Pakistani graduate physics student sees hand of Allah.

Pervez Hoodbhoy lives every day with the consequences of the lack of public education in Pakistan. An MIT-trained professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he was speaking to a graduate-level class in physics a few days after the huge earthquake that devastated Kashmir in 2005, describing the geophysical forces that produced the disaster. "When I finished, hands shot up all over the room," he recalls. "'Professor, you are wrong,' my students said. 'That earthquake was the wrath of God.'"

This, he says, is the legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose education ministry issued guidelines on bringing an Islamic perspective to science and other subjects in the public schools. "The Zia Generation has come of age," he says. "It isn't Islamic to teach that earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates. Instead, you are supposed to say, by the will of Allah, an earthquake happens."

In short, the analytical tools that allowed humans to harness steam, electricity, and Beanie Baby manufacturing count for nothing in the mind of this student in this Islamic university.

And these people want to rule the world.

"Pakistan | The nation's efforts to straddle the fault line between moderate and militant Islam offer a cautionary tale for the post-9/11 world." Intelligence, 8/29/07 (emphasis added) quoting "Struggle for the Soul of Pakistan." By Don Belt, National Geographic, September 2007.