I mentioned the other day that a former Jamaat ul-Fuqra member has started his own blog, Shedding Some Light. Since then “Fuqra Hater” has been adding posts almost every day, and it is worth a trip over there to see what he has to say.
This is important material. CP and I have just been nibbling around the edges, looking over the fence at JF while reading publicly available material about it and speculating. But Fuqra Hater has been inside the “villages”, and has inside information on the affairs of Jamaat ul-Fuqra.
His post for today, A Trip To Pakistan, concerns a trip he made in 1999 to meet Sheikh Gilani, the founder of the Jamaat ul-Fuqra terrorist group and its cover organization, the Muslims of America. Here’s an excerpt from his account:...I met many dignitaries from the pakistani military and ISI..., we did various religious studies, from Quran memorization to islamic law to mystic sufi studies as well. We visited the schools that the Sheikh had.
We then went into the mountains for extensive studies in the sufi way, We met one white man named Javed, formerly named Atif, formerly named STEPHEN PASTER. The missing fingers the keen look in his eyes , I knew right away who it was when some of the elders greeted him by saying hey nubbs, I guess that comes from the missing fingers from the bomb that went off too early(doesnt sound like an expert bomb maker to me). He stayed around for about 30 min then went off to somewhere unknown. Have not seen him since. All the while we were escorted by armed men with klashnikovs and automatic pistols from russia. A town we went to called Peshawar was like gun city, any kind u wanted u could have, even the banned jewish founded uzi was available.
Fuqra Hater’s conclusion:
This is the begining of the end for me within the realm of Gilanism. I am being general but if need be I can name times, places, names and description of my life within this group. I challenge any member of this group to call me on anything I am saying.
Go over to his blog and read the whole thing. Read his other posts, too. This man is putting his life at risk.
3 comments:
That illustration looks like The Skipper in a Fez.
That IS scary..and Fuqra Hater is indeed a brave man.
ISI seems to have its finger in all the bad pies in Pakistan. Is there any solution for that place ? No stable political constellation seems to be possible in that country without including the Islamicists, but a little of the Islamicists is like being a little pregnant.
Fuqra Hater's blog appears to be important in that it exposes a contemporary violent Sufism (mystical Islam). Until recently Sufism had the reputation in the West of being a small, peaceful, tolerant movement within Islam, subject to oppression by the Wahabis and similar Islamic "fundamentalists", and it has been of considerable appeal to many Western religious seekers. (See for example the writings of the convert and Sufi propagandist Stephen Schwartz. The poet Rumi, very popular in the West, was also a Sufi.) Doubtless there are peaceful and tolerant sects within Sufism, but evidently this is by no means the whole story. A while ago Jihadwatch posted an excerpt from the medieval Sufi al-Ghazali about the religious duty to wage jihad on the infidels. Apparently Sufi extremism did not end there. Osama Ben Laden also seems to have adopted at least some of the outward forms of a Sufi Sheikh, though there is no mystical religion involved here that I've heard of. And I think the Chechen rebels are largely Sufis.
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