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Madrassas and Militants

By Badar Alam

Protesting sectarian violence on the streets of Dera Ghazi Khan.(File Photo)

 A blackboard next to the entrance of madrassa block at the Jamia Islamia Rehmani complex on the outskirts of Dera Ghazi Khan prohibits its students from taking part in any political and non-political movement. Does the prohibition also apply to jihadi/sectarian activities?

‘It does,’ replies Habibur Rehman, a senior teacher at Jamia.

The administration of his madrassa takes the alleged link between jihad/sectarianism and Islamic education very seriously. ‘We ensure that our students absorb this belief that changing people’s faith and sectarian affiliations through force is not permissible in Islam,’ says Chaudhry Zahoor Ahmed, Jamia’s general secretary. He proudly tells me that none of the graduates of their madrassa has ever been reported to be involved in jehadi/sectarian activities. ‘We tell them unambiguously that changing the governments and the societies is not our job,’ he says, reciting the Quranic verses that abhor using violence to convert people to Islam.

At the educational set-up run by a Dera Ghazi Khan politician, Hafiz Abdul Karim, the administration is quite aggressive in distancing themselves for jehadi elements.

‘Everyone in the city knows us. Our party (Markazi Jamiat Ahle-e-Hadith) is active all over Punjab. We cannot do something that in any way sullies our reputation among the people and in the eyes of the government,’ says Rana Rizwan Ali, a senior member of the administration of the establishment.

The fact that Karim received votes (in the 2008 general election) from all sorts of people including the Siraiki residents, Punjabi settlers and local traders and shopkeepers, shows that there is widespread approval of the work he is doing, his son Osama Karim told me. In a sense, he is right because people of Karim’s own sect make only a tiny minority in the city and the district of Dera Ghazi Khan. Only nine out of the 240 or so madrassa’s registered in the district belong to the Ahl-e-Hadith. With the votes of Ahl-e-Hadith alone, Karim would not have been able to come quite close to winning against former president Farooq Leghari.

According to Chaudhry Zahoor Ahmed of Jamia Islamia, none of the registered madrassas can afford to indulge in activities that are against the state and the society. ‘We have to operate among people; even raise and collect money from them. We cannot afford to involve ourselves in activities that are seen as subversive and working against peace and harmony in society,’ he says. 
 
These proclamations of innocence gain an added vigour when made in the backdrop of recent media reports that Taliban’s supporters have virtually occupied some villages in Dera Ghazi Khan and are enforcing their own brand of Sharia there. At the centre of these reports is a town called Shadan Lund, the seat of the Lund tribe is situated about 30 km to the north of Dera Ghazi Khan on the Indus Highway. On at least one earlier occasion, the town had made equally ominous headlines across the globe. In November 2001, about 1,000 angry protesters blocked a train at Shadan Lund. They were enraged by the American invasion of Afghanistan and were acting on a strike call by Afghanistan Defence Council, a collective of 35 religious parties some of whom later formed the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). But despite the presence of some religious/sectarian tensions among the residents of the town and notwithstanding the fact that a dozen or so veterans of Afghan war live in the town, Shadan Lund is generally peaceful, says Zafar Lund, a local resident and a civil society activist. ‘We do not see anyone in the town being able to impose on the rest of the populace,’ he says.

Still, Dera Ghazi Khan is extremely vulnerable to such threats for different historical, geographical and demographical reasons. The district’s boundaries touch the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan in the north and the restive Balochistan province in the west. Demographically, it is a Baloch and Siraiki region, with a large number of both Punjabi settlers and Urdu-speaking migrants present across the district.

‘Close to 50 per cent of the people living in Dera Ghazi Khan city are either settlers or migrants (from India),’ says a local official. Some Pathan tribes are also among the old residents of the district.

Overlapping such demographic complexities are the tribal associations of local people and their religious and sectarian affiliations. Kaisranis, who live closest to South Waziristan, are mostly Deobandis, with some of them turning to Ahl-e-Hadith recently. The chief of the tribe, Mir Badshah Khan Kaisrani, a member of the Punjab Assembly, concedes that some of his tribesmen do cross into the tribal areas and Afghanistan to fight. ‘But the traffic of the militants in the opposite direction has never been the case,’ he says.
 
Buzdars, living in the Suleman mountain range, abide by their customary secular Baloch laws and traditions in which carrying arms is a matter of custom and viewing outsiders with suspicion is a habit. Other main Baloch tribes - Legharis, Khosas and Lunds - have been active participants in local, national and regional politics and have mixed sectarian connections. A small number of Ahmedis are also present among Lunds and Kaisranis.

Dera Ghazi Khan also houses a small minority of Shias (about five per cent of total population), mostly residing in the city and coming from artisan groups. Some Khosa tribesmen also profess allegiance to this sect.

Traditionally, Dera Ghazi Khan has been a land of Sufi saints, Hazrat Sakhi Sarwar and Khwaja Shah Suleman Taunsvi being the most prominent of them. Followers of these saints are still in a majority in the district, though new sects, new religious trends and even new faiths have successfully made big inroads into the local society.

Some tension between the old and the new came to the surface on February 5, 2009 when a suicide bomber hit a Shia procession killing 33 people, the biggest ever death toll in southern Punjab from a terrorist attack so far. This was followed by a letter sent to the district authorities, warning against singing and dancing at the shrine of Sakhi Sarwar. Though the police later traced the letter to a tiff between two rival groups of the custodians of the shrine, the district administration hit the panic button immediately after receiving it and hung banners inside the shrine that announced the banning of all singing and dancing within the compound around the saint’s grave.

A similar incident happened in Choti Zaireen, the town where Farooq Leghari comes from. A letter warning against girls’ education was found pasted on the wall of a local school last year. But, local sources say, the letter came from a local tribe known for its extremist Deobandi views.

‘The small tribe keeps making similar, though tiny, splashes every now and then,’ says Tariq Birmani, a local journalist. A group of journalists based in Dera Ghazi Khan is unanimous that none of the two letters was the handiwork of some outside organisation – read Taliban and their sympathisers – nor can they be seen as the evidence of strained-to-the-limit relations between different religious and sectarian communities in the city and the district.

Police sources in Dera Ghazi Khan say some people from the district, like anywhere else in Punjab, did take part in Afghan jehad in 1980s. ‘But their number is less than 100 and almost all of them are under the watch of local administration and intelligence agencies. None of them can leave their places without notifying the authorities first,’ a senior official in Dera Ghazi Khan says.

Many local sources point out that a score of young men belonging to the arid areas between the Suleman Range and the cultivated region of the district went to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir and at one point offering their funeral prayers in absentia at their native villages was a well-attended practice.  

But local administration officials say jehadi/sectarian elements in the district have chosen to remain mostly dormant so far. The people who have been arrested for planning and committing the February 5 terrorist act ‘are new elements with no previous record of any jehadi connection or sectarian affiliation,’ a senior official says without wanting to be named. Investigators are yet to establish their links with either Waziristan or local Afghan veterans. ‘But it is highly likely that they had strong links with Taliban and some hardened sectarian militants in the tribal areas,” the official says.

If his words are anything to go by, these ‘new elements’ will decide which way Dera Ghazi Khan moves as Taliban and their supporters threaten to spread beyond their fiefs straddling Pak-Afghan border.

DAWN. Tuesday, 26 May, 2009