KARACHI: A top official of the Ittehad Tanzeematul Madaris-e-Deeniya Pakistan (ITMDP), a confederacy of five religious education boards running over 14,000 seminaries across Pakistan, said on Saturday that the government had agreed it would not pressure madressahs in the aftermath of the great London plot that was foiled by the UK authorities with active help from Islamabad. Seminaries across the country have been worried and pushed the ITMDP leadership to secure assurances from Islamabad that they would not face action as they did after the 7/7 London bombings. “We have been assured that the recent London incident would not create pressure for us,” Hanif Jalandhari, chief of the Wafaq-ul-Madaris, the largest of the five religious education boards, which controls more than 9,000 seminaries, told Daily Times.
Insiders said in the first ever meeting of the ITMDP with the interior minister Friday the two sides remained confined to the concerns about possible action against seminaries. “The government has agreed not to take any action against the seminaries for the time being,” said an insider, but Jalandhari has insisted that it was not “a matter of time” but the minister had assured them that no action was in the offing against seminaries because unlike the 7/7 incidents no clue was leading to Pakistani seminaries in the latest incident. Jalandhari said that despite some clues leading to Pakistani seminaries in last year’s London bombing investigations, no seminary was involved in the act and time had proved this. “And even this time no clues are there to justify any government action against our seminaries,” he said.
| "Nope. Nope. No clues here. Don't even need to look around. As pure as the driven snow, are the Pak madaris. Trust me." |