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Posted on 10/02/2001 5:59:33 PM PDT by Pokey78

IT WAS not your average school graduation. Before a raucous crowd of thousands at a dusty football field, Mohammed Rasul knelt as a white turban was wrapped around his head and he was proclaimed a hafiz, one who knows the Koran by heart.

“I felt very proud up there,” he said afterwards, smiling shyly as the crowd waved their Osama bin Laden posters behind him. At ten, he was by far the youngest of the 16 students to graduate amid the unusual setting of a pro-Taleban rally. It had taken him two years to learn the Koran in its entirety, an extraordinary feat at any age.

Only one thing was bothering him on this otherwise happy day. “I am too young to join the jihad,” Mohammed said. “I am jealous of the others because they are old enough to go. I pray to God that I can grow up fast so I can join them.”

Mohammed is a product of the Madras Darul Naumania, one of hundreds of madrassahs or religious schools that are dotted across the poor neighbourhoods and dusty refugee settlements in the frontier town of Quetta, in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan.

It was in these backstreet charity colleges that the Taleban movement was born in the late Eighties as a generation of young Afghan refugees grew up to be educated in the zealotry of their militant Muslim teachers. The talebs, or students, who studied here in exile, carried their fiery brand of fundamentalism back to Afghanistan and fought to impose it on the whole country.

Today the madrassahs are still thriving, churning out angry young Muslim men ready to do battle in the name of God. The free schooling they offer has proved an irresistible lure for refugee families and impoverished Pakistanis who otherwise could not afford to educate their children.

Mohammed’s parents came to Pakistan before he was born, fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He spent his early childhood in a mud-built refugee settlement before being packed off to the madrassah at the age of eight. For two years, he slept in a crowded dormitory with 20 others, rising before dawn for the day’s first prayers and retiring again at 10pm after long evening sessions of scriptural study.

“I spent seven or eight hours each day just studying the Koran,” he said proudly. The rest of his time was spent in prayer or absorbing the wisdom of his teachers, Muslim clerics affiliated to Pakistan’s largest fundamentalist movement.

It was at their feet that Mohammed learnt his precocious rhetoric. From his Afghan father he learnt his shooting skills, practising with a light rifle in the dusty lanes outside their home.

“I want to attack America because they hate the Taleban,” he said with a boyish ferocity, to the approving smiles of his teachers. “You speak with passion,” whispered one as he bent down to straighten the Taleban badge pinned to Mohammed’s beige shalwar.

Mohammed may not have long to wait before he can take up arms. At 15, his classmate, Mumat Salim, is already preparing to leave on the jihad. “As soon as America starts attacking I will go,” he said.

Next week Mumat plans to travel to Kandahar to join his Pakistani father who went to fight with the Taleban three years ago. So far, his training for the jihad has been confined to theology and theory, but he had been promised a gun and some military training on his arrival in Kandahar, he said, his eyes ablaze with excitement.

Isn’t he afraid of dying so young, before he has had a life, a job and children? Mumat shook his head in scorn, then smoothed the cloth on his turban. “The jihad is the way to heaven,” he said.

Mohammed gazed up at Mumat with a mixture of admiration and envy. I turned and asked him how he plans to fill the time before it is his turn to do battle. He replied without a pause: “I will teach the other children.”

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