Shortly before four British
Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew
themselves up in the London Underground on July 7,
I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack
in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan.
Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering
Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the
most radical of the religious schools called
madrassas.
Many of the Taliban
leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at
this institution. If its teachings have been
blamed for inspiring the brutal,
ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that
that regime presided over, there is no sign that
the Haqqania is
ashamed of its former pupils:
instead, the madrassa's director, Maulana
Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever
the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would
simply close down the madrassa and send his
students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora
Khattack represents everything that US
policymakers most fear and dislike in this region,
a bastion of religious, intellectual, and
sometimes - in the form of the Taliban - military
resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.
A dust storm was blowing as we crossed the
Indus just below the massive ramparts of the
fortress of Attock, once the great bulwark
protecting India against incursions from
Afghanistan. The road was lined with poplars. In
the distance towered the jagged dragons' backs of
the blue Margalla Hills; a graveyard lay to one
side, its green grave flags fluttering in the
breeze. A few kilometers beyond the river stood a
ramshackle line of buildings, all built in a crude
modern concrete version of Mughal architecture.
Washing was hanging up to dry from the roofs and
verandas of the dormitory blocks, and in the main
courtyard students were bustling around. All were
male, all wore turbans, and all were heavily
bearded.
Maulana Sami proved, however, to
be an unexpectedly dapper and cheery figure for a
man supposed to be such an icon of anti-Western
hatred. He wore a blue frock coat of vaguely
Dickensian cut, and his neatly trimmed beard was
raffishly dyed with henna. He had a craggy face, a
large outcrop of nose, and the corners of his eyes
were contoured with laughter lines. I was ushered
into his office and introduced to his two-year-old
granddaughter, who was playing happily with a
yellow helium balloon. I remarked that there did
not seem to be much evidence of the Haqqania
suffering from the crackdown on centers of
radicalism promised by President Pervez Musharraf.
Sami's face lit up:
"That is for American
consumption only," he laughed cheerfully. "It is
only statements to the newspapers. Nothing has
happened."
"So," I asked, "You are not
finding the atmosphere difficult at the moment?"
"We are in a good, strong position,"
replied Sami. "[President George W] Bush has woken
the entire Islamic world. We are grateful to him."
Sami smiled broadly: "Our job now is
propagating Islamic ideology. We give free
education, free clothes and books. We even give
free accommodation. We are the only people giving
the poor education."
Sami paused and his
smile faded: "The people are so desperate," he
said. "They are fed up with the old ways in
Pakistan, with the secular parties and the army.
There is so much corruption. Musharraf only fights
Muslims and follows the wishes of the West. He is
not interested in the people of Pakistan. So now
everyone is looking for Islamic answers - and we
can help provide that. Only our Islamic system
gives justice."
For better or worse, the
sort of change in political attitudes that Sami
ul-Haq has overseen from his madrassa in
Akora Khattack is being reproduced across
Pakistan. An Interior Ministry report after
September 11 revealed that there are now 27 times
as many madrassas in the country as there
were in 1947: from 245 at the time of
independence, the number shot up to 6,870 in 2001.
[1]
A significant proportion of these are
run by, or connected to, the radical Islamist
political parties such as the MMM, which under
Sami's vice presidency have just imposed a
Taliban-like regime on Pakistan's North-West
Frontier Province, banning the public performance
of music and depictions of the human form. The one
exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of
Colonel Sanders outside the new KFC restaurant in
Peshawar. This was apparently because the colonel
was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic
beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed
elsewhere.
The Islamic political parties
are quite clear about the benefits that can accrue
to them by controlling places of education. The
headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Lahore, for
example, doubles as a madrassa where 200
students receive a Koranic education with a
distinctively political spin. On a visit this
summer I found one maulana preaching a sermon on
the subject of Musharraf's obedience to US
dictates and his willingness to abandon the
Taliban. A spokesman for the party told me quite
explicitly: "The political transformation our
madrassas are bringing about is having a
massive effect on the future of Pakistan. The
recent success of the Islamic parties is very much
associated with the work we do in our
madrassas."
Across Pakistan, the
tenor of religious belief has been correspondingly
radicalized: the tolerant Sufi-minded Barelvi form
of Islam is now deeply out of fashion in Pakistan,
overtaken by the sudden rise of the more hardline
and politicized reformist Deobandi, Wahhabi and
Salafi strains of the faith.
The sharp
acceleration in the number of these
madrassas first began under General Zia
ul-Haq at the time of the Afghan jihad in the
1980s, and was financed mainly by the Saudis.
Although some of the madrassas so founded
were little more than single rooms attached to
village mosques, others are now very substantial
institutions: the Dar ul-Uloom in Balochistan, for
example, is now annually enrolling some 1,500
boarders and a further 1,000 day-boys. Altogether
there are possibly as many as 800,000 students in
Pakistan's madrassas: an entire free
Islamic education system running parallel to the
moribund state sector.
A mere 1.8% of
Pakistan's gross domestic product is spent on
government schools. As a result, 15% of the
schools are without a proper building; 40% without
water; 71% without electricity. There is frequent
absenteeism of teachers; indeed many of these
schools exist only on paper. Last year when Imran
Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain turned
politician, investigated the government schools in
his constituency, he found that 20% of those on
the rolls did not exist at all, while 70% of those
that did were semi-permanently closed.
In
education Pakistan is lagging behind India in the
most striking way: in India 65% of the population
is literate, and the number rises every year; in
the new budget, the Indian education system
received a substantial boost of state funds. But
in Pakistan only 42% are literate, and the
proportion is falling. Instead of investing in
education, the Pakistan military government is
spending money on a new fleet of American F-16s
for its air force. The near collapse of government
schooling has meant that many of the country's
poorest people who wish to improve their
children's hope of advancing themselves have no
option but to place the children in the
madrassa system, where they are guaranteed
a rigidly traditional but nonetheless free
education.
Madrassas are probably
now more dominant in Pakistan's educational system
than they are anywhere else; but the general trend
is one that is common throughout the Islamic
world. In Egypt the number of teaching institutes
dependent on the Islamic university of al-Azhar
increased from 1,855 in 1986 to 4,314 10 years
later. The Saudis have stepped up their funding so
that in Tanzania alone they have been spending $1
million a year building new madrassas. In
Mali madrassas now account for a quarter of
the children in primary schools. [2]
Seen
in this wider setting, Sami ul-Haq and his
madrassas raise a number of important
questions: how much are these madrassas the
source of the problems that culminated in the
Islamist attacks of September 11? Are
madrassas simply terrorist factories?
Should the West be pressing US client states like
Pakistan and Egypt simply to close them down?
In the panic-stricken aftermath of the
Islamist attacks on America, the answers to these
questions seemed obvious. Former secretary of
state Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld were not know for their agreement on
matters of foreign policy, but one thing that they
were united on was the threat posed by
madrassas. In 2003, Rumsfeld posed the
question: "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring
and dissuading more terrorists every day than the
madrassas and the radical clerics are
recruiting, training and deploying against us?" A
year later, Powell described madrassas as a
breeding ground "for fundamentalist and
terrorists".
Since the revelations that
three of the four future British Muslim suicide
bombers visited Pakistan in the year preceding the
July 7 attack, the British media have been quick
to follow the US line on madrassas, with
the Sunday Telegraph helpfully translating the
Arabic word madrassa as terrorist "training
school" (it actually means merely "place of
education"), while the Daily Mirror confidently
asserted over a double-page spread that the three
bombers had all enrolled at Pakistani "terror
schools".
In actual fact, it is still
uncertain whether the three bombers visited any
madrassas while they were in Pakistan:
madrassas only entered the debate because
the bombers told their families they were going to
Pakistan to pursue religious studies, just as they
told them they were going to a religious
conference when they set off to bomb London.
According to sources at the prime
minister's offices in Downing Street there is in
fact no evidence that any madrassa was
visited by any members of the cell at any point on
their journey. Still less is there any proof that
madrassas were responsible for
"brainwashing" the trio, as the British media
assumed after the bombings. Instead, there is
considerable evidence to show that the trio were
radicalized in Yorkshire through the Islamist
literature and videos that were available beneath
the counter of their local Islamic bookshop. And
while it is now certain that the group made
contact with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, there is no
reason to assume that a madrassa acted as
the conduit.
In this case, as in so many
others, the link between madrassas and
international terrorism is far from clear-cut, and
new research has been published that has
challenged the much-repeated but intellectually
shaky theory of madrassas being little more
than al-Qaeda training schools.
It is
certainly true that many madrassas are
fundamentalist and literalist in their approach to
the scriptures and that many subscribe to the most
hardline strains of Islamic thought. Few make any
effort to prepare their students to function in a
modern, plural society. It is also true that some
madrassas can be directly linked to Islamic
radicalism and occasionally to outright civil
violence.
Just as there are some
yeshivas in settlements on the West Bank
that have a reputation for violence against
Palestinians, and Serbian monasteries that
sheltered war criminals following the truce in
Bosnia, so it is estimated that as many as 15% of
Pakistan's madrassas preach violent jihad,
while a few have been said to provide covert
military training. Madrassa students took
part in the Afghan and Kashmir jihads, and have
been repeatedly implicated in acts of sectarian
violence, especially against the Shi'ite minority
in Karachi.
It is now becoming very clear,
however, that producing cannon fodder for the
Taliban and educating local sectarian thugs is not
at all the same as producing the kind of
technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who
carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks
on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa,
the World Trade Center and the London Underground.
Indeed, a number of recent studies have
emphasized that there is a fundamental distinction
to be made between madrassa graduates - who
tend to be pious villagers from impoverished
economic backgrounds, possessing little technical
sophistication - and the sort of middle-class,
politically literate global Salafi jihadis who
plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of
these turn out to have secular and technical
backgrounds. Neither Osama bin Laden nor any of
the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on
America or Britain were trained in a
madrassa or was a qualified alim, or
cleric.
The men who planned and carried
out the September 11 attacks have often been
depicted in the press as being "medieval
fanatics". In fact, it would be more accurate to
describe them as confused but highly educated
middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was an
architect; Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's chief of
staff, was a pediatric surgeon; Ziad Jarrah, one
of the founders of the Hamburg cell, was a dental
student who later turned to aircraft engineering;
Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, was a
product of the London School of Economics.
As the French scholar Gille Kepel puts it,
the new breed of global jihadis are not the urban
poor of the third world so much as "the privileged
children of an unlikely marriage between Wahhabism
an Silicon Valley, which [Ayman] al-Zawahiri
visited in the 1990s. They were heirs not only to
jihad and the umma but also to the
electronic revolution and American-style
globalization." [3]
This is also the
conclusion drawn by the most sophisticated
analysis of global jihadis yet published:
Understanding Terror Networks by a former
Central Intelligence Agency official, Marc
Sageman. Sageman examined the records of 172
al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, and his conclusions
have demolished much of the conventional wisdom
about who joins jihadi groups: two thirds of his
sample were middle-class and university-educated;
they are generally technically minded
professionals and several have a PhD. Nor are they
young hotheads: their average age is 26, most of
them are married, and many have children. Only two
appear to be psychotic. Even the ideologues that
influence them are not trained clerics: Sayyid
Qutb, for example, was a journalist. Islamic
terrorism, like its Christian and Jewish
predecessors, is a largely bourgeois enterprise.
Peter Bergen of John Hopkins recently came
to similar conclusions when he published his study
of 75 Islamist terrorists involved in anti-Western
attacks. According to Bergen, 53% of the
terrorists had a university degree, while "only
52% of Americans have been to college." [4]
Against this background, it should not have come
as a surprise that the British Muslim bombers
attended universities and that one drove a
Mercedes.
It is true that there are
several examples of radical madrassa
graduates who have become involved with al-Qaeda:
Maulana Masood Azhar, for example, leader of the
jihadi group called Jaish-e-Muhammad and an
associate of bin Laden, originally studied in the
ultra-militant Binori Town madrassa in
Karachi. A madrassa dropout took part in
last year's bombing of Musharraf's convoy. In
Indonesia, the Bali bombings were the work of the
Lashkar-i-Jihad group, which partially emerged
from a group of Salafi madrassas in
Indonesia.
By and large, however,
madrassa students simply do not have the
technical expertise necessary to carry out the
kind of sophisticated attacks we have recently
seen led by al-Qaeda. Instead the concerns of most
madrassa graduates remain more traditional:
the correct fulfillment of rituals, how to wash
correctly before prayers, and the proper length to
grow a beard. All these matters are part of the
curriculum of Koranic studies in the
madrassas. The graduates are also
interested in opposing what they see as unIslamic
practices such as worshiping at saints' graves or
attending the Shi'ite laments called
marsiyas, for the death of the Prophet's
son-in-law Ali at the battle of Kerbala. [5]
Their focus, in other words, is not on
opposing non-Muslims or the West - the central
concern of the global jihadis - so much as
fostering what they see as proper Islamic behavior
at home, the personal law governing which is a
central subject of madrassa teachings. In
contrast, few al-Qaeda agents seem to have more
than the most perfunctory grasp of Islamic law or
learning. Moreover, there is a growing body of
evidence that bin Laden himself actually despises
what he sees as the nit-picking juridical approach
of the madrassa-educated ulema
(clerics), regarding his own brand of violent
Islamism as a wholly more appropriate answer to
the problems of the Muslim world.
This was
graphically illustrated when, shortly after
September 11, bin Laden told a group of visiting
Saudis that the "youths who conducted the
operations did not accept any fiqh [school
of Islamic law] in the popular term, but they
accepted the fiqh that the Prophet Mohammed
brought". It is a telling quote: bin Laden showing
his impatience with legal training and the
inherited structures of Islamic authority. The
hijackers, he implied, were taking effective
practical action rather than sitting around
discussing legal texts. As such he set himself up
as a challenge to the madrassas and the
ulema, bypassing traditional modes of
religious study and looking directly to the Koran
for guidance.
A brilliant discussion of
bin Laden's usurpation of the role of the
madrassa-based ulema can be found in
the illuminating essay Landscapes of the Jihad, by
Faisal Devji, who teaches at the New School. Devji
points out just how deeply unorthodox bin Laden
is, with his cult of martyrs and frequent talk of
dream and visions, all of which derive from
popular, mystical, and Shi'ite Islamic traditions,
against which the orthodox Sunni ulema have
long struggled. Moreover, bin Laden and his
followers "routinely attack the most venerable
clerics and seminaries, accusing them of being
slaves of apostate regimes ... They also issue
their own legal opinions or fatwas without
possessing the learning or clerical authority to
do so."
All this highlights how lacking in
intellectual sophistication the debate about
al-Qaeda still is. Again and again, we are told
that terrorism is associated with poverty and the
basic, Koranic education provided by
madrassas. We are told that the people who
carry out this work are evil madmen who hate our
wealth and our freedoms, and that no debate is
possible as they "aim to wipe us out" (as one
British cabinet minister told the BBC after the
attacks on London). That the hostility of the
Islamists may have links with US foreign policy in
the Middle East, especially the Anglo-American
adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, is
consistently denied, despite the explicit video
testimony to the contrary by both Zawahiri and
Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the London bombers.
[6]
In reality, al-Qaeda operatives tend
to be highly educated and their aims explicitly
political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiques,
has always been unambiguous about this. As he
laconically remarked in his broadcast timed to
coincide with the last US election, if it was
freedom they were against, al-Qaeda would have
attacked Sweden. The men who planned the September
11 attacks were not products of the traditional
Islamic educational system, even in its most
radical form. Instead they are graduates of
Western-style institutions. They are not at all
the proteges of the mullahs.
Obscured
debate The debate about the alleged links
between madrassas and terrorism has tended
to obscure both the madrassas' long
histories and the differences among them.
Throughout much of Islamic history,
madrassas were the major source of
religious and scientific learning, just as church
schools and the universities were in Europe.
Between the 7th and 12th centuries,
madrassas produced free-thinking luminaries
such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina and al-Khwarizmi. They
also produced America's bestselling poet
throughout the 1990s, the 13th century Sufi mystic
and poet of love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin
Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was trained as a
Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught
Sharia law in a madrassa in Konya. It is
true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought
and spirituality characteristic of the
ulema of his day, but he did so as an
insider, from within the system.
None of
this should be a surprise. In the entire Koran
there are only about 200 verses directly
commanding believers to pray and three times that
number commanding the believers to reflect, to
ponder and to analyze God's magnificence in
nature, plants, stars and the solar system. The
oldest and greatest of all the madrassas,
the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good claim
to being the most sophisticated school in the
entire Mediterranean world during the early Middle
Ages. Indeed the very idea of a university in the
modern sense - a place where students congregate
to study a variety of subjects under a number of
teachers - is generally regarded as an innovation
first developed at al-Azhar.
In The
Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in
Islam and the West, George Makdisi has
demonstrated how terms such as having "fellows"
holding a "chair", or students "reading" a subject
and obtaining "degrees", as well as practices such
as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even
mortar boards, tassels and academic robes, can all
be traced back to the practices of
madrassas.
It was in cities not far
from Islamic Spain and Sicily - Salerno, Naples,
Bologna and Montpellier - that the first
universities in Christendom were developed, while
the very first college in Europe, that of Paris,
was founded by Jocius de Londoniis, a pilgrim
newly returned from the Middle East. [7]
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars
such as Adelard of Bath would travel to the
Islamic world to study the advanced learning
available in the madrassas. Alvaro of
Cordoba, a Mozarab, or Christian living under
Muslim rule, wrote in the 14th century:
My fellow Christians delight in the
poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the
work of Muslim theologians and philosophers, not
in order to refute them, but to acquire a
correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today
can a layman be found who reads Latin
commentaries on Holy scripture? At the mention
of Christian books they disdainfully protest
that such works are unworthy of their
notice.
When the Mongol invasions
destroyed the institutions of learning in the
Islamic heartlands, many learned refugees fled to
Delhi, turning northern India for the first time
into a major center of scholarship. By the time of
the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 16th century, the
curriculum in Indian madrassas blended the
learning of the Islamic Middle East with that of
the teachings of Hindu India, so that Hindu and
Muslim students would together study the Koran (in
Arabic), the Sufi poetry of Sa'adi (in Persian),
and the philosophy of Vedanta (in Sanskrit), as
well as ethics, astronomy, medicine, logic,
history and the natural sciences. Many of the most
brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example,
the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were
the products of madrassas.
However,
following the collapse of Islamic self-confidence
that accompanied the deposition of the last Mughal
emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1858,
disillusioned scholars founded an influential but
narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrassa at
Deoband, a 100 miles north of the former Mughal
capital in Delhi. Feeling that their backs were
against the wall, the madrassa's founders
reacted against what they saw as the degenerate
ways of the old elite. The Deoband madrassa
therefore went back to Koranic basics and
rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European
from the curriculum. [8]
It was,
unfortunately, these puritanical Deobandi
madrassas that spread throughout North
India and Pakistan in the 20th century, and that
particularly benefited from the patronage of
General Zia ul-Haq and his Saudi allies in the
1980s. Ironically, the US also played an important
part in this harnessing of madrassas for
holy war as part of the Afghan jihad, with the CIA
financing the production by the US Agency for
International Development of some notably
bloodthirsty madrassa textbooks "filled",
according to a Washington Post report, "with
violent images and militant Islamic teachings".
One page showed a picture of a jihadi
carrying a gun, but with his head blown off,
accompanied by a Koranic verse and a tribute to
the mujahideen who were "obedient to Allah ...
Such men will sacrifice their wealth and their
life to impose Islamic law." When the Taliban came
to power, these textbooks were distributed for use
in schools. [9] At the height of the Afghan jihad,
Ronald Reagan is said to have praised mujahideen
madrassa students as "the moral equivalent
of the founding fathers [of America]".
It
is certainly true that many madrassas in
Pakistan have an outdated curriculum: some still
teach geometry from Euclid and medicine from
Galen. Emphasis is put on rote learning rather
than the critical study of the Koran, and
considerable prestige is still attached to
becoming a hafiz - knowing the Koran by
heart. Deobandi madrassas teach that the
sun revolves around the earth and some even have
special seating for the invisible Islamic spirits,
the djinns. [10] This is, however, by no
means the case with all madrassas, some of
which are surprisingly sophisticated.
In
Karachi, the largest madrassa is the Dar
ul-Uloom. Its green lawns resemble a cross between
a five-star hotel and a rather upmarket university
campus. It is clean an prosperous-looking:
well-watered gardens and palm trees give onto
smart, well-kept classrooms and computer rooms;
all around, embalmed in scaffolding, new libraries
and dormitories rise from the ground
Inside, the atmosphere was earnest and
scholarly. In room after room, students sat
cross-legged on carpets, reading from Korans that
lay open before them, resting on low wooden
bookstands. In others students were listening
intently as elderly maulanas expounded to
them commentaries on the meaning of verses in the
Koran and the Hadiths, the traditions of the
prophets. A computer room was filled with bearded
men struggling with the mysteries of using Urdu
and Arabic versions of Microsoft Word and Windows
XP; in the senior years, I learned, all essays are
expected to be typewritten on computers and handed
in as printouts. Of course some other
madrassas lack such equipment.
After the beheading of Daniel Pearl, I had
taken the precaution of informing the British
consulate about my movements; but there was
nothing threatening about the Dar ul-Uloom. The
students were almost all eager, friendly and
intelligent, if somewhat intense. When I asked one
bearded student what music he listened to on his
new cassette player, he looked at me with horror:
the machine was only for listening to sermons. All
music was banned.
Puritanical it may be,
but it is clear that the Dar ul-Uloom, like many
Pakistani madrassas, performs an important
service - especially in a country 58% of whose
population, and 72% of whose women, are illiterate
- indeed half of the population never sees the
inside of a school.
Madrassas are
often backward in their educational philosophy,
but they provide the poor with a real hope of
advancing themselves. In certain traditional
subjects - such as rhetoric, logic and
jurisprudence - the teaching can be excellent. And
although they tend to be ultra-conservative, only
a small proportion of them are militant. To close
them down, without first attempting to build up
the state sector, would relegate much of the
population to a state of ignorance. It would also
be tantamount to instructing Muslims to stop
educating themselves about their religion, hardly
the best strategy for winning the war for Muslim
minds.
You don't have to look far from
Pakistan to find a madrassa system that has
effectively engaged with the problems of both
militancy and educational backwardness. For
although India was originally the home of the
Deobandi madrassas, such colleges in India
have no record of producing violent Islamists, and
are strictly apolitical and quietist. Indeed,
several of modern India's greatest scholars - such
as the Mughal historian Muzaffar Alam of the
University of Chicago - are madrassa
graduates.
An important study of the
madrassas of India by the Hindu scholar
Yoginder Sikand, Bastions of the Believers,
demonstrates how forward-looking and dynamic some
madrassas can be. In the southwest Indian
state of Kerala, for example, Sikand found a chain
of educational institutions run by the Mujahid
group of professionals and businessmen which aim
to bridge the differences between modern forms of
knowledge and the Islamic worldview.
The
Mujahid group has been at the forefront of Muslim
women's education in Kerala, and in many of their
madrassas girls outnumber boys by a
considerable margin. Mujahid intellectuals have
written extensively about women's rights from an
Islamic perspective, and Sikand quotes the Zohra
Bi, the principal of one of the group's colleges:
"Islam is wrongly thought of as a religion of
women's oppression," she told him. "Through our
work in the college we want to show that Islam
actually empowers Muslim women."
This
would seem to confirm that it is not
madrassas per se that are the problem so
much as the militant atmosphere and indoctrination
taking place in a handful of notorious centers of
ultra-radicalism, such as the Binori Town
madrassa in Karachi, whose students are
taught that jihadism is legitimate and noble. Some
graduates have allegedly been involved in the
ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan. The question
remains, however, whether Musharraf's government
has the will to carry out the necessary reforms
that would reproduce the success of
madrassas in India.
So far attempts
at reforming Pakistan's more militant
madrassas have proved at best halfhearted.
Immediately after the London bombings there were
around 250 arrests in Pakistani madrassas,
and there have been some attempts at curbing the
attendance of foreign students: an estimated 1,400
non-Pakistanis have been expelled since July. Some
statements have also been made about standardizing
the syllabus and encouraging madrassas to
teach some modern subjects.
However, the
more extreme madrassas have been able to
resist the enforcement of even these mild
measures; recently, fewer than half of Pakistan's
madrassas complied when asked to register
as educational institutions with the authorities.
To date, the Pakistani government, far from having
found ways of curbing the excesses of the more
radical madrassas, does not even possess
exact statistics about the number of
madrassas in the country. Moreover, the
military government's close alliance with the
Islamist parties, which now virtually control two
of Pakistan's provinces, prevents Musharraf from
acting more strongly against the extremist
madrassas. As a result not even one
militant madrassa has yet been closed.
Such militant madrassas are,
however, likely to create more problems for
Pakistan's internal security than for the safety
of Western capitals. For that, as the July 7
London bombings showed, rather than blaming
seminaries in Pakistan we would do better to
examine the Islamic extremism blossoming on our
own campuses, and the way that the excesses of
American and British foreign policies can fatally
alienate so many previously moderate Muslims and
lead to violence at home as well as in Muslim
lands.
Notes [1] There is
considerable disagreement over the number of
madrassas in Pakistan and the proportion of
the country's students they educate. Most
authorities agree that the number has greatly
increased in recent years, and a widely quoted
report by the International Crisis Group in July
2002 indicated that there could be as many as
10,000 in Pakistan educating over a million and a
half students. This was, however, challenged by a
March 2005 World Bank report based on government
census figures that puts the figure much lower and
suggested that less than 1% of all Pakistanis were
educated in madrassas. There now seems to
be some consensus that the ICG slightly
exaggerated the scale of the problem, while the
World Bank report seriously underestimates it. A
recent survey by Saleem Ali of the University of
Vermont argues that the true figure probably
stands somewhere between these two reports. See
Saleem H. Ali, "Islamic Education and Conflict:
Understanding the Madrassahs of Pakistan", a paper
presented at the US Institute of Peace, June 24,
2005. [2] Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam:
The Search for a New Ummah, p 93; see the
review by Max Rodenbeck, "The Truth About Jihad",
The New York Review, August 11, 2005, which also
discusses several other books mentioned in this
article. [3] Gilles Kepel, The War for
Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, p 112.
[4] Peter Bergen, "The Madrasa Myth", The New
York Times, June 14, 2005. [5] See Olivier
Roy, "Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?" in
Fundamentalism Reborn: Afghanistan and the
Taliban, edited by William Maley (New York
University Press, 1998). See also Barbara
Metcalfe's excellent "Piety, Persuasion and
Politics: Deoband's Model of Social Activism", in
The Empire and the Crescent: Global
Implications for a New American Century,
edited by Aftab Ahmad Malik (Amal, 2003), p 157.
[6] On September 1, al-Jazeera aired a video
recorded by Mohommad Sidique Khan before his
suicide bombing. His statement included the
following words: "Your democratically elected
governments continuously perpetuate atrocities
against my people all over the world. And your
support of them makes you directly responsible,
just as I am directly responsible for protecting
and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until
we feel security, you will be our targets. And
until you stop the bombing, imprisonment and
torture of my people we will not stop this fight.
We are at war." [7] George Makdisi, The
Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in
Islam and the West (Edinburgh University
Press, 1981). [8] The Deobandis have received
an excellent study in Barbara Daly Metcalf's great
magnum opus, Islamic Revival in British India:
Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton University
Press, 1982). See also Jamal Malik,
Colonisation of Islam: Dissolution of
Traditional Institutions in Pakistan (New
Delhi: Manohar, 1988). [9] There is a full
report on these textbooks on the Washington Post
Web site by Joe Stephens and David B Ottaway,
"From US, the ABC's of Jihad," March 23, 2002, at
www.washingtonpost .com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22
?language=printer. [10] See the superb
discussion in Yoginder Sikand's recent Bastions
of the Believers: madrassas and Islamic
Education in India.
William
Dalrymple is a frequent contributor to the New
York Review of Books and lives in New Delhi. His
most recent book, White Mughals: Love and
Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, won the
Wolfson Prize for history.
