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September 27, 2013

Pakistan: Campus Terror and the Muslim Right | Khaled Ahmed

Jamaat-e-Islami rules university campuses across Pakistan in general and Lahore in particular. It rules through the IJT and dominates teaching faculties too. The PU vice chancellor is on the defensive because of cases of sexual harassment registered against him and some other teachers. The latter are also periodically caught obtaining doctorates on the basis of plagiarised theses. As a result, PU degrees are not recognised even in Pakistan. The Jamaat is powerful in Lahore and no one can arrest IJT members and keep them locked away for long. Munawar Hasan, the current chief of the Jamaat — breathing fire over Jamaat leaders being sentenced to death in Bangladesh — is a stormy petrel taking extreme positions on the country's policy. He rose as a strong IJT leader in Karachi to replace Qazi Hussain Ahmad, under whom the Jamaat was heavily into proxy jihad with al-Qaeda contacts, as the chief of the Jamaat.

Vice chancellors in Pakistan often get beaten up by IJT thugs till they learn to coexist with it. There are no liberal faculty members who can survive and teach on campuses. Many IJT student leaders rose to political eminence despite murder cases pending against them. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who planned the 9/11 attack, was arrested from the house of a "women's wing" leader of the Jamaat in Rawalpindi in March 2003. Another al-Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in March 2002 from Faisalabad, was given shelter by Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lahore's University of Engineering and Technology (UET) is another stronghold of the IJT. Pakistan's "endgame warrior" Hafiz Saeed graduated from Government College, Sargodha, and later obtained an MA in Arabic and Islamiat from Punjab University. At university, he was a nazim of the IJT. After graduating, he was appointed lecturer at UET in the Islamiat department. It is from here that he was sent for higher studies to Saudi Arabia. He graduated from King Saud University, Riyadh, and while in Saudi Arabia he was close to the famous Saudi scholar, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, who was the first to pronounce the fatwa of jihad in Afghanistan in 1979.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/campus-terror/1174864/0