Shooter attended Muslim school which has a branch in the GTA
Pakistani founder of Mississsauga madrassa lived in Canada: Officials
MULTAN, PAKISTAN— The woman who carried out last week’s mass shooting in California with her husband had attended an Islamic religious school, or madrassa, founded by a Pakistani scholar who once lived in Canada, intelligence officials and the school said Monday.
Few details have emerged about Tashfeen Malik’s life in Pakistan, where she lived from 2007 to 2014 before heading to the United States on a fiancée visa.
Malik studied pharmacy at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the central city of Multan, where she got a degree in 2013.
While in Multan, she also attended a religious school, which Pakistani intelligence officials on Monday identified as the Al-Huda International Seminary. The school is a women-only madrassa with branches across Pakistan and in the U.S. and Canada, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
The Al-Huda Institute Canada, located in Mississauga, was founded in 2005 by Farhat Hashmi, a Pakistani scholar who lived in Canada at one point but hasn’t resided in the country “for many years,” said Imran Haq, the institute’s operations manager.
“Religious conservatism is one thing. You have people who are conservative in all faiths,” said Haq. “Extremism is something completely separate and there is absolutely no strain of that here.”
In Pakistan, the school is popular among upper-middle class and urban women interested in Islamic studies.
The region where the school is located, however, is home to thousands of extremist seminaries, with hundreds of them linked to Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan, which supports Islamist militants battling archrival India in the disputed region of Kashmir and is widely believed to have ties to insurgents in Afghanistan, has long turned a blind eye to institutions that teach radical interpretations of Islam.
Malik spent more than a year at Al-Huda, taking classes six days a week, the school’s spokeswoman, Farrukh Chaudhry, told The Associated Press.