Seminary weighed down by accusation

The arrests of former students of Darul Uloom have led some to cast doubts over the credibility of this ultra-orthodox college.

The scruffy northern Indian town of Deoband is considered to be the birthplace of the Taliban.

DEOBAND, INDIA // "Welcome to Darul Uloom's computer department," said a soft voice in halting English. "Look, this is where we breed terrorists." Wry chuckles filled the room, drowning out the hum of a ceiling fan. For Adil Siddiqui, whose job is to chaperone journalists visiting Darul Uloom, defensive humour is perhaps the only way left to dispel the myth that this century-and-a-half-old seminary is the ideological powerhouse of global jihad.

"The world thinks we are making bombs here," he said. "But as you can see for yourself, that isn't true." Darul Uloom, located in this grubby town in rural Uttar Pradesh in northern India, is believed to be the ideological birthplace of the Taliban. One of the largest and most influential seminaries in the world, perhaps second in prominence only to Al Azhar University in Egypt, Darul Uloom spawned Deobandism in the 19th century, an ideological strain of the Hanafi sect of Islam to which the Taliban, as well as several other militant groups such as Jaish-i-Mohammad and Harkat ul-Mujahideen, claim allegiance.

Currently there are 3,500 students enrolled in Darul Uloom, and the school has inspired thousands of seminaries across South Asia - about 1,500 in India alone. Although the Taliban in Afghanistan claimed descent from Deobandism, Darul Uloom and its clerics had no role in their enterprise. But in recent years, several students from this ultraconservative madrasa - as well as affiliated Deobandi madrasas across India - have been arrested on serious terrorism-related charges.

Prominent arrests include that of Mohammad Qasmi, a Darul Uloom graduate and a cleric from a small mosque in the town of Phulur in Uttar Pradesh. He was convicted on Aug 26 and sentenced to 13 years in prison for helping to carry out the 2006 bombing of the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi that killed 28 people. Sajjad Ahmad Wani, who had studied for several years at Darul Uloom, was arrested in December on charges of orchestrating bombings in Uttar Pradesh a month earlier that claimed 12 lives. The state police alleged he was a part of Harkat Jihad-e-Islami, a Bangladesh-based terrorism group.

Most recently, Abul Bashar Qasmi, another former student of Darul Uloom, was detained after it was alleged he was the mastermind behind the serial bombings in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad in July that killed 56 people. The arrests of former Darul Uloom students have cast doubt over this ultra-orthodox seminary. The accusations that the school somehow promotes terrorism makes its clerical establishment blanch.

In February, at a conference here, the school issued an "antiterror" fatwa strongly condemning those who take part in terrorist activities anywhere in the world. The seminary passed strictures against terrorism as unIslamic, and it defined terrorism as any action that hurts innocent individuals. Maulana Marghoob-ur-Rahman, the seminary's chief rector and vice chancellor, says he felt the need to do so because Darul Uloom was being labelled "dehshat ka adda" by many - Urdu for "a den of terror".

"Darul Uloom has always invited prejudices from the outside world," said Mr Rahman, who has been the school's vice chancellor for 27 years. "Whenever a bomb blast happens in India, fingers point at us. It's an unexamined belief that we foster terrorism." He added that because Islam is the cornerstone of Darul Uloom's identity, its students were targets of terrorist "insinuations". "If we were not teaching Islam, but engineering or medicine, we wouldn't be treated the same way."

But if that is the case, why single out Darul Uloom? To that, Mr Rahman had no coherent answers, knowing that India, with the second highest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia, has more than 12,000 madrasas. Students, reluctant to give out their names, said prejudices about Darul Uloom's terrorism connections are taking their toll. "When I go to a non-Muslim neighbourhood," said one student from Surat, in Gujarat, "my presence invites fear the moment I mention I'm a student of this seminary. I'm treated like a criminal."

Experts say that even though the school may not be training jihadis directly, it perpetuates a narrow, literal interpretation of Islam, which is the ideology that inspires jihad. A Darul Uloom brochure openly criticises the United States and Israel, saying: "USA, Israel and the fascist lobby in India working under pressure of USA are making every possible effort for the character assassination of our institution. They are taking exception to the teachings of Islam and finding faults with it. It is because of this that mutual clashes are taking place ? and a new term 'terrorism' has been coined."

The Indian government recently announced an ambitious project to modernise education and infrastructure in the country's 12,000 madrasas. The Indian government says its aim is to encourage madrasas to move from rote learning - memorising the Quran - to critical thinking, where teachers ask students to research subjects and think about concepts - and to include science and mathematics in the core curriculum.

But Darul Uloom is resisting such a change. "What does modernisation mean?" said Maulana Arsad Madni, the former secretary of education of the school. "If it means stop preaching Islam, then we're not ready to modernise." However, he later acknowledged that Darul Uloom was offering computer courses to its students and teaching them English for one primary goal: to equip them to counter the negative publicity Islam now receives on the internet.

"Islam is 1,400 years old," Mr Madni said. "God's message hasn't changed over the years. So there's no reason for us to change."