The police tries to attribute the incident to a business dispute, but there is a consistent pattern of attacks by ultra-fundamentalists hostile to the education of women.
by Massimo Introvigne
For the local police, it was all about a trivial commercial dispute that involved the owner of Golden Arrow School in Shakhimar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. They claim a business rival who is currently wanted may have set fire and burned to the ashes the school, serving some four hundred girls including daughters of officers of the Pakistani Army’s Seventh Division. The arsonist sprinkled the walls with kerosene in the night of May 27, and everything was destroyed, including computers, archives, and furniture.
Except nobody in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa believes the story of the business rival. Golden Arrow is the third school for girls burned to the ashes or destroyed with explosives in the area this year. In Shewa Tehsil, a girls’ private school was blown up on May 10.
These attacks have a long tradition and normally come from Islamic ultra-fundamentalists, which believe that girls should not go to school. The modus operandi in Shakhimar points to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, an independent but close ally of the Afghan Taliban. The U.S., the UK, and Canada have designated Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan as a terrorist organization.
At a hearing on May 29 about the possible revision of a controversial decision where he had ordered the release of a man who had distributed an Ahmadi commentary to the Holy Quran (although mostly on procedural rather than substantial grounds), Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa of Pakistan’s Supreme Court mentioned the school-burning incidents as evidence of the threat of Sunni Islamic radicalism.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
