Explaining how much had been done to integrate Jewish society in the UK through teaching in seminaries, he said: "I don't think that has been done with other ethnic minority communities.
Citizens held vigils in cities around the country, including outside parliament in Islamabad, voicing demands that included the arrest of a notorious Taliban-sympathising mullah in the capital, the regulation of religious seminaries and the end of the misuse of Pakistan's much-criticised blasphemy laws.
Even during the present crackdown, the visitor to its seminaries quickly encounters a spectrum of clerical opinions on everything from velayat-e faqih to the wearing of the hijab to relations with Israel and America.
Places at the few state-funded Muslim schools that exist are oversubscribed: there were 17 bids per place at one establishment in Birmingham.Whether they go to a night school linked to a mosque or to a full-time Muslim college (like the 16 boarding "seminaries" run by the purist Deobandi school of South Asian Islam), young British Muslims devote many hours to learning their faith.
Mr Rafsanjani, for instance, says the society, is an exceptional cleric with widespread popular appeal.Pushing the clerics out of electoral politics and back into their secluded seminaries is advocated by progressive religious intellectuals as a way of ensuring the long-term health of the Islamic system.
Conservative Baptists, who maintain that every word of the Bible is literally true, had been consolidating power for a decade as SBC presidents appointed inerrantists to the boards of seminaries and agencies.
Government offices and seminaries on Martyr Street, which the locals call Time To Have Fun Street, are dwarfed by the multi-storey Pearl shopping mall, where the female mannequins wear tight jeans.
Many of them have withdrawn to seminaries and retain little say in the day-to-day management of the economy and foreign affairs, though they are still consulted on matters of principle.
Since 1988, the number of Orthodox parishes has nearly trebled to 19,000; the number of seminaries has increased ninefold to 26; the number of monasteries has increased 25-fold to nearly 500.
Many of the haredi families are poor, because the men choose to study in religious seminaries rather than work.
Among future priests at Russia's (brimful) seminaries, there is a mischievous nickname for women who seek their company—Hochu-Bit-Matuchki, or "I want to be a priest's wife..."....
