Directory of religious organisations and militias; includes list of religious schools operating by these organisations.

As made abundantly clear in the classified documents recently made public by WikiLeaks, Pakistan is the keystone in the international fight against terrorism today. After the US-led coalition targeted terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, these groups, including al Qaeda and the Taliban, relocated to the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan. From its base in this remote, inhospitable region of Pakistan, al Qaeda and its associated cells have planned, prepared, and executed numerous terrorist attacks around the world, in addition to supporting and waging insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. This book is the first detailed analysis of the myriad insurgent groups working in Pakistan. Written by well-known expert on global terrorism Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal, a leading scholar in Pakistan, the book examines and reviews the nature, structure, and agendas of the groups, their links to activists in other countries, such as India and Iran, and the difficulties of defeating terrorism in this part of the world. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews with government officials and former terrorists, the authors argue that Pakistan faces grave and continuing pressures from within, and that without steadfast international goodwill and support, the threats of extremism, terrorism, and insurgency will continue to grow. This timely and necessary book argues that if the international community is to win the battle against ideological extremism and operational terrorism around the world, then Pakistan should be in the vanguard of the fight.

This book provides a detailed account of the emergence and metamorphoses of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and its political arm, Jamat ud Dawah, since the early 1990s. Linking the group's narratives to the process of Islamization in Pakistan and divergent views on the country's Islamic identity, it is the first systematic analysis of how the organization, globally reviled as the perpetrator of the 2008 Mumbai Bombings, has developed its conception of da'wah (proselytizing) and jihad in response to regional and global developments. Samina Yasmeen makes extensive use of Urdu materials (pamphlets, books, ephemera) by Markaz Da'wah wal Irshad, the parent organization of LeT, to examine the 'insider's vision' of the dominant threats to Pakistan and the Muslim ummah, as well as strategies for countering these threats. She argues that while adopting an oppositional narrative vis-à-vis India and the West, LeT has increasingly turned its attention to da'wah narratives within Pakistan engaging with broader spectrums of society. Women have increasingly been assigned significant agency in this narrative, and JuD's activism in education and social welfare has helped it acquire social capital. This, in turn, prompts a re-imagining of the movement's relationship with the Pakistani military.

On the night of 21 November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen killed more than 170 people and injured over 300 in Mumbai, India's commercial capital. This title charts Lashkar's development from a small group unable to make a dent in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets to the most feared organization in Kashmir and a powerhouse in Pakistani society.

Pakistan's transformation from supposed model of Muslim enlightenment to a state now threatened by an Islamist takeover has been remarkable. Many account for the change by pointing to Pakistan's controversial partnership with the United States since 9/11; others see it as a consequence of Pakistan's long history of authoritarian rule, which has marginalized liberal opinion and allowed the rise of a religious right. Farzana Shaikh argues the country's decline is rooted primarily in uncertainty about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of 'being Pakistani'. This has pre-empted a consensus on the role of Islam in the public sphere and encouraged the spread of political Islam. It has also widened the gap between personal piety and public morality, corrupting the country's economic foundations and tearing apart its social fabric. More ominously still, it has given rise to a new and dangerous symbiosis between the country's powerful armed forces and Muslim extremists. Shaikh demonstrates how the ideology that constrained Indo-Muslim politics in the years leading to Partition in 1947 has left its mark, skillfully deploying insights from history to better understand Pakistan's troubled present.

This book provides a critical and a conceptual analysis of radical Islamist rhetoric drawn from temporally and contextually varied Islamist extremist groups, challenging the popular understanding of Islamist extremism as a product of a ‘clash-of-civilizations’. Arguing that the essence of Islamist extremism can only be accurately understood by drawing a distinction between the radical Islamist explanations and justifications of violence, the author posits that despite the radical Islamist contextualization of violence within Islamic religious tenets, there is nothing conceptually or distinctly Islamic about Islamist extremism. She engages in a critical analysis of the nature of reason in radical Islamist rhetoric, asserting that the radical Islamist explanations of violence are conceptually reasoned in terms of existential Hegelian struggles for recognition (as fundamentally struggles against oppression), and the radical Islamist justifications of violence are conceptually reasoned in terms of moral consequentialism. With a detailed analysis of Islamist extremist discourse spanning a wide range of contexts, this book has a broad relevance for scholars and students working in the field of Islamic studies, religious violence, philosophy and political theory.

This book examines a wide array of phenomena that arguably constitute the most noxious, extreme, terrifying, murderous, secretive, authoritarian, and/or anti-democratic aspects of national and international politics. Scholars should not ignore these "dark sides" of politics, however unpleasant they may be, since they influence the world in a multitude of harmful ways. The second volume in this two-volume collection focuses primarily on assorted religious extremists, including apocalyptic millenarian cults, Islamists, and jihadist terrorist networks, as well as CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) terrorism and the supposedly new "nexus" between organized criminal and extremist groups employing terrorist operational techniques. A range of global case studies are included, most of which focus on the lesser known activities of certain religious extremist milieus. This collection should prove to be essential reading for students and researchers interested in understanding seemingly arcane but nonetheless important dimensions of recent historical and contemporary politics.

Taking as its premise the belief that communalism is not a resurgence of tradition but is instead an inherently modern phenomenon, as well as a product of the fundamental agencies and ideas of modernity, and that globalization is neither a unique nor unprecedented process, this book addresses the question of whether globalization has amplified or muted processes of communalism. It does so through exploring the concurrent histories of communalism and globalization in four South Asian contexts - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - as well as in various diasporic locations, from the nineteenth century to the present. Including contributions by some of the most notable scholars working on communalism in South Asia and its diaspora as well as by some challenging new voices, the book encompasses both different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. It looks at a range of methodologies in an effort to stimulate new debates on the relationship between communalism and globalization, and is a useful contribution to studies on South Asia and Asian History.