Editor's note: Nadene Ghouri's Radio 4 programme about John Butt from a couple of weeks ago now has a melancholy postscript. On Tuesday, bombers struck the university he founded in Jalalabad. The programme is no longer available on the iPlayer so I've republished it here, in full. In this blog post, Nadene brings the story up to date - SB

An Islamic university run by former British hippie turned Islamic scholar John Butt, was bombed by the taliban on Tuesday. The attack came just two weeks after John Butt was profiled on Radio 4 in My Story - the Imam of Peace (listen to the whole programme below).

The programme revealed how John, now 60 years old, had gone to live in the often lawless Afghan/Pakistan border region in 1969 as a 19 year-old hippie. When the other hippies returned home he stayed on living among the Pashtun tribes who inhabit the region. He adopted the Pashtun's ancient tribal codes and became fluent in the language. He converted to Islam and is the only Western man ever to graduate from South Asia 's largest Madrassa, Darul Uloom Deoband as a fully fledged Imam.

However, the attack on the university, known as Jamiyat'al-Uloom, was not entirely unexpected. Over the last few weeks so-called night-letters (threatening letters sent at night and in secret) have been distributed in Jalalabad targeting those who work at the university, warning students not to attend and denouncing John Butt as a Christian missionary.

John Butt told the BBC he had welcomed the awareness the radio programme had created about the university and did not think airing the programme was related to the attacks:

Unfortunately anyone who works for peace in Afghanistan is going to be subject to attacks like these. But the voices of peace and moderation must be heard, whatever the personal risks.

During the making of the programme, he said:

We are trying to strengthen Islamic learning and promote a peaceful non-violent theology. To take a life is a sin. I look at those who do that so easily and wonder how far removed from true Islam they are.

The bomb, which appeared to have been set off by remote-control, was left in a water-cooler next to the gate of the building. No one was seriously injured in the attack, which caused considerable structural damage. The latest attack comes eight months after an similar bomb attack on a media training centre - also run by John Butt in jalabad.

In My Story John told how in recent years he saw the Pashtun way of life he had come to love become contaminated by a more militant hard-line ideology. He decided to fight back for his adopted culture by mobilsing young tribal men and women to work with him to promote their old culture over newer more hardline ideas; setting up a radio station broadcast messages of peace and solutions to conflict; and spearheading the formation of a new Islamic university to promote a non-violent theology and give a platform to moderates.

But as the hippie turned peace campaigner, his message of non-violent jihad has set him on a direct collision course with the Taliban and other militants who promote holy war, and who now seek to kill him. When asked in My Story if he feared he would be killed, he replied: "You only die once and I could hit by a bus tomorrow. But if I do die in the cause of doing good for humanity and promoting true Islam will be a good death."

Nadene Ghouri presented The Imam of Peace

• Read Nadene's story about John Butt on the BBC News web site and listen to the despatch she recorded for From Our Own Correspondent.
• The Guardian covered the story of the bombing. Butt wrote an article about Islamic learning in Afghanistan for the Hindustan Times at the end of January.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qt55

The message on my voicemail was garbled. Not surprising perhaps, as the producer was speaking over a dodgy satellite phone connection and was not in the calmest of moods. Something about the Taleban, risky flights, the Pakistani intelligence services and an 18-hour road trip through the notorious Northwest Frontier Province.

It's this kind of thing that makes the job of editing Crossing Continents interesting. Interesting in the sense of alarming, worrying, nerve-wracking and guilt-inducing. I spend rather a lot of my time sitting in a glass box (not quite an office, more like a goldfish bowl) in White City where nothing very dangerous is likely to happen. Although I suppose you could get a nasty scald from a cup of tea.

Meanwhile I send some of the world's best radio documentary journalists off to some very nasty places indeed. Places where nasty things happen to people, including journalists and their contacts. Earlier this year, presenter Lucy Ash and producer Nick Sturdee went to Chechnya and interviewed a human rights worker, Natalya Estimirova. She took them to a field and showed them where the bodies of some young women had been found. The women had been bundled into cars and then murdered. A few days after the interview, Natalya herself was bundled into a car and murdered. Natalia's colleagues believe she was murdered in retaliation for her many years investigating human rights abuses.

Now I had a producer in one of the remotest bits of Pakistan on the trail of a story that had turned very weird. Nothing had gone according to plan. Promised permits had not turned up. An institution they wanted to visit had been blown up by the Pakistani military. Helpful associates proved to have dubious connections. Intelligence agents wanted to take away the recordings. And here I was in my glass box, trying to make sure that my producer got back safely.

Luckily I had a security blanket. A detailed risk assessment - a score of pages long - which the producer had compiled with help from the BBC's high risk team (an amazing bunch), the Islamabad Bureau, the head of the World Service's Urdu service and some streetwise BBC contacts on the ground. I carried the risk assessment with me everywhere in my backpack. The official reason was to keep the emergency numbers in case I needed to ring them. The real reason is that it's a talisman.

And I reminded myself that the producer had wanted to go. She'd found the story she was pursuing and she knew that she was under no pressure from me. If she wanted to ditch the project and bail out at any time, she had carte blanche to do so. And we had procedures in place for the producer to call and text both me and the Islamabad office. I thought back to our series of detailed conversations over several months about the practicality and safety of the project - and how we'd talked it over forwards and backwards here in the goldfish bowl.

So despite the garbled message I calmed down. And I'm happy to say the producer is now back in the UK. Now another team is on location in another potentially dangerous part of the world. And I'm carrying their risk assessment around with me in my backpack again.

Hugh Levinson is producer of Crossing Continents

• Crossing Continents returned last week with The Congo Connection. Peter Greste investigates a ruthless militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is controlled by political leaders living in freedom in Europe. Listen again here.
• The picture, Karakoram Highway (Pakistan 1999) is by Bianca and is used under licence.