Tajikistan asks the students to return home to avoid redical islamic teachings.

admin — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 14:11:14 +0000

Tajikistan has forcefully repatriated more than 100 students from Egypt in a bid to stop them being drawn into radical Islam.

The students, who had been studying illegally at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the world’s highest seat of Islamic learning, were rounded up by Egyptian authorities on Monday at the request of the Tajik government.

“On Monday … Tajik Airlines returned about 134 young Tajiks to the country from Egypt, where they were studying,” said a spokesman for the Tajik Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Tajikistan is pushing for the return of almost all of the 1,000 Tajiks presently studying at Al Azhar, all but a handful of whom are there without government permission.

The repatriated students had travelled via Russia and other countries to reach Egypt, the spokesman said.

Emomali Rakhmon, Tajikistan’s president, announced earlier this year that Tajik parents should stop sending children to study abroad at foreign madrassas, or religious schools, saying they risked being recruited as terrorists.

The al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) claimed responsibility for an ambush on a military convoy in September that killed 28 troops, and Tajik authorities blames terror groups for a suicide car bombing the same month.

Since September, Tajik forces have been engaged in a sweep operation against militants in the Rasht valley on the border with Afghanistan.

Tajikistan, the poorest country of the former Soviet Union, has an 800-mile border with Afghanistan that is almost impossible to police. It suffered a brutal civil war in the early 1990s, which pitted Mr Rakhmon’s supporters against the Islamic opposition, and left tens of thousands dead.

Al-Azhar has tried to distance itself from Islamic fundamentalists, in 2001 branding the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Centre as heretics. But its alumni include many militants, including Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings; Hassan al Banna, one of the founders of the banned Egyptian group, the Muslim Brotherhood; and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders of Hamas.

Source : The Telegraph

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Tajikistan asks the students to return home to avoid redical islamic teachings.

Tajikistan has forcefully repatriated more than 100 students from Egypt in a bid to stop them being drawn into radical Islam.