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COVER STORY: AFGHANISTAN

CRADLE OF THE TALIBAN

In the oppressive heat of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, the young boys huddle together on the floor around a handful of electric fans, rocking backwards and forwards as they memorise the Koran. Extensions are being built all the time at the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania by the side of the Grand Trunk Road, just two hours from the Afghanistan border. More than 2,500 boys from Pakistan, Afghanistan and neighbouring central Asian states study here for free, many more want to join. Nine years of intense learning and a student qualifies as a maulana. Another two years and he becomes a mufti, equipped to issue religious fatwas on issues as diverse as marriage, worship and war. There are no guns here, no military drill. But this is the ideological training ground for a generation of Islamic militants, including the Taliban.

Much of the Taliban's inspiration to revive Islamic values comes from the Deobandi movement that sprouted in the mid-19th century in India's Uttar Pradesh and gathered tremendous momentum in Pakistan. But the Taliban has carried the movement's ideals to the extremes. Many of the Taliban leaders have studied in madarsas across Pakistan, similar to the one at Haqqania, and have close links with the main Deobandi political party, the Jamiat ul-Ulema-Islami. In the early 1990s, Maulvi Fazlur Rehman, Jamiat's leader and a leading figure in Benazir Bhutto's government, nurtured the Taliban and lobbied hard for its cause abroad. Considerable Saudi funding flowed since into Kandahar and the Taliban went from strength to strength. During the mid-1990s, significant groups broke away from Rehman's Jamiat, most importantly one led by Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, whose father had established the Haqqania in 1974. The party has links with more extreme Pakistani Sunni militant groups, including the Sipah-i-Sahaba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. Militants fighting in Kashmir also have close Jamiat ties.

Hardline Divide: Haq (left) has misgivings about the demolitions but Rehman doesn't

Haqqania is funded, Haq says, by individuals from across the world. He is a leading voice among the hardliners who want Pakistan to become a fully Islamic state, run by clerics. Haq, with his long, hennaed beard, is proud of his many former students who are now ministers in the Taliban Government. They include Interior Minister Mullah Khairula Khairkhwa and head of the feared religious police Mullah Qalamuddin. "With the Taliban, there has been a return to law and order in Afghanistan," he says.

At least 300 of his graduates are believed to have died fighting alongside the Taliban. In May 1997 after the religious militia lost Mazar-e-Sharif, he sent his students into Afghanistan to fight at the bidding of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's reclusive leader. The following year more students were sent after the Taliban recaptured Mazar. For the past six years, Haq has supported the Taliban as it enacted its strict interpretation of Islam, banning music, dancing and kite-flying and forcing women to cover themselves in burqas. Haq is said to be in constant touch with Omar and is regarded as one of the Afghan leader's ideologues. But this latest Taliban edict has triggered the first sign of discontent from Haq.

"The worship places of the idolaters were preserved so that the people could learn a lesson from them," Haq says. "The statues should be locked in a museum or sold because there are infidels who are interested in buying them. Then the money should be used for Afghanistan." In contrast, Fazlur Rehman is reluctant to criticise the Taliban's edict ordering the destruction of statues. "As a leader of an Islamic party, I say that statues are not acceptable in Islam," he states.

Pakistan is trying to rein in the country's militant groups and curb the madarsas' power. But there is little sign its hardliners will give up their support for the Taliban they so admire. Haq is at pains to point out that his madarsa is no threat. Indeed there are no Kalashnikovs on the campus. "There is no terrorism in the madarsas," he explains. But thoughts of war in Kashmir and Afghanistan are not far from his students' minds. Says Arshad Yusuf, one of them: "There's a difference between jehad and terrorism." And Kashmir to him is a great cause, one that calls for jehad.

-Rory McCarthy in Akora Khattak

MetroScape
Triple Act
What I would love to do more than anything else in the world is to write another play," says Gurcharan Das. "But I don't know if I have the courage." He should have dollops of it, going by the audience reaction to his 9 Jakhoo Hill--performed to mark the release of Three English Plays by Das --at Delhi's India Habitat Centre
last week.
more...

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