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Pakistan madrassas back in spotlight

Randeep Ramesh

Education in fundamentalist ideology

International attention in the wake of Thursday's developments in the United Kingdom is likely to focus in coming days on Pakistan and the madrassas or religious schools which are abundant in the country.

In the wake of the bombings of July 7 in London last year it was revealed that two of the suicide bombers had been to Pakistan before the attacks, where one had visited a madrassa.

At the time, President Pervez Musharraf promised to crack down on foreigners attending the 13,000 Islamic seminaries — some of which are known to provide an education rich in fundamentalist ideology . On Tuesday, Pakistani authorities ordered hundreds of foreign students expelled from madrassas. Diplomats in Islamabad said they had heard nothing about links with the U.K. arrests, but said ``Pakistan is likely to be busy in the next weeks''.

A U.S. defence analyst said there was a 70 per cent ``probability'' that satellite images pointed to a militant training camp in north-east Pakistan.

Pakistani authorities try intermittently to curb extremist forces.

On Thursday, the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group was put under house arrest in Lahore. Lashkar, an Islamist group fighting a guerrilla war in Kashmir, was closed down in Pakistan after the September 11 attacks, but Hafiz Mohammad Saeed continued to run a religious charity called Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The U.S. has designated both as terrorist organisations.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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