Tucson, Arizona Sunday, 23 September 2001
Inside Jihad University
THE EDUCATION OF A HOLY WARRIOR
By Jeffrey Goldberg
About two hours east of the Khyber Pass, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pak-istan, alongside the Grand Trunk Road, sits a school called the Haqqania madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim religious seminary, and Haqqania is one of the bigger madrasas in Pakistan: the school enrolls more than 2,800 students. Tuition, room and board are free; the students are, in the main, drawn from the dire poor, and the madrasa raises its funds from wealthy Pakistanis, as well as from devout, and politically minded, Muslims in the countries of the Persian Gulf. The students range in age from 8 and 9 to 30, sometimes to 35.
In a typical class, the teachers sit on the floor with the boys, reading to them in Arabic, and the boys repeat what the teachers say. This can go on between four and eight hours each day. What Westerners would think of as high-school-age and college-age students are enrolled in an eight-year course of study that focuses on interpretation of the Koran and of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
Very few of the students at the Haqqania madrasa study anything but Islamic subjects. There are no world history courses, or math courses, or computer rooms or science labs at the madrasa. The Haqqania madrasa is, in fact, a jihad factory. This does not make it unique in Pakistan. There are one million students studying in the country's 10,000 or so madrasas, and militant Islam is at the core of most of these schools.
Haqqania is notable not only because of its size, but also because it has graduated more leaders of the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling faction, than any other school in the world, including any school in Afghanistan. The Taliban is today known the world over for its harsh interpretation of Islamic law, its cruelty to women and its kindness to terrorists - the most notable one being Osama bin Laden, the 44-year-old Saudi exile who the American government believes was behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The Taliban also seems to harbor a deep belief in the notion of a never-ending jihad, which makes the Haqqania madrasa a focus of intense interest in such capitals as Washington and Moscow and New Delhi and Jerusalem, where the experts are trying to understand just what it is the Taliban and its sympathizers want.
The majority of Haqqania students come from Pakistan itself, a fact that also worries officials in Washington and Moscow and New Delhi and Jerusalem. Pakistan's Islamists are becoming more and more radicalized - "Talibanized," some call it - thanks in part to madrasas like Haqqania, and Pakistan is showing early signs of coming apart at the seams.
Pakistan also happens to be in possession of nuclear weapons. Many Muslim radicals say they believe these weapons should become part of the arsenal of jihad. It turns out that many of the Haqqania students, under careful tutelage, now believe it, too.
It is for all these reasons that on a hazy morning in March, I presented myself at the office of the chancellor of the madrasa, a mullah named Samiul Haq, in order to enroll myself in his school. My goal was simple: I wanted to see from the inside just what this jihad factory was producing. The chancellor is a friend and supporter of bin Laden, and he has granted an honorary degree - the first and only in his school's history - to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.
Samiul Haq is also a politician, a former senator who today leads a faction of the Jamiat-Ulema-Islami, the JUI, a radical Islamic party seeking to impose Shariah, or Islamic law, in Pakistan. The maulana, it is said, would like to see Pakistan become more like the Afghanistan of his Taliban disciples.
The maulana is in his mid-60s. He has two wives and eight children, he told me, and he seemed, right from the start, a very happy man. He dispensed with small talk almost immediately, in order to let me know that I should feel at home.
"The problem," he told me, through an interpreter, "is not between us Muslims and Christians." I knew where this was going, but stayed silent. "The only enemy Islam and Christianity have is the Jews," he said. "It was the Jews who crucified Christ, you know. The Jews are using America to fight Islam. Clinton is a good man, but he's surrounded by Jews. Madeleine Albright's father was the founder of Zionism."
"I'm Jewish," I told him. There was a moment's pause.
"Well, you are most welcome here," he said. And so I was. The maulana made me an offer: I could spend as much time as I wanted at the madrasa, go wherever I wanted, talk to anybody I chose, even study the Koran with him. He had a point he wanted to make, of course: His madrasa might be Taliban U., but it was not a training camp for terrorists.
Strictly speaking, Haq was right: I never saw a weapon at the Haqqania madrasa. The closest guns could be found across the Grand Trunk Road, at the Khyber Pass Armaments Co., a gun store that sells shotguns for $40 and AK-47s for $70. And I never heard a lecture about bomb making or marksmanship.
On the other hand, when the Taliban was faring badly not long ago in battle against the northern alliance - the holdout foe of the Taliban in Afghanistan's seemingly endless civil war - Haq closed down his school and sent the students to the front. (He would not tell me how many never came back from the front.)
Classrooms were full when I visited Haqqania. There were no TVs, no radios that I could see. The students woke up before dawn, to pray in the madrasa's mosque. The dormitories were threadbare and filthy, and there was no cafeteria, per se: students lined up at the kitchen with their plates and spoons and were fed rice and curries and nan, the flat Afghan bread.
Suffice it to say, the students at the madrasa almost never see women. There were no female teachers, no female cafeteria workers, no female presence whatsoever at the madrasa. There is no such thing as parents' day, or family day, when mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers come to visit.
The youngest students interested me particularly. They had not yet been armored in the hard-casing of jihadist ideology, and yet they seemed to incorporate the politics of the madrasa into their play. Two 11-year-old boys, both Afghan refugees who came to the school from Peshawar, would follow me around wherever I went. They wore pots on their heads, and their version of hide-and-seek was to jump out from behind a tree or some other hiding place, scream "Osama!" and pretend to shoot me.
I tried to learn what I could about these boys, but they were reticent. And my minders - there was usually someone from Samiul Haq's office with me, listening in on my conversations - didn't want me probing too deeply into how boys came to be students at the madrasa. The youngest boys were kept under lock and key, in a three-story dormitory guarded by older students, and I wasn't allowed to see how they lived.
The two 11-year-olds were refugees, I eventually learned. Compared to a refugee camp, the madrasa is a palace, and they are blessed to be here, where they eat food every single day. No one else - certainly not the government of Pakistan - would provide them with an education, room and board.
During the school day, I would make a special point of auditing classes in which the Hadith was studied, because so much of Islamic thought is found in the Hadith, and also because the Hadith has traditionally been understood to be a text open to interpretation, argument and rigorous intellectual inquiry. But such is not the case at the Haqqania madrasa.
In the classes I attended, even the high-level classes, the pattern was generally the same: a teacher, generally an ancient, white-bearded mullah, would read straight from a text, and the students would listen. There was no back and forth. It seemed as if rote learning was the madrasa's only style of learning.
After a time, I began to be asked questions during classes, questions about America and about my views. One day, in a class devoted to passages in the Hadith concerning zakat, or charity, I was asked my views about Osama bin Laden. Why did America have it in for him? It is unsettling, to say the least, to be seated in a class being held in a mosque, led by a mullah, and attended by some 200 barefoot and turbaned students, and be asked such a question.
I began by saying that bin Laden's program violates a basic tenet of Islam, which holds that even in a jihad the lives of innocent people must be spared. A jihad is a war against combatants, not women and children.
I read to them an appropriate saying of the Prophet Muhammad (I came armed with the Hadith): "It is narrated by Ibn Umar that a woman was found killed in one of these battles, so the Messenger of Allah, may peace be upon him, forbade the killing of women and children."
They did not like the idea of me quoting the Prophet to them, and they began chanting, "Osama, Osama, Osama." When they calmed down, they took turns defending bin Laden. "Osama bin Laden is a great Muslim," a student named Wali said. "The West is afraid of strong Muslims, so they made him their enemy."
Since the students had turned this day's class into a political seminar of sorts, I decided to ask a question of my own. I brought up the subject of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. I asked the students if they thought it would be permissible, by the law of Islam, to use a nuclear bomb during the prosecution of a jihad.
"All things come from Allah," one student said. "The atomic bomb comes from Allah, so it should be used." I then asked: Who wants to see Osama bin Laden armed with nuclear weapons? Every hand in the room shot up. The students laughed, and some applauded.
But, I said, innocent people would inevitably die if the bomb was used. Even if the West, or Russia, is subjugating Muslims, does that give bin Laden and his supporters the right to kill innocent people?
"Osama has never killed anybody innocent," one student, whose name was Ghazi, answered.
"What if you were shown proof that he did?"
"The Americans say they have proof, but they don't give it to the Taliban."
I then presented a hypothetical scenario. "What if," I asked, "you were shown a video in which Osama bin Laden was actually seen murdering a woman. What then?"
There was a pause. A student named Fazlur Razaq stood up: "The Americans have all the tricks of the media. They can put Osama's head on the body of someone else, and make it seem like he's killing when he's not doing it."
I then took from my notebook my secret weapon: the 1998 fatwa issued by bin Laden's organization - the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders - concerning the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.
I read them a passage, the English translation of which reads as follows: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al Aksa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim."
Here it is, I said, in black and white: bin Laden calling for the death of all Americans, civilian and military.
"Osama didn't write that," one student yelled, and the others cheered. "That's a forgery of the Americans."
I asked one final question: What would you do if you learned that the CIA had captured bin Laden and was taking him to America to stand trial?
A student who gave his name as Muhammad stood up: "We would sacrifice our lives for Osama. We would kill Americans." What kind of Americans? "All Americans."
As I left the mosque, Muhammad and a group of his friends approached me. "We'd like you to embrace Islam," he said. "We love you. We want you to have Islam."
Later that day, I met with a small group of students I had grown to like, hoping that, away from their teachers, they would talk a different talk.
Meeting students out of class had already made for a number of interesting moments: I had, for example, been asked for sex.
Many of them were convinced that all Americans are bisexual, and that Westerners engage in sex with anything, anywhere, all the time.
Among the young men I spoke with after the Osama colloquy there was no talk of sex. One, a bright and personable student from a village near Kabul, had told me his name was Sayid. I asked him how his parents felt to have him at the madrasa, knowing that there is a chance he would choose to be a mujahed - against the northern alliance, or perhaps against India, in Kashmir.
"They support the jihad," he said.
"How would they feel if you were killed?"
"They would be very happy," he said. "They would be so proud. Any father would want his son to die as shaheed," or martyr.
If you fought against the northern alliance, you would be killing Muslims, I said. "They're Muslims, but they're crazy," Sayid replied.
A couple of days later, I was due in Islamabad, the capital, for a birthday party, and it was quite a party. A big cake, lots of speeches, lots of dignitaries, including Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the head of Pakistan's government.
Written in lemon frosting across the length of the cake were the words, "Second Anniversary Celebrations of Youm-e-Takbeer."
Youm-e-Takbeer can be translated as "the day of God's greatness," and in Pakistan it refers to May 28, 1998, the day Pakistan first exploded a nuclear bomb. The birthday party, under the auspices of Pakistan's military leader, was a birthday party for the bomb.
"We bow our heads to Allah almighty for restoring greatness to Pakistan on May 28, 1998," proclaimed the science minister of Pakistan, Atta-ur-Rahman, at the outset of the official program.
A couple of days after the party, I went to Rawalpindi, next door to Islamabad, because I'd been given the chance to talk with Musharraf. We met one morning at Army House, the residence of the Pakistani army's chief of staff.
During our conversation, I asked Musharraf if the West should worry that fundamentalist Muslims, in or out of the army, might get hold of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
(In Pentagon exercises, American war-gamers have mapped out a scenario in which Taliban-like extremists gain control of Pakistan's atomic arsenal during a violent break-up of the country.)
"Absolutely implausible," Musharaff said. "There is no question of that happening. There is no question of nuclear material falling into the hands of irresponsible people at all."
I made mention of the religious overtones of the Youm-e-Takbeer celebration, particularly the science minister's remarks, saying that Westerners are discomforted by the belief that God is the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
"Yes, we do use the term 'Allah's will,' " he said. "We do consider God to be the supreme sovereign, and we do consider ourselves to be his representatives on Earth.
"We being his representatives on Earth, whatever has to be done is according to the teaching of Allah.
"But when we say 'the will of God,' that doesn't mean we aren't using our brains, that we are trigger-happy fundamentalists."
Musharraf is not thought of as an Islamic fundamentalist. He is known to have progressive views on the rights of women, for example. And yet he can sound very much like an Islamic fundamentalist at times. I asked the general if he believed bin Laden to be a terrorist. "If at all he's involved in planning or conducting bombings or hijackings, he's a terrorist."
I then asked him if he doubted American claims that bin Laden is a terrorist. "The Taliban has a stand on this subject. They say they need proof, which has not been given to them. We have asked for proof from the U.S. and we are in the process of getting this. From the legal point of view, I haven't seen the proof."
For Samiul Haq, the world is divided into two separate and mutually hostile domains: the dar-al-harb and the dar-al-Islam. The dar-al-harb is the "abode of war." The dar-al-Islam is the "abode of peace."
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union epitomized, for fundamentalist-minded Muslims, the abode of war. Today, it is the United States that symbolizes the dar-al-harb.
How this came to pass, how America, which supported - created, some would say - the jihad movement against the Soviets, came to become the No. 1 enemy of hard-core Islamists is one of the more vexing questions facing American policy makers and the leaders of a dozen Muslim countries today.
One school of thought, Samiul Haq's school, says it's the Americans' fault: American imperialism and the export of American social and sexual mores are to blame.
The other school of thought holds that Islam, by its very nature, is in permanent competition with other civilizations.
This is the theory expounded by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who coined the term "Islam's bloody borders" - a reference to the fact that wherever Islam rubs up against other civilizations - Jewish, Christian, Hindu - wars seem to break out.
Men like Samiul Haq deride this view, and yet, in their black-and-white world, Islam stands alone against the world's infidels: Christians (or "Crusaders," in the fundamentalist parlance) to be sure, but Jews and Hindus especially.
In Haq's view, the West is implacably hostile to the message of Islam, and so the need to prepare for jihad is never-ending.
"Jihad" is a concept widely misunderstood in the West. It does not mean only "holy war." It essentially means "struggle," and according to the traditional understanding of Islam, there are two types of jihad: greater and lesser.
"Greater Jihad," is the struggle within the soul of a person to be better, more righteous - the fight against the devil within.
"Lesser Jihad" is the fight against the devil without: the military struggle against those who subjugate Muslims.
Whenever I meet a Muslim fundamentalist, I ask them the same stupid-sounding question: Which is more important to Islam, greater jihad or lesser jihad?
The answer, usually accompanied by an indulgent look, is usually something like, "They don't call it 'greater jihad' for nothing." The struggle against the external oppressor waxes and wanes, but the fight to suppress the evil inclinations within is perpetual.
But in my conversations with Haq, and with mullahs across Pakistan and Afghanistan, I kept getting a different answer.
"They are of equal importance," Haq said. "Jihad against the oppressor of Muslims is an absolute duty. Islam is a religion that defends itself."
Jihad against the devil without has assumed a place of permanent, even overriding importance in the way these mullahs look at the world.
This was surprising to me, because not even the leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, or sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, ever answered the question this way.
I asked him if this is what he is teaching his thousands of students. "My students are taught Islam. This isn't a military school."
Haq's secret was not that the Haqqania madrasa is a training camp for terrorists. The secret is embodied in the two 11-year-olds cocking their fingers at me, and in the taunts of the students in the mosque who raised their hands for Osama bin Laden, and in the hundreds of thousands of young men at madrasas across Pakistan and Afghanistan.
These are poor and impressionable boys kept entirely ignorant of the world and, for that matter, largely ignorant of all but one interpretation of Islam.
They are the perfect jihad machines.
* Jeffrey Goldberg is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, in which a longer version of this article appeared on June 25, 2000.
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