State funded Jihadi education

I don’t know how many of you noticed this news-article from a few weeks back.

Excerpts from Where the state pays for teachers of hate by Praveen Swami (emphasis mine):

…Back in 1945, Islamist ideologue Abul Ali Mawdudi called on his followers to “change the old tyrannical system and establish a just new order by the power of the sword.” He demanded that members of the party founded in his name “seize the authority of state for, an evil system takes root and flourishes under the patronage of an evil government, and a pious cultural order can never be established until the authority of government is wrested from the wicke d.”

Last week, the National Conference-Congress government quietly moved to help realise Mawdudi’s ugly dream. Hundreds of jobs, a Cabinet decision taken on July 14 mandates, will be handed out to schoolteachers linked to the Jammu Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami, the party set up in Mawdudi’s name.

More than 440 Falah-i-Aam Trust teachers will now be inducted into the State school system.

…Born into a family long-linked to Kashmiri Sufism, Tarabali had come to despise the faith of his parents, seeing it as the cause of the political weakness of the people of Kashmir. Early in his life, he encountered the work of the seminal Islamist ideologue, Maulana Abul Ala Mawdudi, through the Islamist journal Tarjuman al-Quran.

..Having started his career as a teacher at the Islamiya High School, Tarabali went on to work at government-run educational institutions at Chrar-e-Sharif, Baramulla and Shopian. Before he left government service to devote himself full time to Jamaat-e-Islami work, Tarabali had succeeded in recruiting dozens of young men from elite Pir caste families. Most were from Baramulla, Shopian, Srinagar, and Pulwama — the very areas which have seen clashes between police and stone-throwing mobs since last summer.

…Among the young who joined the Jamaat was Syed Ali Shah Geelani — now the patriarch of Kashmir’s Islamist movement.

Not long after independence, the Jamaat set up the first of what would become a network of schools in Srinagar’s Nawab Bazaar, with five students and one teacher. The organisation developed its own textbooks, built around a curriculum that included English, Arabic, Urdu, mathematics and Islamic studies. The Jamaat cadre were appointed instructors…Students, Mr. Sikand records an observer as saying, were “inspired to work for the victory of Islam, jihad in the path of Allah, freedom and self-determination of the Kashmiri people.”

…No great imagination is needed to see what the Jamaat hopes to get from the party affiliates whose salaries will now be paid by the Jammu and Kashmir government — and the tragedy that could lie ahead.

*** End of Excerpts ***

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