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Bozita Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-07-09 07:56 PM
Original message
Wahhabi radicals are determined to destroy a gentler, kinder Islam
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/08/islam-pakistan-rahman-baba

Wahhabi radicals are determined to destroy a gentler, kinder Islam
William Dalrymple
The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009
Article history


Rahman Baba, "the Nightingale of Peshawar," was an 18th-century poet and mystic, a sort of North West Frontier version of Julian of Norwich.

He withdrew from the world and promised his followers that if they also loosened their ties with the world, they could purge their souls of worries and move towards direct experience of God. Rituals and fasting were for the pious, said the saint. What was important was to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart - that we all have paradise within us, if we know where to look.

For centuries, Rahman Baba's shrine at the foot of the Khyber Pass has been a place where musicians and poets have gathered, and his Sufi verses in the Pukhtun language made him the national poet of the Pathans. As a young journalist covering the Soviet-mujahideen conflict I used to visit the shrine to watch Afghan refugee musicians sing their songs to their saint by the light of the moon.

Then, about 10 years ago, a Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrasa was built at the end of the track leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it on themselves to halt what they saw as unIslamic practices. On my last visit, I talked about the situation with the shrine keeper, Tila Mohammed. He described how young Islamists now came and complained that his shrine was a centre of idolatry and superstition: "My family have been singing here for generations," said Tila. "But now these Arab madrasa students come here and create trouble.

"They tell us that what we do is wrong. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out - even fist fights. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems, so gradually have stopped coming."

"Before the Afghan war, there was nothing like this. But then the Saudis came, with their propaganda, to stop us visiting the saints, and to stop us preaching 'ishq . Now this trouble happens more and more frequently."

more...
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Diclotican Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-07-09 08:38 PM
Response to Original message
1.  Bozita
Bozita

Rembember.. THIS IS THE RELIGION UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ARE ALLIED WITH in Saudi-Arabia...

Diclotican
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Bozita Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-07-09 09:22 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. In 2000, the NYT Magazine printed an article that could be reproduced today with nary a blink
The only thing missing is references to Al-Quaida.

I find it amazing that so little attention has been paid to this topic by the MSM.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E0DA1531F936A15755C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&scp=7&sq=Saudi%20Wahhabi%20madrasa&st=cse&pagewanted=all

Inside Jihad U.; The Education of a Holy Warrior
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Published: Sunday, June 25, 2000

About two hours east of the Khyber Pass, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, alongside the Grand Trunk Road, sits a school called the Haqqania madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim religious seminary, and Haqqania is one of the bigger madrasas in Pakistan: its mosques and classrooms and dormitories are spread over eight weed-covered acres, and the school currently enrolls more than 2,800 students. Tuition, room and board are free; the students are, in the main, drawn from the dire poor, and the madrasa raises its funds from wealthy Pakistanis, as well as from devout, and politically minded, Muslims in the countries of the Persian Gulf.

The students range in age from 8 and 9 to 30, sometimes to 35. The youngest boys spend much of their days seated cross-legged on the floors of airless classrooms, memorizing the Koran. This is a process that takes between six months and three years, and it is made even more difficult than it sounds by the fact that the Koran they study is in the original Arabic. These boys tend to know only Pashto, the language of the Pathan ethnic group that dominates this region of Pakistan, as well as much of nearby Afghanistan. In a typical class, the teachers sit on the floor with the boys, reading to them in Arabic, and the boys repeat what the teachers say. This can go on between four and eight hours each day.

What Westerners would think of as high-school-age and college-age students are enrolled in an eight-year course of study that focuses on interpretation of the Koran and of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. These students also study Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic history. The oldest of those attending Haqqania -- the postgraduates, if you will -- are enrolled in the ''mufti course.'' A mufti, in Islam, is a cleric who is allowed to issue fatwas, or religious rulings, on matters ranging from family law to the rules governing the waging of jihad, or ''holy war.'' (One room in the school's administration building houses upward of 100,000 fatwas issued by the madrasa over the years.) There are about 600 students in the mufti course.

Very few of the students at the Haqqania madrasa study anything but Islamic subjects. There are no world history courses, or math courses, or computer rooms or science labs at the madrasa.

The Haqqania madrasa is, in fact, a jihad factory.

This does not make it unique in Pakistan. There are one million students studying in the country's 10,000 or so madrasas, and militant Islam is at the core of most of these schools. Many madrasas are village affairs, with student bodies of 25 or 50. Some of the madrasas are sponsored by Pakistan's religious parties, and some are affiliated with the mujahedeen groups waging jihad against India in the disputed province of Kashmir.

more, lots more...
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Diclotican Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-07-09 09:34 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Bozita
Bozita

I know, and it is scary to think, that this type of "schooling" is the ony option.. This is just madness if you ask me..

But then, I am just a single man, who dosen't understand to mutch of what become of the world anymore..

Diclotican
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bemildred Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-07-09 08:46 PM
Response to Original message
2. Fundies are all alike.
But in the end they lose, because they are deliberately un-intelligent. When your whole deal is fending off the future, fending off change, where does that leave you?
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burning rain Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-07-09 11:53 PM
Response to Original message
5. Sufis incline toward pantheism...
and that's anathema to the orthodox notion of a personal god. Remember Spinoza's ordeals.
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yurbud Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-08-09 12:56 AM
Response to Original message
6. and Wahabbis are SAUDI not Iraqi or Iranian...
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