Pakistan intel officials say Malik attended religious school

Al-Huda’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, now living in Canada, has been criticized for promoting a conservative strain of Islam.

We do know, as my colleague Shawn Jeffords reports, that Hashmi made waves with her conservative teachings of Islam.

A fellow student told AFP that Malik lived in the university accommodation for two years before moving in with her mother and her sister. Friends and family have said no one saw signs of any transformation into ruthless killers. “They converted and started to insult us, saying we do not believe in the oneness of Allah because of our love for saints”.

“This is the first that we are learning of such allegations and are as deeply disturbed as anyone”, Haq added.

Malik was born in Pakistan to an educated and powerful political family, including a cousin of her father who was once a government minister.

But that hardly made her unique in southern Pakistan, particularly after she had spent most of her life in Saudi Arabia, and the timing and circumstances of her shift into militancy remain a mystery to investigators.

Tashfeen Malik, 29, was enrolled in 2013 at the Al-Huda Institute in Multan, which targets middle-class women seeking to come closer to Islam and also has offices in the U.S., the UAE, India and the United Kingdom, said Imran Amir, an administration official at the seminary.

In a chilling twist, authorities also disclosed that a year before the rampage, Syed Farook’s co-workers at the county health department underwent “active shooter” training in the same conference room where he and his wife opened fire on them last week. The school has no known links to extremists, and in Pakistan it is popular among upper-middle class and urban women.

“We had no contact with her afterwards”, said the official, who declined to give her name, citing a school policy. Malik said she was going to get married and move to America, and promised to complete her studies by mail correspondence, but that never happened, Chaudhry said. On both trips, she came to visit her family, once in 2008 for several weeks and the second time in 2013 for four months.

Hashmi says the Al-Huda International Welfare Foundation denounces extremism, violence and acts of terrorism and can not be held responsible “for personal acts of any of our students”.

Pakistani authorities have also been looking into Malik’s time in Multan. “She did engage with male classmates but was mostly reserved with us”, he said.

“These are teachings that are very relevant to Muslims all around the world”, he said.

“We don’t want Muslims to do such things”.

University spokesman Babar Khaqaan said the university was involved in the “promotion of good values”, and he condemned Malik’s actions.

Deobandis and hardliners say the Barelvi traditions of visiting shrines, honouring deceased “saints” and listening to Sufi devotional music that characterised Islam in South Asia for centuries is blasphemous. “Who knows what compelled her to do what she did?”

Hashmi says “it seems” Malik “was unable to understand the lovely message” of the Quran.

The U.S. government has said there was vigorous vetting of her background, including in-person interviews, fingerprints, checks against terrorists watch lists and reviews of her family members, travel history and places where she lived and worked.

They include “be grateful to your husband, remind yourself your husband works very hard to provide for you, be sensitive to his moods, feelings and needs, be cheerful and humorous, smile often, express your love frequently and creatively, and make sure you serve him the foods he likes”.

The investigation into the jihadist couple who massacred 14 people in San Bernardino last week is pointing to Pakistan as the likely source of the pair’s radicalization, a development that threatens to expose once again the tenuous relations between the US and the country accused of once harboring Al Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Usama bin Laden.

– with files from the Associated Press.