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In the name of
Allah
By Nadeem Malik
"If Allah assists you, then there is
none that can overcome you, and if He forsakes
you, who is there then that can assist you after
Him? And on Allah should the believers rely."
- The Holy Koran 3:160
ISLAMABAD - A day
begins with prayers before sunrise at a
madrassa (Islamic seminary). Young students
sitting cross-legged rock back and forth reciting
verses from the Holy Koran. They pledge unity and
entreat success for the ummah (the Muslim
people).
Near the Khyber Pass, Darul Uloom
Haqania is the most prestigious of many such
schools in the North West Frontier Province city
of Peshawar. Haqania boasts of being the breeding
ground of the entire Taliban leadership. Maulana
Samiul Haq, with henna beard, is the founding
father of this largest South Asian seminary.
There are an estimated 10,000 to 15,000
madrassas across Pakistan. These schools,
largely frequented by destitute Afghans and poor
Pakistanis, are run by individual charities and
rely almost exclusively on donations. During the
Afghan jihad days in the 1980s, the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf states generously financed them. Some
estimates suggest that the CIA also recruited
almost 30,000 jihadis from the Middle East to
fight against the Soviets, and channeled billions
of dollars to run the operation.
The top
Pakistani army brass of military ruler General Zia
ul-Haq promoted these religious schools, which
numbered a mere 1,700 in Pakistan in 1979 at the
start of the Afghan war. Afghan refugees from the
war-ravaged country sent their young ones to these
schools during the jihad days, and even after the
Russians withdrew in 1989.
A World Bank
"Country Assistance Strategies" report on Pakistan
estimated that 15-20% of madrassas are
involved in military-related teaching and
training. The World Bank maintains that the
radicalization process started with their
politicization during the 1980s.
"With
active support from the Zia regime (1977-88),
madaris [madrassas] with extremist
administrations were established along the
Pakistan-Afghan border," the bank stated. The
objective, it said, was to form a cadre of
religiously motivated mujahideen to fight in
Afghanistan and provide political support to Zia's
regime. Degrees from madrassas were made
equivalent to degrees obtained from formal
universities. This, the bank observed, facilitated
recruitment of madrassa students into the
civil service, leading to the state's
accommodation of activities encouraging religious
intolerance and sectarian divisions.
"The
contribution of the mujahideen to the Afghan
victory, poverty, falling standards of public
education, and weak governance, account for much
of the success of the madaris in the
1990s," the bank said. Since they provide free
board and lodging, they became popular with the
parents of poor children.
"Marginalized,
the graduates from the non-mainstream
madaris [those which do not include formal
education curricula] with no career-oriented
education resorted to violence to influence the
country's policies," the report said. Successive
governments have done little to restrain them or
bring them into the mainstream education system.
There are conflicting reports on the
number of students that go to the religious
schools. International organizations, like the
International Crisis Group, put the number at
somewhere between 1 million and 1.7 million. A
detailed of study, "Religious School Enrollment in
Pakistan: A Look at the Data", conducted by Jishnu
Das of the World Bank, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and
Tristan Zajonc of Harvard University and Tahir
Andrabi of Pomona College, found Western media
reports highly exaggerated in terms of the number
of students and religious schools.
It
estimated that less than 1% of school-going
children in Pakistan go to madrassas, a
figure that has remained constant since 2001,
according to the study. Some studies point out
(Berman and Stepanyan 2003) that as a percentage
of total school enrollment, madrassa
enrollment in Pakistan is roughly equivalent to
that in Bangladesh and the Ivory Coast and much
less than in India (two states only) or Indonesia.
The study noted that household data in
Pakistan tell whether a child is enrolled full
time in a madrassa, but not whether the
child goes for just an hour on any given day to
study the Koran. Therefore, the data do not
reconcile full-time with part-time attendees - a
child who attends a public school during the day
and a madrassa in the evening is recorded
as enrolled in a public school.
This is an
important distinction since parents might use some
madrassa- or mosque-based education to
teach their children about religion. The study
indicated that about 200,000 children were
enrolled full time in madrassas before
2001.
"Madrassa enrollment declined
from 1940 to 1980, but increased during the
religion-based resistance to the invasion of
Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979. The largest
jump in madrassa enrollment is for the
cohort aged 10 in the period 1989-93 - coinciding
with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the
rise of the Taliban."
The study noted that
"Pakistan's endemic poverty, widespread corruption
and often ineffective government create
opportunities for Islamist recruitment. Poor
education is a particular concern. Millions of
families, especially those with little money, send
their children to religious schools, or
madrassas. Many of these schools are the
only opportunity available for an education, but
some have been used as incubators for violent
extremism. According to a Karachi's police
commander, there are 859 madrassas teaching
more than 200,000 youngsters in his city alone."
Since September 11, 2001, Pakistan has
launched periodic crackdowns against extremist
groups, also targeting religious schools. This led
to the banning of several armed groups and the
arrests of hundreds of activists. In addition,
half-hearted efforts were made to reform the
madrassa education system.
However,
growing pressure after the July 7 blasts in
London, where three of the bombers were of
Pakistani descent and had visited madrassas
in Pakistan, has led to a new and more crucial
phase, necessitating reforms with real
implementation, like the provision of books,
teachers and funds to introduce new curricula.
However, what Pakistan is being asked to
do is not easy. Pakistani society has suffered
much since offering its support to the US in the
"war on terror", as many sections of society
resent this.
"Few countries suffered as
much from terrorism in 2004 as Pakistan, and few
did as much to combat it," says the latest US
State Department publication on "Country Reports
on Terrorism 2004". The report clearly
acknowledges that Pakistan cracked down (in 2004)
on several groups that had been active in the
Kashmir insurgency, "detaining the head of Harakat
ul-Mujahideen (HUM) for several months and
arranging the extradition of the head of the
Harakat ul-Jihad-I-Islami (HUJI)".
In
Pakistan, the US, under its Anti-Terrorist
Assistance-trained Special Investigation Group
(SIG) arrested members of a terrorist organization
that had twice attempted to assassinate President
General Pervez Musharraf and which had detonated
two car bombs near the US Consulate General in
Karachi. The SIG also arrested 12 terrorists
involved in the attempted assassination of prime
minister-designate Shaukat Aziz.
The State
Department report stated that al-Qaeda had
declared the government of Pakistan to be one of
its main enemies, and called for its overthrow.
The government of Pakistan continues to pursue
al-Qaeda and its allies through counterterrorist
police measures throughout the country and
large-scale military operations in the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the rugged
Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Pakistani
army and Frontier Corps units have launched
operations against al-Qaeda safe havens in South
Waziristan Agency (part of the FATA), killing and
dispersing many militants. "These operations
significantly degraded al-Qaeda's command and
control capabilities in the region, but at a cost
of approximately 200 Pakistani servicemen killed
in action," the report said.
Information-sharing with the United
Kingdom and Pakistan led to the disclosure and
disruption of al-Qaeda plans against US financial
institutions. In 2004, the capture of so-called
al-Qaeda communications expert and Heathrow bomb
plot suspect Naeem Noor Khan was seen as a
significant development.
A report by
United Press International claimed last week that
Pakistan had also permitted detectives from
Scotland Yard to investigate Naeem Noor Khan to
learn about the contacts of the three London
suicide bombers who visited Pakistan.
Two
of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad
Tanweer, flew into the southern city of Karachi
together in November 2004. They spent three months
in the country before heading back to the UK in
February this year. Hasib Hussain arrived in
Karachi in July last year.
The vast
majority of the religious schools in Pakistan are
not involved in militancy. But they represent a
failure of the religious scholars, as well as the
vested interests of the ruling elite, which
constrains these institutions to just basic
religious education. They have failed to meet the
challenges of a transition to modern education.
A recent working paper released by a
leading international financial institution
explained the issue. "The elites will oppose mass
education because the more educated the population
the greater the pressures for democratization, and
the greater the threat to the power of these
privileged groups. Their monopoly position is
dependent on keeping their constituents backward."
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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