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Gazi Abbas Shahid
Starting as a ground reporter back in his home UT of Jammu and Kashmir, Gazi has been a part of the news industry for well over a decade. While he finds every type of news engrossing, politics, partic ... Read More
Maulana Hamid ul Haq Haqqani, the son of Taliban’s ‘father’ Maulana Sami ul Haq Haqqani, was killed Saturday in a suicide bombing at the Darul Uloom Haqqania, Pakistan’s infamous ‘University of Jihad’ located in Nowshera district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region. Let us find out more about this notorious madrasa which is widely regarded as the birthplace of Taliban.
Located in Akora Khattak town, about 55 km from the northern city of Peshawar in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the Darul Uloom Haqqania was established by Maulana Sheikh Abdul Haq on September 23, 1947 after the partition of India which led to the creation of Pakistan.
Maulana Abdul Haq molded the newly-founded Islamic seminary along the lines of Darul Uloom Deoband seminary in India, where he had studied, and later taught. Haq served as the first chancellor of the institution and was succeeded by his son Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, the a former Pakistani senator regarded as the ‘Father of Taliban’.
The Darul Uloom Haqqania propagates the Hanafi Deobandi school of Sunni Islam, a hardline movement which calls upon Muslims to return to “origins” of Islam.
Darul Uloom Haqqania has been dubbed the ‘University of Jihad’ due to the seminary’s teaching methods and content of instruction, which allegedly ‘brainwashes’ young Muslim youths to take up arms and wage ‘jihad’ (holy war) against infidels, and the “enemies” of Islam. The seminary has produced several notorious jihadists over the years, such as leading members of Taliban, including the group’s past chief Akhtar Mansour.
At present, the madrasa is home to over 4,000 students, who was provided free lodging, food, clothing, and Islamic education. However, the content of the Islamic teachings given to students is strictly according to the Deobandi school of thought, that promotes hatred for non-Muslims, and even other Muslim sect, who they believe, have “strayed” from “true Islam”.
The Deobandi movement or Deobandism, a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam that adheres to the Hanafi school of law, was formed in the late 19th century around the Darul Uloom Madrassa in Deoband, India, and spread across South Asia after the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
Deobandis, supported by other Sunni fundamentalist groups, established seminaries across Pakistan and part of south Asia, and received overt and covert support from regimes in Muslim nations, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, who realized that spreading the Deobandi radical ideology would help them stay in power.
Soon after its establishment near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Darul Uloom Haqqania emerged as a prominent center of Deobandi ideology. However, the seminary remained under the radar till the late 1980s, when Maulana Sami-ul-Haq took charge in 1988 after his father’s demise, and reportedly turned the seminary into a breeding ground for jihadists.
As per a report by TRT World, Sami-ul-Haq called upon Muslims to wage jihad, terming it as an “essential duty” of every Muslim of fighting age. The development came at a time when the erstwhile Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Darul Uloom Haqqania gained infamy when Sami-ul-Haq’s son, Maulana Hamid ul Haq Haqqani, began training future Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar to wage jihad against their enemies.
“He (Hamid ul Haq) created an internal conflict in people’s, strengthened the ideology at the centre to make people fight the Soviet Union,” the report quotes Pakistani journalist Zarghoon Shah as saying.
Notably, Hamid ul Haq jihadist ideology received support from Pakistan as well as the United States, as the later recognized it as an opportunity to thwart the Soviet Union’s plans in Afghanistan. The US paid billions of dollars in aid and ammunition to Pakistan, a major chunk of which went towards funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, that ultimately led to the creation of Taliban.
Some of the prominent alumni of Pakistan’s notorious ‘University of Jihad’ include top leadership of Taliban such as Taliban founder Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who founded the Haqqani network. Additionally, Asim Umar, Al-Qaeda’s South Asia chief, is also a product of this seminary.
The seminary reportedly has a dedicated training center where students were trained and radicalized to become suicide bombers, later used by Taliban to carry out suicide bombings.
According to a Washington Post, the Taliban maintained close links with Darul Uloom Haqqania even after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, and madrasa is still used to propagate jihadist ideology.
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