Earlier today I reported Norway’s decision to open the door to one of the most insidious figures of the global jihad—Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of the Pakistani Islamist political movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). LGF reader evariste emailed a link to a very good article at Asia Times on the recent crackdown by Pervez Musharraf on JI members: Pakistan turns on itself. Author Syed Saleem Shahzad suggests that this crackdown may lead to civil war in Pakistan, because of the strength of JI in the ISI (Pakistani intelligence) and the government.

KARACHI - Under immense pressure from the United States, a slow and gradual operation has begun in Pakistan against the strongest political voice of Islamists and the real mother of international Islamic movements, of which Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front is the spoiled child.

In a surprise move this week, Pakistan’s federal minister of the interior, Faisal Saleh Hayat, listed a number of incidences in which members of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the premier fundamentalist party in the country, had been tied to al-Qaeda, and called on it to “explain these links”.

“It is a matter of concern that Jamaat-e-Islami, which is a main faction of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal [MMA], has neither dissociated itself from its activists having links with the al-Qaeda network nor condemned their activities,” Faisal said, adding that “one could derive a meaning out of its silence”.

The MMA is an alliance of six religious parties that gained unprecedented electoral victories in national elections in 2002. One of its members is the leader of the opposition in the Lower House, while the MMA controls the provincial government in North West Frontier Province. It also forms part of a coalition government in Balochistan province. The MMA has 67 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, with just under a third of them held by the JI.

Read the whole thing; Shahzad provides a good capsule description of the genesis of Jamaat-e-Islami, and Qazi Hussain Ahmed’s role in the group. You’ll come away from this article even more disturbed that Norway is blindly allowing an openly avowed “Islamic revolutionary movement” to establish a vanguard on Norwegian soil.

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