Rs 300M allocated for madrassa in KP budget, assembly told

[A.M.]

PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly was told on Thursday that a madrassa in Nowshera district, administered by Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Sami chief Maulana Samiul Haq, has been allocated Rs300 million in the annual budget for 2016-17.

“I am proudly announcing that Darul Uloom Haqqania Nowshera will get Rs300 million to meet its annual expenditures,” said Provincial Minister Shah Farman while responding to opposition leader Maulana Lutfur Rehman’s remarks during general debates on budgetary documents.

He said the PTI-led government was not raiding and targeting religious institutions but has been cooperating and providing financial assistance to it. He claimed that the provincial government was providing financial assistance to other seminaries and mosques of the province.

When asked about such a big chunk of financial assistance to a single seminary, Minister for Religious Affairs Habibur Rehman told this scribe after the assembly session that Rs150 million would be provided in 2016-17 while the remaining amount would be given next year to the same madrassa.

“Actually Chief Minister Pervez Khattak had promised to Haqqania Madrassa’s administration financial assistance of Rs150 million which was adjusted in the Auqaf fund this year,” he said and added that he had no objection to this allocation but he was not taken into confidence in this regard.

“Darul Uloom Haqqania is one of the oldest and largest seminaries of Pakistan and it deserves financial assistance,” stated the provincial minister, who belongs to Jamaat-i-Islami.

Habibur Rehman said that about Rs50 million was allocated to Religious Affairs and Auqaf Ministry in the outgoing financial year but not a single scheme was materialised this year.

“In the first year (ADP), our ministry was allocated Rs16 million, in the second year it was Rs19 million and in the third year it was Rs50 million but not a single scheme was materialised during this period,” he said. He added that the chief minister was interested to fulfil his promise regarding financial assistance to the seminary administration.

Earlier, parliamentary party leader of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F Maulana Lutf-ur-Rehman said that the provincial government should stop raids and targeting religious institutions and its students.

On the request of PTI MPA Dr Haider Ali, the treasury benches also staged a walkout against what he called unscheduled and prolonged electricity loadshedding in the province.

“We condemn the unscheduled loadshedding in the entire province as protest rallies and demonstration are taking place in each and every district of the province,” he said and warned that the MPA themselves would lead protest rallies if the electricity loadshedding was not stopped in the province.

 

[A.M.]

Our country is run by lunatics. No two ways to say it.

 

[EagleEyes]

Instead of sucking these kind of institutions dry, i am not sure why we are funding it. Especially with how much these institutions are prone to destabilizing Pakistan in the name of Islam.

 

[Imran Khan]

its nya pakistan where terror factories have funds from gov

 

[FalconsForPeace]

Pakistan’s ‘University of Jihad’ is getting millions of dollars from the government

After terrorists killed more than 100 Pakistani school children 18 months ago, the country’s leaders vowed to crack down on religious seminaries that are recruiting grounds for domestic and international Islamist militant groups.

U.S. officials have also continued to pressure Pakistan in their decade-long effort to get the government to deny safe-havens to insurgent groups destabilizing Afghanistan, especially the Taliban and its brutal offshoot, the Haqqani network.

Despite all of that, Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government is giving $3 million to the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, also known as the “University of Jihad.”

At a provincial assembly meeting last week, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s leaders announced the grant and said it was needed to keep one of the world’s most controversial Islamic seminaries operational. Government leaders noted the seminary currently enrolls and houses about 4,000 students, and their parents expect they will be taken care of.

“A large number of students study, live and eat in this seminary, and it's doing great service for the poor people,” Mushtaq Ghani, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s information minister, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

By subsidizing one of the world’s most controversial Islamist institutions, Ghani said the government will be helping to “mainstream it” as part of a broader reform of what 3 million Pakistani children learn in more than 100,000 madrassas.

But critics are blasting the move, saying it threatens to renew doubts about whether Pakistan can ever be trusted as a reliable partner in the global fight against terrorism.

If there is any institution that could elicit such a response, critics say, its Darul Uloom Haqqania.

“The Taliban are killing our children, and our government is giving money to their sympathizers,” said Shahi Syed, a Pakistani senator.

Although it was founded in 1947, the university gained prominence in the 1980s when both Pakistan and U.S. intelligence officials used it to recruit and nurture rebels who resisted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

During that time, both Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban, and Jalaluddin Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani network, are believed to have studied there, according to past statements made by seminary officials. Asim Umar, leader of al-Qaeda’s South Asia wing, is also believed to have been a former student.

After the former Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, the seminary maintained its ties to Taliban leaders who took control of Kabul in the mid-1990s. Later, after the United States helped oust the Taliban government from power in 2001, the seminary produced scores of insurgents who are still fighting Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government.

Tariq Afaq, a militancy expert from Peshawar, Pakistan, estimates that 80 percent of Haqqania seminary students joined or sympathize with the Taliban. Former Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month, is also reportedly a former student.

The leader of the seminary, Samiul Haq, isn’t known to be as radical as some other Pakistani religious leaders. Haq served two terms in Pakistan’s senate and has become an advocate for vaccinating Pakistani children against the polio virus.

But in interview with Reuters two years ago, Haq embraced the title “father of the Taliban” and said his “students” should fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

“They are my students. In our tradition, a teacher is like a father, like a spiritual leader,” Haq said. “Afghans should be allowed to fight for their freedom.”

Last year, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported that two suspects in the 2007 killing of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto had also attended the seminary. But school officials denied ever having any affiliation with the men.

The seminary, one of the world’s largest Islamic learning centers, focuses on teaching the hard-line Deobandi strain of Islam that advocates for Sharia law.

Over the years, many Deobandi institutions received financial support from Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Persian Gulf countries. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are both past donors to Darul Uloom Haqqania, according to Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper.

It’s unclear why the seminary suddenly appears to be having financial troubles. But Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's government said it will allocate the $3 million over two years to help the seminary meet its budget, and most of the money will be used to build dormitories.

National Pakistani leaders, including aides to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, stress the funding is a local decision. But some lawmakers say the grant upends Sharif’s recent pledge that “any enemy of Afghanistan is an enemy of Pakistan.”

“The provincial government needs to tell the people why such a big amount is to be given to one seminary,” said Sitara Ayaz, a Pakistani senator, who noted other, more moderate religions institutions are not receiving similar funding.

The grant comes at an especially strenuous time in Pakistan’s relationship with U.S. lawmakers and military leaders.

Despite an ongoing Pakistani military operation in the country’s northwestern tribal belt, U.S. officials have been criticizing Pakistan for not doing enough to eradicate Taliban safe havens within its borders.

Given the Pakistani army’s dominant role in the country’s affairs, many analysts think the army's general, Raheel Sharif, who is not related to the prime minister, could stop the grant if he chose to.

But analysts say that Pakistan’s military is increasingly frustrated with both the United States and Afghanistan, which may be causing it to become even more reluctant to crack down on the Taliban.

Earlier this year, Congress blocked U.S. subsidies for a $699 million deal to sell Pakistan eight F-16 fighter jets.

Pakistani military leaders reportedly were not consulted before President Obama authorized the drone strike that killed Mansour.

There is also growing frustration in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad over Obama’s support for India’s domestic nuclear program. And last week, Pakistan and Afghan security forces clashed at a key border crossing.

“If Pakistan is now not interested in cooperating with the U.S., that is something that shouldn’t be surprising,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based military analyst.

But Muhammad Amir Rana, an Islamabad-based security expert, said he was befuddled by the grant.

“This act will alarm the international community, and their reaction won’t be good,” said Rana, noting that it seems the money will be dispersed without any conditions. “If they are trying to mainstream the seminary, then money alone won’t serve the purpose.”

The allocation of the money, however, shows the influence that religious conservatives still yield in Pakistani politics.

In nationwide elections, conservative Islamist parties often struggle to get 10 percent of the vote. But in local elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2014, former cricket star Imran Khan's Movement for Justice party failed to win an outright majority of provincial assembly seats. It now relies on support from Islamist parties to maintain a coalition government.

“This money has much more do with provincial politics, and power, than anything else,” said Zahid Hussain, an Islamabad-based political analyst.

But Ghani, the information minister, insists the grant was approved strictly on “humanitarian grounds.”

“If there are more such requests from seminaries, and they could be brought into the mainstream, we would take such steps,” Ghani said.

Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad and Aamir Iqbal in Peshawar contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ting-millions-of-dollars-from-the-government/

 

[Shah Xaib]

Not every madrassa supports the terrorists

 

[@RV]

I don't understand, why should state provide funds for religious organizations(irrespective of their support to terrorism or not). There are thousands of better ways to use the funds.

 

[Rain]

PTI simply showed, by this act, that they support orthodoxy rather them embarking modernity. They also under the pretext of education reforms, gradually privatizing higher educational institutes on the insistence of some edu-business tycons. They simply ignored the reality of what BoGs did in major hospitals in KPK, they want BoGs for colleges so that few can make fortunes. Absolutly pathetic!

 

[Jinn Baba]

Taliban Khan living up to his name once again.

 

[Silent_Killer]

The only way we can tone down the terrorism is by spreading the true teachings of islam. The decade long war has done no good to us. The only way to tackle the terrorism is by defeating them ideologically. They have been manipulating people by telling people to do the things which are actually illegal in islam. The innocent and ignorant and less religious people fell for their lies.

I can create many verses of my own in here and most of the people wont even notice. And thats because people dont know much about islam, they cant even distinguish between whats there in islam and whats not. And They takes everything for a granted from few people with long big beards without even investigating of their own about either this thing is really there in islam or not.

 

[Windows 10]

Put it on RAW one more time. When one of the jehadi from the very same madarssa gonna kill others then you will be going to blame RAW anyways.

 

[A.M.]

Why are there only 10 replies to this? Where is the outrage? If our politicians are bad.....our awaam is equally worst.

If 5 years from now, a student from this madrassa committed a crime, we will believe that it was the work of RAW or CIA or Afghanis. No one will look inward at institutions like these or red mosque in Islamabad.

Where are the PTI fanboys? Where have they disappeared now? You all made tons of topics chasing a few million dollars worth of apartments, where are the topics for this outrage?

 

[somebozo]

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly was told on Thursday that a madrassa in Nowshera district, administered by Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Sami chief Maulana Samiul Haq, has been allocated Rs300 million in the annual budget for 2016-17

Welcome to naya Pakistan...the Taliban Pakistan...

 

[I M Sikander]

Next time KPK gov will open TTP office in chief minister house kpk to get terrorist in main stream of naya Pakistan.

 

[I M Sikander]

Kpk gov. is allocating funds even to hard core terrorist nurseries as if it is Baap ka maal.

Come on let us know a single college which has been given 300 million grant by kpk gov.