MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Jon Boone, The Guardian – “With his track record as a member of the political arm of a banned terrorist organisation, Mian Shahzib is unlikely to ever be given a visa to enter Britain.

But that does not stop the jovial 33-year-old from giving British children religious instruction every day from the comfort of his home in Pakistan.

He spends hours each night sitting under a fluorescent light in the courtyard of a small mosque in Lahore, peering into a laptop as children first from the Middle East, then Europe and North America spend half an hour after school talking to him over a faltering Skype line. ‘Put on your cap and wash your hands,’ he told a 12-year-old boy sitting in a large office chair in his parents’ home in Edinburgh.

After checking the boy had memorised various prayers to get him through the day, including a special blessing for exiting and entering the toilet, he got down to business, helping the boy read aloud the classical Arabic of a few verses of the Qur’an.

The fact that a hardcore Islamist and long-term follower of the UN-proscribed Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) has daily access to children in the west is likely to fuel concerns about religious radicals spreading their message.

Shahzib’s website, Easy Qur’an Memorising, makes no mention of his history and is one of hundreds of such online companies, some of which advertise on satellite channels broadcasting to the Pakistani diaspora. They are part of a little-known outsourcing boom fuelled by parents of Pakistani origin turning to Qur’an teachers in Pakistan. ‘It’s just like a call centre where you are saving a lot of money by getting someone overseas to do it much more cheaply,’ said Fawad Rana, a property developer in Solihull who has used Qur’an teachers for his two sons for the past three years.

Rana makes an online payment of £30 a month to Faiz-e-Quran, one of the larger online religious education companies, which gets his children three half-hour sessions a week.

‘And there’s the convenience factor – the last thing kids want to do is spend half an hour travelling to the nearest mosque and then not even getting 10 minutes of one-on-one tuition,’ he said.

Although Faiz-e-Quran say it takes care to scrutinise and monitor all the teachers it employs, the industry is increasingly dominated by one-man operations. After several years working on his business, Shahzib now has about a dozen students aged 12 to 18 scattered all over the world. It’s a long way from his past role as an activist with JuD, a Pakistani Islamist organisation known for its holy war against Indian rule in the contested region of Kashmir.

The organisation is on the UN’s list of sanctioned organisations because of its alleged association with al-Qaida and is considered a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.” Read more.