The Darwesh mosque and its madrassa, a kind of religious academy, serve as a finishing school for the Taliban movement, a recruitment center and propagator of its extreme vision of Islam. The most zealous youths come here to spend their days in prayer and study of the Koran, to sit at the feet of their teachers while absorbing a worldview more attuned to the 7th Century than the 21st.
Very little from the alien West penetrates the walls of the Darwesh compound. The young Afghan and Pakistani men who study here have heard about the cataclysmic events in New York and Washington but they were astonished and somewhat disbelieving a few days ago when two visitors from the West told them that the 19 suspected hijackers were Muslim zealots from various Arab countries.
The students had been informed by their teachers that the perpetrators had all been Jews. The youths were quite ready to accept that explanation, despite no evidence to back the assertion and despite the fact that governments from Britain to Russia concur with the United States that Osama bin Laden and his terror network were responsible.
“This was a conspiracy against Islam by the Jews,” said one student, a lanky man in his early 20s with a wispy black beard.
“The Jews and the Indians,” added another student, not wanting to leave out Pakistan’s historic enemy to the south.
A third student said he heard that Japan had accepted responsibility for the terror attacks.
On a sparse lawn beneath spreading gum trees, the discussion grew animated. Pepsi was brought for the visitors.
Oklahoma City cited
A student named Abdul Patah, referring to the Oklahoma City bombing, recalled how Americans first blamed Muslims for the attack only to discover the terrorist was a disgruntled U.S. Army veteran with a grudge against the government.
Patah cited a local proverb about how insiders know better than outsiders, suggesting that the hijacking was an inside job and that the real hijackers would turn out to be Americans.
An older man named Ghalib, with a vise-like handshake and white beard tipped with orange henna, spoke English and tried to lay the matter to rest. His analysis would baffle Americans but appeared to carry some weight with the students.
“This was done by American Jews. They hired the hijackers,” he said.
None of the students had heard of Mohamed Atta, the man U.S. investigators suspect was the hijackers’ ringleader, nor were students aware of the letter found in Atta’s baggage reminding hijackers that “You will be entering paradise. You will be entering the happiest, everlasting life.”
`Lies, all lies’
Sami, a 25-year-old Afghan who fought with the Taliban militia, refused to believe it. “Lies, all lies. Islam does not allow such things,” he said.
There was general agreement among the students that it is wrong to kill innocents.
But then one student suggested the World Trade Center attacks were justified, even if it meant the death of innocents, “because of what the Jews were doing to Muslims in Jerusalem, because the Jews are killing innocents.”
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He reminded the others that this was the politically correct view “because this is the view of our mullahs.”
Like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive spiritual head of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, the mullahs here are devotees of the Deobandi sect of Islam, a straight and narrow interpretation of the faith that has little use for the outside world.
The Deobandi–the name derives from the Indian city of Deoband–first flourished in the 19th Century as a reaction to British colonialism. They believe that a return to strict adherence to Islamic principles will bring about a shift of power away from the Christian world to Muslims.
2,000 schools
Today the sect operates about 2,000 madrassas in Pakistan. These madrassas, especially the ones in the border areas with Afghanistan, have become the main recruiters and indoctrinators for the Taliban movement.
The U.S. government has complained that the madrassas have become breeding grounds for terrorism, but Pakistani officials, including President Pervez Musharraf, defend the religious schools. They say Pakistan’s 7,000 madrassas fill a huge void in the country’s impoverished school system, providing a free education as well as room and board to an estimated 600,000 students.
Some of the madrassas do, in fact, provide a well-rounded education to students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford one, but the ones with close links to the Taliban teach only their vision of Islam.
Mujeburahman, a 26-year-old from Kabul, is a product of this system. He has received all his education in religious seminaries; he joined the Taliban militia to fight in the civil war against rival mujahedeen groups, lost the hearing in his right ear as a result of a combat injury and now spends his days as a student and teacher at the Imam Abu Hanifa madrassa in Peshawar.
The day begins at dawn with prayers and koranic studies. After breakfast, Mujeburahman, who like many Afghans uses only one name, gives religious instruction to boys and girls ages 4 to 10. At 2 o’clock, he begins his own studies at the feet of the learned elders.
His field of study is logic and Arabic literature. Neither he nor his teachers have ever read a book by a Western author. He has never heard of Aristotle.
“We know well about Western cultures,” he explained. “They are under the dictatorship of Jews and fundamentalist Christians.” He “knows” this although he has met very few Christians and no Jews.
It is from this dark and narrow universe that the Taliban leadership has sprung.
As the afternoon shadows lengthen across the courtyard of the Darwesh mosque, the discussion turns to bin Laden.
The young men are eager to talk about him. By making bin Laden larger than life, America has given them a hero and, apparently, a role model.
“Osama was a real mujahedeen,” said Sami, one of the students. “But I will be bigger than him one day.”