The Haqqania madrasah, on the bustling Grand Trunk Road in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, is the largest Muslim school in the country, with 2,800 students, and has graduated more Taliban leaders than any other in the world.
        Students at the school, which is funded by well-to-do Pakistanis and politically minded residents of Persian Gulf countries, range in age from 8 to 35. They study the Hadith (the prophet Muhammad's sayings), Islamic law, Muslim history, and the Qur'an, which they memorize in Arabic without learning the language itself.
        There is no weapons training, but the school's principal, Mullah Samiul Haq, freely admits that his institution's goal is to turn out jihad warriors.
        Haqqania, one of some 10,000 madrasahs in Pakistan, trains about 600 of its older students to become muftis, or Muslim clergymen. All the students seem to be enthusiastic supporters of Saudi-born billionaire Osama bin Laden, founder of the virulently anti-Western al Qaeda terrorist network. They fervently agree with his 1998 fatwa, or religious edict, calling on all Muslims to kill any Americans anywhere. And the students all declare they are foursquare behind providing bin Laden with nuclear weapons in his battle against perceived Western and Christian chauvinism.
        In the past, when the Taliban, the spartan, hardfisted Muslim movement that rules 90 percent of Afghanistan, experienced battlefield reverses in its war with the holdout Northern Alliance, Haq shut his school and had the student body trucked to the front.
        Several hundred of Haqqania's students are Afghans, while several dozen come from such Muslim-majority countries with religious-extremist rebel groups as Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan and from Russia's insurgent province of Chechnya. Such multinationalism inspires trepidation in some observers because of the vision it conjures up of a pan-Islamist Sunni revolution toppling Muslim nations like dominoes across strategically important South Asia and the oil-rich Middle East. Indeed, some worry that Pakistan, with its increasingly radicalized and "Talibanized" Muslims, could be one of the first to fall.
        New York Times reporter Jeffrey Goldberg last year questioned Haq, other Pakistani extremist Muslims, and Taliban leaders and found their attitude toward Islam to be strikingly at odds with that of radical Islamists elsewhere around the world. He noted that the Muslims he talked to in places other than Pakistan and Afghanistan emphasized the orthodox Islamic position that the "greater jihad" (the inner struggle of the believer to overcome the forces of his lower nature) is more important than the "lesser jihad" (the waging of struggle with nonbelievers). But Pakistani and Taliban extremists insisted that the greater and lesser jihads are of equal importance.
--The Editor