Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Phaze SG

Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women
by Somini Sengupta

Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/world/asia/24madrasa.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 23 Hameeda Sarfraz, 19, lively eyes sparkling out of a black burqa, was describing the boons of the afterlife.

"In heaven you get everything without hardship," explained Miss Sarfraz, daughter of a bus driver. "In heaven, if a martyr feels hungry, food appears, the best quality food, and you won't even know where it came from."

Miss Sarfraz, an alumna of the now bullet-ridden Jamia Hafsa Islamic school for girls, says she deeply regrets missing her chance to be a martyr. She fled through the back door of the school on July 3, just hours after a gun battle began between Pakistani special forces and militants holed up in the neighboring Red Mosque, the parent institution of Jamia Hafsa.

Sentiments like hers are the fruits of a radical Islam that has blossomed in this country not just in the lawless tribal areas that American intelligence officials described as an enduring sanctuary for Al Qaeda, but here in its capital, in a mosque-and-school compound that until recently enjoyed the blessings of the state.

She presents a portrait of adolescent passion that one might find anywhere, except that she is a Pakistani girl from a poor rural family, whose members are less devout than she, and her passion is directed against the government of the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Some of Jamia Hafsa's alumnae say they still wish to die in the cause of militant Islam.

During the siege, the Pakistani military maintained that women and children had been held hostage by hard-core fighters inside the compound, but Miss Sarfraz and several others interviewed said they were free to stay or go, and some held out until near the end. The bodies of six women were recovered at battle's end.

"I was studying there six years," said Shahnaz Akhtar, 20, another former student who held out until the next-to-last day of the siege. "I was so attached to it. I couldn't leave just because a dictator started bombing it. I feel more at home there than I do at home."

Shortly before the siege began, female students had come out of the school, draped in black burqas, waving bamboo sticks and taunting troops stationed nearby. The Pakistani news media dubbed them "chicks with sticks."

Miss Sarfraz came home two weeks ago, out of that caldron of radical Islamist fervor, Islamabad, back to the prosaic chores of a young woman in the Pakistani countryside. Home is a village perched on green terraced hills, a little more than 50 miles from the capital.

"I miss Jamia," she continued. "My contact with books is gone. At home the only thing for me to do is take care of my parents. I clean the house. I cook."

She and others came back with a mission to reform their families and their communities, cajoling their mothers and sisters to hide themselves in black burqas. They say they have lost interest in the pleasures of this life, though some, like Miss Akhtar, have yet to give up on pleasures like painting their toenails in dark red. They express an obsession with the afterlife.

They say they would like to see a thousand Jamia Hafsa schools bloom across the nation. Miss Sarfraz has already begun classes at home for the children in her village.

There are, indeed, already some 12,000 religious schools, called madrasas, with about one million students across Pakistan. Some, though not all, embrace militancy.

The families of these returning girls appear to be less hard-line about their faith than their daughters. They say they sent their sisters and daughters to Jamia Hafsa because it was free and safe, and enjoyed a good reputation for providing religious education.

Miss Akhtar's family, for instance, sent her there six years ago, after she completed eighth grade and expressed a desire to further her education. Her village still has no high school for girls; the nearest one is a one-and-a-half mile walk away.

Miss Akhtar studied the Koran; the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad; and Islamic law. She learned of the virtues of martyrdom. "I prayed to God I would play a role in jihad," she said.

She learned to justify suicide bombings as a weapon that could be employed in the event of a battle between what she called "true believers" and "infidels."

Would Islam allow suicide bombing inside Pakistan, an Islamic nation? She said it was possible, and then hesitated when pressed. She said she was not a qualified Islamic scholar.

The battle for the Red Mosque compound began in earnest in January when a group of Jamia Hafsa students, spurred by reports that the government planned to demolish some illegally constructed mosques and seminaries in Islamabad, including Jamia Hafsa, occupied an adjacent public library.

Early that morning, Miss Akhtar recounted, the girls, armed with cane batons, pushed open the library's back door and awakened the caretakers who were sleeping on the floor with cries of "God is great." They threw the keys to the library onto the floor, and fled. Ms. Akhtar giggled as she described the events, and then said she had not been part of it.

In the coming months, the students, along with their counterparts from the boy's school, Jamia Farida, abducted three Pakistani women accused of running a brothel. Then they kidnapped six Chinese masseuses working in what they also said was a brothel; they released them the next day, but it paved the way for the final confrontation.

Three times in the past few months, as confrontation loomed between the Red Mosque and General Musharraf's government, Miss Akhtar's parents appealed to her to come home. She refused, saying she wanted to be a martyr. She flashed a big smile at the memory.

In the weeks before the final siege began, she said, the students were warned that the military could strike. "Are you girls prepared for that?" she recalled being asked by teachers. "Do you have the stamina to defend your religion? Are you ready?"

By the time the fighting was over, the official death toll stood at 102, including 11 soldiers. The military said the leaders of the rebellion, including a pro-Taliban cleric named Abdur Rashid Ghazi, had been killed. About 160 people, including three women, have been arrested. Nearly 1,000 others have been released to their families, including 465 women.

To varying degrees, they have all brought a piece of Jamia Hafsa with them. And their transformation is not lost on their families.

Up the road from Miss Akhtar's home, in a village called Kotla, sat four girls, ages 15 to 18, all cousins who said they had been forced by their families to leave the school after the military raid began.

They sat in one girl's home telling their story, their faces uncovered only because no man was present. But when Mohammed Matloob, the father of one of the girls, walked into the room, the other three quickly pulled their head scarves over their faces. His daughter, Nagina, 16, ordered him to leave the room, which he did, with a surprised shrug.

The girls explained that at Jamia Hafsa they had been taught to observe purdah, the practice of shielding faces and figures from any man who is not a member of the immediate family. They had changed since they left home for Jamia.

"We used to listen to music and watch TV before," said Sayeda Fazlur Rehman, 17, with a look of disgust. "We didn't even pray."

Practicing purdah, they said, would hasten their ascent to heaven. "This life is temporary," Miss Fazlur Rehman declared, a common refrain of the Jamia Hafsa alumnae. "You don't know when you'll die."