Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

Gujarat madrasas: an education in terror?

Praveen Swami

Investigations into a Lashkar-e-Taiba cell in Gujarat cast new light on the Islamist networks that carried out the Mumbai serial bombings — and raise hard questions about the State's madrasas.

FROM THE outside, the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia Arabiyya madrasa resembles a fortress. Its elaborate battlements and massive iron gates all appear to illustrate the entrenched myth that Islamic seminaries are terror factories, not centres of theological learning.

In mid-September, police in Ahmedabad arrested four men with links to two of Gujarat's most famous madaris — or Islamic seminaries — for links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Khalid Sardana, the brother of a top Rajouri-based Lashkar recruiter, was held along with Illyas Memon, Siraj Ansari and Qari Mufidul. While none of the four men possessed weapons more dangerous than inflammatory Islamist literature and videos, police say they have hard evidence that the men were linked to Lashkar cells responsible for a string of terror strikes in western India.

Ever since the arrests, Gujarat's madaris have faced sometimes-venomous attack from both politicians and the press. Much of the attack has focussed on the fact that all the four were linked to the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia near Bharuch and the Dar-ul-Uloom Falah-e-Darain at Tarkeshwar. Little nuanced examination, though, has been attempted of just how the Lashkar cell came into being — and of precisely what role the madaris had in their birth.

Last month, soldiers raided the small mountain hamlet of Hanslot near Thana Mandi. Mohammad Aslam Sardana, the man they were looking for, was not at home. No one was surprised. Using the code-name `Aslam Kashmiri,' Sardana is believed to have recruited at least 20 men from Gujarat and Maharashtra to the Lashkar-e-Taiba — including several members of the cell which executed the July serial bombings in Mumbai.

Sardana arrived at the Dar-ul-Uloom Falah-e-Darain in 1993. His family hoped that the rigours of madrasa education would help to curb his teenage rebelliousness, and ensure that he stayed clear of the terrorist groups that were beginning to make their presence felt in the mountains south of the Pir Panjal range. Over the next nine years, he acquired the titles Hafiz, denoting individuals who know the Quran by memory, and Qari, signifying those skilled in the rules that govern its recitation.

During his time at Tarkeshwar, Sardana met Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad Sheikh, one of the 11 Lashkar operatives arrested at Aurangabad and Beed in May this year for their role in handling a massive explosives and arms consignment that was intended for major terror strikes in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Sheikh fell ill after just six months at Tarkeshwar, and returned to Aurangabad. However, the two men met again in 2001 at a Khatm-e-Bukhari Sharif, a convocation held to felicitate students who have mastered the nine volumes of the Hadith — compilations of the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad — authored by Imam Mohammad al-Bukhari.

Soon after the convocation, the two travelled to Aurangabad to meet with members of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India, who had regrouped under the flag of the far-right Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis. Zabiuddin Ansari, the operational head of the Lashkar cell that carried out the Mumbai bombings, was one of the men Sardana persuaded to join the Lashkar. The other was Zulfikar Fayyaz Ahmad `Kagzi,' the author of the abortive February 19 bombing of a Mumbai-Ahmedabad train, and one of Ansari's principal lieutenants.

Sardana left Aurangabad for Poonch with three Beed residents Sheikh and Ahmad had selected for training with a Lashkar unit active in the Hil Kaka area of Jammu and Kashmir. One, Fahd Sheikh, is thought to have been killed in the course of a firefight with Indian troops. As the Aurangabad-Beed cell grew, a meeting was arranged with the Lashkar commander responsible for all cells active outside Jammu and Kashmir, a Pakistani national so far identified only by the code-name `Junaid.'

By late 2004, the Aurangabad-Beed cell was operating independently of Sardana. Of the precise workings, though, relatively little is known. Rahil Abdul Rehman Sheikh, a Mumbai resident who is thought to have had overall operational command of the multiple cells that executed the July bombings, fled to Dhaka after a botched Delhi police raid on his home. Fayyaz `Kagzi,' for his part, flew to Tehran on an Iran Air flight on the morning of May 9 — hours before the Intelligence Bureau and Maharashtra police personnel began making arrests in Aurangabad — and then travelled by road through the Zahedan border into Pakistan. Zabiuddin Ansari escaped the Maharashtra police pursuit after a high-speed car chase, and is believed to have made his way to a sanctuary in a Lashkar safe house in Bangladesh. Even as this theatre was unfolding, Sardana had begun work on his next project: building the new Lashkar cell in Gujarat using his seminary contacts.

Ideologues and ideas

Inside the imposing walls of the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia, the silence is interrupted only by the insistent hammering of a mason's chisel. Ever since news broke of the arrests at the Lashkar cell, the madrasa, like its counterpart at Tarkeshwar, has been under siege.

When the madrasa opens after the Ramzan vacation, some 1,600 students — 95 per cent of whose families cannot afford to pay for their fees — will resume their studies. After obtaining the degrees offered by the institution most will go on to be small-town clerics, on salaries ranging from Rs.1,500 to Rs.2,000 a month. Although the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia offers classes in English, and is opening a basic computer literacy course next month, most faculty members see these as distractions from its core project rather than as an integral part of a well-rounded theological education.

Are madaris terror factories? "It is ridiculous," says madrasa spokesperson Maulana Wali Surati, "to blame the whole institution for the crimes of a few people." He points out that each of the 122 students from Jammu and Kashmir was admitted only after he produced a certificate from local authorities declaring him uninvolved in terrorism — a certificate which the madrasa then cross-checked with the State Government. Although the madrasa is contemplating ending admissions from Jammu and Kashmir, Surati points out flaws in the idea. "Jammu and Kashmir is a part of our country," he argues, "so it would be tragic if children from the State are denied education just because of suspicion." Surati's reasoning is backed by fact: there is no evidence to show that a majority of the Islamist terrorists studied at madaris, nor to demonstrate that their curriculum breeds hate.

However, Gujarat's theological traditions do not consist only of inward-looking conservatism. The case of Ahmad Deedad, a Gujarat-born South African evangelist who built an enormous international reputation for his aggressive proselytisation campaigns, is instructive. Deedad helped to finance campaigns across Gujarat focussing on spreading what his followers saw as piety and correct religious practices among liminal sects whose religious practices included elements of Hindu tradition.

However, Deedad's work also contained within it the seeds of violence praxis. A 2004 investigation by The New York Times found that Deedad's Durban-based Islamic Propagation Centre International had received large financial contributions from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden — for whom the cleric made no secret of his admiration. In 2001, South Africa's well-respected Sunday Times reported that Deedad's son and successor, Yusuf Deedad, distributed anti-Jewish literature emblazoned with pictures of Adolf Hitler at the World Conference Against Racism.

Most of Gujarat's madaris frown on such discourses. The Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia's widely circulated Gujarati language magazine as well as its textbooks are studiously, even self-consciously, apolitical. Clerics like Surati, for their part, are at great pains to emphasise the importance of inter-faith dialogue and tolerance.

In practice, however, madaris have acted as centres where Islamists may meet, network and obtain access to individuals connected with terrorist groups. Among Khalid Sardana's friends at Tarkeshwar was Bashir Ahmad Bhat, a Harkat ul-Jihad Islam terrorist who returned to active field service in the Kulgam area of Jammu and Kashmir soon after the Mumbai serial bombings. Bhat was killed in an encounter with the Jammu and Kashmir police, but is thought to have left behind a network of associates other HuJI operatives will be able to tap in the future. As such, madaris do seem to be sometimes-unwitting homes to loose, personalised networks that cut across organisational affiliations.

Such networks are not new. Earlier this year, an Ahmedabad court convicted three students of the Dar-ul-Uloom Anwar-e-Raza, near Navsari, for their role in a HuJI terror plot targeting the city. Four kg of an RDX-PETN cocktail and nine 30-mm pistols were recovered from the men on February 15, 2002, less than a fortnight before the Godhra tragedy. One of the three, Imam ul-Haq Banarasi, was the son of a cleric, but Asad Ahmad Munshi and Husain Alibhai Maniar, though children of affluent business families, chose to reject the world their parents had built.

Perhaps the clues to what is going on lie in the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia Arabiyya's fortress-like architecture: its walls are designed not to hide secret armies, but to defend what lies inside from a hostile world. Despite its liberative possibilities, modernity has for the most part spoken to Gujarat's Muslims through the twin media of economic marginalisation and communal violence. Conservatives such as Maulana Surati hope that the walls around his madrasa will protect its students, and the traditions they represent. At least some of his students see offence as a more effective form of defence.

Madaris, though, aren't the problem: India's civil society must instead undertake the more difficult task of serious critical engagement with the ideas and ideologies that engender violence.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Stern tests ahead
Rationalising bank charges
Gujarat madrasas: an education in terror?
Mosquito control, Vietnamese style
Abe and Japan's moment of choice
ISI: in the firing line
Corrections and Clarifications
Appeal for clemency
On Gandhigiri

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu