Mick Hartley

Continuing their story from yesterday on the hardline takeover of British mosques, the Times follow up today with this report on a couple of British youngsters in Pakistan. There is, as they say, good news and bad news:

Here is a tale of two young British Muslims who travelled to Pakistan.

Yasir is 19, comes from Rotherham, supports Liverpool FC and is studying Islam in a Pakistani madrassa that will teach him to hate the West.

There are two reasons why he should not be in a Deobandi seminary in the teeming, dusty backstreets of Karachi. The first is that Pakistan banned all foreign students from its religious schools in 2005 after it emerged that two of the bombers responsible for the July 7 attacks on London that year had spent time in the country.

And the second? Yasir is miserable. He told The Times last month that he was desperate to “get home”, was struggling to cope with life in Karachi and uncomfortable with the seminary’s anti-Western agenda.

Yasir was seven months into an eight-year course of study when he met The Times and during the brief interview his eyes were continually darting from side to side as if in fear that his words might be overheard. He was at first hungry for news of home — what were Liverpool’s coming fixtures, how were England doing in the cricket? — but his strong Yorkshire accent often dropped to a barely audible whisper.

Why was he here? “I don’t know that myself.” What was wrong with Karachi? “It’s crap.” What did he miss about Britain? “Everything. It’s too hard for me here. I don’t like to live here, man. You can’t do anything here. It’s not England. It’s Pakistan.”

The former engineering student gave no explanation as to why he was at Jamia Binoria, whose principal, Mufti Mohammad Naeem, challenged The Times to inspect the seminary to “see if you can find any terrorists”. There were no bomb factories, but for incendiary rhetoric there was Muhammed, a young man from Manchester who was visiting a friend in the seminary’s fatwa (religious edict) department.

Muhammed, who would not give his full name, teaches English to asylum-seekers and, in stark contrast to Yasir, exemplifies Deobandis’ deep hostility towards the West. He was eager to tell The Times that the public had been entirely misled about the real perpetrators of the July 7 attack on London. According to Muhammed, the Government, Mossad, assorted Jews, freemasons and Scotland Yard had conspired to commit mass murder to demonise Muslims. “These are not my opinions. These are facts. The aim was to create terror in the hearts of the British people in order to control them,” he said.

The media were also part of the cover-up. “Why don’t you tell the public that they are being brainwashed and that there is a conspiracy to destroy Islam, as the Prophet told us? Why don’t you tell them that the media is controlled by Jews, that the word ‘British’ is a Jewish word?

And here’s the Deobandi view on waging jihad:

One of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims “to establish the supremacy of Islam” worldwide.

Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.

His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.

Mr Usmani, 64, sat for 20 years as a Sharia judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. He is an adviser to several global financial institutions and a regular visitor to Britain. Polite and softly spoken, he revealed to The Times a detailed knowledge of world events and his words, for the most part, were balanced and considered…

Mr Usmani’s justification for aggressive military jihad as a means of establishing global Islamic supremacy is revealed at the climax of his book, Islam and Modernism. The work is a polemic against Islamic modernists who seek to convert the entire Koran into “a poetic and metaphorical book” because, he says, they have been bewitched by Western culture and ideology.

The final chapter delivers a rebuke to those who believe that only defensive jihad (fighting to defend a Muslim land that is under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a nonMuslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam.