The Masjid al-Haram and
Kaaba, Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Photo by Ariandra 03, Wikipedia Commons.
Continued
doubts about the longevity of the Saudi ruling family are fuelled by its
Faustian bargain with Wahhabism — a conservative, intolerant, discriminatory
and anti-pluralistic interpretation of Islam. 1. It is a bargain that has
produced one of the largest dedicated public diplomacy campaigns in history. Estimates
of Saudi Arabia’s spending on support of ultra-conservative strands of Islam,
including Wahhabism, Salafism and Deobandism, across the globe range from $70
to $100 billion. Saudi largesse funded mosques, Islamic schools and cultural
institutions, and social services, as well as the forging of close ties to
non-Wahhabi Muslim leaders and intelligence agencies in various Muslim nations.
In doing so, Saudi Arabia succeeded in turning its largely local Wahhabi and
like-minded ultra-conservative Muslim worldviews into an influential force in
Muslim nations and communities across the globe.2
The campaign is not simply a product of the marriage between the Al
Sauds and the Wahhabis. It is central to Saudi Arabia’s soft power policy and
the Al Sauds’ survival strategy. One reason, albeit not the only one, that the
longevity of the Al Sauds is a matter of debate, is the fact that the
propagation of Wahhabism is having a backlash in countries across the globe, as
well as on Saudi Arabia itself. More than ever before, Wahhabism, and its
theological parent, Salafism, are being put under the spotlight due to their
theological or ideological similarities with jihadism in general, and the
ideology of the Islamic State (IS) group in particular.
Speaking at a conference in Singapore, sociologist Farid Alatas noted
that madrassas — often funded by Saudi Arabia or other Salafi and Wahhabi
groups — fails to produce graduates trained to think critically. “They have not
been exposed to [Muslim] intellectuals like Ibn Khaldoun,” Alatas said “That is
the opportunity for Salafis and Wahhabis” in the absence of Muslim scholars who
would be capable of debunking their myths he added. Alatas was referring to Abd
al-Raḥman ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Abi Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan Ibn
Khaldun, the 14th century historian, who is widely seen as one of the fathers
of modern sociology, historiography, demography and economics.
Taking Wahhabism’s influence in Malaysia as an example, Alatas pointed
to the uncontested distribution of a sermon by the religious department of the
Malaysian state of Selangor, that asserted that women who fail to wear a hijab
invite rape and resemble a fish that attracts flies.3
Such attitudes fostered by Saudi funding, as well as Saudi Arabia’s
willingness to look the other way when its youth leave the kingdom to join
militant groups, undermine Saudi Arabia’s international image and its efforts
to create soft power. “It is often alleged that the Saudis export terrorism.
They don’t, but what they have done is encourage their own radicals – a natural
by-product of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of Islam – to commit
their terrorist acts elsewhere. As the radicals leave, so does Saudi money,
which funds their violent activities,” said former U.S. Assistant Secretary of
State for East Asia, Christopher R. Hill.4
The estimated 2,500 Saudis who have joined IS constitute the group’s
second largest national contingent.5
The problem for the Al Sauds is not just that their image is under
attack and that their legitimacy is wholly dependent on their identification
with Wahhabism; it is also that the Al Sauds since the launch of their Islamist
campaign, have often been only nominally in control of it. As a result, the Al
Sauds have let a genie out of the bottle that now leads an independent life and
cannot be put back into the bottle. Wahhabi and Salafi-influenced education
systems played into the hands of Arab autocrats, who for decades dreaded an
education system that would teach critical thinking and the asking of difficult
questions.
Saudi funding of conservative Islamic learning neatly aligned itself in
Pakistan, which has an education system shaped by the partition of British
India into predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. This emphasis on
religious nationalism, where minorities are perceived as being inferior,
involved a parochial definition of what it meant to be Muslim in Pakistan.6 The
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported that
Pakistani public school textbooks — circulated to at least 41 million children
— contained derogatory references to religious minorities. The perception of
minorities as threats was reinforced with the enhanced Islamisation of
textbooks in the decade from 1978 to 1988, in which General Zia ul Haq-ruled
Pakistan.7
“In public school classrooms, Hindu children are forced to read lessons
about ‘Hindus’ conspiracies toward Muslims’, and Christian children are taught
that ‘Christians learned tolerance and kind- heartedness from Muslims.’ This
represents a public shaming of religious minority children that begins at a
very young age, focusing on their religious and cultural identity and their
communities’ past history. A review of the curriculum demonstrates that public
school students are being taught that religious minorities, especially
Christians and Hindus, are nefarious, violent, and tyrannical by nature. There
is a tragic irony in these accusations, because Christians and Hindus in
Pakistan face daily persecution, are common victims of crime, and are frequent
targets of deadly communal violence, vigilantism, and collective punishment,”
USCIRF report concluded.8
“By imposing the harsh, literal interpretation of religion exported and
promoted by Saudi Arabia, we have turned Pakistan into a drab, monochromatic
landscape where colour, laughter, dancing and music are frowned upon, if not
entirely banned. And yet Islam in South Asia was once characterised by a
life-enhancing Sufi tradition that is now under threat. More and more, we are
following the example set by the Taliban,” added Pakistani writer Irfan
Husain.9 A Pew Research survey moreover concluded in late 2015 that 78 percent
of Pakistanis favoured strict implementation if Islamic law.10
Syed Imran Ali Shah, whose father was murdered when he was a child, was
16 when in 1999 he was admitted to Mercy Pak School in Peshawar, an educational
institution funded by Saudi-backed Mercy International Pakistan. Zahid
al-Sheikh, the brother of 9/11 mastermind Khalid al-Sheikh, was one of the
charity’s executives in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, a time when
Saudi Arabia joined the United States in financing the Pakistan-based
resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan.11 Syed Imran says his
radicalization was spurred by one of his teachers all of whom were in his words
Wahhabis. The teacher argued the importance of jihad in his sermons.12 Jihad
never figured in the school’s curriculum but students learned to believe that
the beliefs and practices of other sects were heresy. ”We teach students the
aqeedah (creed) of every sect and tell them as to how and where that aqeedah is
wrong so that we can guide them to the right aqeedah,” said Umer bin Abdul Aziz
of the Jaimatul Asar madrassa in Peshawar.13 Based on textual analysis of
madrassa texts, scholar Niaz Muhammad warned that “no one should claim that
their statements about the madrassa curriculum have nothing to do with
sectarianism or other forms of religious militancy.”14
In a seminar moderated by Jordanian scholar Nadia Oweidat at the New America
Foundation in Washington, D.C., on 3 May 2016, Ahmed Abdellahy, a reformed,
former Egyptian jihadist, described being educated in a school system that
divided the world into ‘us and them’. ‘Us’ were the Muslims who had been
victimised by ‘them’. Abdellahy said he was taught that: ‘they’, the
Christians, Westerners and “all the world is against us [Muslims] because we
are better than them.” Abdellahy said. He said this was an attitude engraved in
generations of children who were expected to accept it at face value. “When I
was going to school, the role of the school was to stop you from questioning,”
Oweidat added.15 The inability of Abdellahy’s school teachers to answer
students’ probing questions and a lack of available literature drove him to the
Internet, where militant Islamists provided answers.16
The current backlash of Saudi support for autocracy and funding of the
export of Wahhabism and Salafism, coupled with the need to radically reform the
kingdom’s economy, means that the Al Sauds and the Wahhabis are nearing a
crunch point, one that will not necessarily offer solutions, but in fact could
make things worse. It risks sparking ever more militant splits, that will make
themselves felt across the Muslim world and in minority Muslim communities elsewhere,
in multiple ways.
One already visible fallout of the Saudi campaign is greater intolerance
towards minorities and increased sectarianism in countries like Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. In Pakistan, for example, a U.S. Foreign
Service officer, noted that in Saudi-funded “madrassas, children are denied
contact with the outside world and taught sectarian extremism, hatred for
non-Muslims, and anti-Western/anti-Pakistan government philosophy.”17
The recent shooting in the southern Philippines of Sheikh Aaidh
al-Qarni, a prominent Saudi Wahhabi cleric whose popularity is evident in his
following of 12 million on Twitter, further suggests that the backlash for the
kingdom is not just the Saudi government emerging as a target but also the ulema18
— including ulema who are not totally subservient to the Saudi government.
Sheikh Aaidh al-Qarni is a product of the fusion between Wahhabism and the
Muslim Brotherhood that produced the Sahwa, a Saudi Salafist political reform
movement.
While Philippine investigators are operating on the assumption that the
Islamic State (IS) group was responsible for the shooting, Saudi media were
quick to report that Saudi authorities had warned the Philippines days earlier
that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were planning an attack.19
A key to understanding the Saudi funding campaign is the fact that while
it all may be financed out of one pot of money, it serves different purposes
for different parties. For the Wahhabi ulema, it is about proselytization,
about the spreading of Islam; for the Saudi government, it is about gaining
soft power. At times the interests of the government and the ulema coincide,
and at times they diverge. By the same token, the Saudi campaign on some levels
has been an unparalleled success, on others, success is questionable and one
could argue that it risks becoming a liability for the government.
Problematic Soft Power
It may be hard to conceive of Wahhabism as soft power, but the fact of
the matter is that Salafism was a movement that had only sprouted miniscule
communities in the centuries preceding the rise of Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab,
and only started to make real inroads into Muslim communities beyond the
Arabian Peninsula 175 years after the death of the 18th century preacher. By the
1980s, the Saudi campaign had established Wahhabi Salafism as an integral part
of the global community of Muslims, and sparked greater conservative
religiosity in various Arab countries as well as the emergence of Islamist
movements and organisations.20 The soft power aspect of it, certainly in
relation to the power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has paid off,
particularly in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and
the Maldives, where sectarian attitudes and attitudes towards minorities,
particularly Shiites, and Iran are hardening.
In Indonesia, for example, where recently retired deputy head of
Indonesian intelligence and former deputy head of Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), one of
the world’s largest Islamic movements that prides itself on its anti-Wahhabism,
professes in the same breath his dislike of the Wahhabis and warns that Shiites
are one of the foremost domestic threats to Indonesian national security.
Shiites constitute 1.2 percent of the Indonesian population, including the estimated
2 million Sunni converts over the last 40 years. A fluent Arabic speaker who
spent years in Saudi Arabia as the representative of Indonesian intelligence,
this intelligence and religious official is not instinctively anti-Shiite, but
sees Shiites as an Iranian fifth wheel. In other words, the impact of Saudi
funding and Salafism is such that even NU is forced to adopt Wahhabi language
and concepts when it comes to perceptions of the threat posed by Iran and
Shiites.21
Wahhabi influence has meant that “the nature of South Asian Islam has
significantly changed in the last three decades,” said international relations
scholar and columnist Akhilesh Pillalamarri.22 Pillalamarri argued that “the
result has been an increase in Islamist violence in Pakistan, Indian Kashmir,
and Bangladesh. While governments in South Asia have not initially made the
connection between Saudi Arabian money and the radicalization of Islam in their
own countries, it is now clear that Wahhabism’s spread is increasing
conservatism in South Asia…. As a result, many South Asians are now Wahhabis or
members of related sects that practice a form of austere Islam similar to the
type found in Saudi Arabia. One of these sects is a conservative movement known
as the Deobandi movement, long one of the largest recipients of Saudi
funding,23 which, while indigenous to South Asia, is influenced by Wahhabism,”
Pillalamarri said.24 He was referring to the Deobandi school of Islam, the most
influential sponsor of Islamic education in Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Pashtun
belt founded in the 19th century.25
Many of the madrassas were initially Pakistani state sponsored,
particularly during Zia’s rule. The funding was part of Zia’s Saudi-backed aim
to Islamise the country as a whole. “The global Islamic reassertion spearheaded
by Saudi Arabia and Arab petro-dollars was making itself felt in Pakistan.
There were unmistakable signs of the Saudi impact on Zia’s locally honed
ideological agenda,” says South Asia scholar Ayesha Jalal.26 Zia would handout
as gifts and awards the writings of Sayyid Abul- A’la Maududi, a Saudi-backed
scholar whose Jamaati-i-Islami party advocated the creation of an Islamic
state. Maududi, who was arrested in 1977, was released from prison by Zia’s predecessor,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Saudi Arabia’s request. Maududi used his regained
freedom to back the coup that would topple Bhutto and bring Zia to power.
Maududi was reported to have met with Zia for 90 minutes before Bhutto was
executed.27
Zia’s funding of the madrassas dried up when he suddenly died in 1988 in
a mysterious plane crash. “We then had to turn to charitable donors at home and
abroad for funds to meet our expenditure. How else do you expect us to finance
our expenditure?” says Pir Saifullah Khalid, the founder of the Jamia Manzoorul
Islamia seminary, a sprawling semi-circular complex of multi-storey classrooms
and hostel blocks with a courtyard in the middle, in Lahore Cantonment’s Saddar
area.28
The mushrooming of militant Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi mosques, often
Saudi-funded, has led Pakistani authorities to link scores of madrassas to
political violence.29 Hundreds have been closed in the past years. The Crime
Monitoring Cell of the police inspector general in Sindh has reported that in
2015, 167 madrassas were closed, of the province’s 6,503 with a collective
student population of 290,000. It was also reported that there were another
3,087 unregistered madrassas that cater to approximately 234,000 students.30
Deobandis, like Wahhabis and Salafis, advocate theological conservatism
and oppose liberal ideals and values, and like its theological cousins, run the
gamut from those who are apolitical and focus exclusively on religion, to
militant Islamists who empathise with jihadists and see seizure of power as the
way to implement the Sharia and change social behaviour. These various
ultra-conservative sects, irrespective of their attitude towards politics and
violence, benefit from the fact that with the government’s failing to invest in
quality public education, madrassas have turned into institutions of rote
learning for the poor. These madrassas evade conveying understanding of the
Quran, and are a far cry from the institutions of religious and scientific
learning in the first centuries of Islam that produced intellectuals, scholars
and scientists.
The luminaries of modern-day, ultra-conservative madrassas, include the
likes of Sami ul Haq, the scion of a Deobandi cleric, and former senator who
founded the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassah in the town of Akora Khattak in
Pakistan. Ul Haq is widely seen as the father of the Taliban. Ul Haq argued in
a book published in 2015 that the Afghan Taliban provided good government,
Osama bin Laden was an “ideal man” and that Al Qaeda never existed.31 Ul Haq
had vowed not to stop his students from interrupting their studies to join the
Taliban and awarded Mullah Omar, the late Taliban leader, an honorary degree.
The 2007 plot that led to the killing of prominent Pakistani politician and
former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was believed to have been hatched in
meetings in Akora Khattak.32 A senior Pakistani interior ministry official said
that, all in all, “most of the terrorist attacks during the last three years
could be traced back to madrassas.”33 The militancy among Pakistani Deobandis
persuaded more than 100,000 of the movement’s scholars to issue a fatwa
(religious ruling) denouncing violence and terrorism as un-Islamic in 2008.34
Columnist Pillalamarri dates the expansion of Saudi and Wahhabi influence
in Pakistan to the US-Saudi sponsored jihadist resistance against Soviet
occupation in the 1980s that created the basis for the funding of thousands of
madrassas, that at the time often offered education, shelter and food to the
most impoverished who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to go to
school. “Initially, the mushrooming of Wahhabi and Deobandi groups worked to
produce mujahedeen [freedom fighters] to fight in the war against the Soviets
in Afghanistan. Later, elements of the Pakistani government, notably the
Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), saw the
spread of Wahhabism as useful in creating jihadist proxies to influence
Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir. As a result, despite the end of the
Soviet-Afghan war in 1989, the influence of Wahhabism continued to grow in
Pakistan,” Pillalamarri said.
Proselytization of Wahhabism was facilitated by an agreement in the
1970s between the Pakistani and Saudi governments to promote the Arabic
language and Islamic literature in Pakistan.35 The influx of sectarian,
anti-Shiite Wahhabi materials grew exponentially with the jihad against the
Soviets in Afghanistan. The International Crisis Group (ICG) concluded that
“Saudi patronage has played a particularly important role in promoting jihadi
madrasas and jihadi culture in Pakistan.”36
Saudi-sponsored non-governmental organisations like the Muslim World
League, which fell under the auspices of the kingdom’s grand mufti but was
populated by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and aimed to spread Wahhabism beyond
the kingdom’s borders, opened offices across the globe, including South Asia.
Wahhabi texts, including translations of the Quran, and the writings of Maududi
and Sayed Qutb, were distributed in Muslim communities in the Middle East,
Africa, Asia, the United States and Europe. Wahhabi imams (religious leaders)
were dispatched to build madrassas with Saudi curricula offering free education
to the poor. Wahhabi beliefs were at the same time exported when migrant
workers returned home from the kingdom grateful for the opportunity to earn
money to support their families.
Once back from the kingdom, many of the workers prayed in Saudi-funded
mosques and adopted Wahhabi and/or Salafi practices. “People go to the Middle
East and come back thinking a certain way. There’s Wahhabi money flowing in,”
states International Relations scholar Amena Mohsin, whose maid in Bangladesh
returned from a visit to her village fully covered. “It gives her an increased
status. In that area, near Chittagong, by and large everyone supports the
Hefazat-e-Islam, a conservative group opposed to Bangladesh’s secular education
and women’s rights policy,” she adds.37 Hefazat was founded in 2010 by
attendees of Wahhabi mosques in Bangladesh.38
Evident Risks
The risk embedded in the ultra-conservatism of Wahhabism and Salafism is
further evident in Bangladesh, a secular Muslim state, with militant Islamists
waging a brutal and murderous campaign against liberal and secular
intellectuals, bloggers, and publishers, and carries out attacks on Christians,
Hindus and Shiites. The attacks were largely the work of Islamic State and Al
Qaeda operatives, but were built on the nurturing of a radical, intolerant
environment by Saudi-funded institutions and Bangladeshi workers who had
returned from the kingdom with a far more conservative and black-and-white
worldview.
Saudi influence was also discernible in Bangladesh’s gradual move away
from secularism, which was a pillar of the country’s first constitution after
it broke away from Pakistan and became independent in 1971. The kingdom only
recognised Bangladesh after the assassination of the country’s founder Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman in 1975. President Ziaur Rahman two years later removed
secularism from the constitution, paving the way for the establishment of
formal diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Military leader General Hussain
Muhammad Ershad completed the process in 1988 by making Islam the state
religion.39 The kingdom reportedly funded Jamaat-e-Islami, a leading Islamist party,
whose leaders were charged with war crimes during the country’s war of
independence. Several Jamaat leaders were sentenced to death. Saudi Arabia
lobbied unsuccessfully in 2013 to stay the execution of Jamaat leader Abdul
Quader Molla, but refrained from doing so in 2015 in the case of Muhammad
Kamaruzzaman and the party’s general secretary, Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid.
Analysts said the kingdom was willing to sacrifice its Bangladeshi political
allies in a bid to ensure the country’s support in its regional power struggle
with Iran.40
The cooperation with ISI and other Pakistani government agencies and
officials turned Saudi Arabia from a funder into a player in domestic Pakistani
affairs. Adel al Jubeir who at the time was an official of the Saudi embassy in
Washington, told U.S. diplomats at a lunch in Riyadh during a 2007 visit to the
kingdom by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf: “We in Saudi Arabia are not
observers in Pakistan, we are participants.”41 US Charge D ’Affaires in Riyadh,
Michael G. Foeller, reporting in a cable to the State Department on the
Musharraf visit, noted that “the Saudis have an economic hold on Nawaz Sharif….
Sharif was reportedly the first non-Saudi to receive a special economic
development loan from the SAG [Saudi Arabian Government], with which to develop
a business”.42 He was at the time in the kingdom in exile. Sharif has since
become Pakistan’s Prime Minister.
The degree to which Saudi paranoia about Shiites dictated the kingdom’s
efforts to influence Pakistani politics through check book diplomacy was
evident in State Department reporting on Saudi-Pakistani relations in the
waning years of the first decade of the 21st century. One cable, detailing
discussions in 2009 between U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey
Feltman and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed,
quoted the UAE official as saying, “Saudi Arabia suspects that [then Pakistani
President Asif Ali] Zardari is Shia, thus creating Saudi concern of a Shia
triangle in the region between Iran, the Maliki government in Iraq, and
Pakistan under Zardari.” Feltman noted that, in response, there was a pattern
of Saudi Arabia withholding pledges in international frameworks for financial
support of Pakistan.43
A State Department cable a year earlier in 2008 quoted the Pakistani
Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington, D.C., Sarfraz Khanzada, saying that
Saudi-Pakistani relations were “under strain” because the Saudis had no
confidence in Zardari. Khanzada said Saudi financial assistance to Pakistan had
dropped sharply. The Saudis had not provided “a single drop” of oil on promised
concessionary terms. Instead, they had given Pakistan a single $300 million
check, considerably less than in previous years. “Beggars can’t be choosers,”
Khanzada had said, adding that the Saudis were “waiting for the Zardari
government to fall.”44 Pakistan’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Umar Khan
Alisherzai, told U.S. diplomats in 2009 that “we have been punished by Saudi
Arabia because our president talks to the Iranians.”45
Then Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef went a step
further, advising U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke that the Saudis view “the
Pakistan Army as the strongest element for stability in the country.” Bin Nayef
described the Pakistani military as the Saudis’ “winning horse” and Pakistan’s
“best bet.” The Saudi official said that instability in Pakistan or tension
between Pakistan and India posed a threat to Saudi Arabia’s stability, because
of the 800,000 Pakistani and one million Indians employed in the kingdom.46
Author and former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Hussain
Haqqani estimated that Saudi Arabia donated more than $2 billion to the
Islamist resistance against the Soviets.47 The investment, alongside that of
the United States and others, fundamentally changed Pakistani society and the
country’s power structure. ISI, supported by Saudi Arabia and the United
States, exploited its role as the recruiter, trainer and operations manager of
the Afghan mujahedeen to expand and legitimise ISI’s role as a key arbitrator
of Pakistani politics by manipulating the government’s allies and intimidating
its opponents.48
Moreover, direct Saudi funding as well as support by the Muslim World
League of Jamaat-e-Islami — the Pakistani wing of a movement founded in 1941 by
theologian and philosopher Abul Ala Maududi — became a launching pad for
Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism into then still communist Central Asia.49
The movement’s Afghan wing was headed by figures who would play key
roles in the ultimate defeat of the Soviets and the rise of Wahhabi-influenced
conservatism and Islamism in the country. Burhannudin Rabbani, the theology
professor, twice became President of Afghanistan. Rabbani’s students included
Ahmad Shah Massoud, a legendary Tajik military commander in the fight against
the Soviets and Afghanistan’s subsequent civil war, who was killed by Al Qaeda
on the eve of 9/11; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a two-time Prime Minister, whose
Hezb-e-Islami party received the lion’s share of Saudi funding for the
mujahedeen.50
Hekmatyar, the instigator of Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s, that
in Kabul alone killed more than 50,000 people, was best known for his targeting
of those Muslims denounced as idolaters – just like the Wahhabis at the
beginning of the 20th century. Hekmatyar spent “more time fighting other
mujahedeen than killing Soviets,” quipped journalist and author Peter Bergen.51
Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, a Saudi-funded Wahhabi Islamic Law scholar, politician
and warlord, who split with Rabbani and Hekmatyar to form his own group of
mujahedeen, is believed to have facilitated Osama Bin Laden’s return to
Afghanistan in 198652 after the Saudi was expelled from Sudan and assisted
Masood’s assassins.53
Then Pakistani leader Zia-ul-Haq encouraged Saudi charities to build
mosques and madrassas for the large number of Afghans fleeing the war to
Pakistan as well as for Pakistanis themselves. With little prospect of
employment, refugee camps became recruitment centres for Saudi-funded mujahedeen.
Volunteers from across the globe were welcomed to train alongside the
mujahedeen’s refugee recruits funded by the Muslim World League.54
To help Pakistan alleviate the cost of hosting large numbers of Afghan
refugees, Saudi Arabia hired hundreds of thousands of Pakistani migrant workers
whose remittances boosted Pakistan’s economic growth. Many of the workers
eventually returned home imbued with Wahhabism’s conservative values. The same
was true for Pakistani troops enlisted to assist in fortifying the kingdom’s
security in a deal mediated by the United States.
“Pakistani workers in the Gulf and their families became either
sympathetic or indifferent to Islamization. The expatriate workers were also
influenced by Islamist missionaries backed by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi
establishment during the course of their stay in the Gulf states,” Haqqani, the
former Pakistani ambassador, noted.55
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.56
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.57
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.58 Cultural
anthropologist Sadaf Ahmad describes Al Huda as a “school-turned-social
movement.”59 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.60
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.61
“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.62
“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.63
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.”64
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.”65
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.66 Pakistan’s
some 26,000 madrassas graduate an estimated 200,000 students a year.67 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.68
By contrast, the International Crisis Group estimated that 1.5 million students
were enrolled in Pakistani madrassas in 2002.69
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…”70 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.71
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”72
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.73
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.74
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.75
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.76
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.77
“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.78
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.79
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.80
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,81 and for
carrying out a suicide-bombing of a park in Lahore on Easter Sunday.82 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.83
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.84
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.”85
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,86 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.87 A passionate and emotive
speaker, women reportedly took off their jewellery and handed it to Azhar after
listening to his speeches.88
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 Ahmadis89 a sect is widely viewed by conservative Muslims as heretic,
because it recognizes Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the messiah prophesied by Mohammed.
.90 “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.91
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 intelligence92 until he was killed in 1990 by Shiite militants.
Jhangvi, who earned his spores with his agitation against the Ahmadis, 93
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.94 As mentioned earlier, Saudi funds
were largely routed through the Pakistani military and the ISI.95 The Muslim
World League also funded the prominent Indian Deobandi scholar, Muḥammad
Manzo̤ or Naumani, who compiled a book of anti-Shiite fatwas that included
opinions of Pakistani scholars and was distributed in Pakistan.96
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.97 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.”98
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.99 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.100 “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.101
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.102
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-Hadith103 group that had maintained close bonds with ultra-conservatives like
the Wahhabis and Salafis since its founding in the 1920s.104 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.105
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.”106 The UK’s Office
for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), however,
concluded on the basis of an unannounced visit to Darul Uloom 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.”107
Yet, the Muslim Council of Britain, widely viewed as the UK’s foremost
Muslim umbrella group, in line with Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi thinking,
declared in April 2016 a position against Ahmadis who are also on the defensive
in various countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and
Britain.108 In a statement that paid only lip service to “to pluralism and
peaceful coexistence and…the rights of all to believe as they choose without
coercion, fear and intimidation,” the Council, in response to requests by
unidentified parties for it to take a stand on the persecuted group, stated
that “Muslims should not be forced to class Ahmadis as Muslims if they do not
wish to do so, at the same time, we call on Muslims to be sensitive, and above all,
respect all people irrespective of belief or background.”109 The BBC
documentary further linked Scotland’s largest mosque, the Glasgow Central
Mosque, 23 years later to Sipah-e-Sahaba that has been banned in Britain
because of its deadly attacks against Shiites and other minorities in
Pakistan.110
Responding to the MCB statement in The Independent, Waqar Ahmedi, a
British Ahmadi, warned that “when Muslims start playing God in this way,
religious prejudice, bigotry and hate will inevitably rise – including here in
Britain…. They appear content to regard extremists like the murderer of Asad
Shah and hate preachers as among their co-religionists, but not those who live
by the motto ‘love for all, hatred for none.’ Whatever the theological
differences, no individual or institution has any authority to dictate what
anyone else can and cannot call themselves. My faith is a matter between me and
my Maker. Freedom of belief and the right to self-determination are among the
cornerstones of any progressive society. The Prophet Muhammad certainly stood
up for those rights — one hopes bodies like the Muslim Council of Britain does
too,” Ahmedi wrote. Asad Shah was a popular news vendor in Glasgow who was
murdered a month before the MCB statement because of his faith.111
The MCB statement seemed to belie the longstanding rejection of the
notion by Britain’s Islamic scholars that Muslim radicalism emanated from the
country’s South Asian mosques. The MCB scholars identify Arab Islamists like
Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, better known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, a fiery Egyptian
cleric, (who preached at London’s Finsbury Park Mosque in London before being
extradited to the United States where he was sentenced to life in prison on
terrorism charges, and Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian-born Salafist, as the
guilty parties.
“These Wahhabi preachers, who operated on the fringes of Muslim
communities, certainly played an important role in radicalising elements of
Britain’s Muslim youth. But it was Azhar, a Pakistani [Deobandi] cleric, who
was the first to spread the seeds of modern jihadist militancy in Britain – and
it was through South Asian mosques belonging to the Deobandi movement that he
did it,” Bowen said.112
In his lectures during his visit to Britain, Azhar argued that much of
the Quran was dedicated to “killing for the sake of Allah”, while a substantial
number of the Prophet Mohammed’s sayings dealt with jihad. At the inauguration
of a mosque in Plaistow, Azhar dwelled on “the divine promise of victory to
those engaged in jihad.” In another public presentation, Azhar argued that “the
youth should prepare for jihad without any delay. They should get jihadist
training from wherever they can.” His slogan was “from jihad to Jannat
(paradise).”113
Birmingham-born Mohammed Bilal, a student in the West Midlands, who left
Britain in 1994 to join Azhar’s newly founded Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of
Mohammed), was one of the first Azhar recruited on his UK tour. He died in 2000
as a suicide bomber when he attacked an Indian Army barracks in Srinagar, killing
nine people.114 Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a student from London, was another.
Sheikh gained notoriety as one of the hijackers of an Indian Airlines flight,
who demanded Azhar’s release from prison as well of one of the 2002 kidnappers
who snatched Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and beheaded him.115
Rashid Raul, an in-law of Azhar’s, who like Bilal hailed from Birmingham, is
widely believed to have been one of the masterminds of the 7/7 attacks in 2005
on London’s public transport system, as well as a failed attempt to again
assault the system two weeks later on July 21 and efforts to smuggle liquid
bomb-making substances aboard trans-Atlantic flights.116 Waheed Ali, a young
Bangladeshi friend of the 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer, reported that he listened
to tapes of Azhar’s speeches.117
Jaish-e-Mohammed maintains a semi-legal, public presence in Pakistan
itself, despite government assertions that it is cracking down on jihadist
groups. A Wall Street Journal reporter on a recent visit to Lahore, a city of
600,000 that is home to the headquarters of the Pakistan Army’s XXXI Corps,
visited the group’s four-storey, downtown compound that also houses an
affiliated seminary.
Although the group has had several of its seminaries closed down, it is
building an even bigger facility on four hectares of land on the edge of Lahore
with a new madrassa, crowned with white domes, looming over the surrounding
farmland. “We don’t hide who we are. We are a jihadist group,” a cleric
affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed told the visiting reporter.118 A sign outside
another Jaish complex in the Usman-o-Ali madrassa in the central Pakistani city
of Bahawalpur says its seminary is “under the guidance” of Azhar.119
Jaish-e-Mohammed’s overt operations despite being proscribed reflect the
degree to which the Pakistani military, intelligence and interior ministry has
embraced Saudi-backed sectarianism and ultra-conservatism.
“There is a sense of weary resignation hung around the shoulders of
reports that the government is struggling, and largely failing, to keep on top
of the problem of banned organisations that continue to resurface, remake and
relaunch themselves under a new set of acronyms. Many of these groups are
decades-old, at least in their original iteration, and almost equally many are
either openly sectarian in nature or simply dedicated to the downfall of the
democratic state. It is the interior ministry that is ultimately responsible
for this sorry state of affairs, and the buck ought to stop at the desk of the
interior minister himself — an outcome as likely as rivers ever flowing
uphill…. Let us not deceive ourselves — there is no shortage of people in the
populace that do support such groups, be it with money or logistical support,
and allow them a broad footprint nationwide… Millions are inclined to give
succour to these snakes that we keep at the bottom of the garden and which all
too often turn and bite us,” commented The Express Tribune.120
Pakistani indulgence of Saudi-backed militant groups impacts Muslim
communities far beyond the South Asian nation’s border. In the UK, prominent
UK-based Deobandi scholar Khalid Mehmood has frequently been associated with
Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (AMTKN), a militant Pakistan-based group
that is also legally registered with the UK Charity Commission. AMTKN, with a
history of Saudi backing in its various guises since it first was established
in 1953, campaigns against Ahmadis, an Islamic sect widely viewed by
conservative Muslims as heretics that is on the defensive in various countries
like Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Britain alongside Pakistan. As far
back as the then, Saudi Arabia intervened to prevent the execution of AMTKN
scholars, including Abul Ala Maududi, one of the 20th centuries for most Muslim
thinkers, who were sentenced to death for sparking anti-Ahmadi riots in Lahore
that led to the imposition of martial law in the city. The clerics were
released a year later on a legal technicality.
Back in the UK, prominent UK-based Deobandi scholar Khalid Mehmood has
frequently been associated with Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (AMTKN),
a militant Pakistan-based group that is also legally registered with the UK
Charity Commission. AMTKN campaigns against Ahmadis. The AMTKN website
describes Ahmadis as wajib-al-qati or deserving to die.121 However, the group
defines itself on its website as “an international, religious, preaching and
reform organisation of Islamic Millat, (a global Islamic nationality
irrespective of geographical boundaries. It says that its sole aim has been and
is to unite all the Muslims of the world to safeguard the sanctity of
Prophethood and the finality of Prophethood and to refute the repudiators of
the belief in the finality of Prophet hood of the Holy Prophet Hazrat Muhammad.”122
It has 50 and operates 12 madrassas, mostly in Pakistan, but says it has
operations abroad, listing only Mali by name on its website.
The AMTKN group, whose name translates as the Global Congress for the
Preservation of the Finality of Prophethood, traces its root to Saudi Arabia’s
decision in the late 1970s to deny Ahmadis visas for the pilgrimage to Mecca
and call for their excommunication. The Kingdom, leveraging its financial
support for Pakistan, including funding of its clandestine nuclear weapons
program, got Bhutto to introduce constitutional provisions that obliged the
country’s presidents and prime ministers to swear an oath that they believed in
the finality of Mohammed’s prophecy and denied the possibility of any prophet
after him – provisions designed to move Ahmadis beyond the pale.
Saudi King Faisal advised Bhutto on the sideline of the 1974 Islamic
Summit Conference in Islamabad that Saudi aid would be contingent on Pakistan
declaring Ahmadis non-Muslims.123 The Muslim World League called two months
later on all Muslim governments to excommunicate Ahmadis and bar them from
holding sensitive government positions. The Saudis effectively forced Bhutto to
reverse his awarding of senior posts to Ahmadis after they supported him in a
narrowly won election in 1970. Bhutto’s Minister of State for Defence and
Foreign Affairs was an Ahmadi, as were the official overseeing Pakistan’s
nuclear program and the commanders of the navy and the air force. Ahmadis were
also among the Army’s corps commanders. The Saudi campaign was crowned when
Pakistan’s national assembly amended the constitution in 1974 to designate
Ahmadis as a minority. Saudi rejection over the years has been supported by the
Deobandis.124 .125 Ahmadis have since been banned from calling their houses of
worship mosques and greeting one another with the customary words, As-salamu
alaikum, Peace be upon you. Pakistani passport applications require Muslims
to distance to forswear the founder of the Ahmadi community.
The immediate impact in Pakistan of the campaign was the killing of
Ahmadis, burning of their properties and the desecration of their mosques and
cemeteries. Little has since changed. In 2011, a AMTKN leaflet in Urdu calling
for the murder of Ahmadis that circulated in Pakistan identified a south London
mosque, the Stockwell Mosque, as its overseas contact point.126 The mosque at
the time denied any association with either the leaflet or AMTKN, even though
it is listed as an AMTKN office with the Charity Commission. Four of the mosque’s
managers serve as AMTKN trustees. Piles of leaflets in English demanding death
for Ahmadis were found by a BBC researcher in the mosque in April 2016.127
Three months later, the group again listed the London mosque as its
international address alongside the contact details of its offices in Karachi,
Lahore, Rawalpindi, Quetta, and Multan in newspaper advertisements across
Pakistan calling during Ramadan for donations to restrict Ahmadi activity;
“save Muslims from them;” file lawsuits against them; establish mosques and
seminaries in Chenab Nagar, home to the Ahmadi’s main organization,
Jamaat-e-Ahmadia; and print anti-Ahmadi literature.128 The ad appeared three
weeks after unidentified gunman killed an Ahmadi outside his home in
Karachi.129
The ad appeared on the back of years of deadly attacks on the Ahmadis
and repeated manifestations of tacit government approval. Two gunmen sprayed an
Ahmadi mosque in Lahore in 2010 with bullets. At the same time, two others
lobbed grenades and exploded suicide vests in another mosques 15 kilometres
away. 95 people were killed and 120 others injured. Days later, gunmen attacked
the hospital were the wounded were being treated. “This is a final warning to
the (Ahmadi community) to leave Pakistan or prepare for death at the hands of
the Prophet Muhammad’s devotees,” the group said in a statement.130
At the time, Punjab’s law minister, Rana Sanaullah, a member of Nawaz
Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, campaigned openly alongside leaders of
Sipah-e-Sahaba in an election during a special election in Jhang. Members of
Sipah, flouting restrictions placed on the outlawed group, paraded through the
town wielding weapons and chanting bloodcurdling anti-Ahmadi and anti-Shi’ite
slogans. Rather than halting the march, police escorted it.131
Four years later, on the eve Eid-al-Fitr, which marks the end of the
holy month of Ramadan, a frenzied mob in the city of Gujranwala set Ahmadi
homes and businesses ablaze in retaliation for an allegedly blasphemous
Facebook post by a young Ahmadi man. While the mob danced and police stood idly
by, a fifty-five year-old Ahmadi woman and her two young granddaughters
suffocated to death as a result of the smoke. The girls’ pregnant aunt
miscarried during the ensuing chaos.132
Taxi driver Tanveer Ahmed took AMTKN’s advice literally when he killed
Asad Shah, an Ahmadi shopkeeper in Glasgow, in March 2016. An AMTKN-linked
Facebook page congratulated all Muslims on Shah’s death.133 Ultra-conservative
and Deobandi prejudice against Ahmadis is weaving itself into the fibre of
British society, with Sunnis in Muslim neighbourhoods refusing to greet the
minority with the traditional welcome, salaam aleikum ‘peace be upon you, share
a meal with them or do business with them.134 Ahmadi butchers who sell halal
meat in Britain have seen their business substantially reduced after imams
called on their flock to boycott Ahmadi shops.135 Death threats have persuaded
the Beitul Futuh Mosque in London and Ahamdi mosques elsewhere in Britain,
frequented by the country’s 30,000 followers of the sect, to introduce
airport-style security checks at mosques.136
Security measures at Ahmadi mosques and mainstream Muslim rejection of
the Ahmadis, along with the anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, contrast starkly
with the role the Ahmadis played on the continent a century ago in forging
bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe. Founded in 1923 as part of
the first wave of Muslim emigration to Europe, the Ahmadi mosque was centre of
intellectual discussion on issues as divergent as balancing modern daily life
with the requirements of Islamic doctrine and the future of Germany and Europe
in the wake of World War One. German non- Muslims, disappointed by Christian
civilization, sought answers in those discussions and many ultimately converted
to Islam.137 One of the mosque’s directors, Hugo Marcus, was a gay Jewish
philosopher who converted to Islam.138 Built by a Jewish scholar, Gottlieb
Leitner, the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, a town 45 kilometres south of London,
played a similar role at the time.139
A Poor Return on Investment
Violence in Pakistan in which an estimated 60,000 people have been
killed in the last decades, as well as the thousands of deaths in numerous
other parts of the world, is likely not what Saudi Arabia hoped to achieve
through its campaign to further ultra-conservatism.
A more conservative, intolerant society in which Saudi Arabia held the
foremost status as the leader of the Muslim world was. Pakistan is paying the
price in terms of lives, Saudi Arabia in terms of reputational damage. The
events of March 2016 are the latest to raise questions about the effectiveness
of Saudi Arabia’s more than US $100 billion, four-decade long campaign in
building the kingdom’s soft power. So do Saudi efforts to harness the kingdom’s
diplomatic and military relationships in support of its more assertive foreign
and military policies Saudi Arabia came up short in its effort to rally support
in early 2016 for its conflict in Iran, following Saudi Arabia’s execution of
Shiite cleric Nimr al Nimr, the storming of the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the
breaking off of Saudi diplomatic relations with Iran. Only a handful of
countries – Bahrain, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, and the Maldives – followed
Riyadh’s example and ruptured their ties with Iran, as a result of Saudi check
book diplomacy. Major players like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia
despite close diplomatic, intelligence and non-governmental ties to the
kingdom, rejected the Saudi request, choosing instead to walk a tightrope
between Riyadh and Tehran.
The stakes for Pakistan were higher than other Muslim nations not only
because of its shared border with Iran, but because of the changing
geopolitical dynamics that have come with lifting of Iran’s sanctions. It
revived the construction of an Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline as well as Iranian,
Afghan and Indian interest in development of the Iranian port of Chabahar.
Besides competing with the Chinese-funded Pakistani port of Gwadar, Chabahar
would allow Afghanistan to break Pakistan’s regional maritime monopoly and
offer India access to energy-rich Central Asia.
Saudi Arabia’s seemingly poor soft power return on investment is not
simply that Muslim states largely want to keep their lines open to two of the
Middle East’s foremost power. It also is the result of domestic repercussions
that governments across the Muslim world fear. Saudi Arabia was taken aback
when Pakistan despite massive Saudi financial support for its economy,
madrassas, and nuclear program and the kingdom’s assistance in getting Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif out of prison following General Pervez Musharraf’s 1999
coup and hosting him for his seven years in exile; rejected a Saudi request
that it support military intervention in Yemen.
Saudia Arabia’s seemingly poor soft power return on investment is not
simply that Muslim states largely want to keep their lines open to two of the
Middle East’s foremost powers, but also the result of domestic repercussions
that governments across the Muslim world fear. Saudi Arabia was taken aback
when Pakistan rejected a Saudi request to support its military intervention in
Yemen, despite massive Saudi financial support for Pakistan’s economy,
madrassas, and nuclear program, as well as, the kingdom’s assistance in getting
Nawaz Sharif out of prison following General Musharraf’s 1999 coup and hosting
him for his seven years in exile, using Lebanese politician Saad Hariri as an
intermediary, Saudi Arabia warned Musharraf that continued good relations
depended on the release of Sharif and his family.140
Saudi Arabia had assumed that it had sufficient Pakistani chits to cash
in. The kingdom is home to over two million Pakistani expatriates,141 and is
Pakistan’s single largest source of remittances.142 Saudi Arabia has come to
Pakistan’s aid in times of difficulty, for example, by providing oil on
deferred payment when Islamabad was hit by U.S. sanctions after conducting
nuclear tests in 1998. In addition, some 1,200 Pakistani troops are stationed
in the kingdom.143 Pakistani military foundations recruited retired military
personnel to serve as mercenaries in Bahrain during the Saudi- backed crushing
of a popular revolt in Bahrain in 2011.144
Yet, with Shiites constituting up to 20 percent of the population in
Pakistan and escalating sectarian tensions in recent years, as well as plans
for closer economic and energy cooperation with Iran, Pakistan has little
choice but to walk a tightrope. Just how tight the tightrope is, was evident in
guidelines for coverage of the Saudi-Iranian dispute issued by Pakistan’s
electronic media regulatory authority. “Media houses should ideally refrain
from airing programs that can result in irreparable damage,” the guidelines
said.145
Lack of Oversight
Wahhabism’s proselytising character served the Al Saud’s purpose as they
first sought to stymie Arab nationalism’s appeal in the 1950s and 1960s, and
later that of Iran’s Islamic revolution. These were tectonic developments that
promised to redraw the political map of the Middle East and North Africa in
ways that potentially threatened Saudi Arabia’s rulers. Both developments were
revolutionary and involved the toppling of Western-backed monarchs. Arab
nationalism was secular and socialist in nature. The Islamic revolution in Iran
was the first toppling of a US icon in the region and a moreover involved a
monarch. The Islamic republic represented a form of revolutionary Islam that
recognised a degree of popular sovereignty. Each in their own way, posed a
threat to the Al Sauds who cloaked their legitimacy in a religious puritanism
that demanded on theological grounds absolute obedience to the ruler.
Ultimately, the Saudi campaign benefited from Arab socialism’s failure
to deliver jobs, public goods and services, as well as the death knell to
notions of Arab unity delivered by Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Middle
East in the 1967 in which the Jewish state conquered East Jerusalem, the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Moreover,
Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s early rupture with the non-Salafist Muslim
Brotherhood, led many Brothers to join the stream of migrant workers that
headed for the Gulf. They brought their activism with them and took up
positions in education that few Saudis were able to fill. They also helped
create and staff organisations like the Muslim World League, initially founded
to counter Nasser’s Pan-Arab appeal.146 The campaign further exploited
opportunities created by Nasser’s successor, Anwar al- Sadat, who defined
himself as “the believing president.”147 Sadat in contrast to Nasser allowed
Muslim groups like the Brotherhood and Salafis to re-emerge and create social
organisations, build mosques and found universities.148
The rise of the Brotherhood in the kingdom sparked a fusion of the
group’s political thinking with segments of the Wahhabi and Salafi community,
but also accentuated stark differences between the two. Saudi establishment
clergy as well as militants took the Brotherhood to task for its willingness to
accept the state and operate within the framework of its constrictions. They
also accused it of creating fitna or division among Muslims by endorsing the
formation of political groups and parties and demanding loyalty to the group
rather than to God, Muslims and Islam.149
The Saudi campaign was bolstered by the creation of various institutions
including not only the Muslim World League and its multiple subsidiaries, but
also Al Haramain, another charity, and the likes of the Islamic University of
Medina. In virtually all of these instances, the Saudis were the funders. The
executors were others often with agendas of their own such as the Brotherhood
or in the case of Al Haramain, more militant Islamists, if not jihadists. Saudi
oversight was non-existent and the laissez-faire attitude started at the top.
The lack of oversight was evident in the National Commercial Bank (NCB)
when it was Saudi Arabia’s largest financial institution. NCB had a department
of numbered accounts. These were all accounts belonging to members of the
ruling family. Only three people had access to those accounts, one of them was
the majority owner of the bank, Khaled Bin Mahfouz.150 Bin Mahfouz would get a
phone call from a senior member of the family who would instruct him to
transfer money to a specific country, leaving it up to Bin Mahfouz where
precisely that money would go.
In one instance, Bin Mahfouz was instructed by Prince Sultan, the then
Defence Minister, to wire US $5 million to Bosnia Herzegovina. Sultan did not
indicate the beneficiary. Bin Mahfouz sent the money to a charity in Bosnia,
that in the wake of 9/11 was raided by US law enforcement and Bosnian security
agents.151 The hard disks of the foundation revealed the degree to which the
institution was controlled by jihadists.152 In one instance, the Saudis
suspected one of the foundation’s operatives of being a member of Egypt’s
Islamic Jihad. They sent someone to Sarajevo to investigate. The investigator
confronted the man saying: “We hear that you have these connections and if that
is true we need to part ways.” The man put his hand on his heart and denied the
allegation. As far as the Saudis were concerned the issue was settled until the
man later in court testimony described how easy it was to fool the Saudis.
An ambiguous attitude
One place where refusal to acknowledge Saudi Arabia as the gold standard
of an Islamic State is counter balanced by the belief of the quietist trend in
Saudi-backed Islamic ultra-conservatism is a two storey, walled building built
around a courtyard in an upscale neighbourhood of Islamabad. The building
houses the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), Pakistan’s top Islamic advisory
body designed to guide parliament on whether proposed bills comply with the
Sharia’a. The Council’s offices hark back a quarter of century to a time when
computers with small monitors were far and few between; fax machines dominated;
and desks were piled with papers, folders and press clippings and dotted with a
battery of telephones.
Two of the council‘s members, in a rare public brawl in a government
agency over religion, got into a fist fight in 2015 as the council debated
further discrimination against Ahmadis. The council was considering
categorizing Ahmadis as apostates, a crime punishable by death under strict
Islamic law.
“I am stronger than him… He wants to make the law on Ahmadis
controversial, and push the country towards violence,” Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, a
controversial, pot-bellied, alcohol-consuming scholar and head of the Pakistan
Ulema Council charged after 78-year-old Maulana Mohammad Khan Sherani, the CII
chairman and a member of parliament for the Deobandi-affiliated Jamiat Ulema-e-
Islam (Fazal) party who adheres to Saudi-backed quietist Salafi principle of
unquestioned obedience to a ruler, grabbed his collar and ripped out the
buttons.153
Sporting a square white beard and clad in a black turban and vest and
white salwar kameez, Sherani cuts a stern figure with his Central Asian
features and narrow eyes. He embodies Saudi Arabia’s dilemma: those that it has
nurtured and that are closest to the kingdom’s ideology increasingly view it as
a country that has betrayed its funding beliefs. “Both Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia are Islamic states that do not follow what Islam teaches… Allah did not
ordain monarchies,” Sherani asserted in an interview.154
In remarks that deliberately included Saudi Arabia by implication,
Sherani described Pakistan as “a security state” in which “those that are in
power do what is in their interests… Religious leaders participate in elections
to bring rulers closer to the truth. It’s their prerogative not to follow.
Those in power play games and have many puppets. The ulema’s responsibility is
to keep informing the public and government,” Sherani said.
In a twist of irony, Sherani spoke sitting in his spacious office under
a picture of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the lawyer and politician who founded
Pakistan as a secular republic. The irony and difficulty quietist
ultra-conservatives have in justifying their support for governments they
essentially view as illegitimate was evident in Sherani’s effort to explain his
support of the Pakistani government and endorsement of the Al Sauds’ rule. “You
obey the rules and do not risk fitna in the community,” he said.
Sherani tied himself into knots as he sought to justify his position.
Comparing the government to a blind man standing at the edge of a well, Sherani
argued that it was his responsibility to warn the man but not stop him. “It is
his responsibility if he does not listen,” Sherani said. When asked if his
refusal to stop the man would not make him an accomplice if he fell into the
well and hurt or killed himself, Sherani quickly changed tack. In the only time
that he smiled during a three-hour interview, he said a better example was a
man on a street who asked for directions but then opted not to follow them.
That is not my responsibility,” he said.
In a magazine interview after his brawl with Sherani, Ashrafi, referring
to the CIIl’s Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism asserted that “there is a
dictatorship within the body. The environment is such that no scope for dissent
is left.”155 Shortly after the brawl, the council suggested in apparent support
of the fact that wife beating in Pakistan is the norm rather than the
exception156 that a draft bill in parliament legalize the right of husbands to
‘lightly’ beat wives who refuse to obey their orders or have sex with them. The
council had earlier urged parliament to declare nine year-old girls eligible
for marriage and replace the Pakistani rupee with gold and silver. The council
further denounced a women’s protection bill passed by the Punjab provincial
assembly as a violation of the tenants of the Sharia.157
Members of parliament blamed the CII days after its ruling on wife
beating for the brutal killing of 18-year old Zeenat Rafiq. Rafiq, one of an
increasing number of women killed for asserting their independence, was burnt
alive by her mother after she married a man of her own choice. “I have killed
my daughter. I have saved my honour. She will never shame me again,” neighbours
heard Rafiq’s mother, who had complained for months that her two elder
daughters had married men of their choice, shout from the roof her house when
she was done.158
Rafiq was but one of an average of 1,000 of mostly female victims of
honour killings in Pakistan. A Jirga or council of local elders in the city of
Abbottabad where Osama Bin Laden was killed by US forces ordered the killing of
a teenage girl that had helped a friend elope. The Jirga dictated the manner of
her death. The girl was tortured, injected with poison and then strapped to the
seat of a vehicle that was parked at a bus stop as a message to others, doused
with gasoline and set on fire.
In parliament, deputies charged that the council had legitimized
violence against women and questioned whether it should be allowed to continue
to exist. Opposition deputies Aitzaz Ahsan and Farhatullah Babar asserted that
“the anti-women bias of the CII as expressed in its recommendations and
pronouncements” had “contributed to crimes against women with impunity.”159 So
does the breeding of ultra-conservatism among women in the exponential growth of
all-female madrassahs. Columnist I. A. Rehman picked up on that when he
suggested that a section of society, including women, has been influenced by
ultra-conservative opposition to women’s rights to the extent of justifying
violence against all those who rebel against unjust constraints.”160
The council has also condemned co-education, demanded that state-owned
Pakistan International Airlines hostesses be fully covered, and called for the
dismissal of civil servants who failed to say their daily prayers. It declared
in 2014 that a man did not need his wife’s consent to marry a second, third or
fourth wife and that DNA of a rape victim did not constitute conclusive
evidence.
To be fair, parliament has in recent years not acted on any of the
council’s positions. Nonetheless, the council forced Marvi Memon, a law maker
for the ruling Muslim League, in early 2016 to withdraw a proposal to ban child
marriages, declaring the draft bill un-Islamic and blasphemous.161
The history of the council, ironically housed on Islamabad’s leafy
Ataturk Avenue, named after the visionary who created modern Turkey as a
secular state, charts the increasing influence of Saudi conservatism in
Pakistan. Founded in 1962, the council was originally headed by Fazlur Rahman
Malik, a liberal scholar, who in the words of Pakistani journalist Farahnaz
Ispahani put forward “bold and ingenious interpretation of Islamic themes,
including suggesting that drinking of alcohol was permissible, provided it did
not result in intoxication.”162
Rahman, who returned to Pakistan from Canada at the invitation of
President Ayub Khan to head the council’s predecessor, the Central Institute of
Islamic Research, resigned in 1968 frustrated with the success of conservative
opposition to his ideas. The council’s conservative instinct was boosted in the
late 1970s and the 1980s by Zia ul Haq who needed it to legitimize his effort
to Islamicize Pakistani society. It was under Ul Haq that Pakistan enacted
hudood, Islamic law’s concept of punishment that involves amputations, whipping
and death sentences for crimes such as theft, pre-marital sex, and rape, and
that ultra-conservatives interpret as a license to put rape victims at risk of
prosecution if he or she cannot produce four upright male eye-witnesses.
In an unprecedented parliamentary debate in 2015 about the council’s
role, opposition deputy Pakistan People’s Party’s Farhatullah Babar called for
its dissolution because it was “dangerously conservative” and irrelevant. “I am
pained that some of the council’s pronouncements have prompted the critics to
describe it as something of medieval nonsense at public expense,” said Babar.
He cited a long list of “long and frustrating” council proposals that included
inscribing the words Allah-o-Akbar (God is Great) on Pakistan’s national flag
and charged that the council inspired martyrdom and jihad. Islamist deputies
denounced Babar and demanded that he recite verses of the Quran to prove his
religiosity.163
The positions adopted by the council were with the exception of the
transgenders in line with Saudi policy. Saudi influence was also evident in
Pakistan’s feeble attempts to gain some measure of control of the madrassahs
that mostly involve boarding schools. Registration with the Pakistan Madrassa
Education Board (PMEB), the government’s overall board, established in 2003 to
oversee boards that represent the country’s five Muslim schools of thought, and
encourage madrassahs to use government syllabi and offer vocational training is
voluntary rather than mandatory. Oversight of the five sectarian boards by the
education and religious affairs ministries, bulwarks of ultra- conservatism,
has proven to be spotty at best.
As a result, the PMEB’s efforts have been largely rejected by the more
conservative and militant institutions, many of which have had Saudi financial
backing. PMEB chairman Amir Tauseen, estimated 13 years after the board’s
establishment that up to 10,000 religious seminaries were not registered. A
renewed effort in in 2015 to get madrassas to register, involving newspaper
advertisements, failed to convey sincerity by aiming to get a mere 500
institutions to register.164
Traditional culture on the defensive
Gunmen on a motorbike shot dead one of Pakistan’s best known Sufi
musicians and scion of a musical dynasty, Amjad Sabri, in June 2016 as he drove
his car in the port city of Karachi. Fakhre Alam, the Chairman of the Sindh
Board of Film Censors, claimed on Twitter that security authorities had earlier
rejected a request by Sabri for protection. The Islamabad High Court (IHC) in
2014 demanded an explanation in a blasphemy case from Sabri and two TV channels
who were accused of playing and broadcasting a qawwali, a form of Sufi
devotional music, that was deemed offensive because it referred to the Prophet
Mohammed.165
The killing claimed by the Pakistani Taliban was the latest in a
campaign waged by jihadists as well as non-violent Saudi-backed
ultra-conservative interpreters of Islam that has in recent decades stifled
popular culture; silenced music; led to the bombing of theatres and video and
music shops; and provoked the death of scores of musicians and other artists.
Sabri was a target both as a musician and a Sufi, whose shrines have repeatedly
been attacked in recent years. His assassination served as a warning to those
determined to celebrate and preserve indigenous cultural traditions. Human
rights activist Ali Dayan Hasan warned that each killing brought Pakistan
closer to being what he termed a Wahhabi-Salafist wasteland.
It is a wasteland that Saadat Hasan Manto, a Muslim journalist, Indian
film screenwriter and South Asia’s foremost short story writer envisioned as
early as 1954 in an essay, ‘By the Grace of Allah.’ Manto described a Pakistan
in which everything – music and art, literature and poetry – was censored.
“There were clubs where people gambled and drank. There were dance houses,
cinema houses, art galleries and God knows what other places full of sin … But
now by the grace of God, gentlemen, one neither sees a poet or a musician… Thank
God we are now rid of these satanic people. The people had been led astray.
They were demanding their undue rights. Under the aegis of an atheist flag they
wanted to topple the government. By the grace of God, not a single one of those
people is amongst us today. Thank goodness a million times that we are ruled by
mullahs and we present sweets to them every Thursday…. By the grace of God, our
world is now cleansed of this chaos. People eat, pray and sleep,” Manto
wrote.166
Maulana Amir Siddiqui, the leading imam at Islamabad’s notorious Red
Mosque, one of the Pakistani capital’s oldest mosques named after its red walls
and interior, is just the sort of mullah Manto had in mind. “Music is a great
weapon of Satan used to spread obscenity in society. As music spreads, people
will get only further away from the Qur’an,” Siddiqui argued in a sermon in
2015. In an interview, he added that “if there is something that draws a person
closer to sin like music does, it is forbidden. All music these days is based
on temptation, emotions, and illicit relations between men and women, which can
lead to sex and sin.”167
Seven years prior to Siddique’s sermon, students at the mosque’s
madrassah launched an anti-vice campaign and marched through Islamabad. They
attacked and beat those they accused of running brothels and torched video and
music shops. More than a 100 people were killed in fighting between the
students and security forces.
Authorities found stockpiles of weapons in the Red Mosque’s compound.
Karachi’s Metropol Hotel, once Pakistan’s prime music venue that hosted
the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Quincey Jones, stands today
and shuttered and in decay. “The biggest names in the industry, people we grew
up listening to, have just completely given up. It’s very disheartening, people
walking away, people you think are so successful, gods, the stars and the
icons. It’s like Freddy Mercury just decided to open up a restaurant instead of
being on stage.” said Sara Haider, a 24-year old rising star who records in her
own studio because Pakistani music labels refuse to sign new artists.168
Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist
who operated The Second Floor, one of Karachi’s few remaining retreats for
artists, gave Sara her first break. The 40-year old was gunned down in April
2015.
Gulzur Alam, one of Pakistan’s most popular folk singers with a fan base
that stretches into Afghanistan and across the Pashtu Diaspora, hasn’t
performed for years.
“Pashtun Youth, raise the red flags of revolution high in your hands,
come! Pashtun Youth, raise the red flags of revolution, The land cries for
revolution, The revolution that can ensure freedom for all,” reads one of
his most popular songs composed in 1987.
Sitting on the floor of a dilapidated music hall in Peshawar in front of
empty chairs that have not been occupied for years, Alam recalls how men would
sit on one side and women on the other as he enamoured them with his music.
People would shower flowers as he came on stage. His voice brought audiences to
tears. Yet, under the influence of ultra-conservatives, authorities harassed
him and his family and ultimately shut down the concert hall, saying they could
no longer ensure public security in the face of violent opposition to expressions
of traditional and non-religious culture.
“Now the hall is filled with silence. One feels scared… If you remove
culture from a nation, that nation dies. We have a centuries old tradition of
music. The traditions have been attacked, murdered. It’s left us all deeply
depressed,” Alam says.
Threatening phone calls persuaded him to no longer perform in the
Northwest Frontier Province. He tried to find gigs in the port city of Karachi,
but there, he faced a different problem: ethnic violence against Pashtuns. The
situation was no different in Baluchistan. In total, he moved and his family
moved 18 times to evade the threats.
In Karachi, he landed in the firing lines of ethnic violence against
Pashtuns and returned with his family and without income to Peshawar where his
older brother refused to take him because it would put his family in danger.
Alam, his wife and five children, now cram into three dank, dark rooms with no
running water. “It’s like falling from the sky to earth,” says Rukhsana
Muqaddas, Alam’s wife. “Before this we had a very modern, wonderful life. We
used to send our kids to good schools. Now, we can’t afford to educate them at
all.”169
Alam recalls performing at a wedding with a group of musicians in the
Swat Valley in 2008. They were ambushed by armed men emerging from the bushes
on a mountain road as they were returning home from their performance.
“All of sudden men jumped out. They opened fire. Many people were hit,
including my friend, Anwar Gul,” a renowned composer and harmonium player. “He
died later in the hospital,” Alam said, his voice trailing. Months later he was
hit by a car and walks with the aid of a stick ever since. “We humans are
social beings, we need friends but so many of them have died and I am now
alone. I take sleeping pills to calm my nerves but I believe my death will soon
come as well,” he adds.170
In one of the few music shops still open in Peshawar, Alam points to CDs
by a host of well-known musicians. “Shah Wali, he’s in Canada; Naghma, she’s in
America; and Sardar Ali Takkar, he’s also in America; he’s also in America,”
Alam says, pointing a finger at yet another CD. “I’ve had chances to leave and
have been offered asylum but I never thought it would get this bad. Now it’s
too late, other countries won’t accept us. I gave 35 years to music and I’m 55
years old, I no longer know what to do. I can’t support my family,” Alam says,
explaining why he didn’t follow his friends and colleagues into exile.
Alam’s native Peshawar and Swat Valley nestled in the foothills of the
Hindu Kush, illustrates the corroding impact of Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism
as well as government policies that were supported the kingdom and served its
foreign and soft power policies. The region once boasted a vibrant cultural
life punctured by concerts, theatre performances, art exhibitions, festivals
and poetry recitals. All of that has been replaced by countless madrassahs and
ultra-conservative religious and jihadist literature and education curricula. A
cultural hub was transformed into a hotbed of inward-looking, intolerant
worldviews initially populated by the mujahedeen confronting the Soviets in
nearby Afghanistan and their successors, the Taliban.
A study conducted by the Pakhtunkhwa Cultural Foundation, a
Peshawar-based group that aims to confront the erosion of culture, concluded
that “the Wahabi school of thought gained influence in the society due to
political developments and state patronage, and particularly in the wake of the
war in Afghanistan. Ideologues of the Wahabi school consider artistic
expression against Islam. Groups such as Tablighi preachers sprang up during
the period and rendered great damage declaring songs, films and anything
artistic to be obscene… The sharp decline in socio-cultural life has created a
vacuum that is being filled by religious missionaries…The lack of action of the
Pakistani government to support the development of cultural industries,
together with the lack of a strategy on the part of the incumbent provincial
government to redress the situation, has washed away any other hope for the
revival of music and cultural life in Swat,” the study said.171
It documented the end of public concerts, the demise of scores of
families of artists, the closure of almost 200 CD shops and dozens of cinemas
and the professional death of actors and performers. Clerics set fire in
cinemas and exhibition centres. They smashed billboards that displayed females’
images.172 Police harassed cultural institutions across the Swat valley.
Missionaries targeted dancing and music at weddings and other events. They
argued convincingly in mosques and in street encounters that performances were
sinful and that those involved would not only be condemned to hell in life
after death. People’s suffering, they reasoned, was God’s punishment for their
immoral practices.
Their campaigns were part of Pakistani President General Zia ul-Haq’s
Saudi-backed effort to Islamicize Pakistani society and erode secular or more
liberal religious expressions of culture. “The school curriculum was designed
on the basis of Islamic values and morality. Free expression and creative
thinking were discouraged. Music was considered immoral. ‘The State TV channel
removed music videos. Instead, Islamic shows held sway. Artistic expressions in
all forms were discouraged by various means such as new taxation, ‘forcefully
imposed on the film industry’… This new phase introduced the culture of the
madrassa and Jihadi literature in Swat, with an education curriculum that
glorified Jihad and promoted extremism,” the study said.
Swat Valley counted by 2005 225 madrassahs with thousands of students
educated with no marketable skills but those qualifying them to become imams or
religious teachers. “Madrassa graduates’ mind-sets have little to appreciate or
even tolerate art and secular values in society,” the study added.173
Notions of government inertia if not complicity in branches in which
Saudi-backed worldviews have made significant inroads are fuelled by the fact
that security forces seldom capture the killers of artists and cultural workers
or bombers of shops and cinemas. On the contrary, those branches of government
frequently adopt policies that contribute to an environment of increased
intolerance. Victims and their families are left to their own devices and often
reduced to abject poverty. Islamic scholars who cross ultra-conservative red
lines are disciplined by the religious affairs ministry.
Religious affairs minister Sardar Yousuf suspended Deobandi Mufti Abdul
Qavi, a representative of the ulema in former cricket player Imran Khan’s
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, in June 2016 after a picture of him and
Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani Kim Kardashian who achieved stardom as a drama
queen with videos of her daily life that often tackled controversial issues,
went viral on social media. The picture, in which Baloch donned the mufti’s
cap, was taken during an iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, in a hotel
room during which the two discussed Islam. Yousuf suspended Qavi’s membership
in the committee that sights the new moon to announce the beginning of Muslim
holy days as well as a committee populated by representatives of madrassahs as
the Islamist Jamaat-e- Islami party that issues fatwas.174
Qavi was no stranger to controversy. The scholar claims to be a major
spiritual influence in the life of controversial Pakistani actress, TV host and
model Veena Malik whom he first met when the two clashed on live television.
Malik caused a stir when she appeared nude on the cover of FHM magazine’s India
edition with the initials ISI of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency
written on her forearm. Malik and her businessman husband Asad Bashir Khan fled
in 2014 to Dubai after they were sentenced together with a TV host to 26 years
in prison by an anti-terrorism court on charges of blasphemy for re-enacting
their wedding in a scene that against the backdrop of religious music seemed to
be loosely based on the marriage of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter.175
Returning to Pakistan two years later, Malik and her husband announced during a
visit to Karachi’s Jamia Binoria al Aalmia, a major Deobandi mosque and
seminary that propagates Saudi-backed ultra-conservative that she intended to
enrol in the institution to get an Islamic education.176
Conclusion
It took the Al Qaeda bombings of residential complexes in Saudi Arabia
in 2003 and 2004 as well as a year-long running battle between security forces
and the jihadists rather than the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
to persuade the Saudis to really take control of funding of soft power assets
worldwide by banning charity donations in mosques, putting the various
charities under a central organisation, controlling the transfer of funds
abroad, and working with the United States and others to clean out some of the
charities — or like in the case of Al Haramain — close them down.177
The problem was that by that time it was too late; the genie was already
out of the bottle. At the same time, the soft power /proselytization campaign
still served and serves the purpose of countering Iran as Saudi Arabia battles
the Islamic republic r for regional hegemony.
The question is how long Saudi Arabia can afford the cost of its support
of ultra-conservatism. The domestic, foreign policy and reputational cost of
the Al Saud’s marriage to Wahhabism is changing the cost benefit analysis.
Tumbling commodity and energy prices are forcing the Saudi government to reform,
diversify, streamline and rationalise the kingdom’s economy. Reform that
enables the kingdom to become a competitive, 21st century knowledge economy is
however difficult, if not impossible, as long as it is held back by the
strictures of a religious doctrine that looks backwards rather than forwards,
and whose ideal is the emulation of life as it was at the time of the Prophet
and His Companions.
Moreover, the rise of IS has sparked unprecedented international
scrutiny of Saudi-backed ultra- conservative interpretations of Islam such as
Wahhabism and Salafism, that is causing Saudi Arabia significant reputational
damage. Increasingly Saudi Arabia’s roots are being seen as similar to those of
IS, and the kingdom is viewed as what IS will look like if it survives US-led
and Russian military efforts to destroy it.
In sum, the complex relationship between the Al Sauds and Wahhabism
creates policy dilemmas for the Saudi government on multiple levels,
complicates its relationship with the United States, as well as its approach
towards the multiple crises in the Middle East and North Africa. The Al Sauds’
problems are multiplied by the fact that Saudi Arabia’s clergy is tying itself
into knots as a result of its sell-out to the regime and its close ideological affinity
to more militant strands of Islam.
Ultimately, Wahhabism is not what’s going to win Saudi Arabia lasting
regional hegemony in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, the Al Sauds may
not have a secure way of restructuring their relationship to Wahhabism. As a
result, the Al Saud’s future is clouded in uncertainty, no more so than if they
lose Wahhabism as the basis for the legitimacy of their absolute rule.
The at times devastating fallout of Saudi Arabia’s soft power efforts is
visible in Muslim communities across the globe, nowhere more so than in
Pakistan. Similarly, the fallout of the inevitable restructuring of relations
between the Al Sauds and the kingdom’s ultra-conservative ulema is likely to
reverberate beyond the Middle East and North Africa in the Muslim world at
large, including in South and Southeast Asia.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co- director of the University
of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World
of Middle East Soccer blog and a just published book with the same title.
1David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, London: I. B.
Tauris, 2009.
2Sohail Nakhoda, Keynote: Workshop on Islamic Developments in Southeast Asia,
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 15 November 2015; Prince Ghazi Bin
Muhammad Bin Talal, “What Has Broken? Political, Sociological, Cultural and
Religious Changes in the Middle East over the Last 25 Years”, S R Nathan
Distinguished Lecture, Middle East Institute, 17 November 2015,
https://mei.nus.edu.sg/themes/site_themes/agile_records/images/uploads/What_has_broken_v.8,_As_Given
,_14.11.15.pdf.
3Farid Alatas, Reviving Islamic Intellectualism, Presentation at RSIS
Conference on Islam in the Contemporary World, 28 April 2016,
https://www.rsis.edu.sg/event/conference-on-islam-in-the-contemporary-world/.
4Christopher R. Hill, The Kingdom and the Power, Project Syndicate, 27 April
2016, https://www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/us-saudi-arabia-strained-relationship-by-christopher-r-hill-2016-04.
5Ashley Kirk, Iraq and Syria: How many foreign fighters are fighting for Isil?
The Telegraph, 24 March 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/iraq-and-syria-how-many-foreign-fighters-are-fighting-for-isil/.
6Sara Mahmood, Pakistan’s Public Education System: Narratives of Intolerance,
The Diplomat, 13 May 2016,
http://thediplomat.com/2016/05/pakistans-public-education-system-narratives-of-intolerance/.
7U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Teaching Intolerance in
Pakistan, 2016,
http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/USCIRF_Pakistan_FINALonline.pdf
8 Ibid. U.S. Commission
9 Irfan Husain, Death of diversity, Dawn, 14 May 2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1258146/death-of-
diversity
10 Pew Research, The Divide Over Islam and National Laws in the Muslim World,
27 April 2016,
http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/04/27/the-divide-over-islam-and-national-laws-in-the-muslim-world/
11 Nick Fielding and Yosri Fouda, Masterminds of Terror: The Truth Behind the
Most Devastating Terrorist Attack the World Has Ever Seen, Gloucestershire:
Mainstream Digital, 2011, Kindle edition
12 Umar Farooq, Moosa Kaleem, Nasir Jamal, Ghulam Dastageer and Saher Baloch,
Concealed Truth: What is wrong with madrassas? Herald, 1 May 2016,
http://herald.dawn.com/news/1153383
13 Ibid. Farooq et al.
14 Ibid. Farooq et al.
15 New America Foundation, A Conversation With A Former Muslim Extremist, 3 May
2016, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/a-conversation-with-a-former-muslim-extremist/.
16Ibid. New America Foundation
17 US Consulate Lahore, Extremist Recruitment on the Risein southern Punjab, 13
November 2008, Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08LAHORE302_a.html.
18Joel Guinto, Philippines probes attack on IS-targeted top Saudi cleric,
Agence France Presse, 1 March 2016,
https://news.yahoo.com/philippines-probes-attack-targeted-top-saudi-cleric-061519615.html.
19Al Hayat, الفيليبينتكشفأسماءإرهابيينخططوالاستهداف «السعودية (Philippines
identifies terrorists targeting Saudi), 1 March ,2016
http://www.alhayat.com/Articles/14243379/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A8%D
9%8A%D9%86-%D8%AA%D9%83%D8%B4%D9%81-%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1- %D8%A5%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%8A%D9%86-
%D8%AE%D8%B7%D8%B7%D9%88%D8%A7-
%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%81–
%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-.
20Ibid. Commins
21 Interviews with the author in January and February 2016.
22 Akhilesh Pillalamarri, The Radicalization of South Asian Islam: Saudi Money
and the Spread of Wahhabism, Georgetown Security Studies Review, 20 December
2014,
http://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2014/12/20/the-radicalization-of-south-asian-islam-saudi-
money-and-the-spread-of-wahhabism/#_edn9
23 Sushant Sareen, The Jihad Factory: Pakistan’s Islamic Revolution in the
Making, New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, 2005, p. 282
24 Akhilesh Pillalamarri, The Radicalization of South Asian Islam: Saudi Money
and the Spread of Wahhabism, Georgetown Security Studies Review, 20 December
2014,
http://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2014/12/20/the-radicalization-of-south-asian-islam-saudi-
money-and-the-spread-of-wahhabism/#_edn9
25 Luv Pirri, The Past and Future of Deobandi Islam, CTC Sentinel, 3 November
2009,
https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/the-past-and-future-of-deobandi-islam
26 Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan, A Muslim Homeland and Global
Politics, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, p.
218.
27Haqqani 2005
28Ibid. Farooq et al.
29Ibid. Farooq et al.
30 Crime Monitoring Cell, Update Details of Registered Madaris in Sindh
Province, Home Department, Government of Sindh, undated
31 Sami ul Haq, Afghan Taliban War of Ideology: Struggle for Peace, Islamabad:
Emel Publications, 2015. 32Qaiser Sherazi, “Conspiracy hatched at Akora
Khattak: FIA”, The Express Tribune, 26 May 2010,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/16267/conspiracy-hatched-at-akora-khattak-fia/.
33Ibid. Farooq et al.
34Darul Uloom, Fatwa Against Terrorism, 26 February 2008,
http://noblesseoblige.org/2008/02/26/.
35 International Crisis Group, Pakistan, Madrassahs, Extremism and the
Military, 29 July 2002, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-
asia/pakistan/Pakistan%20Madrasas%20Extremism%20And%20The%20Military.pdf
36Ibid. International Crisis Group
37Samanth Subramanian, “The Hit List, The Islamist war on secular bloggers in
Bangladesh”, The New Yorker, 21 December 2015,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-hit-list.
38Ibid. Pillalmarri
39Shahidul Alam, “Tolerating Death in a Culture of Intolerance”, Economic &
Political Weekly, 21 March 2015,
http://www.shahidulnews.com/tolerating-death-in-a-culture-of-intolerance
40 Interviews with author of Bangladeshi journalist and political analyst, 3
January 2015.
41 The Guardian, “US embassy cables: Saudi influence in Pakistan”, 1 December
2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/130876.
42Ibid. The Guardian
43The Guardian, “US State Department, US embassy cables: Saudis fear ‘Shia
triangle’ of Iran, Iraq and Pakistan”, 3 December 2010,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/201549.
44 The Guardian, “US State Department, US embassy cables: Pakistani relations
with Saudis ‘strained’”, 1 December 2010,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/173954.
45 The Guardian, “US Embassy Riyadh, State Department cables: Saudis distrust
Pakistan’s Shia president Zardari”, 1 December 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/231326.
46 The Guardian, US State Department, US embassy cables: Saudi royals believe
army rule better for Pakistan, 1 December 2010,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/207396.
47Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, Washington: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 2010.
48Ibid. Haqqani
49Ibid. Haqqani
50 Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden,
New York: Free Press, 2002. 51Ibid. Bergen
52 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, London:
Vintage Books, p. 116-117. 53John Lee Anderson. The Lion’s Grave, London:
Atlantic Books, 2002, p. 224.
54Ibid. Haqqani
55 Ibid. Haqqani
56 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.
57Al-Huda International, http://www.alhudapk.com/, 2016.
58Amna 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/.
59 Sadaf Ahmad, Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism
among Urban Pakistani Women, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009.
60 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.
61Sara 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.
62 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.
63Shamila 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.
64 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.
65Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Kitab Al-Tauhid, The Book of Monetheism, Riyadh:
Darussalam Publishers & Distributors, 1996, p. 20.
66 The World Bank, Government expenditure on education as % of GDP (%), 2016,
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS.
67 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/.
68 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.
69 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.
70 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.
71Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
72Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
73Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
74Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
75Ibid. US Consulate Lahore
76 S. Akbar Zaidi, The Ulema, Deoband and the (Many) Talibans, Economic and
Political Weekly, Vol. 44:19, 9- 15 May 2009, p. 10-11.
77 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.
78Ibid. Council of Foreign Relations
79Ibid. Council of Foreign Relations
80 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.
81 Dawn, Taseer’s killer Mumtaz Qadri hanged, 1 March 2016,
http://www.dawn.com/news/1242637.
82 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.
83 Email exchanges with the author on 2 April 2016 of Pakistani scholars.
84 Email exchange with the author on 4 April 2016.
85Mahboob Mohammed, Enlightenment Jihad: The Struggle to Realize the Islamic
Reformation, Draft manuscript of forthcoming book provided to the author.
86Pdf9.com, Molana Muhammad Masood Azhar’s Books, 2016,
http://pdf9.com/books-of-author-molana- muhammad-masood-azhar-aid-1220.html.
87 Innes Bowen, Masood Azhar: The man who brought jihad to Britain, BBC News, 5
April 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35959202.
88Raffaello Pantucci, Maulana Masood Azhar in the British Jihad, Hurst, 24
January 2013,
http://www.hurstpublishers.com/maulana-masood-azhar-in-the-british-jihad/.
89 Owen Bennett-Jones, Deobandi Variations, Dawn, 21 April 2016,
http://www.dawn.com/news/1253337/deoband-variations.
90 Owen Bennett-Jones, Deobandi Variations, Dawn, 21 April 2016,
http://www.dawn.com/news/1253337/deoband-variations
91 Ibid. Moosa, p. 105
92 Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle With Militant Islam, New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 92.
93 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulema in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change,
Princeton: Princeton University press, 2002, p. 119
94 Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and
America’s War on Terror, London: Routledge, 2015.
95 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.
96 Khaled Ahmed, Who killed General Zia? The Express Tribune, 7 December 2012,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/476508/who-killed-general-zia/
97 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/.
98 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.
99Ibid. Sareen, p. 282.
100Ibid. Abbas
101 Interview with the author, 28 June 2016
102 Muhammad Moj, The Deoband Madrassah Movement, Countercultural Trends and
Tendencies, London: Anthem Press, 2015, p. 105-5.
103Ibid. Abbas
104 Stephen Tankel, Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
105Ibid. Abbas
106Ibid. Bowen
107 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_bala
nces_secular_curriculum_with_Islamic_education____inspectors/?ref=mr&lp=19.
108 Athar Akhmad, Muslim sect called ‘less than animals’ , BBC Two, 13 April
2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03qx6q5.
109 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Position Statement: The Muslim Council of
Britain and Ahmadis, 6 April 2016, http://www.mcb.org.uk/position-statement-the-muslim-council-of-britain-and-ahmadis/.
110 BBC News, Police probe Scottish mosque figures’ links to banned sectarian
group, 31 March 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35928089.
111 Libby Brooks, Asad Shah killing should be condemned by all Muslims, say
Ahmadi community, The Guardian, 7 April 2016,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/07/asad-shah-killing-should-
condemned-muslims-say-ahmadi-community-glasgow.
112Ibid. Bowen
113Ibid. Bowen
114 Emma Brockes, British man named as bomber who killed 10, The Guardian, 28
December 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/dec/28/india.kashmir.
115 BBC News, Profile: Omar Saeed Sheikh, 16 July 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1804710.stm.
116Nic Robertson, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, Documents give new details
on al Qaeda’s London bombings, CNN, 30 April 2012,
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-london- bombings/.
117Ibid. Pantucci
118 Saeed Shah, Despite Crackdown, Some Pakistani Militants Walk the Streets,
The Wall Street Journal, 25 April 2016,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistans-crackdown-on-islamic-militants-looks-selective-
1461565803.
119Ibid. Shah
120 The Express Tribune, Re-emergence of banned groups, 10 June 2016,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/1120361/re-emergence-banned-groups/
121Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat, 2016, www.amtkn.com.
122Ibid. Aalmi
123Ibid. Jalal
124Mohammed Wajihuddin, DarulUloom asks Saudi Arabia to ban Ahmadiyas from
Mecca visit, The Times of India, 30 June 2011,
http://www.thepersecution.org/world/india/11/06/ti30.html
125 Mohammed Wajihuddin, Darul Uloom asks Saudi Arabia to ban Ahmadiyas from
Mecca visit, The Times of India, 30 June 2011,
http://www.thepersecution.org/world/india/11/06/ti30.html
126 Kurt Barlin, London mosque accused of links to ‘terror’ in Pakistan, BBC
News, 22 September 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15021073.
127Sajid Iqbal and Noel Titheragde, ‘Kill Ahmadis’ leaflets found in UK mosque,
BBC News, 11 April 2016, ttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35928848.
128 Rana Tanveer, Anti-Ahmadi group campaigning for funds through newspaper
ads, The Express Tribune, 25 June 2016,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/1129892/anti-ahmadi-group-campaigning-funds-newspaper-ads/
129 The Express Tribune, Ahmadi man shot dead in targeted attack in Karachi, 26
May 2016,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/1110466/tragic-incident-ahmadi-man-shot-dead-targeted-attack/
130 Omar Waraich, Sectarian Attacks on Lahore Mosques Kill More than 80, Time,
28 May 2010, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1992630,00.html
131 Ibid. Waraich
132 Iqbal Mirza, Mob attack over alleged blasphemy: Three Ahmadis killed in
Gujranwala, Dawn, 28 July 2014, http://www.dawn.com/news/1122143
133 Libby Brooks, Shunned for saying they’re Muslims: life for Ahmadis after
Asad Shah’s murder, The Guardian, 9 April 2016,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/09/shunned-for-saying-theyre-muslims-life-for-
ahmadis-after-asad-shahs.
134Ibid. Brooks
135 Omar Oakes, Worshippers told at Tooting Islamic Centre to boycott Ahmadiyya
shops, Wimbledon Guardian, 14 October 2010,
http://www.wimbledonguardian.co.uk/news/8451539.Worshippers_told_to_boycott_Ahma%20diyya_shops/
136 Athar Ahmad, Muslim sect called ‘less than animals’, BBC Two, 13 April 2016,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03qx6q5.
137Joern Wegner, Die erste deutsche Moschee, Eine wechselvolle Geschichte, TAZ,
4 August 2013, https://www.taz.de/!5061890/; Westdeutsche Rundfunk, Stichtag,
26 April 1925 – Ältestenocherhaltene Moschee Deutschlandseröffnet, 6 May
2005, http://www1.wdr.de/stichtag/stichtag-224.html.
138Gerdientje Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress: Missionizing
Europe 1900-1965, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015, p. 145.
139Roshan Mughal, Unlikely origins, The Express Tribune, 4 December 2011,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/300034/unlikely-origins/.
140Ibid. Abbas
141 Shah Faisal Kakar, KSA-Pakistan ties touch new heights, Arab News, 14
August 2015, http://www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/news/790986.
142 State Bank of Pakistan, Country-wise Workers’ Remittances, 2016,
http://www.sbp.org.pk/ecodata/Homeremit.pdf.
143 Muhammad Anis, 1,180 Pakistan Army personnel present in Saudi Arabia: Kh
Asif, The News, 20 January 2016,
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/92465-1180-Pakistan-Army-personnel-presentin-Saudi-Arabia-Kh-
Asif.
144 Jean-Luc Racine, Pakistan’s difficult neighbours, Le Monde Diplomatique,
March 2016, https://mondediplo.com/2016/03/08pakistan.
145Ifran Haider, Pemra advises TV channels to display ‘caution’ on Saudi-Iran conflict,
The Dawn, 06 January 2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1231171.
146Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West,
Cambridge/London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 170 – 173; Madawi
al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 73-74.
147Bassem Hassan, Egypt: The Continuing Legacy of the Mubarak-Sadat Regime, Al
Jazeera Centre for Studies, 8 June 2011,
http://studies.aljazeera.net/ResourceGallery/media/Documents/2011/7/30/2011730124542515580Egypt-
The%20Continuing%20Legacy%20of%20the%20Mubarak-Sadat%20Regime.pdf.
148Zachary Laub, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Council on Foreign Relations, 15
January 2014, http://www.cfr.org/egypt/egypts-muslim-brotherhood/p23991.
149Laurant Bonnefoy, Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious
Identity, London: Hurst, 2012, p. 61-3. 150 Interviews with author of senior
Saudi bankers in 2001/2002.
151 Interviews with author of senior Saudi bankers in 2001/2002.
152Andrew Higgins, Robert Block, Glenn Simpson, James M. Dorsey, Christopher
Cooper and Michael Sesit, The War on Terrorism: Muslim Charities Tied to Terror
Are a Risky Target for the U.S./ Saudis Are Asked to Sort Out Religious
Promotion and Support of Militants”/ People Feel Targeted for No Reason and
That the Americans Are Again Trying a Witch Hunt, The Wall Street Journal, 21
October 2001.
153 Raza Khan, Scuffle breaks out between Maulana Sherani, Ashrafi during CII
meeting, Dawn, 29 December 2015, http://www.dawn.com/news/1229401
154 Interview with the author, 16 June 2016
155 Benazir Shah and Abid Hussain, Does Pakistan Need An Islamic Council? The
Caravan, 6 June 2016,
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/pakistan-need-islamic-council#sthash.Tm366VHG.dpuf
156 Tahir Mehdi, Reproductive violence, Dawn, 7 June 2016,
http://www.dawn.com/news/1263136/reproductive-violence
157 Benazir Jatoi, Punjab’s attempt as Protecting Women, The Express Tribune,
17 June 2016, http://tribune.com.pk/story/1124234/punjabs-attempt-protecting-women/
158 Kathy Gannon, In Pakistan, gruesome ‘honour’ killings bring a new backlash,
Associated Press, 4 July 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-pakistan-gruesome-honor-killings-bring-a-new-
backlash/2016/07/04/0cfa3e24-41ae-11e6-a76d-
3550dba926ac_story.html?postshare=9971467696176656&tid=ss_tw
159 Amir Wasim, CII Blamed for rise in incidents, Dawn, 10 June 2016,
http://www.dawn.com/news/1263920/cii-blamed-for-rise-in-incidents-of-violence-against-women
160 I. A. Rehman, The roots of misogyny, Dawn, 16 June 2016,
http://www.ipsnews.net/2016/06/the-roots-of- misogyny/
161 Maryam Usman, Bill aiming to ban child marriages shot down, The Express
Tribune, 15 January 2016, http://tribune.com.pk/story/1027742/settled-matter-bill-aiming-to-ban-child-marriages-shot-down/
162 Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious
Minorities, New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2016, Kindle edition
163 Ibid. Shah and Hussain
164 Zia Ur Rahman, Fresh efforts being made to affiliate madrassas with PMEB,
The News, 26 June 2015,
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/47930-fresh-efforts-being-made-to-affiliate-madrassas-with-pmeb
165 Imtiaz Ali, Famed qawwal Amjad Sabri gunned down in Karachi, Dawn, 22 June
2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1266514/famed-qawwal-amjad-sabri-gunned-down-in-karachi
166 Saadat Hasan Manto, By the Grace of God (Allah ka bara fazal hay) in Amjad
Tufail (ed), Complete and Authentic collection of Manto’s works (Mustanad aur
Jama’y Kuliat e Manto), Edition 6, Islamabad: Narratives, 2012, p. 254-258
167 Steve Chao, Pakistan – Music Under Siege, Al Jazeera, 101 East, 20 October
2015,
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2015/10/pakistan-music-siege-151020115104964.html
168 Ibid. Chao
169 Anne Garrels, Taliban Threats, Attacks Silence Pakistani Singer, National
Public Radio, 12 March 2009,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101733831
170 Ibid. Chao
171 Muhammad Rome, Study on Effects of War and Repression on Musicians,
Performers, and the Public of Swat, Pakistan, Pakhtunkhwa Cultural
Foundation/Freemuse, 3 March 2016, http://www.freemuse.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/Swat-report2016.pdf
172 Mohammad Shehzad, Pakistan: MMA to ban women’s photography, dance and
music, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 24 February 2005,
http://www.wluml.org/node/1905
173 Ibid. Rome
174 Fayyaz Hussain, What really happened when Mufti Abdul Qavi broke his fast
with Qandeel Baloch in a hotel? Daily Pakistan, 20 June 2016,
http://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/lifestyle/real-story-of-mufti-qavis-breaks-
fast-with-qandeel-balcoh/
175 Catherine Shoard, Bollywood star Veena Malik handed 26-year sentence for
‘blasphemous’ wedding scene, The Guardian, 27 November 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/27/bollywood-veena-malik-
sentenced-26-years-jail-religious-blasphemy-wedding
176 Naeem Sahoutara, Veena Malik seeks to join Jamia Binoria for Islamic
education, The Express Tribune, 7 May 2016,
http://tribune.com.pk/story/1098873/veena-malik-seeks-to-join-jamia-binoria-for-islamic-
education/
177Glenn R. Simpson, Saudi Arabia to Shut Down Group/ Assets of Former Director
of al Haramain Frozen: Potential Links to al Qaeda, The Wall Street Journal, 3
June 2004.
About the author
