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A Land of Madrassahs
By Mary Anne Weaver
The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America has focused
world attention on Peshawar, from where U.S. military strikes
could still come.
Peshawar only thirteen miles southeast of the Khyber Pass,
with Afghanistan beyond is a rugged, lawless place, riven by
religious fervor and violence and rich in political intrigue.
The capital of Pakistan s North-West Frontier province is a
sprawling town of pastel colored villas and Afghan refugee
camps, militant training centers and madrassahs, the religious
schools where jihad, more often than not, is preached. It is a
center for arms, drugs and a booming black-market economy.
The key staging area for the jihad in Afghanistan, Peshawar is
an example of an economy which is nearly bankrupt and has a $36
billion foreign debt, a black market economy which exceeds 55
percent of GDP, and a gun-loving culture. In the North-West
Frontier province and surrounding tribal agencies, there are
thought to be roughly seven million Kalashnikovs one for
every grown man.
This is Pakistan s recently self-appointed President, General
Pervez Musharraf s inheritance.
When he came to power, in a military coup in October 1999,
Musharraf pledged to reverse all this: to crack down on endemic
corruption; to jumpstart the economy; to deweaponize the
country, and to rein in its growing band of Islamic militants,
who are schooled in the madrassahs, trained in Afghanistan, and
go on to fight in the disputed state of Kashmir which is
claimed by both India and Pakistan and has been divided between
them for half-a-century.
It is a vicious cycle, and one which the General has been
unable, or unwilling, to reverse. His supporters insist that if
Musharraf has not fulfilled his promises, it is too soon to
conclude that he has broken them.
Yet, over the past year, he has acquiesced consistently to the
demands of the religious right, retreating from his pledges to
document the madrassahs and bring them under state control; to
liberalize the country s draconian blasphemy law; and to
consider (under the strong urging of the United States) the
feasibility of signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It
has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between
Musharraf s surrenders and his tactical retreats which, in
turn, makes it difficult to say which direction Pakistan will
take.
I had come to Peshawar to meet the Maulana Sami ul-Haq, one of
the most powerful, and one of the most anti-American, of
Pakistan s religious militants. He is the chancellor of the al-
Haqqania madrassah, which his father had founded, and which is
the largest in the Frontier and, like its leader, one of the
most militant in Pakistan.
As we sped along the highway, we passed brightly-painted
lorries, which are unique to the Frontier, and whose cargoes
more often than not contain smuggled electronic goods, a
lucrative business controlled in large part by the Afghan
mafia. We weaved our way in and out of a procession of cars,
festooned with religious banners and flags, whose occupants
were enroute to a fundamentalist rally outside Islamabad, which
would attract hundreds of thousands of people, both Pakistanis
and Afghans.
(Political parties and political activities are banned in
Musharraf s Pakistan, but the religious right continues to
organize, rally and recruit, having convinced the government,
or so it appears, that their organizations are more Islamic,
than they are political all of which has led the Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan to accuse the General of being a silent
spectator in the rise of the orthodox clergy and
fundamentalist Islam.)
I glanced out the window and watched clusters of Afghan
refugees tending their tiny shops. Afghanistan has been at war
for twenty years, and the refugees continue to spill across the
frontier, now fleeing the ruling Taliban, whose Islamic
strictures are extreme and often bizarre. Women largely are not
permitted to work. Girls may not attend school. Television,
cinema, and music are banned. So is kite flying. Women are not
permitted to wear white socks. Both of the latter are
considered to be sexually provocative.
Afghan refugees now dominate Pakistan s northern towns and, as
we continued toward the madrassah, it became apparent that, for
all practical purposes, Afghanistan had effectively moved fifty
miles south.
A friend had come with me to act as my interpreter, and as soon
as we entered al-Haqqania s gates, we discovered how vast it
is. Spread over fourteen acres, on the Grand Trunk Road, an
hour or so east of Peshawar, it has scores of classrooms,
administrative buildings, mosques and dorms, and a state-of-the-
art computer room. Much of its funding comes from the wealthy
kingdoms and sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, particularly Saudi
Arabia.
No armed men were visible early that afternoon but, a few weeks
after our visit, scores of gunmen in camouflage fatigues, their
faces covered by black ski-masks, would stand guard across the
campus as some three hundred of Pakistan s leading Muslim
clerics met to pledge their support to Osama bin Laden, the
accused Saudi terrorist who is the chief suspect in the
September 11th terrorist attacks.
We were ushered to a verandah abutting the Maulana s drawing
room. There, ten or so young men lounged about, including the
Maulana s second son, Rashid, who was in the process of being
married, in a ceremony that lasts three days. His father was
supervising the final arrangements for the festivities, so
Rashid and his friends had been asked to entertain us until the
Maulana arrived. They proceeded to brief us on Peshawar s
events of the day. The previous evening, a dozen or so armed
militants had met with great success in smashing an equal
number of satellite dishes and TV sets. The papers that morning
had reported that the United States was about to bomb
Afghanistan again (as we had done, in August, 1998, after we
accused Osama bin Laden of bombing two of our African
embassies.)
What will happen here if that occurs? I asked.
Holy war, one of the young men politely said.
The Maulana Sami ul-Haq rushed onto the verandah, followed by
servants ferrying trays of tea and coffee, fruits and sweets. A
weathered man of sixty-five with a heavily lined face, small
brown eyes, and a straggly beard, dyed orange with henna (which
is quite fashionable here), the Maulana is also a politician
and a former Senator. He is the leader of one of Pakistan s
more radical Islamist parties, which seeks the immediate
imposition of the more punitive aspects of Shariah, or Islamic
law. He told me immediately that al-Haqqania had 2,500
students; had issued nearly a million fatwas, or religious
opinions, over the years (not mentioning the fact that a number
of them had endorsed the fatwas issued by bin Laden in
Afghanistan); and that 95 per cent of the leadership of the
Taliban had studied here.
Pakistan s commitment to that leadership has been reinforced
since General Musharraf seized control. As a result, not only
has his powerful military intelligence organization, Inter-
Services Intelligence, or ISI, intensified its efforts to
impose its own solution on Afghanistan, by accelerating its
military training of the Taliban and by recruiting volunteer
soldiers (from madrassahs such as this) but, since last spring,
it has planned pivotal military operations for Afghanistan s
fundamentalist regime, as the two sides attempt to wrest
control of ten per cent of the country in the north, which
remains in the hands of the remnants of an opposition force a
force supported by India, Russia, and Iran. So, I asked the
Maulana to tell me about the Taliban s mysterious ruler, Mullah
Mohammed Omar. For despite the fact that Pakistan has gambled
heavily on him, except for a handful of officers from the ISI,
few in successive governments of Pakistan, including General
Musharraf, have ever met the man.
He s a very good friend of mine, Sami ul-Haq began. He
considers me as a teacher, and your country should give him a
medal for saving Afghanistan! Mullah Omar and the Taliban
didn t just fall out of the sky. They re the children of the
mujahideen, the children of the jihad, which your CIA trained.
Mullah Omar was an ordinary soldier who fought in that war and
he lost an eye in it. He was an unnamed, unknown Talib who came
from nowhere. We think that God must be behind him. When I last
visited him in Kandahar, I found him in a garage outside his
house. He was sitting on the floor, with a wireless, ruling
Afghanistan. He has no need for pomp and ceremony, for
television or air conditioners. He didn t even have a fan!
What do you think of Osama bin Laden? I asked.
What do you think of Abraham Lincoln? he said.
When I had met General Musharraf earlier, I had asked him if he
was not concerned about the Talibanization of Pakistan. For
many of the madrassahs, although they had begun as religious
schools that had educated, among others, the Taliban, they had
by now, in a role reversal of sorts, begun preaching the
Taliban s ideology of militancy and jihad.
Okay, okay, the General had responded, slightly
irritably. I ve never been to a madrassah, but I do know that
all this talk about their teaching militancy is just hearsay.
I ve met with some of their leaders (including Sami ul-
Haq) and they ve said to me: Who comes to the madrassahs? Has
anyone from the Ministry of Education ever come? No. Only
people from the police, from the intelligence agencies. We re
being treated as though we are dacoits (the legendary bandits
of the Indian subcontinent s ravines)!
So, I now asked Sami ul-Haq what he and his fellow Maulanas
thought of General Musharraf.
We had lots of hopes, but the poor chap has been caught up in
a lot of problems, he said. He s been very firm on Kashmir
and, of course, that s very good. But I wish he d use the stick
and clean up corruption and the politicians mess.
What would happen if he brought the madrassahs under
government control or closed them down? I asked.
Impossible! the Maulana said. I asked him that question
directly, and he replied: Do you think I m mad! The madrassahs
are doing so much for the poor; you re giving poor children
free education, free lodging, free food. Why should I close
them down?
Wedding guests had begun to arrive, so my interpreter and I
said our good-byes. Before leaving, I asked the Maulana if I
could meet some of his students, but al-Haqqania had just
closed for semester break. As he walked with us to our car, one
of the young men from the verandah explained that all of the
students had left. Most had gone off to join some ten thousand
other Pakistani volunteers, who were training or fighting in
Afghanistan.
2002 Mary Anne Weaver
Mary Anne Weaver, a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker,
is reporting on Pakistan during her fellowship year. She
recently signed a contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, based
on her Alicia Patterson Foundation research, for her second
book: In the Shadow of Jihad Pakistan, Islamic Militancy and
the Taliban.
