Religious Mindf*** Update: Pakistan's Red Mosque
 

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/world/asia/24madrasa.html[/url]

[quote][b]Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women[/b]

[i]By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: July 24, 2007[/i]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 23 — Hameeda Sarfraz, 19, lively eyes sparkling out of a black burqa, was describing the boons of the afterlife.

“In heaven you get everything without hardship,” explained Miss Sarfraz, daughter of a bus driver. “In heaven, if a martyr feels hungry, food appears, the best quality food, and you won’t even know where it came from.”

Miss Sarfraz, an alumna of the now bullet-ridden Jamia Hafsa Islamic school for girls, says she deeply regrets missing her chance to be a martyr. She fled through the back door of the school on July 3, just hours after a gun battle began between Pakistani special forces and militants holed up in the neighboring Red Mosque, the parent institution of Jamia Hafsa.

Sentiments like hers are the fruits of a radical Islam that has blossomed in this country — not just in the lawless tribal areas that American intelligence officials described as an enduring sanctuary for Al Qaeda, but here in its capital, in a mosque-and-school compound that until recently enjoyed the blessings of the state.

She presents a portrait of adolescent passion that one might find anywhere, except that she is a Pakistani girl from a poor rural family, whose members are less devout than she, and her passion is directed against the government of the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Some of Jamia Hafsa’s alumnae say they still wish to die in the cause of militant Islam.

During the siege, the Pakistani military maintained that women and children had been held hostage by hard-core fighters inside the compound, but Miss Sarfraz and several others interviewed said they were free to stay or go, and some held out until near the end. The bodies of six women were recovered at battle’s end.

“I was studying there six years,” said Shahnaz Akhtar, 20, another former student who held out until the next-to-last day of the siege. “I was so attached to it. I couldn’t leave just because a dictator started bombing it. I feel more at home there than I do at home.”

Shortly before the siege began, female students had come out of the school, draped in black burqas, waving bamboo sticks and taunting troops stationed nearby. The Pakistani news media dubbed them “chicks with sticks.”

Miss Sarfraz came home two weeks ago, out of that caldron of radical Islamist fervor, Islamabad, back to the prosaic chores of a young woman in the Pakistani countryside. Home is a village perched on green terraced hills, a little more than 50 miles from the capital.

“I miss Jamia,” she continued. “My contact with books is gone. At home the only thing for me to do is take care of my parents. I clean the house. I cook.”

She and others came back with a mission to reform their families and their communities, cajoling their mothers and sisters to hide themselves in black burqas. They say they have lost interest in the pleasures of this life, though some, like Miss Akhtar, have yet to give up on pleasures like painting their toenails in dark red. They express an obsession with the afterlife.

They say they would like to see a thousand Jamia Hafsa schools bloom across the nation. Miss Sarfraz has already begun classes at home for the children in her village.

There are, indeed, already some 12,000 religious schools, called madrasas, with about one million students across Pakistan. Some, though not all, embrace militancy.

The families of these returning girls appear to be less hard-line about their faith than their daughters. They say they sent their sisters and daughters to Jamia Hafsa because it was free and safe, and enjoyed a good reputation for providing religious education.

Miss Akhtar’s family, for instance, sent her there six years ago, after she completed eighth grade and expressed a desire to further her education. Her village still has no high school for girls; the nearest one is a one-and-a-half mile walk away.

Miss Akhtar studied the Koran; the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad; and Islamic law. She learned of the virtues of martyrdom. “I prayed to God I would play a role in jihad,” she said.

She learned to justify suicide bombings as a weapon that could be employed in the event of a battle between what she called “true believers” and “infidels.”

Would Islam allow suicide bombing inside Pakistan, an Islamic nation? She said it was possible, and then hesitated when pressed. She said she was not a qualified Islamic scholar.

The battle for the Red Mosque compound began in earnest in January when a group of Jamia Hafsa students, spurred by reports that the government planned to demolish some illegally constructed mosques and seminaries in Islamabad, including Jamia Hafsa, occupied an adjacent public library.

Early that morning, Miss Akhtar recounted, the girls, armed with cane batons, pushed open the library’s back door and awakened the caretakers who were sleeping on the floor with cries of “God is great.” They threw the keys to the library onto the floor, and fled. Ms. Akhtar giggled as she described the events, and then said she had not been part of it.

In the coming months, the students, along with their counterparts from the boy’s school, Jamia Farida, abducted three Pakistani women accused of running a brothel. Then they kidnapped six Chinese masseuses working in what they also said was a brothel; they released them the next day, but it paved the way for the final confrontation.

Three times in the past few months, as confrontation loomed between the Red Mosque and General Musharraf’s government, Miss Akhtar’s parents appealed to her to come home. She refused, saying she wanted to be a martyr. She flashed a big smile at the memory.

In the weeks before the final siege began, she said, the students were warned that the military could strike. “Are you girls prepared for that?” she recalled being asked by teachers. “Do you have the stamina to defend your religion? Are you ready?”

By the time the fighting was over, the official death toll stood at 102, including 11 soldiers. The military said the leaders of the rebellion, including a pro-Taliban cleric named Abdur Rashid Ghazi, had been killed. About 160 people, including three women, have been arrested. Nearly 1,000 others have been released to their families, including 465 women.

To varying degrees, they have all brought a piece of Jamia Hafsa with them. And their transformation is not lost on their families.

Up the road from Miss Akhtar’s home, in a village called Kotla, sat four girls, ages 15 to 18, all cousins who said they had been forced by their families to leave the school after the military raid began.

They sat in one girl’s home telling their story, their faces uncovered only because no man was present. But when Mohammed Matloob, the father of one of the girls, walked into the room, the other three quickly pulled their head scarves over their faces. His daughter, Nagina, 16, ordered him to leave the room, which he did, with a surprised shrug.

The girls explained that at Jamia Hafsa they had been taught to observe purdah, the practice of shielding faces and figures from any man who is not a member of the immediate family. They had changed since they left home for Jamia.

“We used to listen to music and watch TV before,” said Sayeda Fazlur Rehman, 17, with a look of disgust. “We didn’t even pray.”

Practicing purdah, they said, would hasten their ascent to heaven. “This life is temporary,” Miss Fazlur Rehman declared, a common refrain of the Jamia Hafsa alumnae. “You don’t know when you’ll die.”[/quote]

:smile:

[QUOTE=]Practicing purdah, they said, would hasten their ascent to heaven. “This life is temporary,” Miss Fazlur Rehman declared, a common refrain of the Jamia Hafsa alumnae. “You don’t know when you’ll die.” [/QUOTE]

:wink:

I would change the last line to “You don’t know when you”ll get raped”
It’s a more realistic fear than inevitable death.

I have made several trips (3 to 5 days at a stretch) in the major capitals of States in the middle East. The Purdah is normally a veil covering the face. In the orthodox cities like Jeddah (next door to Mecca, next door to heaven) the Burka is used which covers the whole body, hair to feet, leaving two eye size ports to look thru.

On one of my trips there I wondered how the husbands can recognize the 4 wives they are allowed (lucky devils!) in a gathering.

As an amateur math’cian I tried to evolve a mystical formula for their ratio of 1:4.
The usual constants pi , e , or phi wouldn’t fit in. So I approached an old wizened guy sitting in a park who had beady eyes, a chest length grey beard and a headgear of a silken scarf with a coil of rope on his head, and a long white shirt. He seemed to me to be a guardian of the fold fingering his amber beads.

“Tell me dear sir how can one recognize his 4 wives in a large gathering when there were a lot of other burka clad ladies around.? I asked.
He studied me from head to foot, narrowed his beady eyes and made me feel an alien.

“Study the feet and the toes he responded.”

To think that I have spent 5 rigorous years in practical shop floor training along with theory in a 6 day 8 hour week in Mech. Engg. and another two years in machine design I chided myself as to how I did not arrive at such a practical solution.

“ But sir, most of them wear stockings and closed shoes so that’s no good” I said

“Wait for the hot season then” he said. It was like canceling out and rationalizing a complex fraction, you never know what to expect!

“Call out by name you stupid” he mumbled. And what if there are two or more with the same name I pondered but dared not ask. I was aiming to, in some way, finding out the singles and if they are young and perhaps beautiful.

“And what about the cold season?” I asked

“Study the hands and fingers and the gold they wear and watch them carefully.
They will communicate with their hands” To me it was like saying 1 = 0

The loud speakers blared forth It is time to pray the 5th and final time.
He excused himself to purify himself by the washing of hands and feet.

I felt like borrowing a burka and scooting incognito to my 5 star hotel as at prayer time I dare not risk being caught on the streets patrolled by their Holy men who served as moral police to make sure they all face west and start praying where ever one is.

Well back at the hotel I soaked myself in the luxurious bath tub fully immersed but disheartened. Then the thought struck me. I jumped from the tub grabbed a towel around me and rushed out shouting “Eureka! Eureka! I have found it, I have found it”
The revelation was the words in a Persian saying (Omar Khayam era)

“You can keep a woman locked up in a room: yet she will poke thru the key hole!”

I was lost in reverie when my phone rang. The voice at the other end said
“Its call time sir, pick up in one hour”

Boy wasn’t I happy to be homeward bound !

Mally :coffee:

[quote]…the 4 wives they are cursed with…[/quote]We've read that groups of women who live in close quarters on a day to day basis will assume the menstrual cycle of the most dominant woman. We haven't bothered to check to see if this is a scientific fact, but the mere thought of four wives, in really bad moods, all at the same time, unsettles us.

:unsure:

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;111166]We've read that groups of women who live in close quarters on a day to day basis will assume the menstrual cycle of the most dominant woman. We haven't bothered to check to see if this is a scientific fact, but the mere thought of four wives, in really bad moods, all at the same time, unsettles us.[/QUOTE]

Is that so?

[SIZE="1"]Your extensive knowledge of feminine resonance disturbs us.[/SIZE]

:unsure:

Fiction!
 

:smile:

By the way my post #2 is pure fiction based on my vast experience living in the Mid-East.

Mally :coffee:

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;111166]We've read that groups of women who live in close quarters[/QUOTE]

I don't know about the rest of the Muslim world, but in Saudi Arabia (or at least in Riyadh) the standard practice is to have separate houses in different parts of the city for each wife. I suspect this resonance effect is one of the reasons.

One of the engineers told me the hardest thing to do is to tell your first wife you've gotten married. Engineers typically had two wives, their managers had three. Planning where to go home each night was an important part of their lives.

They don't even have the courtesy to invite them to the wedding? Tsk, tsk.

Shambo ( a TB infected sacred bull) is about to be
slaughtered on health grounds here in the UK
(or Wales if that counts).
Don't know if anyone cares in USA
or even Mumbai for that matter.

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;111166]We've read that groups of women who live in close quarters on a day to day basis will assume the menstrual cycle of the most dominant woman. We haven't bothered to check to see if this is a scientific fact, but the mere thought of four wives, in really bad moods, all at the same time, unsettles us.[/QUOTE]

In a previous life we were an Arab sheikh who moved to Italy into a mansion in the environs of Rome. Now that our 4 wives were living under one roof, we indeed soon became acquainted with the aforementioned menstrual synchronization phenomenon. But that wasn't the problem - the real issue was that after sveral years of living in Rome our 4 wives all wanted to exchange their menstrual cycles for Vespa scooters.

[spoiler]This post sponsored by Extra-Strength Pamprin - "No need to be crampin', if you just take your Pamprin."[/spoiler]

The Cow.
 

[QUOTE=davieddy;111204]Shambo ( a TB infected sacred bull) is about to be
slaughtered on health grounds here in the UK
(or Wales if that counts).
Don't know if anyone cares in USA
or even Mumbai for that matter.[/QUOTE]

:smile:

Ha! ha! Davie, one less of the few potent males left in the U.K.! :missingteeth:

In India we do care for these sacred animals.

FYI: The cow has been held in veneration since the beginning of civilisation in India and that's on par with the oldest civilisations anywhere else.

The reason is ,when humans took to agriculture and gave up there clubs, for a living they depended on the cow as a source of supply, for every part of the cow can be used, not only its milk or meat. Today we even use cow dung as a source of bio energy!
Hence cows were domesticated early in the era. The cow was so essential for living that it got incorporated in folk lore and eventually was regarded as a Divine Being!

Coming back to the present era If you ever visit Delhi you will see that cows are spread out on the main streets. They are given the right of way!

There are various societies for prevention of cruelty of animals.

Hunting sport is banned all over India. Thats when I hung up my Johnson & Johnson 12 bore db-bl and 44 bore single bore combination (3 barrels) bequeathed to me by my father who was a crack shot and taught me a lot of Jungle lore. Since then I think it is wise to protect our heritage and take to the camera. Its bloodless shooting!

Mally :coffee:

Sequel: The sacred Bull.
 

:smile:

The sacred Bull; sequel to the cow.

The bull has from antiquity been a symbol of power! Why?
Take a good look at a stud bull and you will get an inferiority complex straight away.
Ancient Greece and other civilized people (Like the Indians of the same era) revered the bull from a virile animal to a God!

The Minotaur was a monster off spring of a union between Parsiphae, wife of Minos, king of Crete. Half human and half taurian the creature was kept in the Labyrinth of Knossos until Theseus killed it.

Even the zodiacal sign Taurus was named after the bull like constellation of Pleiades and Hyades entered by the sun about 21st. April.

Mithras the ancient Persian deity in sculpture is portrayed by slaying a bull.

In India the Bull of Nandi is very common in worship and sculpture.

In our own times, a little more than for the most of you, the bull played an important part in Hitler’s life, the man who was a Nobody of Vienna turned into the leader of Greater Germany !.

The insalubrious Dr. Morell plied him with experimental medicine in the last 6 years or more of Hitler’s life. It is well known that Hitler at an early age had only one testicle and he lost his sexual prowess. Dr. Morell being a good psychologist assured him with mental suggestions that the extract from a stud bull’s testicle would enable him to regain his former self. These medicines were administered at an early age.

Hitler and his generals were keen occultists and believed in the supernatural power of the bull.

Recent research has revealed that to test the effect of the extract he visited his favorite Jewish whore and it seems she reassured him by mimicking climaxes to his endeavors and he believed he was turning better and better.

Like many in her day she practiced indiscriminant sex. Now she had the royal family 1) chancre, 2) Gonorrhea, and 3) tertiary neuro Syphilis and she passed it on to him.
As the illness progressed he developed an insane hatred of the Jews. The rest is History.

The devotion of the bull ring is so great that the arena is described as the “Sands of God”

I refrain from commenting on this cruel and barbarous sport.

Mally :coffee: