Afghan insurgents target moderate Islamic university | World news

• Jon Boone in Kabul
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  Wednesday 9 February 2011 16.46 GMT

• Article history

 

Afghans walk past a bus damaged by a bomb in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan. The bus had been carrying police academy trainers. Photograph: Rahmat Gul/AP

An Islamic university in eastern Afghanistan established by Cambridge University's Muslim chaplain has been bombed by insurgents, in an apparent attempt to snuff out its efforts to provide a moderate religious education to young Afghans.

The Jamiyat'al-Uloom'al-Islamiya in the once peaceful city of Jalalabad was attacked on Tuesday evening, when a powerful bomb hidden near the entrance buckled heavy metal gates and destroyed nearly all the building's windows. Several students and staff were wounded by flying glass, but no one was seriously hurt.

The university was established in 2009 by John Butt, an Englishman who converted to Islam in 1970 and has worked for decades in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a journalist and religious scholar. The 69-year-old also serves as Cambridge University's Muslim chaplain.

The city was struck by three other bombs on Tuesday, including an attack on a bus carrying policemen and the son of a leading political family in the province. The rash of bombings reflects the growing clout of militants in a prosperous trading town which also suffered a series of mysterious bomb attacks on music shops last year.

Butt studied at the influential Deoband madrasa in India after converting to Islam in 1970 and proudly calls himself a "Taliban", which, he points out, simply means "religious student".

However, the moderate brand of Islam promoted by the white mullah from England is regarded as a threat in militant circles and in recent weeks the university had been receiving "night letters" of the sort routinely used by insurgents to intimidate people.

Butt said the notes accused the university, and three other local madrasas, of "spreading western propaganda and poisoning the minds of the young generation in Afghanistan".

The notes also said the institution was trying to "sideline jihad with our emphasis on the peaceful propagation of the word of God".

"We are up against people who want to destabilise Afghanistan and people who set a lot of store by the militant ideology which has infiltrated into Afghanistan over the last 30 years," Butt said.

The attack follows a similar bombing in Jalalabad eight months ago at a media training centre operated by Butt's PACT radio station, which promotes moderate Islam on both sides of the nearby border with Pakistan.

Both that attack and the recent night letters have led some of the university's 120 students to drop out, and Butt said the bomb attack would probably further demoralise the institution.

Butt has been living and working in the now war-torn region ever since he travelled from England to Afghanistan on the hippy trail in the late 1960s, although he has become somewhat despairing at the difficulty of working in a country where security has declined sharply in recent years.

He believes "contemporary" religious education, which includes practical subjects such as business studies, as well as the traditional study of Islam, can help reduce the radicalisation of young people and give them different career options.

He also hopes to provide an alternative for young people who might otherwise travel to madrasas in Pakistan, some of which operate as indoctrination and recruitment centres for Taliban fighters and suicide bombers.