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.
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