'Hate crimes against Muslims very possible following Sydney siege'

[Stefan_Dusan]

Retaliation is just a horrible thing and, as Gandhi said, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".

If I take 1 of your eye, you take mine, then I take your other one. That leaves you blind and me with 1 eye.

And what do they say about the one eyed man in the sea of the blind?

[Melina]

It does make me gloomy when this happens. It's not like the people that are getting attacked had anything to do with the murders. And I bet this is exactly what the murderers wanted. The probably want to antagonise Muslims and non-Muslims against each other.

Retaliation is just a horrible thing and, as Gandhi said, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".

So what do you suppose people do? Hold hands and sing kumbaya? How do you measure true justice? If one does nothing while their country is being invaded not just only will they be tortured but so will their family. SOmetimes it is either you or them. If you had to chose between your family or someone elses to survive, What would you chose?

[Sisak]

I smell the end of the Anglo-English Australia.

[Petros Houhoulis]

Except those aren't madrassas.

Help me out here, I'm looking for a good one. Can you name anything specific?

You can find plenty of madrassas in each of them. If you want more details:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...madrassas.html

A madrassa is an Islamic religious school. Many of the Taliban were educated in Saudi-financed madrassas in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism, a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam which is rooted in Saudi Arabia. Around the world, Saudi wealth and charities contributed to an explosive growth of madrassas during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. During that war (1979-1989), a new kind of madrassa emerged in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region -- not so much concerned about scholarship as making war on infidels. The enemy then was the Soviet Union, today it's America. Here are analyses of the madrassas from interviews with Vali Nasr, an authority on Islamic fundamentalism, and Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.(For more on the role of madrassas in producing militant Islamists, see the story of Haroun Fazul.)
Vali Nasr
an authority on Islamic fundamentalism
All of these groups are rooted in a network of seminaries, or as the term is called in the local vernacular, "madrassa." My argument was that the main source of funding for these groups is Saudi Arabia. In fact, this whole phenomenon that we are confronting, which Al Qaeda is a part of, is very closely associated with Saudi Arabia's financial and religious projects for the Muslim world as a whole. ...
You said that the main source of funding for these Islamic extremists--
Or at least the institutions that train them.
-- is whom?
It's Saudi Arabia and its network of charities and the like. The argument I make is that there is an undercurrent of terror and fanaticism that go hand in hand in the Afghanistan-Pakistan arc, and extend all the way to Uzbekistan. And you can see reflections of it in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Indonesia, in the Philippines.
For instance, in one madrassa in Pakistan, I interviewed 70 Malaysian and Thai students who are being educated side by side with students who went on to the Afghan war and the like. These people return to their countries, and then we see the results in a short while. ... At best, they become hot-headed preachers in mosques that encourage fighting Christians in Nigeria or in Indonesia. And in a worst case, they actually recruit or participate in terror acts.
What you're saying is that, if we wanted to look for the causes of what's happened -- Al Qaeda and the movement worldwide -- we would have to look to the schools, to the educational system which Saudi Arabia has fostered in the Islamic world?
... In order to have terrorists, in order to have supporters for terrorists, in order to have people who are willing to interpret religion in violent ways, in order to have people who are willing to legitimate crashing yourself into a building and killing 5,000 innocent people, you need particular interpretations of Islam.
Those interpretations of Islam are being propagated out of schools that receive organizational and financial funding from Saudi Arabia. In fact, I would push it further: that these schools would not have existed without Saudi funding. They would not have proliferated across Pakistan and India and Afghanistan without Saudi funding. They would not have had the kind of prowess that they have without Saudi funding, and they would not have trained as many people without Saudi funding.
....
What is a madrassa?
It's a seminary. It's where students of different ages, as young as nine or ten, go to learn religious education and to be schooled first of all in reading and then in religious studies. In the old times, it substituted for regular elementary education and higher education, and ultimately produces quote, unquote, clerics. In other words, scholars, preachers, you know, religious community leaders who conduct the religious affairs of a community.
But you're saying the influence of the Saudis in these schools has been to create a certain kind of Islam, not your mainstream Islam?
Well, first of all, because of the Afghan war, we have a new kind of madrassa emerging in Pakistan-Afghanistan area.
And throughout Central Asia, right?
They've been spreading throughout Central Asia, but there have been Central Asian students, Filipino students, Indonesian students, Nigerian students, Arab students, thanks to scholarship funding provided from Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia, that have been going to these schools.
And I'm also told in Kurdistan and all kinds of places.
All kinds of places. Now these Afghan madrassas, how they differ from the traditional madrassas is that they were not really so much concerned about scholarship. They were more concerned about training religious fighters who would go into the Afghan field and fight. I mean, the phenomenon of Taliban, meaning religious seminary students--
That's what the word means.

The word means. Who are they? Are they budding preachers? Are they scholars? How much scholarship do they have? Are they better trained in throwing grenades than interpreting religious law? These are all open questions.
So you have the whole rise of, if you would, Islamic West Points, or Islamic military camps, Islamic guerilla camps along the border, which mix a dosage of Islam with a lot of military training. Then they also train a new generation of mosque leaders and clerics who go open their own madrassas or go populate mosques from Jakarta to Rabat.
But I thought that in the 1980s, when the Saudis started to really spend a lot of money on this, that they were doing this in a sense with our approval to help isolate Iran and the rise of fundamentalist Shi'ism?
Yes. Well, the first generation of madrassas, [from] which many of these Northern Alliance people also came, were organized to fight the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. This was obviously the cause.
So they were basically recruiting schools?
They were recruiting, organizing schools which also use Islamic ideology as a way of creating a very efficient guerilla army with a very clear anti-communist ideology.
So what's wrong with that?
Nothing. We're dealing with the sort of unintended consequences of that, and particularly because the United States didn't really properly clean up after it left Afghanistan.
.....
Who goes to these madrassas?
They are recruited from among the lower classes and lower-middle classes. In the Afghan-Pakistan arena, there are members of Pashtun tribes who enroll in these madrassas. There are peasant children from the peasant backgrounds. And occasionally there are also lower middle-class children they are very able to recruit among people in Pakistan particularly who don't have any access to any other kind of schooling. ...
That's why the ideology that's propagated by these schools is so significant in shaping minds in the Muslim world. So if regular schooling is not schooling people, and schools that propagate fanaticism are schooling people, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out what would be the impact on society.
Richard Holbrooke
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton administration

I think that one of the tragedies of this story is that the Saudi Arabians exported their problem by financing the schools, the madrassas, all through the Islamic world. I saw this in Uzbekistan a few years after Uzbekistan got out of the Soviet Union, became an independent state in cities like Tashkent and Samarkand, where the Saudis were funding these schools teaching Koranic studies and creating a class of people for whom education was simply the Holy Book, the Koran.
... What happened here was that the Saudi Arabian government had two wings. The mainland Saudi leadership went into financial issues, defense issues, and they controlled the elite establishment in order to purchase support. From the more fundamentalist religious groups, they gave certain other ministries, the religious ministries, education ministries, to more fundamentalist Islam leaders. And that's how the split occurred.
So the Saudi government was, to a certain extent, pursuing internally inconsistent policies throughout this period -- reaching out to the West with sophisticated, well educated, internationally minded leaders like its foreign minister, like its ambassador in Washington and others. At the same time, it was funding with this vast oil revenue a different set of efforts: education, which was narrowly based in the Koran. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26418558

16 March 2014 Last updated at 01:04 GMT The Afghan madrassa accused of radicalising women

Malyar Sadeq Azad BBC AfghanFemale students in full body veil at the Ashraf-ul Madares madrassa
An unregistered religious school in northern Afghanistan has been accused of radicalising thousands of women.
A BBC investigation has found that the Ashraf-ul Madares madrassa in Kunduz province preaches that listening to radio, watching television and taking photos are un-Islamic activities and that women should not work outside their homes.
Activists say the school undermines women's rights, but the founders say they are providing badly needed religious education.
About 6,000 women and young girls are studying at the madrassa which was established by two influential mullahs in Kunduz four years ago.
Students from the madrassa are instantly recognisable because of their strict Islamic clothing.
'Tent wearers'The older students cover their heads, faces and eyes, and they also wear gloves and socks. Some wear a full body black chador, which has led to them being dubbed "tent-wearers" by some residents.
Kunduz city officials say the radical interpretation of Islam taught in the school - particularly over dress codes - is causing tension between seminary students and other local people.
Teachers at the madrassa say religious instruction in state schools is insufficient
"They tell them 'you are an infidel - why is your clothing un-Islamic, why don't you know how to pray?'" says an official from the Kunduz Women's Affairs Directorate.
Some of the seminary students also attend local government-run schools, and here too there have been confrontations.
"When [they] see students or teachers of ordinary schools wearing normal clothes or with their hair visible, they stop them and openly tell them: 'You have committed a sin by not wearing clothing to cover your entire body'," says Wazhma, a teacher at a government-run school.
The head of the madrassa, Mawlavi Abdul Khaleq, rejects the criticism.
He told the BBC the school's goal was to help young women achieve their full potential by understanding the history and basic teachings of Islam.
"In the beginning of Islam, Muslim girls used to take part in religious activities," he said. "They even used to participate in wars… but we Muslims have now lagged behind."
Strict separation So what do the students themselves think? Although they've been warned not to talk to the media, one young woman agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
"If a chocolate does not have a wrapper, every fly can sit on it, but if it has a wrapper, it can be protected better," she said. "So the hijab for women is like a wrapper for them."
She told the BBC that she had grown up as a refugee in Pakistan, and had previously attended a private university.
"I used to wear short, tight clothes which are not appropriate for a Muslim woman," she said. "But now I have been informed about the truth of Islam and I know it is not appropriate for a Muslim girl to laugh and joke at any party."
A madrassa teacher instructs pupils from behind a curtain
In government-run seminaries in Afghanistan, male teachers can instruct girl students face to face - as they do in ordinary schools and colleges.
But at Ashraf-ul Madares, male staff have to teach their girl students from behind a curtain or from inside a booth in order to avoid eye-contact.
"There should be partitions so that the male teacher can't see the girls, even if they wear hijab, because their eyes are open during reading," says Abdul, one of the seminary teachers.
The rules are less strict for the 200 girls under 10 who also study at the Ashraf-ul Madares.
Here the teachers sit among the children, wooden ruler in hand to enforce good behaviour.
"The madrassa discipline is military-style, and children will be punished if they don't learn well or are noisy," Abdul says.
So why go to an unregistered madrassa when there are more than 30 similar schools in Kunduz run by the Ministry of Education and already catering for some 2,000 female students?
Officials at the Ashraf-ul Madares argue that the curriculum provided by the Ministry of Education is not fully Islamic. They say they offer different teaching based on books brought in from Iran, Pakistan and some Arab states.
Afghanistan's deputy education minister Shafiq Samim, declined to comment specifically on the Ashraf-ul Madares madrassa, but acknowledges there is a problem in Kunduz.
Teachers use a wooden booth in class to avoid direct contact with female students
"Students are told people who don't pray are infidel, while in Sharia law only unbelievers are called infidel," he said. "One madrassa student even told her mother that she was infidel because she did not pray for a few days."
Mawlavi Abdul Khaliq, the head of Ashraf-ul-Madares takes issue with this.
"Those who oppose this seminary are actually unaware of Islam or are influenced by countries that support non-Islamic ideas and values in Afghanistan and want a decline in Islamic values", he says. "In general, these kinds of people are provoked by outsiders."
Expansion plansMany of the school's critics also want to know how it is funded.
Mawlavi Abdul Khaliq says some costs were covered by donations from students.
"They sell their earrings, rings and gold to help," he said. "Once we were even able to buy land for around $20,000 and build on it, all paid for by these girls."
The madrassa has expansion plans, hoping to open branches in other Afghan provinces.
The Ministry of Education has confirmed that there are about 1,300 unregistered religious schools operating in the country, as opposed to 1,100 state-run madrassas.
Shahrzad, a civil society activist in Kunduz fears that the growing influence of conservative establishments outside government regulation could cost women in particular dear.
"When religion is misinterpreted, the first and biggest victims will be women," she says. "Their Islamic and legal rights, their rights to work, learn, train and join politics and their civil freedom will be restricted."

http://www.rediff.com/news/special/d...s/20141022.htm

Did this Bengal madrassa train terrorists?

October 22, 2014 15:42 IST

The Simulia madrassa, on the outskirts of Bardhaman town in West Bengal, allegedly had links with Gulshana Bibi and Amina Bibi, the women arrested after the October 2 blast in the town.
The NIA alleges the madrassa trained poor Muslim women in jihad.
The madrassa had an unwritten convention: The women trained there would be married only to men who were on the same 'mission.'
Indrani Roy/Rediff.com and photographer Dipak Chakraborty report from Mongolkot, Bardhaman.
There was something strange about the mud house with its thatched roof and small compartments-cum-rooms that stood amid vast stretches of paddy fields.
Once the motorable road ended, we had to walk along the aal, a narrow piece of land between paddy fields to reach the main door.
The main gate was locked, but the backyard had a metal door latched from the inside.
Entry was denied as an assistant sub inspector and six constables belonging to the West Bengal police guarded the mud house.
"We have been staying here for the past few days," the plainclothes police officer told Rediff.com after verifying our credentials over and over again.
"You can take photographs from outside, but from a distance," he added in a stern voice.
We were at the Simulia madrassa in Bardhaman's Mongolkot, about 35 km from the town.
The madrassa allegedly had links with Gulshana Bibi and Amina Bibi, the two women who were arrested for their alleged involvement in the October 2 blast at a two-storey house in Bardhaman's Khagragarh.
According to sleuths, members of the terror outfit Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, a wing of the Harkat-ul Jihadi Islami-Bangladesh, were involved in the explosion.
The National Investigation Agency, led by Deputy Superintendent of Police Vijayendra Singh, is investigating the case.
The NIA is assisted by National Security Guard commandos, the West Bengal police and its Criminal Investigation Department.
Subsequent inquiry and cross-examination of three suspected terrorists held by the police on the day of the explosion and others arrested later exposed the Simulia madrassa's alleged link to the incident.
After questioning Gulshana Bibi and Amina Bibi, the investigators discovered that the Simulia madrassa only admitted women at an early age.
Women at the madrassa were experts in handling all sorts of arms, police sources told Rediff.com
The madrassa had 'recruiters' who would bring in new students from districts other than Bardhaman and hand them over to 'trainers' (the students had no clue about their identities).
As many as 30 to 40 young girls lived at the Simulia madrassa till October 2, the day of the explosion, after which neither the landowner nor the students could be traced.
The madrassa land belongs to Borhan Sheikh. His family refused to speak to us despite persistent efforts.
The madrassa had an unwritten convention: The women trained there would be married only to men who were on the same 'mission,' police sources said.
Soon after marriage, the couple would either set out on an 'assignment' or await instructions, the sources added.
Investigations revealed that terror networks operating in West Bengal use couple modules and rent houses across the state to carry out subversive activities.
According to sources, jihadis united in such a marriage hardly had any emotional attachment. Theirs was a marriage of convenience.
When the police broke open the house at Khagragarh after the explosion on October 2, they were stunned to find two men lying in a pool of blood and their 'wives' washing away the blood.
While scanning the Simulia madrassa, NIA investigators discovered a secret tunnel behind a heap of steel trunks in a corner.
The tunnel opened into an adjacent pond.
To ensure that no bombs or improvised explosive devices were hidden in the pond, the NIA hired local residents to scour the pond.
The investigators believe the tunnel was used by terrorists for clandestine visits to the madrassa.
The investigators also seized bows and arrows, air guns, punching bags filled with sand and a phone book, believed to be of one Yousuf Sheikh, the madrassa's mentor.
The phone book contains contact numbers of women who were trained at the Simulia madrassa, sources told Rediff.com
Yousuf Sheikh is yet to be traced.
After interrogating the arrested women, investigators discovered that Sheikh received arms training in Uttar Pradesh for about four years before he came to the Simulia madrassa.
The NIA also seized Arabic and Urdu literature that the 'students' were asked to read.

Another view of the Simulia madrasaa. Photograph: Dipak Chakraborty

The investigators also discovered an abandoned orange Tata Nano close to the madrassa, with the registration number WB 58F-6943.
The car's registration number belonged to a two-wheeler and dated back to 2006. The first batch of Nano cars hit the roads in 2008.
The Nano car had an 'army' sticker to hoodwink the police, sources told Rediff.com
The investigators picked up the car's owner, a resident of Beldanga in Murshidabad.
The Nano was used to carry arms and ammunition and also to transport people, sources said.
The car and its passengers fooled the police mainly because of the 'army' sticker, they added.
Keeping in mind that the Panagarh military base is nearby, police pickets granted the vehicle safe passage.
Two school students who live in a house close to the madrassa said they had seen the Nano car parked close to their home.
"It would be gone by the evening and would be back the next morning or afternoon," they told Rediff.com
Asked if they had any friends at the madrassa, they said, "The girls who studied there hardly ventured out and even if they did, they were in burqa and would not speak to anyone."
The Simulia madrassa has paddy fields all around, a pond (linked to the tunnel) towards the back and a bus stand close by.
While the terrorists could have used the tunnel and the paddy fields to access the madrassa at night, they could have availed of the Nano and state transport buses to move to any other part of the state, especially villages in Murshidabad bordering Bangladesh, sources told Rediff.com
The NIA's investigation has uncovered intricate links between the Simulia madrassa and some madrassas in Birbhum and Murshidabad districts.
The NIA has conducted raids at suspicious madrassas across Bengal.
"They had no links with the village, all the people there were outsiders. They wouldn't talk to us," says a man who lives near the Simulia madrassa.
"Often poor villagers send their daughters to unrecognised madrassas like this one which take care of their lodging and boarding in lieu of Rs 500, Rs 700 per month," the man told Rediff.com
According to sources, there are more than 3,500 unrecognised madrassas in Bengal. Bardhaman itself has 600.
Of these 600, only 32 are aided, sponsored or recognised by the state government.
"Didn't you ever see anything suspicious" we asked another man whose home has a clear view of the madrassa.
"Nothing seemed suspicious," he said. "The madrassa belonged to a different world, it seemed. Life has changed after the Khagragarh incident. We are often questioned by the police."
"All of us who stay close to this place live in fear. Perhaps, we should have been more alert," he said.
The NIA is not ruling out a possible link between the Bardhaman explosion and the May 1 blasts aboard a train at the Chennai Central railway station, which had killed a young IT professional and injured 14 others.

The Assam police, which arrested six people for probable links to the Bardhaman blast, is on the lookout for 30 suspects.

They are not joking in Kenya!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29375677

26 September 2014 Last updated at 19:00 GMT Kenyan 'radical madrassa' closed in Machakos

Police said the profiling of terror suspects found some of them had attended the Machakos madrassa

The authorities in Kenya have closed a madrassa - or religious school - for teaching radical Islamic ideologies.
The school in Machakos, about 65km (40 miles) from the capital, was targeted after local youths were detained on suspicion of joining Somali militants.
It is the first Kenyan madrassa to be closed because of allegedly extremist teachings. A police chief warned that others could follow.
Somalia's al-Shabab group has carried out a series of attacks in Kenya.
The al-Qaeda affiliate says they are in revenge for the presence of Kenyan troops in Somalia and the killing of Muslims.
A year ago, 67 people were killed when the group's fighters laid siege to the upmarket Westgate shopping centre in the capital, Nairobi.
Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka told the BBC the decision had been taken to close the Daarul-Irashad centre, which opened in 1997, on the advice of the police's CID, anti-terror and intelligence units.
The recent arrest in the Machakos area of 21 young men suspected of being recruited for al-Shabab first raised suspicions, he said.
The police then profiled suspects arrested in other terror crackdowns and found that others had passed through that madrassa, the spokesman said.
The head of the madrassa, Farqan Chacha, told the BBC the school was challenging the closure in court.
He confirmed that all pupils at the school, which offers three-month courses for new converts, had been sent home.
The BBC's Abdullahi Abdi in Nairobi says Machakos is a large town south-east of the capital with a minority Muslim population that has not been subject to any attacks.

Pakistan is so fucked up, the Madrassas are not even the problem!!!

http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-08-2...may-be-problem

The Madrassa Myth: in Pakistan, Public Schools may be the Problem

PRI's The World
August 21, 2013 · 12:45 PM EDT
Host Marco Werman
Reporter Beenish Ahmed

Pakistani students at a madrassa, or Islamic school, in the city of Haripur recite aloud from the Quran in hopes of memorizing the entire holy book. (Photo: Beenish Ahmed)

Credit: Beenish Ahmed

Recent reports have pointed to Pakistan's Islamic, religious schools like this one as training grounds for terrorists. But most students attend the schools-–called madrassa–for a purely spiritual purpose.
"I studied in a public school until 7th grade and then I left to come here,"� said Mohammad Kamran Rafeeq. "I liked learning about my faith and I had two friends who had studied here. They said the teachers were really good, so I came and enrolled."
At seventeen, he one of the oldest in this class. He moved from Kashmir four years ago to live and study at this madrassa near the city of Peshawar.
The madrassa provides Rafeeq and his fellow students with room and board. Nearly every waking hour of the day is geared toward becoming a hafiz–memorizing the Quran in its original Arabic. Qazi Wajid ud-Daym, who helps run the school, said the kids learn the meaning of the verses they read, but they avoid any particular stream of interpretation.
"We only teach the memorization of the Quran,"� he explained. "We decided to stop the other classes before they became an issue because different sects interpret the Quran differently. That caused problems so we basically dropped everything but just the words of the Quran."
But the reality in Pakistan is that most students do learn a variety of interpretations of Islam. And not necessarily in madrassas. Even the public school curriculum was infused with religious undertones by the military dictator Zia Ul-Haq in the 1970s.
Dr. A.H. Nayyar is a retired professor who's studied the effects of this dramatic shift. He said, "They had lessons on Islamic principles and Islamic practice and Islamic history in books on English, in books on social studies. And in some cases, also in books on mathematics."
More troubling, said Nayyar, is the very radical and militant view of Islam that was inked into the country's national public school curriculum, and into the hearts and minds of students.
"There were lessons in textbooks which actually told students, and still continue to do in the latest books, that jihad is enjoined upon all Muslims and getting ready for jihad, not just by fighting yourself, but also if you can't fight supporting it by providing it money and help and so on and so forth, is supposed to be duty of each and every Muslim,"� he said. "No wonder that jihad has now become so deep-rooted in Pakistani society."
Nayyar and others say it's ironic that people in the West equate madrassas with radical Islam since the vast majority of school-age kids in Pakistan go to public schools.
"Madrassa enrollments at most were about 1.5 percent. So think of it as, you know, kind of a fringe experience,"� said Jishnu Das, a senior economist at the World bank.
Das has done a lot to debunk what's called the "madrassa myth."� It' the idea that Pakistani kids have gone off to madrassas, radicalized en masse, and sent off to commit acts of terrorism. While he said this does happen on a small scale, the reasons for going to a madrassa tend to be far more benign.
"It had nothing to do with poverty, it had nothing to do with availability,"� Das said about his research on education in Pakistan. "This was primarily, you know, one brother is going to public school, one sister is going to private school, one kid is going to the madrassa. Why? Because he wants to really learn the Quran and become a hafiz. What do you do about that? One kid wants to become a priest. Should we say you're not allowed to go to the seminary? And that's precisely what it seemed like."
Back at the madrassa, Rafeeq said he plans to go back to Kashmir to continue his secular schooling, though he'll keep up with his religious studies on the side.
When I ask if he hopes to take part in militant jihad, a smile briefly flickers across his face.
"I'd like to,"� Rafeeq said, "But I don't know if I'll have the heart for it in the end."
It's impossible to know where Rafeeq's interest in jihad comes from: his public education, madrassa instruction, or something else entirely. Regardless, his quick grin is evidence enough that another generation of Pakistanis could easily be lured into a violent future–perhaps through the very institutions meant to give them a better life.