Pakistan's Surrender To Jamaat-ud-Dawa Chief Hafiz Saeed Was A Blend Of Pakistan's Islamic Ideology And The Revisionist Policy Vis-a-Vis India
By Khaled Ahmed
December 5,
2020
On November
19, a pivotal development took place in Pakistan. An anti-terrorism court
sentenced chief of the banned organisation Jamaat-ud-Dawa (erstwhile
Lashkar-e-Toiba) Hafiz Saeed, to 10 years in jail for “terror financing”. The
conviction came as Pakistan tried to avoid blacklisting by the global
dirty-money watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) which punishes
“illicit financing of militant organisations”.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz
Saeed has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for “terror financing” by an
anti-terrorism court. (File Photo)
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Who was
this man who made the world cower in fear when he organised the attack on
Mumbai in 2008? From a Kashmiri Gujjar background, Hafiz Saeed lived in Simla
before Partition. After 1947, he grew up in Sargodha where his family began
farming. Saeed’s father Maulana Kamaluddin was a religious scholar, so was his
uncle Maulana Hafiz Abdullah, who later helped in setting up the “terrorist”
organisation, LeT.
Religion
serves as an agent of detachment from reality. Saeed’s career embodies this
phenomenon. After graduation in 1974, Hafiz Saeed was appointed lecturer at the
University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore in the Islamiat
department. From here, he went for higher studies to Saudi Arabia and became
intimate with the infamous Saudi scholar, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, who was to
pronounce the fatwa of jihad in Afghanistan in 1979.
Saeed, like
most clerics, was against democracy. After the fall of East Pakistan in 1971,
and a fatwa of jihad in 1979 by Bin Baz, he turned to the war in Afghanistan,
joining the training camp of Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, where he linked up with the
teacher of Osama bin Laden and Arab fighters, Abdullah Azzam. He also met bin
Laden several times. In 1986, the teachers of the Islamiat in Engineering
University had founded Markaz Dawat wal-Irshad, a Wahhabi organisation devoted
to the Saudi brand of Islam and raising armies for the jihad in Afghanistan.
In 1990,
LeT was established in consultation with the Wahhabis in Afghanistan. By 2001,
it was the most well-known jihadi outfit in the region, boasting 1,100 martyrs
and 15,000 Indian troops killed in Kashmir. Back home, everyone seemed inspired
by jihad. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb, appeared in
LeT rallies.
In 2003,
after a career of jihad in Kashmir, the LeT was banned. It then became
Jamaat-ud-Dawa and devoted itself to serving al Qaeda as a coordinating agency
with networks in Pakistan. In February 2002, at the high tide of al Qaeda’s
revenge killings inside Pakistan, bin Laden’s lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, was
caught in Faisalabad from a safe house of Hafiz Saeed.
(File Photo)
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On April 9,
2016, The News disclosed that Saeed had been running stealth courts in
violation of Pakistan’s constitution: “The supra-constitutional Sharia courts,
established by Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), operate across the country and only the
Lahore court of this parallel judicial system has issued verdicts in 5,550
cases, including murder trials.”
The
“courts” had been going on since 1990 and one had been active even in
Islamabad! Mufti Muhammad Idrees, a kind of stealth high court chief justice
sitting in Masjid Qadisiya (the headquarters of JuD in Lahore), spilt all the
beans. He claimed that seven Sharia courts had been functional, one each in
Lahore, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur, Multan, Karachi, Quetta and Islamabad. Saeed
was the head of all these courts, which makes him a kind of chief justice.
The state
had surrendered to Saeed and was helpless to oust him from his
spiritual-terrorist empire. The surrender of the state to Saeed was a blend of
two contingencies — the evolution of the ideology of the state under Islam, and
the drive of a revisionist policy vis-à-vis India.
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Khaled Ahmed is consulting editor, Newsweek
Pakistan.
Original Headline: Pakistan state’s surrender
to Hafiz Saeed embodies the perils of religious ideology
Source: The Indian Express