Islam's Other Hot Spots

By Tim McGirk/Karachi; Phil Zabriskie/Solo; Helen Gibson/ London

Where exactly does terrorism start? In the past two years, the U.S. has leaned hard on its allies across the globe to crack down on the sources of Islamist militancy. While the governments of Pakistan, Britain and Indonesia have moved against known terrorists, radicalism can bury its roots deep within a culture, especially in places where the message of jihad is taught to the next generation. TIME visited three hot spots of militant Islam:

PAKISTAN Cooler Surface, Seething Below

On a hot summer afternoon in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, hundreds of young Muslim students sleep in the shadow of a mosque's arches, enduring the hard stone floor and swarming clouds of flies. Suddenly the call to prayer resounds through a loudspeaker. The boys spring up to wash in ritual preparation. Starting as young as 8, these boys spend six hours a day memorizing the Koran, with breaks only for rest and prayer. The students get no lessons in math, geography, history or computers. Allah's will as recorded in the holy Koran, the teachers say, is all they need to understand the universe. The system of belief is summed up this way by student Syed Ayaz Ali Shah: "Since the days of the Prophet, there are only two forces on earth, Muslims and infidels. And their fight will go on until Judgment Day."

Islam doesn't get more radical than the version taught at the Binori town mosque and seminary, which educates more than 9,000 students at branches across the city. There, in the feverish days after Sept. 11, sermons reviled President George W. Bush as a decadent Pharaoh and lauded Osama bin Laden as an Islamist hero. The school counted top Taliban commanders as alumni and served for years as a favorite rendezvous for al-Qaeda men passing through Pakistan en route to Afghanistan. In response to 9/11, the U.S. denounced these schools, or madrasahs, as terrorist-training academies and called for strict controls on their incendiary teachings. The U.S. hoped the newly cooperative regime of President Pervez Musharraf would rein them in.

How much has changed? Today the overt signs of Binori's notorious radicalism are gone. You no longer find posters asking for donations to the families of "martyrs" killed fighting American "infidels" in Afghanistan. Sermons nowadays steer clear of politics. "We were warned by the Pakistani police not to say anything bad about Bush or the Americans," says Qari Mohammed Iqbal, one of the mosque's administrators. "So now we don't." Secret police are regularly planted among the worshippers to ensure that the preachers obey.

Behind the classroom doors, however, anti-U.S. rhetoric is as scorching as ever, inflamed by the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Abdul Razzak Sikander, one of the Binori preachers, puts it, "The West is against Islam. They are afraid of us." Holy war, he believes, is a legitimate weapon of defense against this religious enmity.

At less radical seminaries, leaders say they have adopted new rules to curb such ferocity. "Any student or teacher who tries to do politics inside here," declares one principal, Mufti Mohammed Naeem, "is kicked out in 30 minutes. But," he admits, "jihad is everywhere, in graffiti, the Urdu newspapers, in tea-shop talk." Once his students leave campus, they are prey to extremist groups.

Even with the secret police watching, there are always recruiters circling around the madrasahs. An Islamist militant told TIME that teenage volunteers who want to enlist these days in the Taliban are taken first in small groups to Pakistan's lawless tribal lands, where they are given a scant few weeks of weapons training and are assigned to hit U.S. targets inside Afghanistan. Because they are so inexperienced, martyrdom is only a few weeks away; these youngsters are usually the first to be killed.

There's little hope of undermining the dangerous influence of the Islamist madrasahs so long as Pakistan remains as poor and illiterate as it is. Parents know that at least the madrasahs will give their children a free meal. "It's poverty and hunger that drive these students to the madrasahs," says Aziz Ahmed Faruqi, who teaches in a Karachi seminary. "If their stomachs weren't empty, they wouldn't come." --By Tim McGirk/Karachi. With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain

BRITAIN No Pause in The Recruiting

In a shabby, multiethnic west London shopping mall, robed men sit placidly at a stall offering Islamist pamphlets and videos on Shari'a law or jihad in Chechnya. They hope a black Islamic flag and a display of postcard-size stickers advertising a conference on Sept. 11 will attract the curious. On closer inspection, it is clear the conference's message will be anything but passive. The stickers at the al-Muhajiroun group's stall depict THE MAGNIFICENT 19, a lineup of the 9/11 hijackers set against New York City's burning Twin Towers and a smiling Osama bin Laden.

"To us," says Abu Yahya, 28, a British-born veteran of training camps in Afghanistan and one of the leaders of this Islamist group, "the men are magnificent." He professes equal admiration for two others, both acquaintances: Omar Khan Sharif, one of the two British suicide bombers who blew up a crowded Tel Aviv bar last April, and Omar Saeed Sheik, the British citizen accused of murdering journalist Daniel Pearl.

In the city dubbed "Londonistan" for its large population of fervent Islamists, British security forces have done little since 9/11 to quell provocateurs like al-Muhajiroun, which is widely suspected of influencing young men to join the jihad. Many of the MAGNIFICENT 19 stickers plastered on lampposts and walls across Britain have been scratched off by authorities, but police rarely disrupt al-Muhajiroun's stalls or meetings. Last month police raided the homes of the group's leaders, Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad and Anjem Choudary, but both men remain at liberty.

Al-Muhajiroun is typical of the zealous Islamist fringe that targets disaffected young Muslims in Britain. Anti-Jew, antigay and antipornography, the group, founded in London by Syrian-born Bakri, is patient in its approach but extremist in its long-term goals. It wants to see Islam's flag fly over Downing Street in a new caliphate in which Muslims are united in one great borderless state under Shari'a law. The highly active group stages meetings all around Britain on a daily basis and claims to have branches in 30 British cities and offices in 21 countries, including a presence in the U.S.

Muslims and police who dismiss the publicity-seeking Bakri as a mere loudmouth may underestimate the man and his group. Although officials have dug up no proof that al-Muhajiroun breaks the law or directly recruits for terrorist cells, the group does nothing to discourage jihad, and its passionately professed beliefs have radicalized many adherents. The Tel Aviv bombers both apparently attended al-Muhajiroun meetings, as did other young Britons who took off to join the Taliban. Now, says Abu Yahya, "the best recruitment for us as Muslims has been the occupation of Iraq."

Al-Muhajiroun followers are nothing if not dedicated. At 10 o'clock one night last week, more than 20 young men and their robed wives sat down in segregated halves of a spartan office in a north London industrial park to listen until dawn as Bakri expounded on his brand of Islam. And they returned for a second session the following night. Says Choudary's black-robed wife Umm Luqman, 28, a British university graduate of Pakistani background: "We believe that no matter what, Islam will prevail. Since 9/11, Islam has been heard." --By Helen Gibson/London

INDONESIA A Lingering State of Denial

Agung Syuhada's bright pink house stands out against the brown houses and verdant rice fields that make up the village of Bekonang in central Java. On a late afternoon, he greets visitors with a sleepy smile. As an ustad, a teacher, who runs a local Islamic boarding school, Syuhada has been welcomed amid the diverse faiths in this part of the predominantly Muslim country. Despite his own staunch Islamic beliefs, he explains, "I worked with whoever needed assistance, regardless of religion. I think people appreciated that."

Yet Syuhada hangs a framed picture of Osama bin Laden on his front porch. Though he insists suicide attacks are anathema to Islam, he respects bin Laden "for leaving behind all his wealth to fight injustice against Muslims." But when asked how that squares with charges that Indonesians linked to al-Qaeda carried out the lethal bombings in Bali last October and at Jakarta's Marriott hotel last month, he falls silent. "I don't know," he says. "All these killings have me confused."

For followers of any faith, one requisite for living harmoniously in Indonesia is acceptance of the many often overlapping religious and cultural traditions that typify the country's spirituality. In Bekonang, for instance, a number of families, including some nominally Muslim, distill sugarcane into an alcoholic brew called ciyu. Much of it is sold to bars in the neighboring city of Solo, which has a reputation as a spawning ground for Islamist extremists. But locals know Solo better as a haven for drinkers, gamblers and other denizens of the night. Though alcohol is forbidden in Islam, Syuhada refuses to denounce the trade. "Of course we'd like people to stop selling ciyu, but we cannot force them to," he says.

The kind of tolerance on display in Solo, for all its social virtues, has contributed to a state of denial. In a country conditioned by three decades of dictatorship not to trust the authorities, more than a few Indonesians--from schoolchildren to religious and community leaders and even some government officials--refuse to accept that their country is infested with a homegrown terrorist organization actively tied to al-Qaeda.

What many citizens don't realize is how much the country's spiritual attitudes are changing, says Jamhari Makruf, executive director of the Center for Study of Islam and Society at Jakarta's Islam Universitas Negeri. He has conducted surveys that reveal a rising religious consciousness in a country struggling to find its democratic footing since the downfall of dictator Suharto in 1998. Some people are adopting more puritanical versions of Islamic practice, the surveys show. But most are finding solace in characteristically tolerant forms that blend the Koran with local traditions like Javanese mysticism. Until the bombings, Makruf didn't know that a small Islamist group was combining an ultra-orthodox reading of the holy book with avowedly anti-Western militancy and was waging terrorist attacks in the name of those beliefs. "I was surprised by the existence of Jemaah Islamiah," he says. "In everyday life, they were not part of Islamic society here."

They are now. That was evident last week when Indonesian judges sentenced Abubakar Ba'asyir, a conservative cleric who started Pondok Ngruki, an Islamist boarding school in Solo, and, according to several foreign governments, allegedly co-founded Jemaah Islamiah in the early '90s, to four years in prison for treason and immigration violations. But he was acquitted of charges that he ran the radical group and planned a series of Indonesian bombings (He has consistently denied involvement in terrorist activities, and is suing TIME for a 2002 article that links him to terrorism.) Only slowly are the citizens of Solo coming round to acknowledge that Jemaah Islamiah has been thriving in their midst.

Here in central Java, as in most of Indonesia, moderate and liberal Muslims are dominant. Islamists haven't made inroads in electoral politics, and recent attempts to codify Shari'a law in the country's constitution were soundly defeated. When puritanical Islamists in Solo conducted sweeps of the bars and nightclubs to shut them down for the holy days of Ramadan and trashed some establishments to make their point, Solo's drink purveyors and customers fought back with well-attended street demonstrations.

Though roughly 90 Jemaah Islamiah members have been detained in Indonesia, Sidney Jones, head of the Jakarta office of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, says, "Every time we've done research, we find out more about how extensive it actually is." She believes Jemaah Islamiah has "thousands of followers." But unless internal sectarian strife flares anew or Iraq becomes the kind of rallying point for jihad that Afghanistan was, Indonesia's militant radicals will have to convince potential recruits that attacking Western targets at home is an honorable way to fight the infidel. The Marriott bombing did little for that pitch. The victims were mostly Indonesian Muslims. "There's unquestionably a huge sense of outrage," says Jones, "and a lot more willingness now to say that this kind of violence is not in keeping with Islam." An 18-year-old student at a school near Solo allegedly run by a member of Jemaah Islamiah says, "I'd rather play basketball than go fight."

Even so, skepticism about U.S. actions here and in Iraq and Afghanistan is strong, and so is the view that the war on terrorism is a war on Islam. Moderate Muslim voices are struggling to convince the vast majority that terrorism is a pressing domestic issue. On his porch in Bekonang, preacher Syuhada doesn't accept charges that some nearby schools mold militants. But, he says, with downcast eyes, "some people take the lessons and go their way." --By Phil Zabriskie/Solo. With reporting by Zamira Loebis

With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain, Zamira Loebis