools that U.S. intelligence officials regard as far more dangerous. They are the madrassas of the Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect, part of a worldwide network of Muslim extremists that now figures at the center of the Sept. 11 attacks.