ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 24 — Dressed from head to toe in an all-enveloping black burka, Umm-e-Okasha joined a pack of students from her militant Islamic school on Friday night, and at midnight they drove to a massage parlor here in the Pakistani capital and rang the bell.
“There were about 25 Chinese women, dressed only in underpants and bras,” recalled Ms. Okasha, 24, a muscular high-school badminton champion who had shed her black garb for soft mauves, her face uncovered, during an interview inside the women-only confines of the school. “They scattered, but we managed to grab five.”
The vigilantes, including students from an affiliated school for men, shoved the skimpily clad Chinese masseuses into a car, gave them shawls for modesty and hauled them back to the school as hostages, she said.
Under pressure from Pakistan’s government, concerned about maintaining its friendly relations with China, the school released the Chinese masseuses on Saturday afternoon, less than 24 hours later.
The episode was just the latest brazen escapade in a campaign by Jamia Hafsa, the women’s boarding school, and its sprawling separate male counterpart, Jamia Faridia, to embarrass the government of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who is considered a close ally by the United States in the fight against terrorism.
The students’ effort is being led by the heirs of a famed preacher of jihad, Maulana Muhammad Abdullah, who was assassinated in the mid-1990s at the Red Mosque, which is adjacent to the school.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the preacher’s younger son who leads the men’s school, known as a madrasa, is carrying out the campaign with his older brother, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, who succeeded their father as the chief cleric at the Red Mosque. The older brother’s wife, Umm Hassan, runs the women’s school. They have the backing of Pakistan’s religious parties, a factor that gives them clout in their battle against General Musharraf.
The leaders of this campaign admire the Taliban, the ousted rulers of neighboring Afghanistan, who have a growing presence in Pakistan’s border regions. They also say they are friendly with Al Qaeda, whose leaders are suspected to be in the border region as well. The heirs regularly denounce the Musharraf government for being secular and accuse it of being corrupt and a lackey of the United States.
Such pronouncements are not unusual from Islamists in Pakistan. But the school, a complex of shabby, white-painted buildings, is almost cheek by jowl with Parliament, right under the nose of the military-led government.
In efforts to taunt the authorities, the school leaders organized a sit-in at a children’s library by the burka-clad women from the school. Government security officers called in to dislodge the protesters have been thwarted. In March, the students abducted three Pakistani women accused of running a brothel and held them for several days. Last month, students from the men’s school barricaded three policemen inside the school, releasing them only after a government security posse threatened to storm the building.
On several occasions, the black-clad women have appeared outside the compound wielding bamboo batons, and to multiply the feeling of menace, similarly dressed students have stood, clearly visible from the road, on the balconies of the school.
But capturing the Chinese citizens appeared to be a step too far for a movement that so far has been able to outwit the government. After the Chinese ambassador, Luo Zhaohui, intervened, the Interior Ministry issued a statement saying the students’ behavior had “exceeded all limits.”
On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Ghazi, the leader of the men’s division of the madrasa, said the masseuses had been freed on the grounds that the authorities had pledged to close down the capital’s brothels.
But he defended the raid. “It is the duty of the government to stop the massage parlors,” he said at a news conference. “Since the government is not doing it, it is the responsibility of society to do it. We have no other choice.”
Mr. Ghazi, dressed in a white turban and flowing white tunic, implied that the massage parlor was a brothel, saying that a massage cost the equivalent of about $20, and “extras” about $10. “If you want massage treatment, men should go to men, and women should go to women,” he said.
In an interview, Mr. Ghazi, 43, a graduate in history of Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, gave a taste of his political views. A Shariah state, which would operate under Islamic law, was a necessity for Pakistan, he said, because the current rulers had failed to provide for the people.
His college-age students asked “many times,” he said, about the legitimacy of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing was justifiable against American soldiers. “It depends on the circumstances,” he said. “In a supermarket I will say no. Suicide bombing against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, I will say yes, yes. It’s not suicide. It’s a mission, then it’s allowed.”
“We say it is not allowed in Pakistan. It’s allowed in Afghanistan if they want to attack the allied forces.” He added: “If they ask us, we answer. We don’t order them.”
At the wing for the women next door, the principal, Ms. Hassan, 38, a woman of soft voice but firm views, said she presided over about 4,500 students ranging in age from 7 to their early 20s. The principal goal, she said, was to produce “true Muslim girls.” The basic curriculum focused on Koranic teachings.
During a brief tour of the school building, girls squatted on the floor of classrooms memorizing texts. In one class, the students had a simple biology text. They recited to themselves passages about the fertilization of flowers but seemed to have little comprehension of the subject.
In a large second-floor room, about 200 girls from 9 to 15 years old, dressed in white with white shawls over their heads, sat on the floor with Islamic texts on their laps, their heads bowed as they listened to a male voice reciting Koranic verses piped through a loudspeaker.
At night, the girls sleep on mats on the floor of the classrooms. Some of the younger girls looked unhealthy, with mottled skin and fragile bodies. A teacher explained that because the students did not pay fees, and the government did not lend support, the school could not afford proper dormitories for the girls.
Ms. Hassan, her face absent of makeup but her fingernails and toenails varnished with red, said she was proud of her raiders.
“I said to the students before they went off, ‘The Chinese are masters at karate; you don’t know how to make one kick.’ But they were able to manage.”
Her girls, she said, were setting an example. “The government is a lazy mother,” she said. “We’re doing these things for them.”
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