
I’d wager Tafsheen Malik knows a tad more about Islam than Obama (who insisted last night she did not represent Islam).
MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) — The woman who carried out last week’s mass shooting in California with her husband had attended an Islamic religious school or madrassa while she was living in Pakistan, intelligence officials and the school said Monday.
Few details have emerged about Tashfeen Malik’s life in Pakistan, where she lived from 2007 to 2014 before she left for the United States on a fiancee visa. Malik studied pharmacy at the Bahauddin Zakariya University in the central city of Multan where she got a degree in 2013.
While in Multan, she also attended a religious school, which Pakistani intelligence officials on Monday identified it as the Al-Huda International Seminary. The school is a women-only madrassa with a chain across Pakistan and branches in the U.S. and Canada, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
Al-Huda’s founder, Farhat Hashmi, who now lives in Canada, has been criticized for promoting a conservative strain of Islam, though the school has no known links to extremists. In Pakistan, it is mostly popular among upper middle class and urban Pakistani women interested in Islamic studies.
Malik spent more than a year at Al-Huda, taking classes six days a week, the school’s spokeswoman Farrukh Chaudhry told The Associated Press.
She enrolled in a two-year course to learn the Muslim holy book, Quran, its translation and interpretation but did not finish the course, Chaudhry added. Malik was a student there from April 17, 2013 until May 3, 2014, when she handed in her last paper in the first-year curriculum, the spokeswoman said.
