Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Nursery for Jihad
phenomenon drew international attention, particularly following the
rise of the conservative Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The movement
was largely the product of hundreds of seminaries in the Pashtun belt
on the border with Afghanistan.
The link between madrasas and the Afghan jihad is exemplified by
the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa. Founded in 1947 by Haq’s father,
Maulana Abdul Haq, a well-respected Islamic scholar belonging to the
Deobandi order, Darul Uloom Haqqania developed into a centre for
pan-Islamism with the beginning of the Afghan war. It saw a huge
expansion with the support of the government and funds from abroad.
Like other Deobandi institutions, Darul Uloom was controlled by a
faction of JUI, a mainstream religio-political party that was part of a sixparty
conservative alliance known as Muttehida Majlis Amal (MMA).
The party became an important part of the Afghan jihad. The seminary
traditionally had a large number of students from Afghanistan, but they
increased considerably with the influx of Afghan refugees.
By 1985, about 60 per cent of the students in the seminary were
Afghans. It also attracted students from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan. From the beginning of the Afghan jihad, the school
had relaxed the rules concerning attendance, allowing the students to
take time off to participate in the ‘holy war’. The seminary, however,
drew immense international attention in the 1990s with the emergence
of the conservative Taliban movement. Thousands of Afghan, as well
as Pakistani students crossed the border into Afghanistan to join the
Islamic militia. In 1997 the school was closed for several months
to allow the students to participate in the Taliban’s war to capture
Afghanistan’s northern province of Mazar-i-Sharif. Such a large-scale
cross-border movement would not have been possible without the
collusion of Pakistani intelligence agencies.
Just months before the 11 September terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington, the school hosted a conference of Islamic parties and
militant groups to express solidarity with bin Laden and the Taliban
regime. Masked gunmen in camouflage guerrilla outfits stood guard
as Islamic leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan congregated at the
sprawling auditorium on 9 January 2001, vowing to defend bin Laden
and to launch a holy war against the West. Besides the 300 leaders
representing various radical Islamic groups, the meeting was also
attended by a former army chief, General Aslam Beg, and a former
ISI chief, General Hamid Gul. They declared it a religious duty of
Muslims all over the world to protect the Saudi dissident whom they
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