Slow learning curve at Pakistan's
madrassas By Ron
Synovitz
When Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf announced plans to reform the country's 10,000
madrassas almost two years ago, he said the move
was necessary because some of the private Islamic
schools had become breeding grounds for "intolerance and
hatred".
Reports now suggest, however, that
there have been few changes at the most radical
madrassas, the religious schools that spawned
Afghanistan's Taliban movement.
To be fair,
International Crisis Group terrorism expert Najum
Mushtaq says it is wrong to label Pakistan's entire
madrassa sector as a hotbed of Islamic extremism.
"We should make no generalizations about
madrassas," he said. "Madrassas are of so
many kinds. To associate militancy with madrassas
is only to avoid the real issue, which is that the
Pakistani state has been promoting religious extremism
itself - initially with the help of the West [to stop
the spread of communism from Afghanistan during the
1980s], and then on its own as a tool of Pakistan's
military strategy and defense strategy. Madrassas
were, at best, a pawn in the game of religious
extremism. And [even] that [refers] to a very small
section of madrassas."
Pakistan's
government last month approved more than US$100 million
for madrassas participating in the modernization
program. About 80 percent of an estimated 10,000
madrassas are to receive those funds - meaning 20
percent of the madrassas have not met Islamabad's
reform criteria. According to a World Bank study, that
is about the same number of madrassas that were
sending their students to camps for military training
when Musharraf's reform program was launched.
A
recent report in Britain's Daily Telegraph has drawn
attention to the situation by focusing on the Dar
ul-Uloom Islamia madrassa in the town of
Charsadda. Situated in the remote mountains near the
border with Afghanistan, the school instructed future
leaders in Afghanistan's Taliban regime, such as
commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, who is high on the United
States' most-wanted list in Afghanistan.
Indeed,
the Taliban movement began with students who attended
the religious schools in Pakistan. A recent European
Union report says that as many as 30 percent of the
Taliban's fighters attended madrassas such as Dar
ul-Uloom Islamia.
Dar ul-Uloom leader Maulana
Gouhar Shah admitted that his madrassa sent
volunteers to fight on the side of the Taliban against
US forces in Afghanistan in late 2001. Shah said his
students and staff are "still weeping" because of the
collapse of the Taliban. Shah, a religious conservative
who also is a member of Pakistan's parliament,
acknowledged that his madrassa had not changed
its fundamentalist program since the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, in the United States.
Supporters of the madrassa system say
that most are charitable religious schools that have
helped raise the literacy rate in Pakistan. Millions of
poor Pakistanis and refugees from Afghanistan never
would have had access to an education if the
madrassas did not exist. But Musharraf says
children who get free religious schooling at the
madrassas often grow up with few skills beyond
the ability to lead prayers at a mosque.
Musharraf's reform scheme calls for modern
disciplines such as English, science, mathematics,
economics, and even computer science. The plan aims to
curtail the enrollment of foreign students and to block
funding - both from Islamabad and from abroad - for
madrassas that fail to register and adhere to the
modern curriculum. The scheme also calls for
madrassas to stop sending students to military
training camps.
Three "model" madrassas
were established in Pakistan last year using government
funds. But so far the most radical madrassas
appear to be rejecting the example. Instead, they
continue to teach from a medieval syllabus that rejects
"Western science" as un-Islamic.
Critics note
that the reform plan allows the current madrassa
managers and teachers to retain their posts. Crucially,
the program is not compulsory. And some conservative
Islamist groups continue to oppose government
interference in the curriculum.
Shortly after
Musharraf approved the plan, the US-based Center for
Contemporary Conflict said it would take years for any
positive effects to be seen.
Arnaud de
Borchgrave, director of the Transnational Threats
Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic
and International Studies, says the shortsighted
policies of the US during the 1980s led to a
proliferation of madrassas in Pakistan. The
legacy of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan is
"all the things that [the United States] had set up to
fight the Soviets - such as the encouragement to
Islamist fundamentalists to set up madrassas
along that [Pakistan-Afghanistan] border - not so much
to be emulated nationwide, but to set up an ideological
barrier against what was feared to be the penetration of
communist ideology into Pakistan", de Borchgrave said.
Unlike Mushtaq, de Borchgrave considers
Pakistan's madrassa sector, as a whole, to be a
potential source of Islamic extremism. "To this very day
now, you have madrassas that have spread all over
Pakistan which were originally encouraged by the United
States and Saudi Arabia," he said. "They are churning
out hundreds of thousands of kids - about an estimated
700,000 this year from about 10,000 madrassas -
all still paid for by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia
to the tune of about $300 million a year. And that is
the clear and present danger. Not Iraq. Iraq was a clear
and distant danger."
Other recent international
studies are critical of madrassas that focus
solely on Islamic teachings. Some madrassas use
texts from the 11th century to teach medicine and others
teach mathematics based only on the works of the ancient
Greeks more than 2,300 years ago.
Pakistani
Education Minister Zobaida Jalal told BBC World recently
that it is "the wrong perception" all over the world
that madrassas are responsible for breeding
fanatics and extremists in Pakistan. "Let me tell you
that's the wrong perception. The madrassas don't
breed any kind of extremists in the country. Actually,
it's once these children get out of madrassas.
It's organizations, certain organizations, which have
recruited them," Zobaida said.
However, she
admitted that the government was trying to bring
madrassas into the mainstream. "The major program
that the government has put into place ... we are going
to implement. We are devolving back to the provinces.
Eight thousand madrassas in the country have been
targeted over the next three years for this [financial]
support. We are now going to bring them into the
mainstream of education."
Copyright 2004
RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington, DC 20036.
