Islam's Other Hot Spots

Monday, Sep. 15, 2003 By TIM MCGIRK/KARACHI; PHIL ZABRISKIE/SOLO; HELEN GIBSON/ LONDON

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Where exactly does terrorism start? In the past two years, the U.S. has leaned hard on its allies across the globe to crack down on the sources of Islamist militancy. While the governments of Pakistan, Britain and Indonesia have moved against known terrorists, radicalism can bury its roots deep within a culture, especially in places where the message of jihad is taught to the next generation. TIME visited three hot spots of militant Islam:

PAKISTAN Cooler Surface, Seething Below

On a hot summer afternoon in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, hundreds of young Muslim students sleep in the shadow of a mosque's arches, enduring the hard stone floor and swarming clouds of flies. Suddenly the call to prayer resounds through a loudspeaker. The boys spring up to wash in ritual preparation. Starting as young as 8, these boys spend six hours a day memorizing the Koran, with breaks only for rest and prayer. The students get no lessons in math, geography, history or computers. Allah's will as recorded in the holy Koran, the teachers say, is all they need to understand the universe. The system of belief is summed up this way by student Syed Ayaz Ali Shah: "Since the days of the Prophet, there are only two forces on earth, Muslims and infidels. And their fight will go on until Judgment Day."

Islam doesn't get more radical than the version taught at the Binori town mosque and seminary, which educates more than 9,000 students at branches across the city. There, in the feverish days after Sept. 11, sermons reviled President George W. Bush as a decadent Pharaoh and lauded Osama bin Laden as an Islamist hero. The school counted top Taliban commanders as alumni and served for years as a favorite rendezvous for al-Qaeda men passing through Pakistan en route to Afghanistan. In response to 9/11, the U.S. denounced these schools, or madrasahs, as terrorist-training academies and called for strict controls on their incendiary teachings. The U.S. hoped the newly cooperative regime of President Pervez Musharraf would rein them in.

How much has changed? Today the overt signs of Binori's notorious radicalism are gone. You no longer find posters asking for donations to the families of "martyrs" killed fighting American "infidels" in Afghanistan. Sermons nowadays steer clear of politics. "We were warned by the Pakistani police not to say anything bad about Bush or the Americans," says Qari Mohammed Iqbal, one of the mosque's administrators. "So now we don't." Secret police are regularly planted among the worshippers to ensure that the preachers obey.

Behind the classroom doors, however, anti-U.S. rhetoric is as scorching as ever, inflamed by the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Abdul Razzak Sikander, one of the Binori preachers, puts it, "The West is against Islam. They are afraid of us." Holy war, he believes, is a legitimate weapon of defense against this religious enmity.

At less radical seminaries, leaders say they have adopted new rules to curb such ferocity. "Any student or teacher who tries to do politics inside here," declares one principal, Mufti Mohammed Naeem, "is kicked out in 30 minutes. But," he admits, "jihad is everywhere, in graffiti, the Urdu newspapers, in tea-shop talk." Once his students leave campus, they are prey to extremist groups.