His Lal Masjid isn’t red anymore — the government has repainted it limestone yellow and the minarets and the dome are white. “They wanted to wash away the blood and the smoke and the soot on the walls... but, can you just whitewash blood-stained walls,” he asks.

The Lal Masjid, once the centre for hardline Deobandi teachings, now just holds prayer services. The almost two-acre Jamia Hafsa madarsa complex has been razed to the ground completely.

His aide, Syed Ali Hussain, a telecom engineering student from Islamabad’s Jamia Hamdard, says, “We don’t know how many of our brothers and sisters are buried beneath this ground. There were around 3,000 students... even if we subtract 1,300 young men and women who surrendered, there are still 1,700 students missing.”

The Maulana describes “possession of weapons including rocket launchers and machine guns” as pure government propaganda, but says, “there were 13-14 guns in the seminary for self-defence... and according to UN guidelines, one can keep weapons for self-defence”.

The Maulana adds that “violence always begets violence, it never achieves peace”. “The siege of Lal Masjid was not an action, but a reaction... in our Islamic traditions, there is no room for violence,” he says.

On whether he supports “suicide bombing”, the cleric doesn’t give a straight answer. “The Ulemas who are engaged in jehad are better placed to answer this question, but we have to see the root cause of why people turn to suicidal missions.”

As for the current civil unrest following Benazir’s death, he says, “All this is happening because the nation is deviating from Islamic traditions and practices.”