Know your theocrats: Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba

IJT student activists welcome progressive politician and former cricket star Imran Khan to Punjab University.

Those of us who attended the University of Iowa might remember the terrifyingly-named Campus Crusade for Christ, a Christian student group devoted largely to making t-shirts and organizing church retreats where, it can be presumed, absolutely no one got handjobs. In America, our campus religious groups are pretty harmless, and still we find them vaguely inappropriate. In Pakistan, their campus religious groups beat people with bicycle chains, and they are allowed to run the teacher’s union. That’s the news from this LA Times report on Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, who slapped a male philosophy student at Punjab University for talking to a female student. After the philosophy department organized a protest, the IJT responded by attacking their dormitory in the middle of the night. Then nothing happened because, as the principal of Punjab university put it, the IJT runs “a parallel administration.”

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