Master Alvi and his circle were as literal-minded as you could get. Known among more liberal neighbours as the ‘no-doubters’, they were certain about everything, especially matters ecumenical. Alvi and his followers believed that every form and facet of Islam that was not of the Deobandi-infused Sunni school was contemptible. These opinions were passed down through the family like a gold watch. But while the Alvis sought security and comfort in an age that no longer existed, the world outside Bahawalpur was changing fast. And in the summer of 1995, Master Alvi confided in his friends that for the first time since Partition, nothing seemed certain.
He had read how Islam was under attack in many places around the world. In former Yugoslavia, Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims in a genocidal onslaught. In the Caucasus, Russia had launched a war against Chechen Muslims, leaving many thousands dead. Most distressing, as it was nearer and involved a people he regarded as his closest brothers and sisters, was the Muslim uprising over the border in Indian Kashmir, which was being put down by hundreds of thousands of Indian security forces, turning the Kashmir Valley, once regarded as a jewel, into one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world.
Master Alvi had more personal worries concerning Kashmir, too. The ‘rock’ of Kausar Colony, as he was known to his neighbours in the comparatively well-to-do community where he lived, by whom he was regarded as a matchmaker, troubleshooter, arbitrator, religious pundit and general go-between, a man who was trusted, loathed and envied in equal measure (like all big religious fish in small barrels), Alvi had a serious problem that needed fixing. One of his sons, his favourite, Masood Azhar, the third boy of eleven children, had gone missing in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Although Master Alvi still thought of him as his ‘golden child’, Masood was actually twenty-seven, short-sighted and a squat five foot two inches tall. Sporting an oversized pair of aviator shades and a luxuriant beard, Masood had, much to his father’s delight, embraced the family business of ‘no doubting’ with great enthusiasm, becoming the scourge of all kufrs, or unbelievers, including Muslims who did not adhere to the Deobandi way, such as Shias, whom he once described in a pamphlet as ‘cockroaches’. Masood was not handsome or charming – his siblings teased him for being a ‘little fatty’, according to a relative. One brother joked, in an aside that was passed around Kausar Colony, that with his head swathed in an Arab keffiyeh and his body robed in a white cotton shawl over traditional white kurta pyjamas, Masood looked like a ‘fundamentalist pupae’. But when he opened his mouth, something happened. Elaborate bursts of English, Urdu, Persian and Arabic flew out, arpeggios of assertions that, despite his somewhat high-pitched delivery, stopped people in their tracks.
Masood had the gift of the gab, something that had first been noticed at the age of four, when he recited lengthy tracts of the Koran at the local maktab (Islamic elementary school). After winning prizes for public speaking, he had caught the eye of a relative who taught at Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town, a wealthy mosque and madrassa a short bus ride from downtown Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, five hundred miles south of Bahawalpur, on the Arabian Sea. One of the largest religious seminaries in Pakistan, Binori Town was widely recognised as among the world’s most influential centres of Deobandi ideology.
To Deobandis, Binori Town, with its vast, sprawling campus, dusky pink towers, delicate, white-topped minarets and grand gateway, was Paris. Since its foundation in the 1950s by the religious scholar Yusuf Binori, members of every faction of the biggest Sunni religious-political party in Pakistan, the Assembly of Islamic Clergy, had vied to study there. Having one’s son among its 3,500 students was considered a blessing that would markedly raise one’s standing in the community.
In 1981, a year after twelve-year-old Masood had been enrolled and Master Alvi had received the necessary plaudits, the madrassa began taking its students down a new path, one that would transform the course of Masood’s life. Exciting dispatches had begun arriving from Afghanistan, sent by three recent Binori Town graduates who, styling themselves ‘The Companions of the Afghan People’, had headed up to Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, a gateway to neighbouring Afghanistan, where they had joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet Red Army that had occupied Kabul eighteen months previously. This anti-Soviet campaign was being secretly funded by the US government through the CIA, and run on the ground by its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency was a secretive organisation, with enormous resources, whose skilled agents, never publicly identified, were universally feared for spying on, abducting, torturing and executing Pakistanis, as well as ruthlessly meddling in the affairs of the country’s neighbours. Now in Afghanistan, knee-deep in America’s battle to temper Moscow’s regional ambitions, the ISI made sure that it got a grip on the recruitment and training of those Pakistanis who went there to fight, as well as on the Afghani tribes being trained to mount resistance.
The three graduates from Binori Town had undergone basic training, supervised by military instructors borrowed from the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI, and paid for by the CIA, before being sent through the Khyber Pass to do battle with the Red Army. Stories of the Companions’ bravery in Khost and Kandahar were read aloud at Binori Town after Friday prayers, entrancing many students, including Masood Azhar.
By the time Masood was fifteen, in 1983, one of the three Binori Town graduates had been martyred in Afghanistan, another had vanished, presumed dead, while the third had become a famed warrior with the nom de guerre ‘Saifullah’, or Sword of Islam. Reports of his continuing exploits spurred on a second generation of graduates from his old alma mater, who streamed up from Karachi to the Afghan border by bus, lorry and cart. Some of them joined Harkat ul-Mujahideen – the Order of Holy Warriors – a movement of Afghanistan-bound mujahids that had been established by Binori Town scholar Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil.
With his belly-quivering rhetoric, Maulana Khalil rang the bell for jihad so loudly that thousands volunteered for battle from the Karachi mosque complex; with Master Alvi’s help, many more came from madrassas across the southern Punjab. Soon Maulana Khalil and Master Alvi’s efforts had drawn the attention of the ISI, which noted that the Holy Warriors were making a significant contribution to their Afghan operation. According to the indiscreet Alvi himself, the ISI began to finance the Order. A former student claimed that cash stuffed inside jute rice sacks was delivered to the main canteen at Binori Town mosque. Convalescent centres for wounded fighters were opened nearby. Some of the ISI money was used to extend the large network of affiliated madrassas all over Pakistan, especially in the lawless tribal areas of the north-west, where Pashtun tribesmen liked to say they had been ‘born to fight’. Money aside, the system was soon self-sustaining. Those who survived Afghanistan, coming back to Karachi as ghazis, or returning war heroes, gave inspiring speeches to students during lessons and at Friday prayers, priming the next generation for a holy jihad, while Binori Town was guaranteed a steady stream of willing new pupils from across Pakistan, most of whom arrived as six-year-olds who were then steeped in a deeply conservative curriculum tinged by the ethos of the Dark Ages.
Among the thousands of students, Masood Azhar stood out. He quickly gained a reputation for his oratory prowess and religious fervour. Maulana Khalil, who visited Binori Town regularly, came to hear of him. ‘He thought I had talents that needed growing,’ Masood later reflected solemnly, when, at the tender age of twenty-five, he put pen to paper and wrote down his life story for other students to read. ‘Had this not been my path since I was a child?’
By the time Masood reached ninth grade, Maulana Khalil announced that he would be sent ‘for jihad’ with other students