| |
Medievalism and Pakistan's
madrassas
By Nadeem
Iqbal
ISLAMABAD - To win the favor of heaven,
45-year-old Muhammad Mazhar, a taxi driver, enrolled his
youngest son in a religious seminary, or
madrassa, and his eldest in a secular school.
Today, Mazhar's eldest son, 20, is in the first year of
a chartered accountancy course, considered a good career
in this South Asian country. His youngest son, 15, is
learning the Koran by rote.
By sending at least
one male child to religious education, Mazhar is
following a rural tradition prevalent among poor
families and earning the blessing of Allah. Also, room
and board at the madrassa is free, an important
consideration. But is Mazhar doing the right thing by
his son?
That is a question that has taken on
new importance as Pakistan grapples with the meaning of
religious identity and education in the aftermath of
September 11. Part of that self-examination process has
taken the form of a movement aimed at reforming the
madrassa tradition of religious education. It is
time, say some officials and experts, to improve both
the quality of education at madrassas and to
encourage more enrollment in the mainstream schools.
But reforming religious education is far from a
simple matter. Currently there are some one million to
1.7 million students enrolled in madrassas in
Pakistan, most of them between the ages of five to 18
and from poor families.
Some students are eager
to learn more subjects. Fourteen-year-old Abdul Ghafar,
who goes to the Shah Faisal Jamai Islamiamadrassa
here, says he is studying how to interpret the Koran and
use it in everyday problems. But "a student must also be
studying English and science", he says.
In fact,
for the country's top poet Ahmad Faraz, many
madrassas are beyond reform. "These
madrassa should be abolished and an option be
given to students in the secular schools that whoever
wants to get special Islamic education could opt for
those subjects," says Faraz, who also heads the National
Book Foundation that prepares textbooks.
So far,
the government's most recent effort, over more than
eight months, to make the teaching methods in some
10,000 Islamic schools "market intensive" flopped. It is
caught between two forces: a religious clergy lobby and
calls for reforms under international pressure in the
post-September 11 environment.
Attempts to
reform the madrassas are far from new, and under
the current military government include a law passed in
August last year that created a Madrassa Education
Board.
That law aims to have Islamic education
along with subjects of general education system, while
maintaining its autonomous character. The law requires
the registration, regulation, standardization and
uniformity of curricula and standards
inmadrassas.
An education official said
that the program of introducing new curriculum in
madrassas - the result of a survey of religious
schools - was in fact devised in 2000.
But
reform efforts today have been complicated by pressures
from abroad. Sensing foreign and Western forces behind
current reforms, the religious lobby in Pakistan is
digging in. There was also some controversy about the
reforms with the resignation as religious minister in
early August of Dr Mehmood Ghazi.
Ghazi quit
after he failed to bring the religious lobby on board a
draft law that would introduce registration of
madrassas with the government and scrutiny of the
foreign funds they receive, which mostly comes from Arab
countries. The registration of madrassas is
actually part of the Madrassa Board ordinance
passed last year.
The government also asked the
religious schools to teach English and science, for
which it promised to provide textbooks and teachers on
the state's payroll.
The reforms would also bar
schools from teaching religious hatred or extremism,
prevent them from enrolling foreign students below the
age of 18 and require them to receive official clearance
before enrolling any older foreign student.
These are part of the government's efforts to
curb religious extremism, which President General Pervez
Musharraf in August called a scourge on Pakistan and
Islam. Pakistan's interior ministry estimates that 10 to
15 percent of madrassas might have links with
internal sectarian strife or militant, terrorist
activities outside, and in the past they gave birth to
the Taliban.
The World Bank in Pakistan's
Country Assistance Strategy, issued in June, estimates
that 15 to 20 percent of religious schools are involved
in military-related training or teachings.
In an
interview, Ghazi declined to say that he resigned
because of his failure to push religious education
reforms. But of the religious lobby, he says, "They have
certain reservations regarding future independence and
autonomy of religious education."
Wary of a
backlash, the government did not promulgate the
registration law at once but made the draft public and
said it would be enforced within a week. Still,
objections from the religious lobby forced it to defer
the plan indefinitely.
Now this task has been
assigned to the interior ministry, headed by a retired
army general. That brings to four the ministries
involved in madrassa reform, apart from the
foreign office, the religious ministry and the education
ministry.
In early August, a meeting with
religious leaders convened by Interior Minister
Moinuddin Haider set up a committee of three government
representatives and six ulama (scholars) to
review the proposed law. No deadline was set for
amending it.
Mufti Munibur Rahman, a spokesman
for the Alliance of Religious Schools, says that the
committee was told that the religious leadership would
not accept restrictions on the religious schools'
independence. He said that curbing the admission of
foreign students below the age of 18 years old would
harm Pakistan's status as an Islamic state.
But
in a July report, the International Crisis Group (ICG)
said that reforming religious schools was not only about
religion or curbing extremism, but the larger goal of
giving relevant education to Pakistanis.
"Madrassas have a long history in
Pakistan and in Muslim societies generally," its report
said. "They serve socially important proposes and it is
reasonable for a government to seek to modernize and
adapt rather than eliminate them."
The report,
titled "Madrassa, Extremism and the Military",
recommended that foreign aid to Pakistani education
stress the rebuilding of a secular system that had been
allowed to decay for three decades. It added, "Militancy
is only a part of the madrassa problem. The
phenomenon of jihad is independent of madrassas
and most jihadis do not come from these schools.
"Pro-jihad madrassas only play a
supporting role mainly as a recruiting ground for
militant movements. Most madrassas do not impart
military training or education, but they do sow the
seeds of extremism in the minds of the students."
(Inter Press Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
