Daily Times

Islamabad: The banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has reportedly launched a magazine for women. The copies distributed online show its title as Sunnat-e-Khaula – that translates into The Ways of Khaula (R.A). Hazarat Khaula Bint al-Azwar is prominent among Muslim Arab warrior from the 7th Century. She had fought side by side with her brother Hazarat Zaraar ibn Azwar, the legendary commander of the Rashidun army in many battles, including the decisive Battle of Yarmouk in 636 A.D., against the Byzantine Empire. She is most well known for conquests fought in the region that makes present-day Syria, Jordan, and Palestine.

Such celebrated is her memory across the Muslim world that in 2011 the Government of Jordan issued a stamp in her honour. The naming of the magazine after the legendary Hazarat Khaula is not the first instance of terrorist outfits usurping the legacy of 7th century Muslim conquests to further their ill designs, including provoking people to undertake unlawful activities like mass killings that are also prohibited under Islamic jurisprudence.

By invoking the legacy of Khaula (R.A.), the TTP is perhaps luring women towards ‘jihad’, another term from Islamic history it uses to legitimise its terrorist acts. It has been using women as suicide bombers since 2010-11 when the group claimed an attack in Karachi and said that they sent a couple to carry out the suicide mission on a police station killing 10 people. That was probably the first instance of TTP using a woman as a bomber. On the same day – June 26, 2011 – Afghan Taliban also used an eight-year-old girl child to bomb a police check post in Uruzgan province. A couple of years later, ISIS started luring women in massive numbers to fight in the Middle Eastern battlefields. A few months ago, Pakistan’s security forces arrested Noreen Leghari, a medical student, who was planning to bomb a Church in Lahore on the occasion of Easter.

The 45-page English language magazine Sunnat-e-Khaula appears to be intended for the educated urban women and is openly asking them to join the group. A three-page long editorial forecasts an India-Pakistan war. The text claims that Taliban would be the ‘last hope for people of Pakistan’ and regurgitates TTP’s anti-Pakistan rhetoric.

The next seven pages contain an English language translation of TTP chief Mullah Fazlullah’s lecture addressed at Muslim women.

What follows is an 18-page article by one Dr. Khaula Bint Abdul Aziz. The author, claiming to be a Lahore-based medical professional, narrates her journey from ‘ignorance’ (associated with worldly education) to ‘guidance’ (the life of ‘jihad’). Emphasising the importance of Purdah and Niqab, the author claims that her education had misled her into equating mere worldly information with knowledge. She says she had forgetten the ‘soul of Islam’, which in her view included Jihad as a compulsory element.

Perhaps, the most shocking content in the magazine is a four-page letter attributed to a six-year-old child named Omar Mujahid. The author claims to be a student at ‘madrassa- tul-sharia in Khurasan’. He narrates that his elder brother had died while executing a terrorist attack in Pakistan. In this sloppily drafted emotional letter, the author also explains how he helps his mother serve and take care of mujahideen, and plays with toy guns. All the while, he says, he waits earnestly to participate in ‘Jihad’.

But the interview of Mullah Fazlullah’s wife remains the cherry on the top. The woman whose name is not revealed discusses her father Sufi Mohammad, the chief of banned Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) who was arrested in 2009 after a military operation in Swat but stands acquitted in 16 cases of terrorism for lack of evidence. She mentions her training in ‘Islamic ways’ and also advocates marriages in early age saying that this ‘prevents sins’.

Published in Daily Times, August 3^nd 2017.