More muscle to Pakistan's
madrassas By Kanchan
Lakshman
A macabre video circulating in
Pakistan shows the gruesome death of Ghulam Nabi,
a Pakistani militant accused of betraying a
front-ranking Taliban leader who was killed last
December in an air strike in Afghanistan.
The video, obtained by AP Television News
in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's North West
Frontier Province (NWFP), on April 17, shows a
12-year-old boy slashing at Nabi's neck until the
head is severed. A voice in Pashto identifies Nabi
and his home at Kili
Faqiran village in Pakistan's
Balochistan province.
The fanatical
intensity with which the child - egged on by a
group of adults chanting "Allah hu akbar" -
demonstrates the tremendous dangers of the kind of
psychological indoctrination to which Pakistan's
children are being subjected.
While
Pakistan, in the words of John Negroponte, former
director of US national intelligence and now
deputy secretary of state, "remains a major source
of Islamic extremism and the home for some top
terrorist leaders", it periodically seeks
redemption through a promise - repeated
incessantly since September 11, 2001 - to clean up
its seminaries, and to rid them of extremism and
hatred.
The claim is that this would
strike at the base and root of Islamist terror.
The promise has raised great expectations in the
West and in South Asia. However, the state of play
on the ground tells an altogether different story.
During a televised address to the nation
as far back as January 12, 2002, President General
Pervez Musharraf warned that the greatest danger
facing Pakistan came not from outside, but from
Pakistan's own home-grown Islamist radicals - "a
danger", he said, "that is eating us from within".
This danger, more than five years later,
has assumed menacing proportions. The rapid
escalation of violence orchestrated by Islamist
extremists across Pakistan in recent times and
cumulative efforts to further radicalize the
country have now led Musharraf's military regime
to revisit the idea of madrassa (seminary)
reforms.
Most of the officially estimated
13,000 seminaries (unofficial estimates range
between 15,000 and 25,000, and in some cases go as
high as 40,000) in Pakistan, with an approximate
enrollment of 1.5 million students, have squarely
rejected the tentative reforms - in essence
requiring the registration of madrassas and
the maintenance of accounts, including records of
domestic and foreign donors, as well as the
teaching of "secular" subjects as part of the
curriculum - initiated by the government in 2003.
They have opposed all changes, alleging
that the reforms constituted a conspiracy to
"secularize" (that is, de-Islamize) the education
system at the behest of the United States. The
networks and support structures of Islamist
extremism in Pakistan, painstakingly constructed
through the Pakistan-Afghanistan arc, have little
evident interest in engaging with the president's
"enlightened moderation".
Speaking on the
status of education in Pakistan, Education
Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi disclosed, at the Civil
Service Academy in Lahore in the first week of
April, that there were 5,459 madrassas in
Punjab province; 2,843 in NWFP; 1,935 in Sindh;
1,193 in the Northern Areas; 769 in Balochistan;
586 in "Azad" (Pakistan-occupied) Kashmir; 135 in
the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas; and 77
in the capital, Islamabad.
A majority of
the extremist seminaries that preach and support
militant violence follow the Deobandi sect and are
associated with the Wafaq-ul-Madaris, the main
confederacy of seminaries. According to the
International Crisis Group (ICG), "The two
factions of the Deobandi political parties,
JUI-Fazlur Rehman [Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islam faction
headed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman] and JUI-Samiul
Haq, run over 65% of all madrassas in
Pakistan." Rehman and Haq are widely considered to
be the primary backers of the Taliban.
One
of the principal instruments of reform and
government regulation of madrassas was the
proposed registration process. Equally important
is the content of subjects taught to students.
Aimed at mainstreaming these religious schools,
the government had initiated efforts to introduce
subjects such as English, general science and
mathematics.
The ulema (religious
leaders), however, claimed that the registration
process was intended to curb the "independence and
sovereignty" of madrassas and was,
consequently, not acceptable. Five years after its
inception, the Madrassa Reform Project has been an
unambiguous failure.
While there is far
too much resistance at the ground level,
ambivalence and a reluctance to implement the
reforms dominates the state's agencies and
initiatives. According to the ICG's report of
March 29, "This is best demonstrated in Sindh
province and its capital, Karachi.
"After
three years of efforts by the Sindh Education
Department to help 'mainstream' the province's
madrassas by including secular education in
them, Islamabad asked provincial education
authorities in mid-2006 to return more than $100
million in unspent federal money."
The
project did not have any significant impact, since
most madrassas refused to take the
government's help. Incidentally, Pakistan's record
in utilizing funds for the socio-economic sectors
remains abysmal and, according to one report, 92%
of the funds earmarked for the five-year Education
Sector Reforms Program (2001-06) has remained
unused.
In a detailed verdict on August
29, 2005, the Supreme Court of Pakistan observed
that madrassas were not providing students
with general education that could enable them to
come into the mainstream of society and compete
with the educated class for employment or other
purposes, including elections.
The court
noted, further, that not a single religious
educational institution had included such subjects
as English, Urdu and Pakistan studies in its
curriculum, even though the Inter-Board Committee
of Chairmen had recommended this. In a scathing
criticism of the educational system in its
September 1, 2005, editorial, Daily Times opined:
The seminaries in Pakistan enlist a
million pupils and throw up thousands of
"graduates" every year with nothing much to do
except set up new mosques to earn their
livelihood ... Pakistan cannot produce young
people who can propel the economy forward. What
kind of young men does Pakistan produce? In a
word, warriors. The truth is that there is
nothing secular in Pakistan studies, English and
Urdu, either, if you take a close look at the
textbooks that the students have to mug up
[study intensively].
The
madrassa, as a medium of radical Islam,
knows too well that the Pakistani state is
fragile. For instance, reports indicate that
intelligence agencies have warned the government
of potential suicide attacks if any military
action is initiated against the pro-Taliban Lal
Masjid (Red Mosque) and the Jamia Hafsa seminary
in Islamabad.
A report submitted to the
federal government disclosed:
These two buildings host a large
number of trained suicide bombers and a
reasonable stockpile of arms ... if any action
is taken, they may retaliate with suicide
attacks, resulting in heavy casualties ...
Maulana Abdul Aziz, prayer leader of Lal Masjid,
and his brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi, head of
Jamia Hafsa, enjoy the complete backing of at
least 18 religious seminaries located in the
federal capital and receive constant support, in
kind, from these seminaries.
The
report also mentioned that suicide bombers
involved in the January 26 attack on the Marriott
Hotel in Islamabad and the February 6 attack at
the parking lot of Islamabad International Airport
were linked to the seminary.
Ominously,
the report warns further, "The real cause of
concern is that the number of would-be female
suicide bombers is quite large compared [with]
male students and, if action were to be taken, at
least 150 casualties are feared."
Not
surprisingly, Musharraf has publicly ruled out the
use of force to address the crisis generated by
students of the Jamia Hafsa and the Lal Masjid.
They are run by prominent clerics Maulana Ghazi
Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz, sons of the
slain cleric Maulana Abdullah (killed in 1998),
who reportedly patronized several jihadist groups.
Presiding over a high-level meeting in Islamabad
on Sunday, he asked the chief of the Pakistan
Muslim League, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, to
negotiate with Abdul Aziz and Ghazi Abdul Rasheed
for a "peaceful settlement".
The Lal
Masjid brigade, among others, is demanding: the
rebuilding of demolished mosques in Islamabad;
immediate declaration of sharia (Islamic) law in
Pakistan; immediate promulgation of the Koran and
Sunnah in the courts of law; and "immediate
discontinuation to declaring jihad as terrorism by
the government, as it is the great sacred
religious duty of Muslims".
The agitators
also want the government to close down brothels
and music shops in Islamabad, and remove all
advertisements depicting women. A large number of
female students of the Jamia Hafsa have been
occupying a public library building since February
in protest against the Islamabad administration's
plans to demolish the seminary, which has about
7,000 students, but was illegally built on public
land.
The Wafaq-ul-Madaris, Pakistan's
main and influential confederacy of seminaries,
which runs about 8,200 institutions, has supported
the extremist program of the Lal Masjid brigade.
The confederacy's secretary general, Qari Mohammad
Hanif Jhalandari, announced on April 15: "We are
in complete support of their four demands - to
enforce the sharia in Pakistan, have the
government rebuild all the mosques it destroyed,
close down all dens of vice across the country,
and change the Women's Protection Act in line with
the Koran and Sunnah."
There is mounting
evidence of the military regime buckling under
pressure from the Islamist extremists. For
instance, the government was reportedly
contemplating moving the madrassas out of
Islamabad amid the standoff with the Lal Masjid
and Jamia Hafsa. The Islamist extremists have,
however, always rejected government attempts at
interference with their "sovereignty".
On
April 17, the government was again on the back
foot when it provided land for two of the seven
mosques demolished by the Islamabad administration
(the Capital Development Authority has reportedly
declared 87 mosques in Islamabad to be illegal).
Land for the remaining five demolished mosques is
to be provided as early as possible. Most of the
illegal mosques were reportedly built without the
submission of proper building plans, while some
were constructed on state land.
In his
"leaked memo" of October 2003, then US secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld raised a critical
question: "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring
and dissuading more terrorists every day than the
seminaries and radical clerics are recruiting,
training, and deploying against us?"
For
long, global aid programs from the West have
underwritten the military regime's agenda in
Pakistan. According to last month's US
Congressional Research Service Report, "Annual
instalments of $600 million each, split evenly
between military and economic aid, began in FY
[fiscal year] 2005 ... In the years since
September 2001, Pakistan has received nearly $1.5
billion in direct US security-related assistance
... Some 80% of Defense Department spending for
coalition support payments to Pakistan, Jordan,
and other key cooperating nations has gone to
Islamabad."
At US$4.75 billion to date,
averaging more than $80 million per month, the
amount is equal to more than one-quarter of
Pakistan's total military expenditures. The
administration of US President George W Bush has
reportedly requested an additional $1.7 billion
for 2008, claiming that coalition support payments
to Pakistan have led to "a more stable
[Pakistan-Afghanistan] border area", a claim that
is roughly as true as the proposition that Iraq is
now peaceful.
In addition, Pakistan has
received, for instance, $14 million in funding and
technical assistance for a "legislative
strengthening program"; the US Agency for
International Development (USAID) has provided
about $3 million in education assistance to
Balochistan province alone since 2002, and has
funded a $6 million project to the province for
food security and poverty alleviation in arid
agriculture. Additionally, USAID has given more
than $2 million in assistance for health
activities provided to Balochistan since 2003.
There is a danger that liberal military
and developmental financing by the international
community will lead to the worst-case scenario of
further radicalization, since "each dollar of
'development aid' or 'financial relief' to
Pakistan releases a dollar of domestic resources
for further militarization, radicalization and
extremist religious mobilization".
The US
government, according to Pakistani scholar Husain
Haqqani, repeatedly makes the mistake of defining
as "moderate" those authoritarian Muslim rulers
who fulfill America's foreign-policy goals. But,
he said, "These strategic American allies are not
the force for ideological moderation that would
change the Muslim world's long-term direction ...
Authoritarian governments in the Muslim world do
not want democracy, as that would amount to the
potentates giving up their power."
Western
aid, experience has shown in South Asia, has
largely been focused on short-term security
interests. The experience in Pakistan has shown
that reliance on civil-society projects to promote
democracy under what are in essence authoritarian
governments is, at best, problematic.
No
accountability exists for such regimes as far as
their domestic policies are concerned. And since
most aid is being routed through increasingly
militarized state channels, capacity-building and
attempts to promote democracy, consequently, are
bound to suffer. The use of stringent
conditionalities can temper the diversion of aid
to unintended recipients, and economic sanctions,
if necessary, may have to be imposed against such
regimes, since aid accountability is vital.
The collapse of the seminary-reform
project is a clear indication that Islamabad is
either apathetic or does not have the capacity to
dismantle the extremist infrastructure across the
country. Summing up his country's mood, Shafqat
Mahmood, a former member of Parliament, aptly
noted: "Quiet seriously, we are in a terrible
mess."
Kanchan Lakshman is a
research fellow with the Institute for Conflict
Management and assistant editor of Faultlines:
Writings on Conflict & Resolution.
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