By Iqbal Hamza
The British didn’t just colonize Muslim lands. They engineered a curriculum. And that curriculum lives on, quietly, in the minds of every Pakistani general who has ever pinned on his stars. By the time an officer reaches that rank, something has been hollowed out in him. No red lines. No moral compass. Just an addiction to dollars, a slavish devotion to the West, a gift for playing both sides, and an insatiable hunger for power.
These generals have sold Islam, the pulpit, the faith, the nation, the people, hundreds of times over, whenever the price was right. When Western money came calling, they handed over Muslims without flinching, without shame. They traded every Islamic and humanitarian principle they ever claimed to hold. They even sold one of their own, Aafia Siddiqui, a Muslim woman, a Pakistani, to the Americans.
When the “war on terror” dollars started flowing and they needed to perform for their patrons, they launched an assault on Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa, in the heart of Islamabad, of all places. They demolished the mosque. They martyred dozens of Muslim women. All of it, every bit of it, was theater, performed to please Western applause and collect the payment that followed.
This is what the British curriculum produces: men who feel nothing, who understand nothing of spiritual value or moral worth.
Power and money. That’s the whole ledger. Over the past two and a half decades, no commodity has proven more profitable for Pakistan’s generals than Islam itself, and its scholars. From Arab states, they collect riyals in the name of Islamic brotherhood. From the West, they collect dollars in the name of fighting Islamic extremism. They’ve turned the faith into a revenue stream, and its learned men into inventory.
Hundreds of scholars have been killed on their orders in that same period, some executed openly, others disappeared quietly. From Maulana Hassan Jan to Sheikh Naseeb Khan, from Maulana Sami-ul-Haq to the recent targeting of Sheikh Idrees Sahib, look closely at any of these cases and you’ll find the fingerprints of the Pakistani generals.
Ask yourself: why has no senior general ever been assassinated by these so-called unknown gunmen? Why do the deaths of these prominent scholars follow such a strikingly similar pattern?
ISIS, a project designed in Washington to discredit jihad and the mujahideen, has now been outsourced to Pakistan. The playbook is simple: kill religious scholars, then pin it on jihadists, and watch as jihad, Islamic governance, and the very concept of a caliphate get dragged through the mud. If the Pakistani military weren’t running the ISIS operation here, then why do these attackers go after scholars instead of soldiers?
So why did the Pakistani generals kill Sheikh Idrees Sahib?
Pakistan is fracturing from within. Public patience with the military regime has finally run out. And when the generals needed a distraction, they did what they always do. They struck Afghanistan. But this time, it backfired. The targets they chose, madrassas, mosques, civilians, a hospital full of patients, then universities and schools, are not legitimate military targets under any legal or moral framework, Islamic or otherwise. The Pakistani public noticed. They drew the obvious conclusion: the TTP, whom these generals call terrorists and use as a pretext for violating Afghan territory, carry themselves with more dignity than the uniformed men of Pakistan.
The generals turned to the scholars for support. Despite pressure and intimidation, the religious community stayed quiet. The endorsement never came.
Two days before Sheikh Idrees Sahib was killed, an audio message of his surfaced. It was clear he was under intense pressure from the military. So they silenced him, partly to keep the secret of that pressure from spreading, and partly for the strategic dividends his death would bring: smearing their opponents, driving a wedge between rival religious factions, and sending a green light to the West that the ISIS project can keep running, that jihad and Islamic governance can keep being tarnished.
Pakistani scholars and ordinary people need to understand what they’re dealing with. This army was not raised on Islamic values. It was raised on a British curriculum, and it has developed a taste for the blood of Pakistan’s own religious scholars. If the people don’t stand against this military regime, the killings won’t stop. More ulema will vanish, one by one, into that same convenient silence.