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Taliban Target: Scholars of Islam By MUJIB MASHAL and JAWAD SUKHANYAR New York Times, MAY 28, 2017 TOGH-BAIRDI, Afghanistan — A lone grave, its dirt mound shaded under the drooping branches of a mulberry tree and kept adorned with flowers, has become a daily stop for seminary students and staff members near Togh-Bairdi, in northern Afghanistan. It is the burial site of Mawlawi Shah Agha

Who are the new jihadis? Biographies of ‘homegrown’ European terrorists show they are violent nihilists who adopt Islam, rather than religious fundamentalists who turn to violence by Olivier Roy There is something new about the jihadi terrorist violence of the past two decades. Both terrorism and jihad have existed for many years, and forms of “globalised” terror – in which highly symbolic

I am returning to active blogging after a few years in response to requests from some loyal followers. The purpose remains educational in focus and I hope to use this medium to alert my students and other followers about informative and insightful publications on South and South West Asia besides occasional updates about my own writings, travel reports and events.

SUMMARY - The AMMAN MESSAGE http://ammanmessage.com/ ‘[T]he best resource for those who wish to travel along the straight path in their words and their actions, and in their spiritual and religious life’ — The Grand Shaykh of the Azhar, Shaykh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi (may God have mercy on him), 2006. The Amman Message started as a detailed statement released the eve of the 27th of Ramadan

Confronting Extremism Through Building an Effective Counter-Narrative This article was originally published in the Development Advocate Pakistan on April 25, 2016. While Pakistan is using kinetic means to push back terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), it is still struggling to find an antidote to religious extremism and

SIPR Lecture Series: "Are Taliban History?" @ Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan - November 27, 2015 Sponsored by American Institute of Pakistan Studies: http://pakistanstudies-aips.org A lecture was organized under the SPIR Lecture Series on November 26, 2015 at School of Politics and International Relations. Dr. Hassan Habbas from National Defense University, Washington D.C. gave