"There's good in Pakistan's Madrasas"

International Herald Tribune, 08-Dec-05.
There's good in Pakistan's madrasas
Jonathan Power

Students reciting the Koran in a madrasa in Lahore (Pakistan).
LAHORE, Pakistan Tightening the noose on the Islamic schools known as madrasas, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, promulgated last week an ordinance prohibiting these institutions from teaching or publishing literature that promotes militancy, sectarianism and religious hatred.

This should please both the Americans and the British, who have long been convinced that the schools are a breeding ground for fundamentalists and terrorists. Some of the London suicide bombers were educated in Pakistani madrasas, and London has been leaning on Islamabad to close down the more extremist ones.

How virulent are they? This week I arrived unannounced at one of the largest madrasas in Lahore, a city that 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 madrasa, Jamera Ashnafia, has 1,200 boys, who 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 quarters, grouped around a mosque, are roomy and airy. Inside the mosque, small groups of boys giggled and recited their way through the pages of the Koran. Financing 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 someone, 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 firsthand 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 a recent 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 fewer than 1 percent 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 is the madrasas, which offer at least some education to the poor. And at the other pole, there is 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 extends 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 finances some of them and expelling, as it did after the London bombings, some of its foreign students. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. After all, in the centuries before imperial conquest, madrasas were the major source of Islamic learning. Our mortarboards, tassels, academic robes and rituals of the oral defense of a written thesis can all be traced back to them.

By all means make them better and broader in what they teach, but to seek their abolition would only be one more blow to the self-esteem and urge for self-betterment of the very poor of this fraught but forward-looking country.

(Jonathan Power is a commentator on foreign affairs.)