Drugs rehab - Pakistan madrassa style

Failures in British drug policy yet again delivers a boost to extremism, this time helping recruitment as well as finance and logistics.

Urfan Azad was a heroin dealer and an addict. He was introduced to me as a former gangster. He had been feared and respected on his home turf in Reading, Berkshire, UK. Ten years ago, Urfan reached rock bottom. He was almost killed in a knife attack by rival dealers and he was desperate to change his life. He felt unable to get the help he needed from British drug services. So Urfan decided to seek alternative therapy in Pakistan, at a madrassa, an Islamic religious school.

Urfan recalled how each day began long before dawn with a roll call, then prayer. "Two o'clock in the morning was not a good time for drug dealers to get up in the UK," he said with a wry smile. "To get spiritually started in the morning, we used to chant so loud. It was as if we were releasing our illness from ourselves. It sounded like horses galloping."

As a punishment for sleeping in, he was once forced to strip down to his waist in the pouring rain, run up to the top of the mountain and sit there for eight hours. "That soon broke my 'gangster' drug dealer attitude," he said.

Urfan said not everyone managed to kick the habit. But for him the important thing was the combination of discipline, religious learning and prayer. "You are continuously practising your religion. All day, all night. Sooner or later God helps you."

Then Urfan revealed another side to the madrassa. He pointed to a flat surface the size of a football pitch along the mountain slope. It was here that the addicts and criminals were given military training, he says. "We were taught to crawl on the ground with guns. They made me strip an AK-47 and put it back together again."