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Saturday, February 6

New Delhi Emergng as India's Biggest Publication Center For Jihadi Literature

This is an extensive investigative report; here are the opening passages:     

February 5, 2016, MEMRI: New Delhi's Abul Fazl Enclave Emerging As India's Biggest Publication Center For Jihadi Literature – And Antisemitic Literature, Including Book On 'Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion'
By Tufail Ahmad, Director, MEMRI South Asia Studies Project

While global attention is focused on the Pakistan-Afghanistan region as the breeding ground of South Asian jihad, it is actually New Delhi's Abul Fazl Enclave area that has emerged as the global clearinghouse of jihadi literature in Arabic, Urdu, English and Hindi.

Since 9/11, governments across the world have acted against the publication of jihadi books, magazines, and digital literature, but at the same time, a number of Islamist and jihadi publication houses have emerged in Abul Fazl Enclave, surviving right under the nose of the Indian security establishment.

It may be that the jihadi literature published from Abul Fazl Enclave goes undetected because the Indian intelligence agencies have no Urdu-language expertise, or because the Urdu-language staff hired by them turn a blind eye to such literature.

[Pundita note: I find it hard to believe that Indian intelligence agencies don't have enough analysts to translate works written in Urdu.]
  
It appears that Islamist books written by radical Indian writers such as Rashid Shaz are also being published in Arabic from London.

Abul Fazl Enclave is part of Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim region of New Delhi that is the seat of the Jamia Millia Islamia – a government-funded university attended predominantly by Muslims. In this region, Abul Fazl Enclave is the headquarters of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (or Jamaat-e-Islami India). This is South Asia's largest Islamist organization, founded by Maulana Abul A'la Maududi (1903-1979). Maududi was a jihadi ideologue for South Asia, much like Hassan Al-Banna and Syed Qutub were jihadi ideologues for the Middle East and elsewhere. 

Due to the partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, this religious network has the following organizationally unconnected branches: Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, and Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu & Kashmir.

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