The Literature of Lashkar-E-Tayyaba: Deadly Lines of Control

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In this volume, C. Christine Fair and Safina Ustad have painstakingly gathered and translated a representative collection of innumerable writings of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (The Army of the Pure). Documents such as Hum Jihad Kyon Kar Rahen Hain? ('Why Are We Waging Jihad?") and Difa-i-Jihad (In Defence of Jihad) clearly lay out the organization's under- standing of jihad, and when it must be fought and by whom. Other publications translated in this volume, such as Mujahid ki Azaan (The Mujahid's Call), Ghaziyan-i-Saf-Shikan (Noble Warriors and Battlefronts), and Hum Maen Lashkar-e-Tayyaba Ki (We, the Mothers of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba), provide insight into how the organization recruits adherents to its cause and what kind of operations they claim to conduct.

Many of the texts in this volume explain the root of the organization's opposition to other religious traditions in the country. Shahrah-i-Bahisht (Highway to Heaven) by Amir Hamza is dedicated to revealing the heterodox practices associated with popular mystical traditions in Pakistan, while Masalah-yi takfir aur is ke usul o zavabit (The Problem of Takfir and its Principles and Regulations) takes aim at organizations which engage in the dangerous practice of takfir, by which they declare Muslims to be apostates and subsequently subject them to lethal violence. Kashmir Manzil Dur Nahin (Destination Kashmir is Nigh) by Ali Imran Shaheen typifies the organization's approach to the history of the region, the narratives it propagates about the nature of the Kashmir dispute as well as what it wants its readers to believe about Indian Hindus, and the nature of the Indian state itself.

Fair and Stead’s volume is timely. Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (The Army of the Pure) remains the most important Pakistan-based jihadi organization operating in South Asia. Scholars believe it enjoys the fullest sup- port of the Pakistani establishment, something conceded by Pakistan's former president and army chief, Pervez Musharraf.

This volume is the culmination of more than thirteen years of work. The authors first met in 2010 in the context of a project on Pakistani political violence with Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Jacob Shapiro, C. Christine Fair, and Jenna Jordan. After the project's completion, we began focusing on the large collection of materials which Fair began collecting as a student in Pakistan during the 1995-1996 academic year while studying Urdu at the Berkeley-Urdu Language Program in Pakistan and during numerous trips to Pakistan until August 2013.

We collected the materials presented here through a combination of visits to Pakistan over several decades, as well as the inter-library loan facilities at Georgetown and Harvard Universities and the Library of Congress. Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service generously provided substantial resources for this effort for which we are profoundly grateful. Without this financial support over many years, this project would not have been possible. To this end, we thank the recently deceased James Reardon-Anderson and Anthony Amend in particular. Additionally, we are extremely indebted to the Security Studies Program within the School of Foreign Service which provided research assistant support as well. The substantial funding from the School of Foreign Service also made possible the book In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, which draws extensively from the publications included here. In this sense, this current book can be seen as the source material for In Their Own Words.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT, also known as Jamaat ud Dawah, JuD), a terrorist organization based in Pakistan, is the deadliest Islamist militant organization operating in India, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in South Asia and beyond. While former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf admitted repeatedly that the state explicitly used groups like LeT and other groups operating in Kashmir, the Pakistani state denies such sup- port. Although there is considerable scholarship on its history and operations, few scholars have exploited the organization's vast publications. This volume is the first scholarly effort to curate a sample of LeT's Urdu-language publications and then translate them into English for the scholarly community studying this group and related organizations. The original texts were written and published by Dar-ul-Andlus (which exclusively publishes LeT's books, pamphlets, posters, speeches, etc.) with the explicit intention of diffusing the group's ideology, raising funds, and cultivating volunteers for the organization. It is our hope that by rendering this group's materials more accessible we can contribute to the myriad efforts to combat such groups and the violence they perpetrate. What's in a Name? While international attention to LeT is relatively new, the organization itself is not. It coalesced in the late 1980s in Afghanistan when Zaki-ur- Rehman Lakhvi merged his Ahl-e-Hadees militant group with another Ahl-e-Hadees organization, Jamaat ud Dawah (JuD, Organization for Proselytization), which Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Zafar Iqbal es- tablished. The organization that ensued from this merger was known as the Markaz-ud-Dawah-wal-Irshad (MDI, Centre for Preaching and Guidance).