Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

1 1 0Islam i n World Cult u r e sAfghan refugee boys at a window in one of several madrasas at the Shamshatu refugee campnear Peshawar, Pakistan, December 6, 2001. (REUTERS/Corbis/Haider Shah)In Pakistan, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the rapidproliferation of independent, self-styled religious parties, and along with it, anexplosion of urban sectarian violence. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid documentsin his book Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia(2000), the marked rise of militant Islam in the region is, in large measure, thedirect result of the Afghan war of the 1980s. In one of the last theaters of thecold war, the Pakistani government, with active support from both the UnitedStates and Saudi Arabia, backed disparate groups of m u j a h i d i n soldiers in thefight against the Soviet Union. During this proxy war, the military regime ofPresident Zia al-Haq actively funded a broad network of m a d r a s as within Pakistan.Diverse in ideology and institutional structure, these religious institutionsoffered young Pakistanis and Afghan refugees food, shelter, a free education,and military training. Throughout the 1980s, the Jamiat Ulama-i Islam( JUI), under the leadership of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, established hundredsof m a d r a s as in the Pashtun ethnic belt along the North-West Frontier Provinceand Baluchistan. In 1993, with the return to power of the Pakistan People’sParty under the leadership of Benazir Bhutto, the JUI began to receive statesupport and entered the official circles of power. At the same time, dozens ofb r e a k a w a y, extremist factions emerged out of the mainstream JUI. Among