Hafiz Muhammad Saeed

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed (born June 5, 1950, Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan) cofounder of several Islamic organizations in Pakistan that followed the Ahl-e-Hadith school of thought, a Muslim reform movement rooted in the works of Shāh Wālī Allāh and influenced by the Wahhābī movement in Saudi Arabia. Most notable among these organizations were the militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba and the charity organization Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

Early life and activism

Saeed was born in the city of Sargodha in Pakistan’s Punjab province a few years after the 1947 partition, when his family left Shimla in northwestern India. He became well-learned in Arabic and Islamic Studies, obtaining a postgraduate degree from the University of the Punjab and becoming a lecturer at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. He continued his study at King Saud University in Riyadh, and, upon returning to Pakistan in the late 1970s, he was appointed to serve on the Council of Islamic Ideology, an advisory council to the Pakistani government.

In the mid-1980s Saeed cofounded an organization for the proselytization of the Ahl-e-Hadith movement. It later merged with a group led by Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi that was fighting Soviet forces in the Afghan War (1978–92), forming the Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad in 1986. Its militant wing became known as Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Leadership in Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa

In the 1990s Lashkar-e-Taiba began focusing its operations on the Kashmir region, especially the portion administered by India known as Jammu and Kashmir. After the organization’s participation in a 2001 attack on the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s legislature, Pakistan banned the organization and arrested and briefly detained Saeed. Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad was dissolved, and Saeed reorganized its charitable assets into Jamaat-ud-Dawa, allowing him to deny any continued involvement in Lashkar-e-Taiba. Nonetheless, many observers, including India, the United States, and the United Nations, came to conclude that Jamaat-ud-Dawa never severed its connections to Lashkar-e-Taiba.

International scrutiny of Saeed, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jamaat-ud-Dawa intensified after the 2006 Mumbai train bombings were connected to Lashkar-e-Taiba and again after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, whose perpetrators were believed to have been trained for the attack by Lashkar-e-Taiba after being recruited by members of Jamaat-ud-Dawa. In the weeks following the 2008 attacks, the United Nations designated Saeed an international terrorist.

Although he was detained and placed under house arrest for brief periods throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Pakistan claimed difficulty in finding direct evidence of Saeed’s involvement in terrorism, and he largely remained free and active in the country’s socio-political realm. In 2017 he founded the Milli Muslim League (MML) political party to contest the 2018 parliamentary elections, but the party was prevented from running after the United States listed it as a terrorist organization. Shortly before the election, however, Saeed backed the Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek party, and MML candidates ran under its banner, though the party failed to win any seats in the legislature.

In 2019 an attack in Pulwama in India-administered Jammu and Kashmir brought Pakistan and India to their worst tensions in decades, and Pakistan implemented a broad crackdown on suspected militants in response. Although not implicated in that attack, Jamaat-ud-Dawa was banned, Saeed was arrested, and in 2020 he was convicted on multiple charges of involvement with a proscribed organization. In the years that followed, he was convicted of other charges related to terrorism.