Inflation is high and donors are not as generous as in the past. “We are facing the worst financial crisis. We have 5,000 students to teach, educate and feed and we can’t meet our expenses,” he said, while spooning mango into the mouth of a three-year-old adopted son. As a result, there will be no commemorations of the week-long standoff between the government forces and the Lal Masjid clerics and their supporters, he said.
Army commandos had stormed the building in a leafy boulevard on July 10, 2007, and more than 100 people were killed. The army demolished Jamia Hafsa, an adjacent girls’ seminary and hostel.
The operation opened the floodgates to militant attacks within Pakistan and more than 3,500 people have died in bomb blasts and attacks since. A civilian administration replaced military ruler Pervez Musharraf but the war between the government and the Taliban has spread like wildfire across Pakistan’s tribal belt and the northwest. The army has redeployed forces from the border with India, hurling 140,000 troops into battle against the Taliban in the northwestern tribal belt.
The urban areas of the country have suffered. The bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel in September 2008 sparked an exodus of Westerners from the city. Attacks have turned Peshawar into a fortress and bomb blasts have become frequent in Lahore. On the eve of the third anniversary of the Lal Masjid operation, bombers slaughtered 102 people in Mohmand Agency, targeting the local administration and peace efforts.
Aziz presents Islamic rule as the one-stop solution to Pakistan’s social, economic, political and security woes. “The Lal Masjid changed the track of the nation towards revolution,” he said. “After that, the whole nation took a turn towards Islamic rule of law and Islamic system.”
According to government records, there are more than 15,000 seminaries in Pakistan, educating around five per cent of the 34 million children who are in education. Islamabad administrator Amir Ahmed Ali says there are 305 in the capital – 140 of them are registered, up from 128 last year.
Zafarullah Khan, director of the independent Centre for Civic Education, acknowledged that donations had slowed. “But I think these seminaries are otherwise flourishing and the government seems helpless to tackle the issue by either bringing them in the national mainstream or taking action against them,” he said.
Jamia Hafsa says it educates around 650 girls in Islamic studies and the Quran, the majority of whom live on campus. At their new, cramped quarters, classrooms double up as dormitories when bed rolls are shaken out at night. Staff members say the girls also study science, maths, English and computer studies, but few demonstrate fluency in English.
“The biggest problem is that there is no Islamic system. Everyone has forgotten Islam. If the situation remains the same, Islamabad will become Baghdad. Pakistan will become Iraq,” said teacher Roma.
The mosque was a flashpoint in the capital and there were fears it could become one again when Aziz was released on bail last year. Aziz and his wife Ume Hassan deny any link with jihad but when the roomful of girls dressed in the niqab were asked whether any of their relatives were fighting against government troops, there was silence.
But Imtiaz Gul, an expert on the tribal belt, points to a connection between the Lal Masjid and the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Gul says that the so-called Ghazi force, set up by Abdul Aziz’s younger brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi, was still operating and was allied to the TTP and Afghanistan’s Haqqani network. “They are involved in many attacks. The army had found a lot of material about the Ghazi force during the Swat operation,” he said.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 11th, 2010.
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