Jihadist Tashfeen Malik Attended Radical Islamic Seminary in Pakistan — #SanBernardino

Here's the breaking story at the Los Angeles Times, via Memeorandum, "San Bernardino shooting updates: Tashfeen Malik attended seminary in Pakistan; President Obama to address the nation."

And click though, at LAT, "San Bernardino assailant attended Islamic institute in Pakistan":

Two students who attended college with San Bernardino assailant Tashfeen Malik confirmed that during her time at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, Pakistan, she began attending Al Huda, a chain of modern institutes of Islamic education which mainly focuses on women with the stated objective of “bringing them back to their religious roots.”

“She used to go to attend sessions in Al Huda almost every day,” said a fellow student, who asked not to be identified. “She was not too close to any class fellow."

The fellow student said that Malik did not share her thoughts on religious issues with fellow classmates in the department of pharmacology, where she studied.

"We all are in state of shock," the fellow student said.

Experts said that the majority of women who attend Al Huda institutes, located in large cities, wear the hijab. They are usually well-heeled. These institutes use the group-isolating Islamic preaching session (called ‘dars’) activity to reinvent personal identity through ‘discovery’ of Islam.

Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani security analyst, said Al Huda institutes teach women "fundamentalist" ideas, though they do not necessarily promote a jihadist agenda. “I call Al-Huda the fourth generation of religious seminaries. It does not promote use of violence but takes you closer to the red line. Now, it is a personal decision to cross the red line and take or give one's life.”

She said that the impact of such institutes is widespread, because a child going to a seminary has an impact on the thinking of other members of her family. “People would be familiar with, for instance, a daughter going to an Al Huda changing the mother and eventually the entire household. This dynamic is mirrored in more traditional seminaries as well.”

Sadaf Ahmad, an assistant professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, has written in a book about Al Huda institutes that Farhat Hashmi’s (founder of Al Huda) denunciation of various cultural practices and disapproval of Westerners and Indians helps women redefine their own identity as Muslims.  The author found Al Huda graduates to be “very intolerant and judgmental toward people who were different from them.”