Travelling on a plane to London in 2011, I spent most of my time studying a detailed research paper authored by Mathew J. Nelson, a distinguished lecturer of Political Science at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the UK.

I had been invited to London by a South Asian student body at SOAS for a talk on the cultural aspects of contemporary Pakistani politics and youth. I was hoping to meet Mr Nelson at SOAS whose paper, ‘Religion, Politics and the Modern University in Pakistan and Bangladesh’, had convincingly contextualised a rough thesis that was taking shape in my mind at the time.

Whereas I had first come across Nelson’s paper in late 2010, it had originally appeared in 2009. It was one of the first academic attempts to suggest that the universal narrative and understanding of the rise of religious extremism in Muslim countries as being something entirely linked to the fall-out of madressah education, poverty and illiteracy, was just one aspect triggering the radicalisation of large sections of Muslim societies, especially in developing countries.

In 2009, a lecturer in UK pointed out the blurring lines between evangelical groups and the more clandestine, violent ones

Nelson warned that this was a somewhat myopic mode of understanding the thorny phenomenon of religious extremism in these countries, because his research (of various private and public-sector universities of Pakistan and Bangladesh), had produced certain findings, signifying that those trying to comprehend the issue of religious extremism might be being a tad too simplistic in their approach.

Though agreeing that many madressahs in Pakistan and Bangladesh (ever since the 1980s) have played a role in molding militant mindsets, Nelson’s research concluded that the understanding needed to be stretched beyond the confines of madressahs.

Today, as Pakistan stands reeling from the shock of watching perfectly ‘normal’ and educated middle-class students and professionals being arrested for their alleged involvement in a number of gruesome acts of terror (in the name of faith), Nelson, in his 2009 paper, was advising experts to turn their attention towards this segment of society.

When his team of researchers went around various private and public universities in Pakistan and Bangladesh (between 2008 and 2009), they discovered that the conventional dynamics of student politics in these universities had eroded. The erosion had created a vacuum in which a whole generation of young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis now found themselves engaging with various new enigmatic players (all of them religious).

Till the early 1970s, most universities in Pakistan were hotbeds of leftist and liberal politics. Enrollment to these universities grew two-fold from 1969 onwards, and most of the new entrants came from conservative towns and small cities.

Alienated by the rhetoric of the left groups, and by the fact that in the 1970s these groups had begun to splinter, a large number of the new entrants became natural constituents of right-wing student outfits.

One of the most organised among these was the Islami Jamiat Tulaba (IJT), the student-wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami. The IJT did well to deliver various services through the student unions. Incidents of violence were low and differences between student groups were resolved through annual student union elections.

But things in this respect began to change quickly after the emergence of the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship in July 1977 — especially after Pakistan agreed to become the launching pad for Afghan insurgents fighting against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.

It is correct to suggest that some of the strongest seeds of religious militancy and extremism in Pakistan were sown during the Zia regime (1977-88). These seeds produced a culture which encouraged resolution of conflict through violence.

Student politics was one of the first entities in the country to be engulfed by such a culture, and violence between student groups between 1977 and 1984 produced dozens of casualties.

Unfortunately, this is the portion of student politics that has lingered in the minds of young Pakistanis from the mid-1990s onwards.

Then, the mushrooming of private universities undermined the importance public-sector universities had once enjoyed. The private universities kept conventional student outfits out. But, as Nelson observes, the administrations of most of these universities did not discourage the entry of religious groups who were (till the 1990s) completely absent from public-sector campuses.

The new groups were largely evangelical in nature. When in 2008, I was conducting research (for a paper on the historical evolution of student politics in Pakistan), I heard various lecturers and administrators of private universities in Karachi and Lahore suggest that the evangelical groups were apolitical and good for the ‘spiritual nourishment’ of the students.

It cannot be out-rightly proposed that the presence on campuses of such evangelical groups is the main reason behind the conservative nature of the two post-90s’ generations of Pakistani college and university students.

But when this presence is coupled with the proliferation of the myopic ideological narrative developed by the state (from the late 1970s onwards), along with the constant attacks ideas such as democracy face in the populist media, it becomes easier to figure out just why the last two generations of college and university students in Pakistan have been so conservative.

And, as we can now see, one can also determine why many educated and urban young Pakistanis have become so vulnerable to the pull of ideas that gradually tug them out of the space provided to them by the evangelical groups and into a realm that is far more violent and worrisome.

This is what Nelson was foreseeing six years ago. The blurring of the line that separates evangelical groups from the more clandestine and violent ones. Nelson’s concern was that universities in this region just might end up becoming recruiting grounds for those bent on committing and facilitating violence in the name of faith. He observed that they might be looking for young men and women who were a far cry from the archetypal madressah students.

Nelson concluded that the rise of extremism (in South Asia) should now be understood as something that has gone ‘beyond the madressah’. He insisted that the conventional idea which stated that acts of religious terror are only extensions of economic deprivation, should now take second place. The focus should be on the more problematic phenomenon of well-to-do, urban middle-classes being radicalised by environments constructed by the administrations of universities who are (willingly or otherwise) unable to comprehend that the evangelical groups just might be generating more notorious byproducts.

Ironically, these environments were proudly created (by facilitating evangelical groups) as a way to keep away the violence of conventional student politics. But as we have now seen, this environment has uncannily begun to produce violence of a completely different, and even more worrisome, nature.

It is blurring the line between demonstrations of piety and sheer terror by men and women who are supposed to be seen as sophisticated models of intellectual enlightenment, ideological refinement and professional success.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, December 27th, 2015