PAKISTAN:Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the brother of a cleric arrested leaving the siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, is still inside. Last summer, Political Correspondent Mary Fitzgeraldmet him
One of the things that surprises people most about Lal Masjid is its location. Right in the middle of Pakistan's leafy purpose-built capital, the sprawling pink-walled complex is within walking distance of the national parliament. Just down the road are the offices of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency. Perhaps not quite where you would expect to find a radical pro-Taliban mosque and madrassa in which students learn that jihad is the highest goal.
Lal Masjid is run by Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his brother, Maulana Abdul Aziz, both of whom had been playing a game of dare with Pakistani authorities long before this week's deadly stand-off.
I visited the complex last summer and met Ghazi, a wiry figure dressed in a black turban and pristine salwar kameez. Articulate, razor-sharp and with a puckish sense of humour, his wire-rimmed glasses and grey beard gave him a somewhat professorial air. Next to his bare feet lay a Kalashnikov and a pistol.
We sat on the floor of his study - spartan but well-equipped with phones, computers and fax machines - while a teenage couple waited in the corner for their pre-marriage counselling session conducted by Ghazi. Outside, dozens of young men with wispy beards skulked.
Speaking fluent English, Ghazi boasted of meeting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998 but insisted that he did not agree with the killing of innocent civilians. He wanted to establish an Islamic state based purely on Sharia law in Pakistan, he said, and he outlined why he believed jihad was important: "Christianity says turn the other cheek, Islam says an eye for an eye. Jihad is one of the fundamentals of Islam."
At that time Ghazi and his brother had been declared absconders after the government charged them with inciting a riot when police searched the complex following the London bombings.
When I pointed out the incongruity of their position as wanted men living right under the nose of the authorities in Islamabad, Ghazi laughed.
"The reason they don't come near here to arrest us is because they don't dare," he declared, picking up his Kalashnikov and waving it for extra emphasis. "They know if they enter Lal Masjid we will fight them to the last man."
Ghazi was proud of the adjoining Jamia Hafsa, which he claimed was the largest women-only madrassa in the world. Unlike the Taliban, he was in favour of women's education. "They say if you teach a man, you teach one person, but if you teach a female, you teach a whole family," he said with a smile.
I was allowed to visit the madrassa, a ramshackle collection of musty rooms built around a courtyard. It was hard to believe that the school could fit the thousands of students Ghazi claimed. The girls, mostly drawn from Pakistan's tribal badlands, pressed around me, drawing their veils about themselves and giggling.
As I was leaving, a clumsy drawing of a Kalashnikov caught my eye. Why the gun? I asked. Much giggling ensued before one girl answered that it was because Islam forbade images of living beings. But why not a flower or arabesque? They looked at each other before one piped up: "Because we like guns!"