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

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nursery
For jihad
s porting white turbans, the young men listened in silence to the
concluding sermon at the graduation ceremony. ‘Being watchmen
of your religion, you are naturally the first target of your enemies,’ declared
a frail, black-turbaned Maulana Samiul Haq. His long grey beard
coloured with henna, the fiery cleric was head of Pakistan’s leading
institution for Islamic learning, Darul Uloom Haqqania. Situated in the
town of Akora Khattak on the Grand Trunk Road near Peshawar, the
radical seminary, often described as the University of jihad, in September
2003 turned out another class of young Pakistanis and Afghans
ready to wage a holy war against the enemies of their religion.
Banners showing Kalashnikov rifles and tanks adorned the walls of
the seminary. Some posters carried slogans in support of bin Laden
and holy war. ‘It is your sacred duty to defend your faith before
everything else,’ exhorted Haq, a member of Parliament and the leader
of an alliance of six Islamic parties that ruled the North West Frontier
Province. In his mid sixties, the cleric took pride in having met bin
Laden. ‘He is a great hero of Islam,’ he told me a week after 9/11,
showing off photographs of himself posing with the Saudi militant.
Thousands of students, teachers and religious leaders assembled
within a tented ground inside the sprawling campus broke into