Madrassa statistics

Daw, April 5, 2005
Madrassa statistics based on unscientific surveys: speaker
By Faiz Rehman

WASHINGTON: Madrassa enrolment figures in the press and in institutional reports are sometimes highly inflated, said Tahir Andrabi, associate professor at the Pomona College, on Monday.

Speaking at a seminar organised by Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Andrabi criticised media reports, including the 9-11 Commission report, for using numbers about madrassas based on unscientific surveys.

“Madrassas’ enrolment accounts for approximately 0.3 percent of all children between the ages of 5 and 19. Given that the overall enrolment rate for this group is roughly 42 percent, this represents less than 0.7 percent of all enrolled children, less than the 33 percent cited by the International Crisis Group report,” said Andrabi, who recently released a study on religious schools’ enrolment in Pakistan.

He alleged the 9-11 Commission used unsubstantiated numbers in its famous reports and claimed some figures about Pakistan were based on “a Karachi police commander’s interview.”

Another speaker, Prof Anita Weiss, who has visited Pakistan several times to study madrassas, said Pakistan should invest in mainstream public schools rather than reforming madrassas, saying, “Numbers are important; every dollar spent on modernising madrassas should be invested in mainstream education.”

University of Vermont professor Dr Saleem Ali said most madrassas varied in substance and form. Dr Ali claimed that most “indoctrination” occurred at mosques and not at madrassas. He said, “Only a small number of madrassas teach militancy and are affiliated with Jihadi groups,” adding that students at most madrassas did not have the time to learn anything other than the Quran, hadith and fiqh.

Sindh Education Minister Dr Hamida Khuro said the British left an education system designed to produce clerks for the colonial regime. Successive governments did not give education a priority and “failed to realise that education was crucial for the nation’s development,” she said, adding that the current government had doubled GDP spending on education. She criticised Ziaul Haq’s regime for purposefully ignoring education to manipulate the people.