Deobandi madrasas among the Pashtuns and Darul Uloom Haqqania

At a glance

• The Deoband school, opened in 1867 in a small town of the United Provinces by Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and others, sent teachers back to the Pashtun country from the 1870s. Haji Turangzai studied there, and an Afghan taught logic in its early years. [2, 3]

• Darul Uloom Haqqania (جامعہ دار العلوم حقانیہ) stands on the Grand Trunk Road at Akora Khattak in Nowshera. Maulana Abdul Haq, who had taught at Deoband, founded it in 1947 by the press accounts; the seminary's own chroniclers trace its roots to 1936 and 1937. [4, 5, 11]

• His son Maulana Sami ul Haq led it from 1988 until he was stabbed to death at his Rawalpindi home on 2 November 2018. His son Maulana Hamid ul Haq was killed by a suicide bomber at the seminary on 28 February 2025. [5, 11, 13]

• Haqqania's graduates include Taliban ministers. Sami ul Haq called the Taliban "my students" and said the seminary had no special or secret link with them. [7, 8, 10]

• Pakistan's government counted 17,738 registered madrasas in December 2024, 4,005 of them in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 575 in Balochistan. [14]

• Pashtun nationalists, Barelvi Sufis and Pakistani politicians have criticised the seminary and its politics. Its head, students and an English scholar who studied in Deobandi madrasas on the frontier answer them in their own words. [1, 9, 10, 15, 16]

From Deoband to the frontier

Barbara Metcalf dates the school at Deoband, a country town of the United Provinces, to 1867, when Rashid Ahmad, Muhammad Qasim and others opened it. Other writers give 1866. [2] Sana Haroon, who studied the Pashtun borderland, describes its founders as men initiated in the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi order and trained in the Islamic sciences, who followed Shah Wali Ullah's teaching and promoted the removal of what they called heretical innovations from popular practice. [3] Haroon's phrase is that its scholars separated the Sufi and revivalist tendencies in his work and kept the second, which is why the school sits uneasily beside the Sufi orders of the Pashtun country. [3]

Pashtuns were in its classrooms early. Metcalf notes that logic was taught for many years by an Afghan, Maulana Ghulam Rasul, whose language the students found hard to follow. [2] Mahmud Hasan, who joined the staff in 1873, taught students from Kabul, Qandahar, Balkh and Bukhara. [2] The school's own proceedings, in Metcalf's reading, called the Afghan students "quick-tempered and angry". In 1879 it threatened any rowdy student with expulsion, and the tahsildar of Deoband once forbade all Afghans to enter his jurisdiction. [2] By the end of the nineteenth century there were Deobandi schools as far off as Peshawar. [2]

Haroon names the Pashtuns who went to study and came home. Abdul Aziz, the Pakhli Maulvi, was a son of the Baray Mulla Sahib of Charsadda. Fazal Rabbi came from Hazara. Maulana Saifur Rahman, from Mathra in Peshawar district, taught in a madrasa set up by Obaidullah Sindhi near Delhi, brought many Pashtun students there, and in 1914 led them home and on into Mohmand country. [3] Haroon says Haji Turangzai joined a party of ulama from Deoband for the Haj in 1875 and spent some years at the school. In 1914 Mahmud Hasan, by then its head, asked the Haji Sahib to move into the tribal country to wage jihad, and the Haji Sahib folded that request into his own programme of social reform. [3] His life is told in the Haji Sahib of Turangzai.

Critics of Deoband made the frontier connection a charge. In the 1890s, Metcalf writes, a pamphlet addressed to the government claimed that the school drew students from the frontier to train them for religious warfare. The school's defenders answered it. [2]

Abdul Haq and the school at Akora

A study published in 2021 by teachers at Azad Jammu and Kashmir's Mohiuddin Islamic University, which is friendly to the seminary, gives the local account. The Akora Khattak elders had tried several madrasas, none of which lasted. In 1937 they opened one called Taleem-ul-Quran, with Maulana Abdul Haq as president, 350 students and six teachers. [4] A school, the Anjuman Taleem-ul-Quran, dates from 1936, and the study says Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, the Deoband leader, visited Peshawar in 1937 and laid its foundation. [4] Abdul Haq was called to Deoband to teach and stayed four years. After partition in 1947 he returned and, in the study's words, "developed it in pattern of Deoband in 1948". [4] The press gives the founding year as 1947. [6, 11]

He also went into politics. The Express Tribune says he was a founding leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam in Pakistan and sat in the National Assembly for three terms, twice beating Nasrullah Khattak, father of Pervez Khattak, the defence minister in 2018. [5] The seminary stands on the Grand Trunk Road about 60 kilometres east of Peshawar. [11] The 2021 study describes a campus of 300 kanals, a free mess for students and a high school open to the town's children, whose old boys include Ajmal Khattak, later president of the Awami National Party. [4] The same study reports a remark by Abdul Wali Khan, the first ANP president, that Haqqania was "a place of peace, prosperity and tranquility", quoting it from a seminary publication. [4] That is the seminary's own record of a Pashtun nationalist's praise; the nationalist case against it comes below.

Afghan students came from the start. Haroon found an incomplete list in the seminary's magazine Al Haq naming at least 371 Afghan graduates between 1945 and 1978. [3]

Sami ul Haq and the war next door

Sami ul Haq was born at Akora Khattak on 18 December 1937 and took charge of Haqqania after his father died in 1988. [5] He had entered politics in 1980. After 1988 he split from Maulana Fazlur Rahman and formed his own faction, the JUI-S, and he sat in the Senate from 1985 to 1997 and again from 2003 to 2009. [5, 6] Fazlur Rahman said at his death that he himself had studied at Haqqania for 11 years and counted Sami and Abdul Haq as his teachers. [5]

Haroon puts the seminary in the longer story of the Afghan war. Pakistan's Deobandi ulama built madrasas on the Deoband pattern in the cities and in the settled districts of the North-West Frontier and Balochistan, and those in the Frontier and Balochistan began to take in and train hundreds of exiled Afghan ulama as Islamists fled Daoud Khan's government between 1973 and 1978. [3] The wider account of those years is in the civil war and the Taliban emirate, 1992 to 2001.

What the seminary says about the Taliban

Taliban (طالبان) is, in the words of the AFP interview Dawn ran in 2013, a word meaning "students" in Pashto. [7] Haqqania is the best-known school the movement's leaders attended, and the sources agree on the bare facts and disagree on what they mean.

Ahmed Rashid, as the Express Tribune quotes him, wrote that Sami ul Haq was called "the father of Taliban". Most of the Afghan Taliban's leadership council had studied at Haqqania, at least eight Taliban cabinet ministers in 1999 were its graduates, and dozens of graduates served as governors, commanders, judges and officials. [5] Dawn adds that Jalaluddin Haqqani and his sons Sirajuddin, Anas and Ibrahim all studied there and use the name Haqqani to mark the link. [11] The New York Times, reporting in November 2021, listed Sirajuddin Haqqani, Amir Khan Muttaqi and Abdul Baqi Haqqani among the new Taliban ministers who passed through Haqqania. The seminary's administrators told it that the justice minister, the head of the water and power ministry, and various governors, commanders and judges did too. [10]

Sami ul Haq spoke freely. In an interview in 2013, near the campus, he said of the Taliban: "They are my students. In our tradition, a teacher is like a father, like a spiritual leader." He called Mullah Omar "an angel-like human being" and predicted: "Give them just one year and they will make the whole of Afghanistan happy." [7] A book of his answers to Pakistani and Western journalists, reviewed in Dawn in 2016, adds the other half. He wrote that the seminary has "no special relation or secret links with the Taliban", only a student and teacher bond "similar to the one your students have with their teachers at Harvard and Oxford University", and that no Pakistani Taliban were ordered to fight in Afghanistan. [8] He accepted that nearly 90 per cent of the Taliban leadership graduated from Haqqania and called it coincidence. [8] The same pages quote him claiming credit: "I as the founder principal am the man behind the Taliban movement." [8]

His son Rashidul Haq Sami, the vice chancellor, told the Times: "We feel proud that our students in Afghanistan had first broken the Soviet Union and now sent the US packing." [10] He said students are neither trained for combat nor obliged to fight in Afghanistan. [10] Graduates of the 1980s and 1990s told the Times they had no military training, though some said teachers openly discussed jihad and urged them to join the insurgency, and one said students could slip into Afghanistan to fight during vacations. [10]

Accounts differ on Mullah Omar. Sami ul Haq called him one of his best students, and RFE/RL lists him among the alumni. [7, 9] Dawn's 2025 list of alumni names the Haqqani family and not Omar. [11] Omar's own rise from a village madrasa at Singesar is told in the civil war and the Taliban emirate.

JUI, politics and public money

Haqqania's politics ran through the JUI. Abdul Haq was one of its founders and Fazlur Rahman, the later head of the main faction, was a pupil. [5] Haroon says that when the Taliban came to power the JUI ulama supported them partly for ideological and personal reasons, because many of them had studied with the Taliban in Pakistani Deobandi madrasas in the 1980s. [3] After the American invasion of 2001 Sami ul Haq set up the Afghan Defence Council. Dawn's obituary says it became the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, the religious alliance that won the 2002 elections and formed the government of the North-West Frontier Province. [6]

The state has also paid the seminary. RFE/RL reported in March 2018 that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government gave it $2.5 million that February to "mainstream" it, after $2.7 million in 2017. [9] The New York Times gave lower figures of $1.6 million for 2018 and $1.7 million for 2017, and said the money built a new block, a badminton court and a computer lab. [10] Michael Semple of Queen's University Belfast told RFE/RL that Sami ul Haq's alumni network and its political weight probably explained the grant. [9]

Panjpir

Panjpir is a separate school from Haqqania. The sources place it beside Deoband: the Express Tribune names the "Deobandi and Panjpiri creeds" together, and Butt, below, studied at both. [1, 17] Its centre is Darul Quran at Panjpir in Swabi, which Dawn says was founded by Maulana Mohammad Tahir and an ex-army officer, Mohammad Aamir. His son Maulana Mohammad Tayyab runs it and heads the Jamaat-i-Ishaat al-Tauheed wa Sunnah. [18]

John Butt, an Englishman who graduated from Deoband and subtitled his memoir "the life and times of a Pashtoon Englishman", studied on the frontier in the 1970s and left an account of Panjpir. He went there in the Ramadan of 1973 to hear Maulana Tahir, whom he calls Shaykh al-Quran, give his yearly Quran course. Butt estimates 1,500 to 2,000 students, 80 to 90 per cent of them Afghans. [1] The maulana spoke a pure Swabi Pashto and recited the Quran's translation in Pashto, and Butt, who learned his own Pashto in madrasa, says that "Generally, Pashtoon nationalists look at mullas and madrasas as the antithesis of Pashtoonwali". He did not think it true of Panjpir. [1] He adds that Pashtuns frowned on the name Panjpiri, hearing in it five pirs, though it is only the village's name. [1]

Butt's judgement of what followed is blunt. Maulana Tahir, he writes, called political Islam "Destruction and rebellion all for the sake of gaining power", and the politicisation of the Panjpiri movement "happened later". Butt quotes a classmate at Deoband: "Our politics should be Islamic, but our Islam should not be political." [1] The Express Tribune reported in 2010 that Lashkar-e-Islam in the Khyber Agency followed the Deobandi and Panjpiri creeds and had claimed almost all attacks on shrines there. A member of the Panjpir school told the paper their aim was to "eradicate bidaat (excess in religion)" and that they did not target innocent people. [17] The attacks and the Deobandi ruling on shrines are set out in ziarats, shrines and the urs.

The size of the madrasa world

On 19 December 2024 the government told the Senate that Pakistan had 17,738 registered madrasas with 2,249,520 students. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had 4,005 of them with 1,283,024 students, Punjab 10,012 with 664,065, Sindh 2,416 with 188,182 and Balochistan 575 with 71,815. [14] The figures count registered institutions and do not say how many follow which school, so they give no Deobandi total. The New York Times put the number of seminaries the state was trying to bring under control at more than 30,000. [10] For Deoband itself Metcalf reports that 8,934 Deobandi schools were said to exist at the school's centenary in 1967. [2] How these numbers relate to Pashtun regions is discussed in education in the Pashtun lands.

Two killings

Sami ul Haq had gone to Rawalpindi on 2 November 2018 to address a protest against the acquittal of Aasia Bibi. He went home to rest instead, and his son said he was stabbed to death there, at the family house in Bahria Town. [5, 13] Dawn reported in 2019 that the police inquiry was inconclusive, with an interim charge sheet filed after a month. [13]

On Friday 28 February 2025 a suicide bomber killed Hamid ul Haq, who had led the JUI-S since his father's killing, at the seminary as he left the Friday congregation. Dawn counted six dead, including Hamid, and 18 wounded. The Express Tribune counted Hamid and six others. [11, 12] Witnesses said the bomber was dressed as a religious scholar. [11] No group claimed it. Dawn recorded that the Taliban's interior ministry in Kabul blamed IS-K and quoted the editor Iftikhar Firdous saying that an IS-K video of 23 February had named Haqqania, while the Taliban's deputy spokesman called Hamid's death "a great loss for the scholarly community". [11, 12] Dawn also noted that Sami ul Haq had kept his distance from the Pakistani Taliban and had issued a fatwa in December 2013 backing the polio campaign. [6, 11]

Students and teachers in their own words

A 21-year-old student, Abdul Wali, told the New York Times that Haqqania "is one of the few prestigious madrassas in the country where students consider studying an honor because of its history, the prominent scholars teaching there and its quality Islamic education". The Times saw 1,500 final-year students in one lecture hall, laughing at an instructor's jokes, and more than 4,000 students, mostly from poor families, were enrolled. [10] Courses run from Quran memorisation to Arabic literature, and the seminary has added English, mathematics and computing. [10] The 2021 study says its dar ul ifta has issued about 150,000 fatwas. [4]

Butt defends the madrasa as "akin to a classical education in the West", old-fashioned and in need of reform. He says a legitimate criticism is that it is too tilted towards theology. [1] Azmat Abbas, the author of Madrassa Mirage, tells the Times that a school's syllabus matters less than its individual teachers. [10]

Critics, and the answers

Pashtun nationalists have not spoken with one voice. Syed Alam Mehsud, president of the nationalist Wolesi Tehrik, said the 2018 grant "proved" that the government was "supporting extremist elements". [9] At a seminar in Peshawar in 2003 Afrasiab Khattak and other Awami National Party speakers called the new religious alliance government "a democratic version of Taliban" and said its initials stood for "Military-Mullah Alliance". Khattak said that just as the Taliban "bulldozed the Afghan culture", the MMA was doing the same in the province, and that Pashtuns wanted all jihadi organisations removed. [15] That criticism is of a political alliance and its intelligence-agency patrons. It is not a ruling on Haqqania, and the seminary's own story has Ajmal Khattak as a pupil of its school and Wali Khan as a praiser. [4]

Sufis and Barelvis are the plainest critics. At a rally at the Data Darbar shrine in Lahore in July 2010, a week after suicide bombers killed 43 there, Barelvi speakers denounced Deobandi groups such as the JUI, "which has expressed sympathy for the Taliban". Sahibzada Fazal Karim, chairman of the Sunni Ittehad Council, said: "Our intelligence agencies know full well who is a terrorist, and where they get their support." [16] The Express Tribune reported in the same year that Deobandi and Barelvi scholars alike had condemned suicide attacks on shrines. [17]

The defenders speak for the seminary and its record. Sami ul Haq said that "religious schools are not military training camps". [8] Rashidul Haq Sami said the world should give the Taliban a chance. [10] The New York Times found that experts credit Haqqania's reforms with some success and say it "does not advocate militancy like it once did", while still teaching, in their view, a narrow reading of Islam. [10] Rahimullah Yusufzai, the Pashtun journalist, told RFE/RL that Haqqania "is not a terrorist training camp" but that its alumni set "a powerful precedent" for students, and that "not all the students go and fight". [9] Michael Semple answered that "faculty, students, and alumni of the seminary are intimately linked to several militant groups". [9] The seminary rejected a Dawn report that two suspects in the 2007 killing of Benazir Bhutto had attended. [9]