Education
Born John Butt in Trinidad in 1950, his early life was spent in Walton-on-Thames, England and he attended boarding school at the Stonyhurst College, before becoming a hippie and travelling to Pakistan.
Born John Butt in Trinidad in 1950, his early life was spent in Walton-on-Thames, England and he attended boarding school at the Stonyhurst College, before becoming a hippie and travelling to Pakistan.
Arriving in Swat in 1969, he was impressed by the tribal way of life and (unlike most of his fellow hippies) settled in the area, learning Pashto and Dari (he speaks a total of seven languages). He then spent eight years studying at Darul Uloom Deoband, graduating in 1984, the only Westerner to do so since its foundation in 1866. He left Swat in 2010 when his house was washed away by floods.
In 1993 he worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation World Service to create a new Pashto and Dari radio soap opera.
Loosely based upon the format of The Archers, British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4"s long-running series, New Home New Life became so popular that it has been credited with influencing the Taliban not to press ahead with plans to outlaw radio. In response, he established the Pak/Afghan Cross-border Radio Training and Production (Pact) project in 2004, producing the Across the Border programme to confront what he saw as Islamic extremism.
lieutenant makes perfect sense. There is currently nowhere in Afghanistan where a young man can do higher Islamic studies.
They go to Pakistan, where as we know some of them have become radicalised.
