Are
the madrasas in Pakistan
spreading hatred?
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
December 8, 2005
LONDON - Tightening the noose on
Islamic seminaries - madrasas - Pakistan's president,
Pervez Musharraf, promulgated last week an ordinance
prohibiting these institutions from teaching or
publishing literature which promotes militancy,
sectarianism and religious hatred.
This should please both the
Americans and the British who have long been convinced as
Colin Powell, when Secretary of State, put it, that "the
madrasas are a breeding ground for fundamentalists and
terrorists". Some of the suicide bombers who exploded the
bombs on the London transport system in July were
educated in Pakistani madrasas and London has been
leaning on Islamabad to close down the more extremist
ones.
How virulent are they? Yesterday I
arrived unannounced at one the of the largest madrasas in
Lahore, a city that, besides being the home of some of
the most beautiful and breathtaking of Mogul
architecture, sits close up to the Indian border and
provides a base for an assortment of militant groups,
some prepared to use violence without
compunction.
I purposely chose a madrasa of the
Deobandi school of Islamic belief which is considered to
be close to the ultra fundamentalist Wahabism of Saudi
Arabia. This madrassa, Jamera Ashnafia, has 1200 boys,
where they spend two years at the age of 10 doing little
else but learning the Koran by heart. Some later go on to
government schools to learn from a wider curriculum, some
return at the age of 16 or 18 to study Islamic theology
up to university level.
Everything is free, the atmosphere
is convivial and the sizeable buildings grouped around a
mosque are roomy and airy. In the mosque small groups of
boys giggled and recited their way through the pages of
the Koran. The finance is all raised inside Pakistan from
donations, the madrasa's accountant told me. Accompanied
by a university professor who read the Urdu notices
pinned to various boards and walls we could find not one
word of an extremist pitch. One said simply, "Even a
smile is charity". We left convinced, as one teacher told
us, that the school has no truck with violence and even
forbids teachers to use corporal punishment. "Even if a
pupil decides to use his pen as a stick and poke some one
we are against it," he said.
Maybe I was hoodwinked but I don't
think so. I checked out their reputation and it stands up
well. But there is no doubt that militant madrasas abound
in Pakistan. Too many observers who know the country well
and who know what's what in Pakistani education have seen
first hand the preaching and indoctrination of hatred by
clerics, creating a class of religious lumpen
proletariat.
One of the most notorious is
Haqqania, recently visited by the India-based novelist
William Dalrymple. In the latest issue of the New York
Review of Books he reports that its director boasted to
him that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters
he would simply close down the school and send the boys
off to war.
The International Crisis Group says
there are 10,000 madrasas. The World Bank has challenged
this figure saying that less than 1% of all Pakistanis
are educated in them.
What is not challenged is that the
madrasas exist because of the country's appalling record
on state education. In contrast to its neighbor, India,
one administration after another has allowed the
educational system the British built up to disintegrate.
It has been saved by two developments - the first, the
madrasas which give at least some education to the poor
and at the other pole the astonishing success of the
Beaconhouse school system which began as a single
playgroup 30 years ago and thanks to the drive of one
exceptional woman has mushroomed into a school system all
over the country that ranges from kindergarten to
university, with some 60,000 students. I lectured for two
days to nearly a thousand of its teachers and I have
rarely come across a group exuding such dedication. But
this is private education catering almost exclusively to
the children of the elite.
It is right that the government is
now pushing for registration of the madrasas, watching
more carefully the outside money (often Saudi) that
arrives to finance some of them and expelling, as it did
immediately after the London bombings, some of its
foreign students.
But the baby should not get thrown
out with the bathwater. After all, in the centuries
before imperial conquest madrasas were the major source
of Islamic religious and scientific learning. Our
mortarboards, tassels, academic robes and rituals of the
oral defence of a written thesis can all be traced back
to the madrasas.
By all means make them better and
broader in what they teach but to seek their abolition
would only be one more blow for the self-esteem and urge
for self-betterment of the very poor of this fraught but
forward looking country.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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