VISION: Musharraf aims to be the great reformer

Situated in the heart of Karachi, the Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town is a sprawling mosque and madarsa complex with gleaming white marble floors and red sandstone minarets. Established in the late 1950s by a religious scholar, Yusuf Binori, it is widely recognised as one of the most influential centres in the world of the hardline Deobandi Sunni Muslim ideology. Along with a similar madarsa at Akora Khattak, the largest seminary in Pakistan, Binori Town has imparted training to the leading lights of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan as well as to personalities such as Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar and Azam Tariq of the recently banned extremist Sunni political party, the Sipah-i-Sahaba.

The centre, which is run as a trust, also houses a big and well-organised library, classrooms, a hostel and cafeteria, a small graveyard and its own tubewell. It imparts religious education to some 8,000 students at a time, most of them from Afghanistan and the Pushto-speaking areas of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, with a liberal sprinkling of students from Africa, Central Asia, Philippines and Malaysia. The tuition is free and many receive free board and lodging. The centre is run on donations from sympathisers in 45 countries, including the US, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Switzerland. "People give us money out of love for Islam," says Mufti Jamil, a teacher at the madarsa.

Despite the number of guerrilla fighters that have passed through its corridors, the faculty at the madarsa is at pains to point out that the centre plays no role in imparting military training or recruiting volunteers for jihad. "We impart purely religious education in our schools, not military training," says a teacher outside the main hall where children are busy memorising verses from the Koran.

The schooling involves indoctrination of students with the fundamental tenets of the Deobandi ideology. The centre follows a strict curriculum spread over 10 years, with the youngest students joining the "university" at about six years of age. "It is a thoroughly un-modern curriculum with only religious subjects being taught," says a government official refusing to be named. With such madarsas, the Government may find it difficult to implement the promised reforms.

-Hasan Zaidi