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| India-Pakistan | |
| Rotten fish | |
| 2011-08-08 | |
| [Dawn] In a recent statement, Interior Minister Rehman Malik Pak politician, current Interior Minister under the Gilani administration. Malik is a former Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) intelligence officer who rose to head the FIA during Benazir Bhutto's second tenure. He later joined the Pak Peoples Party and was chief security officer to Bhutto. Malik was tossed from his FIA job in 1998 after documenting the breath-taking corruption of the Sharif family. By unhappy coincidence Näwaz Shärif became PM at just that moment and Malik moved to London one step ahead of the button men. came down hard on the Tablighi Jamat (TJ), claiming that the Islamic evangelical movement has become a breeding ground of Through the sectarian turmoil that the country faced in the 1980s and 1990s, the TJ was free to preach and recruit. It was always believed to be a harmless movement that had no political, sectarian or Islamic exemplar motives. However, some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them... since the country's Sunni majority remains Bareilvi -- an 18th century sub-continental Mohammedan concoction built from elements of Sufism and 'folk-Islam'--a parallel evangelical movement emerged from within this fold. Called the Dawat-i-Islami, it claims to represent the Barelvi majority's spiritual interests. Also seen as non-political, the Dawat however has been accused of containing members that have graduated to becoming members of the Barelvi Sunni Islamic exemplar organization, the Sunni Tehreek A Brelvi political group founded in bloody Kärachi in 1992 by Muhammad Saleem Qadri. Its political wing is the Pakistan Inqilabi Tehreek. As the MQM's power declined it became the primary opposition to the Deobandi Binori Mosque hard boyz in the heyday of Nizamuddin Shamzai. By coincidence, Muhammad Saleem Qadri was bumped off by Deobandi button men of the SSP in 2001. Even more coincidentally, SSP's funding comes from Kärachi, where‐also strictly coincidentally‐Binori Mosque is located. Go figure. . The guard who rubbed out Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer (for 'blasphemy') was also a former member of the Dawat. It is also staunchly anti-Deobandi creed. What Malik spouted about the TJ may be the first time a member of a sitting government in Pakistain has accused the outfit of breeding possible recruits for various hardcore Islamist organizations. Alarms in this respect were first raised by some western observers when in the mid and late 1990s the radical anti-India/Hindu and anti-West chief of the ISI, Major Javed Nasir, became a staunch member of the TJ. This was also the time the TJ was making great headway in the Pakistain army. The event was seen as being only incidental and the TJ continued to recruit and preach freely--now more than ever after making deep inroads into Pakistain's showbiz scene and the cricket team as well. But the accusations (though suppressed in Pakistain) kept coming. The TJ's name came up in connection with terrorism plots such as in October 2002 in the US (the 'Portland Seven case') and the September 2002 'Lackawanna Six case' (also in the US).
In 2008, the Spanish police tossed in the slammer fourteen Asian Mohammedans for allegedly planning to attack various places in Spain. Twelve were Paks. A Spanish Mohammedan leader claimed that all of these men had once been members of the TJ. Though counter-terrorism experts have understandably focused their studies more on the Islamic exemplar groups like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, in the last five years or so, many of them have now begun to also study the dynamics of evangelical groups like the TJ. They believe that in spite of the fact that the TJ's primary function remains non-political, its rather secretive organizational structure and the goodwill that it enjoys among most Paks allows elements from terrorist organizations to use it as a way to recruit members for more violent purposes. They say that many young men joining the TJ are more vulnerable to the Islamists' propaganda due to the TJ's conservative social orientation. Rehman Malik was not shooting in the air. He was merely pointing out yet another area of concern in a country being torn apart by men committing violence in the name of faith. His statement only became controversial because very few Paks are aware of the potential of the TJ polluting its pond with rotten fish. | |
| Posted by:Fred |