Woman in Deadly Shooting Attended Islamic Religious School

Investigators suspect that Malik, who went to the United States on a fiancee’s visa and spent extended periods of time in both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, may have radicalised her husband.

Al-Huda said in a statement that it has no links to any “extremist regime” and seeks to promote a “peaceful message of Islam and denounce extremism, violence and acts of terrorism”.

Arif Rafiq, an analyst at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said her attendance “suggests that she had embraced a more modern yet austere variant of Islam”.

Pakistani authorities have also been looking into Malik’s time in Multan.

Washington Post correspondents came to what is believed to be the epicenter of Sunni extremism after it emerged that Chicago-born Pakistani-American Farooq may have followed his wife, student Tashfeen Malik, to the US. Former classmate Afsheen Butt said Malik showed drastic changes after a trip to Saudi Arabia in late 2008 or early 2009, and distributed Islamic religious literature.

The Al Huda Institute Canada condemned the attack by Tashfeen Malik and her husband – which left 14 people dead and 21 wounded – and expressed concerns about a possible backlash against the foundation, which has been criticized for teaching a particularly conservative strain of Islam.

The FBI has said it’s investigating the shooting at a holiday gathering of Farook’s co-workers as an act of terrorism.

Al-Huda, founded in 1994, is one of the most well-known female madrassas in the country where religious seminaries are thought to teach hundreds of thousands of students each year.

But for all that, there was little in her biography to make Malik stand out from others of her generation, said Paracha, the Dawn journalist.

Behind him, a group of young men played guitar by a fountain, while women in full face veils sat chatting with male students at a nearby table.

But that doesn’t mean members of Al-Huda go on to become terrorists, said Mohammad Amir Rana, a terrorism expert at the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies.

India has asked Saudi Arabia for travel details of Tashfeen Malik, the Pakistani woman suspect in the California mass shooting, after Saudi authorities claimed that she had travelled to India in 2013.

“My brother’s family cut off all relations with us 30 years over an inheritance feud”, said Malik’s step-aunt Hifza Bibi, a schoolteacher. Requesting anonymity, a Bahauddin Zakariya University teacher said Tafsheen was a bright student and got positions in her examinations.

Mr Rabbani said his brother (Tashfeen’s father) was a normal Barelvi Muslim, but might have taken interest in Salafi Islam in Saudi Arabia.

Bodwich said the bureau doesn’t know when or whether anyone else radicalized them.

While studying to be a pharmacist, Malik also enrolled at Al-Huda, a madrassa where she would spend her evenings.

The investigations so far, she said, has not thrown indication of why the couple picked up guns and became murderers.

Malik’s family allegedly has roots in the Punjabi area where they had political weight and ties with some local extremists.