Tashfeen Malik Attended Conservative Religious School In Pakistan

Multan, Pakistan: The Pakistani woman who carried out the mass shooting in California along with her husband last week had earlier spent a year studying at a conservative religious school for women in this southern Pakistani city, officials said Monday.

Officials at the Al Huda center in Multan said that the woman, Tashfeen Malik, enrolled in an 18-month course to study the Quran in 2013, just as she completed a degree in pharmacology at a nearby public university. But she left before finishing the course, telling administrators she was leaving to get married.

A national spokeswoman for Al Huda, an international chain of religious schools geared toward educated and often affluent women, said that Malik stopped her religious studies with the group in May 2014. A few months later, she was granted a K-1 visit that enabled her to travel to the United States, where she married Syed Rizwan Farook, according to U.S. officials.

The couple had a baby girl six months ago. Then, after covertly amassing a stockpile of ammunition and homemade explosives, they attacked a holiday party last week at a social services center in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 21, the authorities say.

Critics in Pakistan have long accused Al Huda, which urges women to cover their faces and study the Quran, of spreading a more conservative strain of Islam. But it has never been directly linked to jihadi violence.

Still, confirmation that Malik had studied with the group offers a new clue to her disposition in the years before she left Pakistan for the United States.

Malik took the Al Huda course around the time that she finished her studies in pharmacology at the city's Bahauddin Zakariya University. At Al Huda's local office - a large white building on a spacious compound in an upmarket residential neighborhood - the coordinator, Alia Qamar, described her as a typical student.

"She said she was leaving to get married," said Qamar, who spoke to a reporter while wearing a black niqab that exposed only her eyes. "Had she completed our course, I'm sure nothing like this would have happened."

Qamar said she thought Malik started at the school in 2012. But Farrukh Chaudhry, a national spokeswoman for the organization who spoke by phone from Karachi, said records indicated that Malik enrolled with Al Huda on April 17, 2013, and left on May 3, 2014.

At the morning courses, Malik and fellow students studied and interpreted the Quran - a typical course at Al Huda, which focuses heavily on Islamic scripture. "Quran for all; in every hand, every heart," reads the slogan on the group's website.

Before leaving in May 2014, Malik had requested information about completing her studies by correspondence, Chaudhry added. "We sent her the documents by email but never heard back," she said.

Al Huda, founded in 1994, draws much of its support from women from educated, relatively affluent backgrounds. Typically, some women turn to the group after their children have grown up, sometimes causing friction inside their families as less pious family members complain of being pressured to conform with a more conservative family lifestyle.

"They are trained to be activists and reformers, bringing people back to what they call the 'real' Islam, true and pure," said Faiza Mushtaq, an assistant professor of sociology at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, who did her Ph.D. on Al Huda.

The group also provides charitable services such as the provision of education scholarships and a marriage bureau to help religious parents find a suitable spouse for their children.

The organization's founder, Farhat Hashmi, is based in Canada but enjoys a large following in Pakistan, which has grown partly through the astute use of social media. Qamar, the coordinator in Multan, said she had just returned from a talk being given by Hashmi in Sahiwal, another town in Punjab, earlier on Monday.

Officials with the group emphasize that, while conservative, it has no links to violence. Critics largely accept that idea, while countering that it fosters a dangerously narrow mindset.

"Religious conservatism and piety are not the only thing institutions like Al Huda spread," said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, now at the Hudson Institute in Washington. "Their teachings have a strong dose of 'Muslims are destined to lead the world' and 'the corrupt West must be confronted.'"

Still, Al Huda's narrow worldview does not explain Malik's transformation into a gun-wielding killer, said Mushtaq, the sociologist.

"Yes, Al Huda teaches women to be narrow and doctrinaire. But there's little in the classroom that explains why a woman like Tashfeen Malik would take up arms," she said.

Al Huda supporters insist they are a model of transparency. "We have nothing to hide - that's why we are welcoming anyone to come and ask questions here," said Qamar Zaman Sheikh, a businessman and the husband of the Al Huda coordinator in Multan.

"Whatever Tashfeen Malik allegedly did is an individual act," said Chaudhry, the national spokeswoman. "We have nothing to do with it."