Pakistani madrasas refuse to expel last few foreigners

KARACHI, July 25 (Reuters) Islamic seminaries in Pakistan pledged today to resist moves to expel foreign students, a year after the government said they would all be sent home as part of a drive to counter religious extremism and terrorism.

President Pervez Musharraf decided in the wake of the July 7 bomb blasts in London that all foreigners studying at Islamic schools, known as madrasas, should leave by the end of 2005, as their presence was giving Pakistan a bad reputation as a breeding ground for militancy.

The government later relaxed the deadline in a compromise with clerics in charge of the madrasas, but the authorities have recently turned down extensions to students' visas and threatened them with deportation.

''We will not hand them over at any cost,'' Mohammad Hanif Jallandari, a cleric at the Ittehad-e-Tanzeemaul Madaris, an alliance of madrasas, told a news conference in Karachi.

When Musharraf issued orders for foreigners studying in madrasas to go home, he said there were over 1,000 in the country.

Authorities say most have left but there are still 200 in Pakistan, mostly studying in Islamic schools in Karachi.

Jallandari said madrasas were not taking any new foreign students.

Pakistan has about 12,000 madrasas, which provide education, shelter and food to boys from poor families. But a few are suspected of being teaching militancy.

The number of foreign students at madrasas fell sharply when Pakistan imposed tougher visa rules after joining the US-led war on terrorism following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

The country saw a spectacular rise in the number of madrasas in the 1980s, when the schools, backed by funding from the West and Arab countries, became recruiting grounds for Islamic volunteers fighting Soviet forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.

REUTERS PKS KP1942