Fortresses of faith

The discovery of a madrassa-based Lashkar cell in Gujarat raises difficult questions about such seminaries.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Ahmedabad

A TRUCK thunders by, carrying giant steel pipes to one of the sprawling factories that surround Bharuch town. Inside the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia Arabiyya, the 24-hour roar from the highway is barely audible: it has been built to filter out the sights and sounds of the world. From the outside, the madrassa resembles nothing so much as a fortress. Its elaborate battlements and massive iron gate seem wilfully designed to illustrate the entrenched myth that Islamic seminaries are nurseries of hatred, not centres of learning.

In mid-September, police in Ahmedabad arrested four men from two of Gujarat's most famous madaris - or Islamic seminaries - for their links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. They were Khalid Sardana, the brother of a top Rajouri-based Lashkar recruiter, Illyas Memon, Siraj Ansari and Qari Mufidul. While none of the four men possessed weapons more dangerous than inflammatory Islamist literature and videos, the police say they have hard evidence 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 four were linked to the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia and its sister madrassa, 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 its birth.

Last month, soldiers raided the small mountain hamlet of Hanslot, near Thana Mandi in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district. Mohammad Aslam Mohammad Latif 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 that executed the July serial bombings in Mumbai.

Sardana arrived at the Dar-ul-Uloom Falah-e-Darain at Tarkeshwar in 1993. His family hoped the rigours of a madrassa education would help still his teenage rebelliousness - and ensure that he stayed clear of the terrorist groups which were then 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 Koran by memory, and Qari, signifying those skilled in the rules that govern its recitation. In 2002, he left for a two-year stint at a madrassa in Lucknow, and then returned to Tarkeshwar.

At some point during his first stint at Tarkeshwar, Sardana met Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad Sheikh, one of the 11 Lashkar operatives arrested at Aurangabad and Beed in Maharashtra in May this year for their role in handling a massive consignment of explosives and arms 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 the Khatm-e-Bukhari Sharif, a convocation held to felicitate students who have mastered the nine volumes of Hadith - compilations of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad - authored by the Imam Mohammad al-Bukhari.

Soon after the convocation, Sardana and Amir travelled to Aurangabad to meet with members of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), who had regrouped under the flag of the local Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, a far-right religious order. Zabiuddin Ansari, the operational head of the Lashkar cell that carried out the Mumbai train 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 of them, Fahd Sheikh, is thought to have been killed in the course of a firefight with Indian troops; the two others, Nisar Ansari and Asad Ansari, were never heard of again. Not surprisingly, Sheikh and Ahmad became increasingly suspicious that Sardana might be an Indian covert agent, who was leading members of the Aurangabad SIMI cell into jail - or even death. To reassure the group, Bilal Ansari, a calligraphist-turned-terrorist who was arrested for his role in the Aurangabad Lashkar cell, was despatched along with Sheikh to meet with top Lashkar commanders in Poonch. A similar 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 for Dhaka after a botched raid on his home by the Delhi Police.

Fayyaz `Kagzi', for his part, flew to Teheran on an Iran Air flight on the morning of May 9 - hours before Intelligence Bureau and Maharashtra Police personnel began making arrests in Aurangabad - and is thought to have then travelled by road through the Zahedan border into Pakistan. Zabiuddin Ansari dodged a high-speed car chase by the Maharashtra Police, and is believed to have found sanctuary in a Lashkar safe house in Bangladesh. Even as this drama was unfolding, Sardana had begun work on his next project: building the new Lashkar cell in Gujarat using his contacts at the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia.

Inside the imposing walls of the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia, the silence is interrupted only by the insistent hammering of a mason's chisel. It is a fitting sound, for ever since news broke of the arrests of the Lashkar cell, the madrassa, like its counterpart at Tarkeshwar, has faced a series of hammer-blows from hostile politicians and journalists.

When the madrassa opens after the Ramzan vacation, some 1,600 students - 95 per cent of whose families cannot afford to pay their fees - will resume their studies. After obtaining the degrees offered by the institution - those of Alim and Qari, which take an average of nine years to complete - 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 offers classes in English, and will open a basic computer-literacy course next month, most faculty see these as distractions from its core project rather than as an integral part of a well-rounded theological education.

Is the madrassa training terrorists? "It is ridiculous to blame the whole institution for the crimes of a few people," says madrassa spokesperson Maulana Wali Surati. He points out that each of the 122 students from Jammu and Kashmir was admitted only after they produced a certificate from local authorities declaring them to be uninvolved in terrorism - a certificate that the madrassa then cross-checks with the State government.

Although the madrassa is contemplating ending admissions from Jammu and Kashmir, Surati points out the 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 an education just because of suspicion." "I know young people are not what they used to be," he concludes, "and we've even been compelled to post a watchman outside the local cinema theatre to stop our students from sneaking in there. But I cannot spy on my students round the clock."

Surati's gentle reason is backed by fact: there is no evidence to show that the majority of Islamist terrorists studied at madaris or that their curriculum breeds hate. Many of the ethnic Kashmiri students there, Sardana's own story shows, were sent because their parents feared they would be recruited by Islamists. After all, if the parents of students from Jammu and Kashmir wanted their wards to join terrorist groups, they could have done so simply by letting them stay at home. Up the road, at the Dar-ul-Banat madrassa for girls, most of the pupils from Jammu and Kashmir came because their parents were wary of the sexual violence that war brings in its wake. Thousands of middle-class and elite Jammu and Kashmir families send their children to institutions across India, but Gujarat's madaris attract only those who can afford nothing better.

It would, however, be a mistake to see Gujarat's madaris solely as bastions of an inward-looking orthodoxy. The case of Ahmad Deedad, a Gujarat-born South African evangelist who built an enormous international reputation for his aggressive proselytisation campaigns, is instructive. The winner of the 1986 King Faisal Award for services to Islam, Deedad's followers, often immigrants from the subcontinent, helped finance campaigns across Gujarat focussing on spreading neo-conservative practices among liminal sects whose religious practices included elements of Hindu tradition, like the Sunni Vohras. Tablighi Jamaat preachers inspired by Deedad focussed on spreading what they saw as piety and correct practice - not terrorism.

However, Deedad's work also contained the seeds of violence praxis. A 2004 investigation by The New York Times found that his Durban-based Islamic Propagation Centre International had received large financial contributions from Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden - a figure 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, had distributed anti-Jewish literature emblazoned with pictures of Adolf Hitler at the World Conference Against Racism. While the elder Deedad travelled across the world before his death in 2005, his incendiary attacks on Christianity often caused trouble. Singapore, France and Nigeria all refused him entry, while Australia on one occasion threatened to deport him.

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. Loose, personalised networks often emerge cutting across States.

Among Khalid Sardana's friends at Tarkeshwar was Bashir Ahmad Bhat, a Harkat ul-Jihad Islam (HuJI) terrorist who returned to active field service in the Kulgam area of Jammu and Kashmir soon after the Mumbai serial bombings. Bhat was recently killed in an encounter with the Jammu and Kashmir Police, but is thought to have left behind a network of associates that other HuJI operatives will be able to tap in the future.

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 kilograms 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 and had been schooled in madaris all his life - the stereotype of a likely terror recruit. The other two, Asad Ahmad Munshi and Husain Alibhai Maniar, though, were children of affluent business families, who had chosen to undertake studies in madaris - rejecting the world their parents had built for them. Many of the estimated two dozen men who joined jehadi organisations after the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat also came from affluent homes; one, Ayub Damarwala, is known to have been killed in combat in Jammu and Kashmir.

Perhaps clues to what is going on lie in the Dar-ul-Uloom Islamia Arabiyya's fortress-like architecture: walls designed not to hide secret armies but defend what lies inside from a hostile world. Despite its enormous and evident liberating possibilities, modernity has spoken to Gujarat's Muslims mostly through economic marginalisation and communal violence. No serious assessment of Islamist terrorism in Gujarat can ignore, for example, the role the closure of Ahmedabad's textile mills and the consequent displacement of Muslim workers had in the empowerment of reactionary clerics. Although ultra-right tendencies in Islam long predate the pogrom of 2002, there is little doubt that large-scale communal violence has stoked them.

Conservatives like Maulana Surati hope the walls around the madrassa will protect its students and the traditions they represent from the dangers outside. At least some of his students, though, see offence as a more effective form of defence, and seek to blow up the hostile world. Gujarat's madaris are neither victims nor villains, but sites of complex contestations. Madaris in themselves are not the problem: it is India's civil society that must instead undertake the more difficult task of engaging with the ideas and ideologies that make Islamists engender violence.