Word: madrasahs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...answers. "When we live according to God's law, we are successful, and others will emulate us." How far would she go to defend this principle? I never get an answer. Hassan looks out the window. Government rangers, a kind of paramilitary force, are trying to cordon off the madrasah complex with razor wire. The male students are fighting them off. "Emergency!" Hassan declares, and leaps to her feet. The teacher's lounge, a room of brightly dressed women, is doused in black as students and teachers don dark floor-length robes and headscarves that show only their eyes. Stout...
...down video and music shops for promoting un-Islamic behavior. Twice now, the female students have abducted alleged prostitutes, saying that if the government doesn't cleanse the capital of sin, they will. "A man goes to medical school and becomes a doctor," says Aman. "We go to a madrasah, so we must practice Islam. But the government is not letting us. How can we allow this to happen...
...locus of local anger against Musharraf is the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in the capital Islamabad. For months the clerics of the mosque and the students of its two madrasahs, or seminaries, have openly defied the authorities: they have occupied a nearby children's library to protest government plans to raze illegal mosques built on state-owned land; set up their own Shari'a court; and have even kidnapped policemen and terrorized neighboring areas with a Taliban-like vigilante campaign against anything they consider un-Islamic. On July 3, that defiance erupted into a bloody clash between security forces...
...Come on, we are going out to protest," says Aman, now recognizable only by the glasses perched on the outside of her burqa mask. I follow her outside the madrasah gate where a hundred or so black-robed women chant in unison against Musharraf and Bush. A crack, a small explosion, and a cloud of acrid tear gas drifts our way, fronted by a pack of stampeding men. Apparently they tried to occupy the neighboring Environment Ministry...
...burns my skin. Someone from the second floor above the gate pours a bucket of water on us. Blissful reprieve, even if it lasts only a few seconds. Eyes streaming, coughing, choking, spitting, we scrabble at the front door, battling to get through the narrow passageway, back into the madrasah, to safety...