Pakistan was Islamised gradually but when it reached a peak in this process in the 1980s, the country became vaguely aware of an extremism that the West called fundamentalism. When the international media began using the word there was an immediate reaction against it. The cleric and the intellectual both thought it an attack on Islam and began defending Islam instead of worrying about the growing extremism at home. It appears that the biggest irritant between the West and the world of Islam was the way the West chose to define the phenomenon of return to Islam among Muslim societies. The West harked back to Christian fundamentalism, European and American, to find the vocabulary for a brand of Islam that it feared. On the side of Muslims, there was also an inability to understand what the West really wanted to say. At the level of cultural experience all Muslims were not yet ready to see why religion must be separated from the functioning of the state. Almost no Muslim, liberal or conservative, was willing to concede that secularism was a valid political concept. (Confusion prevailed because a Western secularist may be rationalist without believing in religion; in Muslim societies, all secularists are believers). The liberal Muslim was under pressure from the fanatic with whom he had not yet learnt to disagree at the level of ideas. He was angry with the West calling the world of Islam fundamentalist.¹

Pakistan's fundamentalism was mobilised and made sectarian by the government of General Zia. It also became jihadi and terrorist with a lot of financial support from the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Americans were concerned only with winning the war in Afghanistan and defeating the Soviet Union, but the Saudis had ideological and sectarian aims. To the extent that jihad in Pakistan responded to the financial stimulus of Saudi Arabia it became mercenary and cannot be discussed as a manifestation of Islam. It is quite certain that at the level of the jihadi leadership, the jihad was motivated by financial gains. Almost all the jihadi leaders came into possession of considerable wealth, which they shared with the state apparatus in Pakistan and not in sufficient measure with the young recruits who fought the war. It is possible that among the rank and file of the jihadi youth there was belief in the spilling of blood in the name of Islam and belief in martyrdom. The same is true of sectarianism. The leader who plans the killings is working for money but the man who actually kills may be moved by religious passion. There is evidence that youth from the crime underworld also joined the jihad. One has to concede that in such cases the rank and file too were motivated by financial considerations. Jihad and the consequent 'weaponisation' of Islam have inflicted permanent damage on civil society and state institutions in Pakistan.

Pakistan's Islamic Orientation
The Pakistan Movement was not clear about the kind of state it would culminate in. The clarity that we see today is a part of the nation-building process that began in 1949 with the adoption of the Objectives Resolution by the Constituent Assembly charged with the task of framing the country's first Constitution. Pakistan became an ideological state on the basis of the Muslim experience in India. Soon after 1947, the religious parties with strong grassroots presence in the cities began challenging the vague founding principles of the state. Scholars of great standing relied on the early lineaments of the state in Islam in their rejectionist rhetoric. What helped in this was the inchoate theory of the state in Islamic history. After 1949, the process to transform Pakistan into a religious state ipso facto made the clergy the guardian of the new founding principle. The civilian politicians finally gave in in 1958 and the army began to rule directly in Pakistan. The army as an interest group was brought down in 1971 by its compulsion to operate the state on the basis of conflict with India. In the next phase, the growing power of the clergy and the offended post-nationalisation industrial groups enabled the army to stage a comeback. The army under General Zia combined three interest groups: the army, the clergy and the industrial elite. The army broke from the past secular tradition of professionalism by adopting ideology as its strong plank. This gradually led to the Islamisation of the army and the industrial elite. The democratic institutions opened up by him allowed a fuller Islamisation of the law followed by Islamisation of society.

The ideological state of Pakistan was one among many in the third world experiencing gradual loss of economic viability. Pakistan army postponed an economic crisis by participating in the decade-long Afghan war in the 1980s, assisted financially by the United States and Saudi Arabia. The religious groups gained stature and power in this period. Islamisation of law and society had already given them more power than any other interest group. Islamisation within the army had dimmed the dividing line between the clergy and the military officers increasingly drawn from the country's middle class. It was after the creation of local militias under religious leaders on the pattern of Afghanistan - for use in the low-intensity war in Kashmir after 1989 - that the religious group became supreme in Pakistan. At the cost of internal sovereignty, the concept of jihad by non-state actors was allowed. Leaders of the jihadi militias as 'warrior priests' attained higher profiles than the elected leaders. The idea of the state preached by the powerful religious leaders was utopian but it allowed them to constantly portray democracy as an alien system in which only the corrupt prospered. Democracy was acceptable to them only under shariah but most clerics did not agree completely with the shariah enforced by General Zia. Deprived of real power and uncertain of their tenure in government, the elected leaders took to embezzling state funds and taking graft. The enrichment of the religious leaders through even more dubious means could not be challenged. The state began to be called a failing or failed state that could default on its debts.

Before 1947, East Pakistan was in the grip of linguistic nationalism centred in West Bengal. West Pakistan was Low Church in terms of religion as its incompletely settled land was still dominated by shrines.² Despite the world's biggest canal system established by the British to circumvent brackish underground water, the region had not yet surrendered to the High Church seminary. The countryside dominated West Pakistan as opposed to Central India where the Pakistan Movement had taken birth in the Muslim-minority provinces. In the Northwest, Afghanistan was High Church, strongly aligned with the seminary whose graduates had trained at Deoband in India ³ and were traditionally aligned with the languishing Ahle Hadith (Wahabi) movement which had retreated from Delhi after 1857 to Bhopal. The Pakistan movement grew out of its leaders' rejection of the Khilafat Movement literally run by the Congress leadership. This led to the rejection of the Pakistan Movement by the strong city-based seminarian clergy. However, because of their rivalry with the more puritanical Deobandis and Ahle Hadith, the Brelvi clergy favoured the Pakistan Movement. In West Pakistan, the cities had opened up to the seminaries but the countryside was predominantly shrine-oriented where mystical saints were celebrated as a part of the folk song tradition.⁴ Since Muslim-majority West Pakistan had not responded enthusiastically to the Pakistan Movement, Muslims and Hindus celebrated the same saints. The Deobandis opposed the mysticism of the shrine, the Brelvis accepted it. Ironically, a High Islam non-clerical Pakistan Movement was rejected by the High Islam clergy of India and accepted by the Low Church and was forced to govern a predominantly Low Church territory.

The Conversion to High Church
After 1949, the state started moving in the direction of Islamisation as a nation-building tool. It began to realise quite early that Islamic law-making could not be achieved under Low Church conditions. The seminary had to be taken on board for giving legitimacy to state institutions. A Council of Islamic Ideology was soon set up which was deliberately High Church, dominated by the Deobandi minority among the clergy. Mysticism could not be the foundation of the ideological state. Islamic scholars like Dr Fazlur Rehman were not tolerated for long in the Council; and the highwater mark of the High Church dominance came when General Zia appointed Maulana Yusuf Banuri the founder of the Banuri Mosque of Karachi as head of the Council.⁵ The NWFP was traditionally High Church because of its cultural proximity with Afghanistan. After 1947, the seminary there aligned itself with the pro-Congress National Awami Party (NAP). It should be interesting to investigate how the two parties, one secular-socialist and the other orthodox-puritanical, interacted in their pro-India orientations. The lessening of the aggressive politics of High Church was owed to its adoption by the state of Pakistan. When the war in Afghanistan began in 1979, the linkage of the mujahideen with the seminarian tradition increased the charisma of the seminary. The rise of the Taliban and the induction of jihad by Pakistan into its Kashmir policy, drove the Brelvis out. No Brelvi could go to Afghanistan for training because he would be considered an infidel. Many boys from the Brelvi institutions had to change over to a Deobandi or Ahle Hadith seminary before going to Afghanistan.

Shah Waliullah, the 18th century Muslim thinker seems to have inspired both liberal and orthodox ways of thinking in South Asia.⁶ His most remarkable contribution was the linkage he formed between Deobandi Islam and the Hanbali Islam of Saudi Arabia during his sojourn in Hijaz. The rise of Saudi influence in Pakistan during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets cemented the old nexus further. Saudi gift of the seed money for General Zia's Zakat Fund was conditional: a significant bequest had to be made to the Ahle Hadith seminary headquarters in Faisalabad, the city from where Al Qaeda's Abu Zubaidah was to be arrested in 2002. Army chief Aslam Beg was the first to allow Deobandi seminaries in Bahawalpur and Rahimyar Khan so that their armed youth could be used as ‘second line of defence' against a possible Indian attack from Rajasthan.⁷ The Arab sheikhs, who enjoyed extra-territorial rights, came to the area for hunting rare birds and began to fund the seminaries, thus allowing the rise of the Sipah Sahaba under an intensely anti-Shia and anti-Iran leader, Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi.⁸ The Deobandi-Ahle Hadith tradition in India had always been coloured with strong sectarianism. Jihad in Pakistan brought to the fore the dominance of a Deobandi consensus together with a strong anti-Shia trend among the main jihadi groups.

Birth of Religious Extremism
Religious extremism began in earnest during the second jihad which was the extension of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets to Kashmir as a low-intensity conflict with India after 1989. The first jihad had empowered the Jamaat Islami and its Pushtun leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmad. The sojourn of the Afghan jihadi leaders in Peshawar had begun a crucible process with the help of Saudi money. The High Church Afghans mixed with the local Deobandi consensus and tacitly agreed to oppose the Low Church trends in Pakistan. It was a 'hard' Islam Pakistanis knew nothing about. It came mixed with the even tougher tribal code called Pushtunwali that the 'settled' Pushtuns of Pakistan had gradually forgotten even in the Tribal Areas. The presence of the Arabs - especially the Egyptian runaways like Al Zawahiri acted to further radicalise local Islam with salafi ideals overlaid with Qutbite concept of the jahiliyya violence.⁹
The Deobandi seminaries became powerful on receiving their share of Zakat from the government of General Zia. After 1989, the empowerment of the Deobandis took up momentum as the jihad in Kashmir was restricted to Deobandis and Ahle Hadith. The surrender of internal sovereignty to these militias happened first in the NWFP and the Tribal Areas; it later extended to a number of cities in Punjab and, in particular Karachi, where the centre of the Deobandi consensus emerged at the Banuri Complex of seminaries. Increasingly the youth joining the jihad were made conscious of the fact that somehow Pakistan had not enforced true Islam and that Pakistanis were living like infidels. More animus was shown towards the Shia community and to some extent the Ismailis.¹⁰

According to a report by Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies, Pakistan has 6,761 religious seminaries where over a million young men are taking religious training. The Ministry of Religious Affairs has given out similar numbers in its report. But Herald (November 2001) says: 'According to the Interior Ministry, there are some 20,000 madrasas in the country with nearly 3 million students'. In 1947, West Pakistan had only 245 seminaries. In 1988, they increased to 2,861. Between 1988 and 2000, this increase comes out to be 136 percent. The largest number of seminaries are Deobandi, at 64 percent, followed by Brelvi, at 25 percent. Only 6 percent are Ahle Hadith. But the increase in the number of Ahle Hadith seminaries or madrasas has been phenomenal, at 131 percent, going up from 134 in 1988 to 310 in 2000. Out of the total number of youth taking religious training in the seminaries, 15 per cent are foreigners. Among the Ahle Hadith, there are 17 organisations active in Pakistan, looking after their own seminaries. Out of them, six actually take part in politics, three take part in jihad, and three are busy spreading their mazhab or school of thought. They are all puritans who do not follow the state fiqh and are also called wahabi. Most of them follow the lead of the ulema of Saudi Arabia and receive assistance from rich Saudi citizens.¹¹

The grand Deobandi alliance is probably the biggest force in Pakistan after the state's armed forces.¹² Based in Karachi, the Banuri Complex housed leaders that sat in the shuras of the various Deobandi jihadi militias. Its religious scholars sat in the shura of Sipah Sahaba as well as the shura of the two militias, Harkatul Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Muhammad. The Deobandi leaders think nothing of issuing fatwas of death against foreigners coming to Pakistan on business. It is these fatwas in part that caused the embassies in Islamabad to issue advisories to their nationals not to visit Pakistan.

The Harkatul Mujahideen was once Harkatul Ansar which was banned by America because of its terrorist character. In 2000, it was split between two leaders, Fazlur Rehman Khaleel and Masood Azhar. Their organisations were trained in Afghanistan and were payrolled by Osama bin Laden. Both the commanders were close to Osama and had accompanied him to Sudan for some time in early 1990s. When Masood Azhar was arrested in India, Osama financed the hijack of an Indian airliner to spring him from jail. Along with him was sprung another man close to Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Umar. Umar had opened the office of Al Qaeda in Lahore in 2000 for a brief period before going underground once again.¹³

After his release in 1999 Masood Azhar no longer wanted to work under the Harkat leadership of Fazlur Rehman Khaleel. He founded Jaish-i-Muhammad, helped by his Banuri Mosque elders. True to Deobandi tradition, he began shooting off his mouth against General Musharraf which embarrassed his handlers among the intelligence agencies. The Harkat was split and its assets divided between the two leaders. But when the double-cabin vehicles were returned by Jaish to Fazlur Rehman Khaleel in bad repair, the two factions began to fight each other. Osama bin Laden ended the dispute by sending a dozen brand new double-cabin vehicles to Khaleel from Afghanistan.¹⁴

Maulana Azam Tariq of Sipah Sahaba had built up his power outside Jhang where he was the virtual ruler. A French lady scholar writing his biography says he gave administrative orders for the area of Jhang from his house.¹⁵ His sectarian party has produced a violent offshoot, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, whose killings Azam Tariq disavowed by saying that the Lashkar has been removed from the umbrella of his party. Yet when Lashkar activist Haq Nawaz was about to be hanged he tried all means at his disposal, including threats to the state, to get him absolved from the crime of killing an Iranian diplomat. Sipah is not only very powerful in Karachi it is also influential in Kurram Agency and in Gilgit, both areas being concentrations of Shia population. Azam Tariq announced in 2001 that he would select 20 cities in Pakistan and enforce his Deobandi shariah there, mainly in the shape of compulsory business shut-down during namaz and the compulsory attendance at namaz of all Muslims. In addition, he promised to impose hijab (veil) on all women venturing out of the house. Hardline injunctions against women are also issued by his Deobandi colleague Maulana Samiul Haq who vows to treat the women with the same severity as the Taliban.

The Salafi Connection
There are 17 Ahle Hadith organisations in Pakistan, out of whom six take part in politics and three also took part in jihad. Differences of ritual exist among them, as also differences of strategy. At times these differences become very intense and give rise to mutual vilification, as in the case of Markazi Ahle Hadith of Allama Sajid Mir and the former Lashkar-i-Tayba (Now Jamaat al-Dawa) of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Jamaat Ghuraba Ahle Hadith holds that its supporters should quietly reject the political system till the majority of the population becomes Ahle Hadith, after which Pakistan will automatically become Islamic. Jamaat al-Mujahideen thinks that the political system is batil (false) and as long as a caliphate does not come into being, it will not take part in politics but will struggle to establish an Islamic government. Hafiz Saeed's organisation holds the same position. The Ahle Hadith monthly journal Sahifa Ahle Hadith (Karachi) wrote in January 2000: 'We believe that General Musharraf does not represent Islam or Pakistan but America and its allies. We condemn General Musharraf's decision and demand that he should not sow the seeds of hatred between the people and the army simply to extend his personal rule. He should stop giving statements against mujahideen Muslims because America and its allies listen only to the language of violence and will not negotiate till the Muslim ummah decides to break America into pieces through guerrilla war, as it did in the case of Russia'.¹⁶

The salafi influence in Pakistan has also come in from the United Kingdom where a violent cleric, Sheikh Umar Bakri propagates the subversion of all Islamic states in order to impose khilafat there. The Lahore High Court recently ruled that the activities of Hizb al-Tahrir came within the ambit of preaching of Islam and could not be designated as anti-state. The government had gone to the court complaining that the Hizb was spreading sedition against the government. Hizb al-Tahrir being against democracy, it advocated the establishment of khilafat in Pakistan. It made no bones about the government of General Musharraf being in violation of the tenets of Islam and openly called for its removal. When the Hizb entered Pakistan in 2000 from the United Kingdom together with its companion, al-Muhajirun,¹⁷ it had called for the removal of the Musharraf government. The Punjab government which had rented the Alhamra Hall to the two organisations regretted the decision. (One nazim of the Hizb doing time in a Peshawar jail for distributing abusive pamphlets against General Musharraf is a medical student who took over from the earlier nazim after he went to the United States to study electrical engineering at Chicago University.) The government had no idea who these organisations were and what their objectives were in Pakistan.¹⁸ Some of the Hizb youth were English-speaking with cockney accents and therefore impressive-looking; the bureaucracy or the intelligence services had no idea of the origin of Hizb al-Tahrir. Now of course Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are complaining that the Hizb is busy undermining their governments. In Uzbekistan, international human rights organisations have sided with the Hizb against the Uzbek government. Writes Farouk Turaev (Daily Times 20 August 2002): 'The Independent Organisation for Human Rights in Uzbekistan (IOHRU), and the Interior Ministry agree that approximately 4,200 suspected Hizb al-Tahrir activists are now in prison. Most are serving long sentences of up to 20 years for crimes, such as violating the country's constitution, running prohibited organisations, and distributing rebellious pamphlets.' Activists of the Hizb have also been arrested in Kyrgyzstan, and in Egypt where the party is banned.

Origin of Sectarian Violence
After coming to power, General Zia took over the populist slogan of Nizam-e-Mustafa and imposed shariah on Pakistan. It really meant the imposition of the Sunni Hanafi fiqh or jurisprudence followed by the majority population from which the Shias were excluded. Two early laws under shariah enforced by him, failed miserably: the first, abolition of riba (interest), failed because of the inability of the Islamic scholars to reinterpret Islam for modern conditions; the second, zakat, failed because the Shia jurisprudence, called Fiqh-i-Jaafaria, had a conflicting interpretation of zakat. In 1980, an unprecedented procession of Shias, led by Mufti Jaafar Hussain, laid siege to Islamabad and forced General Zia to exempt the Shia community from the deduction of zakat. The concept of Sunni ushr (poor-due on land) is also rejected by Shia jurisprudence. It appears that, when the anti-Shia movement started in Jhang in the 1980s, General Zia not only ignored it but saw it as his balancing act against the rebellious Shia community. This was worsened by Imam Khomeini's criticism of General Zia.

The rise of Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi in the stronghold of big Shia landlords in Punjab changed the sectarian scene in Pakistan. There is evidence that General Zia was warned of Jhangvi's anti-Shia and anti-Iran movement, but he ignored the warning and allowed it to blossom into a full-fledged religious party called Anjuman-i-Sipah-i-Sahaba of Pakistan (ASSP). In small towns, the old Shia-Sunni debate restarted with the fury that had become dampened in the past. The tracts which carried this debate were scurrilous in the extreme and helped the clerics to whip up passions. Meanwhile, in 1986, General Zia allowed a 'purge' of Turi Shias in the divided city of Parachinar (capital of Kurram Agency on the border with Afghanistan) at the hands of the Sunni Afghan mujahideen in conjunction with the local Sunni population.

Parachinar was the launching-pad of the Mujahideen attacks into Afghanistan and the Turis were not cooperative. Tehrike-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqha-i-Jaafaria had come into being during the dispute over zakat in 1980. When the Parachinar massacre occurred, the party was led by a Turi leader, Allama Arif-ul-Hussaini, a companion of Imam Khomeini during his exile in Najaf. (He is celebrated as a martyr in Iran with a postage-stamp portrait.) Allama Hussaini was murdered in Peshawar in August 1988, for which the Turis held General Zia responsible. That was also the year of General Zia's death (within a fortnight of Hussaini's murder) in an air-crash in Bahawalpur, and for a time there was rumour of Shia involvement in his assassination although no solid evidence supporting this speculation was ever uncovered. The NWFP governor, General Fazle Haq, whom the Turis accused of complicity in the murder of Allama Hussaini, was ambushed and killed in 1991. In 1989, the Afghan mujahideen government-in-exile came into being in Peshawar after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. At the behest of Saudi Arabia, the exiled Shia mujahideen of Iran were not included in this government. The Saudis paid over 23 million dollars a week during the 519-member session of the Mujahideen shura as bribe for it.¹⁹ In 1990, Maulana Jhangvi was murdered at the climax of his anti-Iran and anti-Shia campaign of extreme insult and denigration.²⁰ The same year, as if in retaliation, an activist of Sipah-i-Sahaba shot the Iranian consul Sadiq Ganji dead in Lahore. The tit-for-tat killings were thus started. Maulana Isar-ul-Qasimi, chief of the Sipah, was gunned down in 1991.

Since then, the state of Pakistan has had to answer for the killing of more Iranians in Pakistan. Another consular officer was gunned down in Multan and a number of Iranian air force trainees were ambushed in Rawalpindi on inside information received by the killers, thus implying involvement from sectarian officers from within the army. Most commentators in Pakistan are scared of telling the truth. Most inter-sectarian dialogue is fake since its great facade of speech-making is nothing but divine-sounding rationalisation. Almost all Muslim clerics lie when it comes to sectarian deaths. General Zia allowed the Deobandi lashkars to attack Gilgit and put under challenge the historical domination there of Ismaili and Shia communities.²¹ In 2003, the anti-Shia violence was extended to Balochistan where the Hazara Shia community was targeted in two incidents killing over 50 men. The Pakistan government, speaking through prime minister Mir Zafrullah Jamali and interior minister Faisal Saleh Hayat, claimed that the act of terrorism could have been planned and executed by India through its freshly opened consulates in Afghanistan. It later came to light that the action was coordinated by the banned sectarian organisations, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Sipah Sahaba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi.²² Jaish-i-Muhammad, as an offshoot of Sipah Sahaba, had carried out the murders of Shia doctors in Karachi in 1998. Its Al Qaeda-backed activist Sheikh Umar executed the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Pakistan's jihad in Kashmir has created an alternative state apparatus in the outfits that fight there as surrogate warriors. The price that civil society pays for this deniable covert war has been climbing over the years and has now become almost intolerable. During the latest round of war in Afghanistan most of these outfits have opposed General Musharraf's policy of joining the world coalition against terrorism. All religious leaders of these jihadi outfits know their activity can easily fall in the category of terrorism and therefore try to scare the common citizen by predicting that the next American target will be Pakistan. They see hazily the possibility of a takeover, not by themselves, as that would be impossible given their internecine nature, but by someone else from within the establishment, that will give them a new lease of life an earlier lease having seen foreclosure the day Osama bin Laden decided to attack New York and Washington. In 2001 the state of Pakistan had to effect a volte face in its jihadi policy after the UN Security Council resolution 1373 which banned the jihadi militias in Pakistan and took action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Local politics earlier aligned to the pro-Taliban policy has been severely disrupted as a result.²³

The reaction of the Pakistani people and intellectuals against the United States for what ensued in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, has given fresh legitimacy to the militias dubbed terrorist by the UN resolution. The Pakistan army's policy of 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan against India, Iran, Uzbekistan and the Northern Alliance, deliberately sacrificed the earlier doctrine of the Durand Line that had divided the Pushtun nation in 1893, as a result of which the map of Pakistan was legitimised in 1947. After 2001, as a reaction to the defeat of the 'strategic depth' policy, the Pushtun vote in Pakistan brought a government of a predominantly Deobandi consensus in the NWFP. It is the vote of a nation that wants to be reunited at the cost of the integrity of Pakistan. The public opinion in Pakistan is close to the thinking of this consensus as demonstrated by the 'million marches' in favour of the clergy.

(Khaled Ahmed is Consulting Editor of the Friday Times).

References

1.	Bobby S. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, (Zed Books London, 1995). The book discusses the problem from the Muslim point of view but with the tools of Western scholarship.
2.	Daily Times Lahore (11 September 2003) quoted Ernest Gellner from his book Post-modernism, Reason and Religion: 'High Islam stresses the severely monotheistic and nomocratic nature of Islam, it is mindful of the prohibition of claims to mediation between God and man, and it is generally oriented towards puritanism and scripturalism. Low Islam, or Folk Islam, is different. If it knows literacy, it does so mainly in the use of writing for magical purposes, rather than as a tool of scholarship. It stresses magic more than learning, ecstasy more than rule-observance. Rustics, you might say, encounter writing mainly in the form of amulets, manipulative magic and false land deeds. Far from avoiding mediation, this form of Islam is centred on it: its most characteristic institution is the saint cult, where the saint is more often than not a living rather than a dead personage (and where sanctity is transmitted from father to son).' Gellner was an outstanding theorist of modernity and a rare breed among late twentieth century scholars. He made major contributions in very diverse fields, notably philosophy and social anthropology. He is known for his path-breaking analyses of ethnicity and nationalism (Thought and Change, 1964; Nations and Nationalism, 1983), among other works.
3.	Dr Rashid Ahmad Jullundheri, Journal Al Ma'aref Quarterly, (January-March 1998) Idara Saqafat Islamia Lahore. The issue contains a long survey of the Deoband seminary's birth and activities under British Raj.
4.	K.K. Aziz, Religion, Land and Politics in Pakistan: A Study of Piri-Muridi; (Vanguard Books Lahore, 2002): Historian Khursheed Kamal Aziz has taken in hand an interesting but difficult theme from Pakistan's history: the relationship between ownership of land and the custodianship of grassroots spirituality as a power base for national politics. He was surprised to find that not much research work had been done on the subject. The most significant angle he provides to the understanding of the Brelvi dominance in Pakistan on the eve of 1947 is in his narrative of the participation of the Chishti order of sufi saints in the politics of a land that was dominated by Suhrawardi saints and Deobandi ulema. It was the Chishti success that brought in the Brelvi influence from Central India and converted what became known as Pakistan into a Low Church territory. This also makes known the Chishti support to the Pakistan Movement as opposed to the Deobandi ulema who opposed it.
5.	Daily Jang, Lahore (14 June 2003), wrote that the founder of the Banuri Mosque complex, which is the centre of the powerful Deobandi movement in Pakistan, was Maulana Yusuf Banuri (1908-1977) who was born in Basti Mahabatabad near Peshawar, son of Maulana Syed Muhammad Zakariya who was in turn the son of a khalifa of Mujaddid Alf-e-Sani. He was educated in Peshawar and Kabul before being sent to Deoband where he was the pupil of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani. He returned to join the seminary of Dabheel. In 1920 he passed the Maulvi Fazil exam from Punjab University. In 1928, he went to attend the Islamic conference in Cairo. He migrated to Pakistan in 1951 and started teaching at Tando Allahyar. He founded the Jamia Arabiya Islamiya in Karachi in 1953 while he led the attack against Pakistani Islamic scholar Dr Fazlur Rehman. He was involved in the aggressive movement of Khatm-i-Nabuwwat from 1973 onwards and was made member of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) by General Zia on coming to power.
6.	Dr Javid Iqbal, Islam and Pakistan's Identity, (Vanguard Books Lahore, 2003). The Mughal rule in India and the rise of the puritan wahabi Islam in the Mughal twilight is discussed in the book as a process of constant adjustment to reality; so is the 'enigmatic' and fantasy-ridden Khilafat Movement. But the highlight of the discussion is the consideration by the author of the role of Shah Waliullah who continues to inspire both the fundamentalists and the liberals in Pakistan. The followers of Deoband who link up with the Ahle Hadith or wahabis and subliminally apostatise the Shiites revere him because he was in the tough Naqshbandi tradition. The liberals love him because he translated the Quran into Persian. The author links Iqbal's 'liberal' interpretation in his Lectures of the Islamic hudood to Shibli's reading of Shah Waliullah.
7.	This came up at a seminar in Islamabad. The information was given to the writer by a retired general of the Pakistan army.
8.	There were secular beneficiaries too. A number of Sindhi families profited from the hospitality they offered to the Arabs who would spend an average of $1.5 million on each visit. The Mahr family of chief minister of Sindh in 2003 is said to be one such beneficiary.
9.	Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam, (University Press of America, 2003). The author traces intolerance to the anti-intellectual and anti-book nature of the salafist and wahabi Islam. He describes his argument with an Egyptian salafist priest who, when finding it difficult to answer some of the questions Khaled put to him, condemned him as a philosopher and a follower of traditions apart from the Quran and Sunna. Khaled's main objection to the prevalent salafist trend is its total rejection of classical Islamic thinkers of the fiqh.
10.	Daily Khabrain Lahore (22 March 2003) published a brief biographical note on late Allama Ehsan Elahi Zaheer of Jamiat Ahle Hadith who was killed by a bomb on 23 March 1987 in Lahore near Qila Lachchman Singh. Along with him four other Ahle Hadith scholars had also died. He had published a number of virulently sectarian monographs in Arabic and was known to receive direct financial assistance from Saudi Arabia. Allama Zaheer was a great orator and an equally great author who was born in Sialkot in 1940 in the home of the Sethi branch of the Sheikh community. His father did not send him to school but got him trained on Quran and then sent him for more religious education to Jamiya Islamiya in Gujranwala. In 1963, after qualifying, he was sent by the seminary to its headquarters in Madina University from he acquired the highest degree. Back home in 1967 he passed many exams: MA in English, MA in political science, MA in Persian, MA in Urdu and Law. He was made leader of prayers at the wahabi mosque Chinianwali. As a speaker he was in the mould of Ataullah Shah Bukhari and took part in agitations against Bhutto. He wrote hard-hitting books on Shiism, Ismailism and other sects, in Arabic, and wrote equally hard-hitting books in Urdu. After he was blown up by a bomb he was taken to a local hospital from where he was taken to Saudi Arabia on orders of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia who sent his personal plane for him. He died in Madina in 1987, his funeral prayer was headed by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia Sheikh Bin Baz, after which he was buried next to Imam Malik's grave.
11.	Muhammad Amir Rana, Jihad Kashmir wa Afghanistan: Jihadi Tanzimun aur Mazhabi Jamaton ka aik Jaeza, (Mashal Books Lahore, 2002). The book is the only authentic and factual account of the jihadi militias based on their in-house publications, and has been translated into English in India, which has put its young author at risk from the militias and the intelligence agencies in Pakistan.
12.	John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, (Pluto Press London, 1998). As noted by Cooley, during the 1980s, Osama's Karachi connections included the Banuri mosque, later recognised as one of the JUI-Taliban strongholds in Pakistan. It is here that he met another veteran of the Afghan war, Mullah Muhammad Umar. In 1994, Mullah Umar was to emerge as the ruler of three-fourths of Afghanistan as leader of the Taliban. In 1996, Osama returned to Afghanistan from Sudan with his wives and children. In 1998, he was interviewed in Afghanistan by an American TV news network. From a mountain hideout in Jalalabad, Osama threatened to kill 'terrorist' Americans and praised the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center in New York and the 1993-94 debacle of the American troops in Somalia, 'implying' his complicity in the two incidents.
13.	The writer succeeded in arranging for a meeting with him through a third party but Umar Sheikh had to leave Lahore urgently for an unknown place on the appointed day.
14.	Muhammad Amir Rana, Jihad Kashmir wa Afghanistan: Jihadi Tanzimun aur Mazhabi Jamaton ka aik Jaeza, (Mashal Books Lahore, 2002).
15.	Maryam Zahab researches the Shiite faith in Pakistan and lives in Paris. The Arab name is probably a pen-name. She met the writer in 1999 after her latest series of interviews with Azam Tariq in Jhang.
16.	Muhammad Amir Rana, Jihad Kashmir wa Afghanistan (Mashal Books, Lahore, 2002)
17.	The Economist (September 13-19, 2003) in its survey Islam and the West: 'A movement in Britain, al-Muhajirun, pumps out jihadi propaganda and has said on its website that it wants to become “a fifth column” to prepare ‘the world-wide Islamic revolution’.
18.	Akbar S. Ahmed, Islam under Siege: Living Dangerously in post-Honour World (Polity Press, 2003): 'In Britain, Sheikh Umar Bakri's Khilafah, the journal of Hizb al-Tahrir, attacked Jinnah as a kafir, an insult for a Muslim. Moreover it accused Jinnah of being an enemy of God and the holy Prophet because Jinnah supported women, Christians and Hindus and advocated democracy. Why I asked myself did they pick on Jinnah? Because I concluded Bakri saw him as a major ideological opponent. Significantly after the American strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, Bakri emerged in the media to claim that he represented bin Laden in Europe' (p113). Later, when Akbar started visiting Christian and Jewish gatherings to present the Islamic view he was attacked by Hizb al-Tahrir in the press. 'I was walking perilously close to the fatwa territory', he writes.
19.	Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: from a Buffer State to Failed State, (Yale University Press, 1995). The book discusses the formation of the 'interim government' in Peshawar and its inability to allow representation to the eight-party Shia alliance based in Iran. The interim government was sought to be set up in 1989 as the last of the Soviet troops vacated Afghanistan. Circles close to director general ISI Gen. Hamid Gul said that the Shia were ousted from the government at the behest of the CIA because of Washington's opposition to Iran. Rubin's version says that while the mujahideen groups conferred in Peshawar, Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze arrived in Islamabad with the proposal that some lower-echelon non-controversial elements of the PDPA be included in the government. The proposal was rejected. The Iranian shura was kept out because Saudi Arabia was against it. Saudi intelligence spent $25 million per week during the discussions in Peshawar, and each delegate was paid $25,000 to keep the Shias out. The seven parties in Peshawar appointed all the 519 members of the assembly who were mostly Pukhtun from eastern Afghanistan. Director ISI Hamid Gul promised the presidency to Mujaddidi to keep him from walking out. 'Sayyaf became prime minister in deference to the Saudis who had promised to fund the Islamic army if their wahabi sect was adequately represented'. Hekmatyar could not be accommodated as defence minister because of the ensuing squabbling in the shura. According to Rubin, this manipulation by Saudi and Pakistani bureaucrats fanned nationalist passions among the commanders who became increasingly autonomous after this incident.
20.	For an idea of the kind of orator Jhangvi was, one has to listen to a cassette of his speeches distributed by Sipah Sahaba in Lahore in 1993. Jhangvi got his audience to chant Khomeini 'kutta' (dog) and sought to prove from orthodox religious tracts that the Shia were not Muslims.
21.	K.M. Ahmed in daily Dawn (21 December, 2002): 'In April 1988, armed rioters from outside entered the Gilgit environs. Eleven villages around town were torched, their wooden structures burnt to ashes and valuable goods looted. Around 40 persons were killed. The civil administration did its best with the limited police force in Gilgit (which at least managed to save the town) and when it sought the help under aid to civil power provisions of the law (as the raiders started to move to the outlying villages), this help was denied on various pretexts. It was clear to the Gilgit civil administration that the raiders, who were tribals and mujahedin elements, could not have reached this remote place from Peshawar without someone's blessing. The Frontier Constabulary, whose checkposts dot the Swat-Besham road and the Besham-Gilgit highway, did not act to intercept the raiders. (The writer is former Commissioner, Gilgit Agency.) See also: F.M. Khan, The story of Gilgit, Baltistan and Chitral: A Short History of Two Milleniums (Ejaz Literary Agents). 'General Zia was a Satan under whom the devil from Hazara, Qasim Shah, got Pakhtun-Sunni lashkars to invade the region in 1988 with General Ayaz Mehmud, a relative of General Zia, looking on approvingly.' (p134). The religious map of the Northern Areas given by the author is as follows: Gilgit is 60% Shia, 40% Sunni: Hunza 100% Ismaili; Nagar 100% Shia; Punial 100% Ismaili; Yasin 100% Ismaili; Ishkoman 100% Ismaili; Gupis 100% Ismaili; Chilas 100% Sunni; Darel/Tangir 100% Sunni; Astor 90% Sunni, 10% Shia; Baltistan 96% Shia; 2% Nurbakhti; 2% Sunni.
22.	GEO TV (12 September, 2003) had host Hamid Mir interviewing the imam of the Hazara Imam Bargah at Quetta where the Shiite community was blown up by suicide bombers. The imam said the attack was carried out by Sipah Sahaba, Jaish-i-Muhammad and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and this information had been given to the administration in Quetta. Qazi Hussain Ahmad was present at his side when he stated this. He added that Qazi Hussain Ahmad was a member of the MMA and should take measures against people in the MMA who were also involved. Qazi Hussain Ahmad instead said that it was the responsibility of the government to end terrorism. IG police Balochistan said that the mastermind of the Hazara killings in Quetta was related to Ramzi Yusuf now in prison in the United States after being caught in Pakistan in 1995. He said that the mastermind of the killings was a brother-in-law of Ramzi and thus the killings could be related to Al Qaeda. When asked if RAW was involved he said he was looking for proof after coming to know that the killers keep coming and going to Afghanistan where the Indians had consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad and Herat. A Shia website had earlier carried scanned posters by Deobandi scholars, including MMA's Maulana Samiul Haq, declaring the Shia non-believers. These posters had appeared in Quetta days before the massacre of the Hazaras.
23.	Geo TV (12 September 2003) Hamid Mir investigated the well known mystery of the perfumed soil of Kohat after Al Qaeda mujahideen were gunned down there. The champion of the mujahideen cause was ex-MNA Javed Ibrahim Paracha who narrated the incident. After 9/11, Bulgarian and Chechnyan mujahideen fled from Afghanistan and came down to the Tribal Areas from where they came to Kohat where already 27 Arab mujahideen were in jail. They were the offspring of the Sahaba (Companions of the Prophet PBUH) and were Ahle Bait (from the family of the Prophet PUBUH). They were met by an ISI officer (hassaas idaray ka afsar) who assured them safe passage to Bannu, but when they approached the town they saw troops. Upon this, they shot the ISI officer. After that the Flying Coach was subjected to a barrage of bullets and all of them were killed. The last beautiful youth who died said that he was going to paradise. The entire surroundings smelled sweet with the perfume of the blood of the martyrs. The people of Kohat were moved by the perfume of the blood and gathered around the dead bodies. They picked them up and took them to the CMH, planning to bury them in Kohat after medical care. But the administration took the dead bodies to Peshawar. A jirga was held which decided to bury the mujahideen in Kohat. When the graves were dug the soil started smelling sweet. After which Javed Ibrahim Paracha went to Peshawar to demand the dead bodies. Paracha was arrested and taken to face the FBI where he said he did not know Osama but he thought him a soldier of God. He said he had named his own son Osama bin Laden. He then organised the construction of Shuhada-i-Islam Chowk in Kohat. People had taken the perfumed soil soaked with the blood of the Al Qaeda soldiers and were keeping it in their homes. Javed Ibrahim Paracha belongs to the strong Punjabi Paracha clan of Kohat who are Hindko-speaking traders. He was a member of JUI but had a tiff with Maulana Fazlur Rehman. In 1997 he fought election on a PML(N) ticket and was returned as MNA. He has led a strong sectarian reaction to around ten families of the Shia community in Kohat and protested at their taking out tazia during Muharram. His sectarian outreach extends to Hangu and Tal where he has been responsible for sectarian violence. The Parachas of Kohat are known for their financial support to Al Qaeda. Javed Ibrahim Paracha fought the 2002 election for PML(N) but was supported by Sipah Sahaba. He lost the election.