SAFER | The South Asia Foundation for Education Reform

ATLANTA (AP) — Two American-born teens forced by their father to attend a religious school in Pakistan for nearly four years have returned home to Atlanta after a documentary filmmaker pushed for their release.

Noor and Mahboob Khan, now 17 and 16, arrived in Atlanta late Thursday from Jamia Binoria, a prominent madrassa in Karachi. The boys are featured in a new documentary “Karachi Kids” by filmmaker Imran Raza, set to be released next week.

The boys’ father, Fazal Khan, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he sent them to the madrassa because he wanted them exposed to Islam. He said he had tried to bring his sons home but the boys couldn’t get exit visas.

“I sent a ticket. But I couldn’t get the paperwork,” he told the Journal-Constitution on Wednesday. “I’m responsible for my children.”

A woman who identified herself as the boys’ sister answered the phone at the family’s Norcross home Friday afternoon. She said her father and brothers weren’t home and declined to comment further to The Associated Press.

Raza had been working to get the boys home when U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, got involved. In a July 4 visit to Pakistan, he asked President Pervez Musharraf to release the Khan brothers.

The teens were sent home just a few days later.

Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman Richard Kolko declined to say whether the agency is questioning the Khan brothers. He said earlier in an e-mailed statement that the FBI helped coordinate the boys’ return in conjunction with the U.S. State Department.

In a statement posted on the documentary’s Web site on Thursday, Raza said he is grateful that Noor and Mahboob are home.

He said hundreds more American children remain in Pakistani madrassas — many of which are considered extremist Muslim schools that indoctrinate students with radical beliefs.

“This pipeline to jihad must be closed,” Raza wrote on the Web site. Raza did not immediately return a call for comment by The Associated Press.

Raza traveled to Karachi after the July 7, 2005, terrorist attack in London that killed 52 subway and bus passengers. There he found Noor and Mahboob, who had come to the school the previous year.

The documentary follows the brothers, showing how their schooling affects them.

In the documentary’s trailer, a young Noor talks about missing his home and family. He says waking up every day and realizing he’s in Pakistan is like “a big punch.”

“You don’t know how badly I want to go back,” he says. “If there was a plane right now, I’d just go step on it and go back to America.”

But after a couple of years in the madrassa, Noor says he is glad his father sent him to the school. He says he doesn’t believe Muslims were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“Not one Jew died that day. That is what they say,” he says in the film.

Ericka Pertierra, a producer for the documentary, said she hopes to help Noor and Mahboob reacclimate to living in the United States. After becoming involved in the film, Pertierra founded the South Asian Foundation for Education Reform to bring attention to radical madrassas recruiting and indoctrinating American boys with radical ideology.

She said she’s identified 200 American boys in 22 madrassas, but there are many more madrassas in Pakistan.

“Noor and Mahboob are just the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

From the Associated Press.  Article by Dorie Turner on July 11th, 2008.

Two teenage American boys finally arrived in Atlanta recently after being forced to spend four years in a radical Pakistani religious school that recruits for the Taliban.

Noor Elahi Khan and his younger brother Mahboob were tricked into traveling to Karachi by their Pakistani-American father, a taxi driver from Atlanta. He enrolled them in the Jamia Binoria, a school famed for its connection to the Taliban and other radical Pakistani jihadi groups.

For nearly four years the boys were taught rote memorization of the Qur’an and the narrow sectarian outlook of their school. Their case became known only when Pakistani-American filmmaker Imran Raza discovered them in 2005 while filming; he later undertook their rescue.

The story of the Khan brothers illustrates a little-known problem that is much bigger than these two boys.

The brothers are “the tip of the iceberg,” says Erika Pertierra, who, with Raza, produced a documentary film about the boys called “Karachi Kids” (the scenes of the boys are moving, although the film is overwrought). Eighty other Americans are currently studying at Jamia Binoria, according to its headmaster. As many as 600 Americans may be studying in Pakistani madrassas (the term for religious schools), Pertierra says.

What will these students do, one must ask, when they return to the United States?

After 9/11, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf pledged to modernize the curriculum of the schools. His project didn’t make much of a dent. One of the 2005 subway bombers in London, a Pakistani-Briton, briefly studied in a madrassa. When that became known, Musharraf pledged to deny foreign students visas, a pledge not kept.

The scope of the madrassa problem is smaller than some believe, but still very worrying. Only 1 percent to 3 percent of Pakistanis study in madrassas full time, according to data in Christine Fair’s benchmark 2008 study, “The Madrassa Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan.”

Some terrorism experts, such as Peter Bergen, say involvement of madrassa graduates in the worst anti-Western terror attacks has been rare. The World Trade Center hijackers were mainly well-educated Saudis.

Yet those figures don’t give reason to relax about Pakistani madrassas — or the Americans who study there.

Fair fears that, as the numbers of suicide bombers increase in Afghanistan, recruitment may shift more to Pakistani madrassas.

She also worries that some U.S. students in madrassas may become ripe targets for recruiters. “If you need someone who could get into the U.S. easily,” she says, holders of U.S. passports in Pakistani madrassas fit the bill.

How should U.S. officials address this problem? The answer is tricky: Parents can choose their children’s education, and the Khan boys’ father wanted it to be along traditional religious lines.

Meantime, Noor Elahi Khan has lost four years of high school and has few good options. Film producer Pertierra is seeking a way to get Noor the education he’s missed. She’s also started the South Asia Foundation for Education Reform to raise awareness about the need for reform of radical madrassas, and about the American boys there. You can learn more at www.safereform.org.

©2008, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  She can be reached at trubin@phillynews.com.

Karachi - Pakistan’s immigration authorities issued immediate deportation orders Monday for an American girl awaiting an uncertain destiny holed up in a fundamentalist Islamic seminary.

Muna Abanur Mohammed is among the eight students at Jamia Binora, a leading madressa in southern port city Karachi, who were placed on a black-list last month by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, due to the expiration of their religious education visas to study Koran.

‘Yes we have received the deportation orders but we will not hand her over,’ Maulana Mufti Mohammed Naeemi, founder and head of the madressa, a 12-acre sprawling walled compound seminary, told Deutsche Presse-Aguntur dpa.

‘No one could dare come near a one mile radius of our compound,’ he said.

Senior immigration officers at state Federal Investigation Agency, requesting anonymity, said they had no immediate instructions from the federal authorities to carry out any swoop against the madressa to remove students holed up inside.

Meanwhile, a US embassy official in Islamabad said they were closely watching the situation.

‘We are aware and monitoring the situation,’ Press Attache Megan Eliss said.

A madressa insider told dpa that the US embassy was in constant touch with the girl.

So far, out of the eight students, two American teens, known as the Khan brothers, were removed last week by US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Pakistani authorities and sent back to Atlanta, Georgia, following the intervention by US Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas.

Both brothers were evacuated following a documentary ‘Karachi Kids’ shown by US-based Fox Television, which claimed that teens were forced to study at Jamia Binoria.

Naeemi said the madressa would try its level best to negotiate with the Pakistan government for an extension of Muna’s visa.

But he could not say how long he would manage to violate Pakistan’s writ by holding the girl at his seminary.

The other five students who have also been served deportation orders include four girl students from Thailand and one male from Fiji.

Article published by South Asia News on July 21, 2008

Dear Congressman McCaul,

I want to express my sincere appreciation to you for your efforts to expedite the homecoming of Atlanta brothers, Noor and Mahboob Khan. During our April meeting in your Washington office, I expressed my deep concern about the health and welfare of these boys who have now been living in the Pakistani madrassa, Jamai Binoria, for almost four years. Your initiative and bold steps to take this issue directly to President Musharaff will undoubtedly enhance our efforts at the South Asia Foundation for Education Reform (SAFER).

SAFER, as you know, is committed to the safe passage and re-acclimation of the Khan brothers upon their return to the United States. While they have received an extensive religious education, memorizing the Quran and developing an awareness of their ancestral homeland, they have been deprived the priviledge of a well-rounded scholastic education. Well after the Khan boys return to their home and family in Atlanta, SAFER will be working to encourage madrassa reform on a grand scale. This includes addressing the issue of hundreds of U.S. and other non-Pakistani children living in madrassas and ensuring that all children attending these Islamic schools are offered broader academic opportunities.

Congressman, thank you again for your support.

Sincerely,

Ericka Pertierra
Founder