[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Myths and madrassas
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Myths and madrassas
By William Dalrymple
Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew
themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus
River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here,
straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania,
one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrassas.
Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this
institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal,
ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over,
there is no sign that the Haqqania is ashamed of its former pupils: instead,
the madrassa's director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that
whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down
the madrassa and send his students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora
Khattack represents everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in
this region, a bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes - in the form
of the Taliban - military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.
A dust storm was blowing as we crossed the Indus just below the massive
ramparts of the fortress of Attock, once the great bulwark protecting India
against incursions from Afghanistan. The road was lined with poplars. In the
distance towered the jagged dragons' backs of the blue Margalla Hills; a
graveyard lay to one side, its green grave flags fluttering in the breeze. A
few kilometers beyond the river stood a ramshackle line of buildings, all built
in a crude modern concrete version of Mughal architecture. Washing was hanging
up to dry from the roofs and verandas of the dormitory blocks, and in the main
courtyard students were bustling around. All were male, all wore turbans, and
all were heavily bearded.
Maulana Sami proved, however, to be an unexpectedly dapper and cheery figure
for a man supposed to be such an icon of anti-Western hatred. He wore a blue
frock coat of vaguely Dickensian cut, and his neatly trimmed beard was
raffishly dyed with henna. He had a craggy face, a large outcrop of nose, and
the corners of his eyes were contoured with laughter lines. I was ushered into
his office and introduced to his two-year-old granddaughter, who was playing
happily with a yellow helium balloon. I remarked that there did not seem to be
much evidence of the Haqqania suffering from the crackdown on centers of
radicalism promised by President Pervez Musharraf. Sami's face lit up:
"That is for American consumption only," he laughed cheerfully. "It is only
statements to the newspapers. Nothing has happened."
"So," I asked, "You are not finding the atmosphere difficult at the moment?"
"We are in a good, strong position," replied Sami. "[President George W] Bush
has woken the entire Islamic world. We are grateful to him."
Sami smiled broadly: "Our job now is propagating Islamic ideology. We give free
education, free clothes and books. We even give free accommodation. We are the
only people giving the poor education."
Sami paused and his smile faded: "The people are so desperate," he said. "They
are fed up with the old ways in Pakistan, with the secular parties and the
army. There is so much corruption. Musharraf only fights Muslims and follows
the wishes of the West. He is not interested in the people of Pakistan. So now
everyone is looking for Islamic answers - and we can help provide that. Only
our Islamic system gives justice."
For better or worse, the sort of change in political attitudes that Sami ul-Haq
has overseen from his madrassa in Akora Khattack is being reproduced across
Pakistan. An Interior Ministry report after September 11 revealed that there
are now 27 times as many madrassas in the country as there were in 1947: from
245 at the time of independence, the number shot up to 6,870 in 2001. [1]
A significant proportion of these are run by, or connected to, the radical
Islamist political parties such as the MMM, which under Sami's vice presidency
have just imposed a Taliban-like regime on Pakistan's North-West Frontier
Province, banning the public performance of music and depictions of the human
form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders
outside the new KFC restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the
colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared
the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.
The Islamic political parties are quite clear about the benefits that can
accrue to them by controlling places of education. The headquarters of the
Jamaat-e-Islami in Lahore, for example, doubles as a madrassa where 200
students receive a Koranic education with a distinctively political spin. On a
visit this summer I found one maulana preaching a sermon on the subject of
Musharraf's obedience to US dictates and his willingness to abandon the
Taliban. A spokesman for the party told me quite explicitly: "The political
transformation our madrassas are bringing about is having a massive effect on
the future of Pakistan. The recent success of the Islamic parties is very much
associated with the work we do in our madrassas."
Across Pakistan, the tenor of religious belief has been correspondingly
radicalized: the tolerant Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now deeply out
of fashion in Pakistan, overtaken by the sudden rise of the more hardline and
politicized reformist Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi strains of the faith.
The sharp acceleration in the number of these madrassas first began under
General Zia ul-Haq at the time of the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, and was
financed mainly by the Saudis. Although some of the madrassas so founded were
little more than single rooms attached to village mosques, others are now very
substantial institutions: the Dar ul-Uloom in Balochistan, for example, is now
annually enrolling some 1,500 boarders and a further 1,000 day-boys. Altogether
there are possibly as many as 800,000 students in Pakistan's madrassas: an
entire free Islamic education system running parallel to the moribund state
sector.
A mere 1.8% of Pakistan's gross domestic product is spent on government
schools. As a result, 15% of the schools are without a proper building; 40%
without water; 71% without electricity. There is frequent absenteeism of
teachers; indeed many of these schools exist only on paper. Last year when
Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain turned politician, investigated
the government schools in his constituency, he found that 20% of those on the
rolls did not exist at all, while 70% of those that did were semi-permanently
closed.
In education Pakistan is lagging behind India in the most striking way: in
India 65% of the population is literate, and the number rises every year; in
the new budget, the Indian education system received a substantial boost of
state funds. But in Pakistan only 42% are literate, and the proportion is
falling. Instead of investing in education, the Pakistan military government is
spending money on a new fleet of American F-16s for its air force. The near
collapse of government schooling has meant that many of the country's poorest
people who wish to improve their children's hope of advancing themselves have
no option but to place the children in the madrassa system, where they are
guaranteed a rigidly traditional but nonetheless free education.
Madrassas are probably now more dominant in Pakistan's educational system than
they are anywhere else; but the general trend is one that is common throughout
the Islamic world. In Egypt the number of teaching institutes dependent on the
Islamic university of al-Azhar increased from 1,855 in 1986 to 4,314 10 years
later. The Saudis have stepped up their funding so that in Tanzania alone they
have been spending $1 million a year building new madrassas. In Mali madrassas
now account for a quarter of the children in primary schools. [2]
Seen in this wider setting, Sami ul-Haq and his madrassas raise a number of
important questions: how much are these madrassas the source of the problems
that culminated in the Islamist attacks of September 11? Are madrassas simply
terrorist factories? Should the West be pressing US client states like Pakistan
and Egypt simply to close them down?
In the panic-stricken aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the answers
to these questions seemed obvious. Former secretary of state Colin Powell and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were not know for their agreement on matters
of foreign policy, but one thing that they were united on was the threat posed
by madrassas. In 2003, Rumsfeld posed the question: "Are we capturing, killing,
or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and
the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" A year
later, Powell described madrassas as a breeding ground "for fundamentalist and
terrorists".
Since the revelations that three of the four future British Muslim suicide
bombers visited Pakistan in the year preceding the July 7 attack, the British
media have been quick to follow the US line on madrassas, with the Sunday
Telegraph helpfully translating the Arabic word madrassa as terrorist "training
school" (it actually means merely "place of education"), while the Daily Mirror
confidently asserted over a double-page spread that the three bombers had all
enrolled at Pakistani "terror schools".
In actual fact, it is still uncertain whether the three bombers visited any
madrassas while they were in Pakistan: madrassas only entered the debate
because the bombers told their families they were going to Pakistan to pursue
religious studies, just as they told them they were going to a religious
conference when they set off to bomb London.
According to sources at the prime minister's offices in Downing Street there is
in fact no evidence that any madrassa was visited by any members of the cell at
any point on their journey. Still less is there any proof that madrassas were
responsible for "brainwashing" the trio, as the British media assumed after the
bombings. Instead, there is considerable evidence to show that the trio were
radicalized in Yorkshire through the Islamist literature and videos that were
available beneath the counter of their local Islamic bookshop. And while it is
now certain that the group made contact with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, there is no
reason to assume that a madrassa acted as the conduit.
In this case, as in so many others, the link between madrassas and
international terrorism is far from clear-cut, and new research has been
published that has challenged the much-repeated but intellectually shaky theory
of madrassas being little more than al-Qaeda training schools.
It is certainly true that many madrassas are fundamentalist and literalist in
their approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the most hardline
strains of Islamic thought. Few make any effort to prepare their students to
function in a modern, plural society. It is also true that some madrassas can
be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil
violence.
Just as there are some yeshivas in settlements on the West Bank that have a
reputation for violence against Palestinians, and Serbian monasteries that
sheltered war criminals following the truce in Bosnia, so it is estimated that
as many as 15% of Pakistan's madrassas preach violent jihad, while a few have
been said to provide covert military training. Madrassa students took part in
the Afghan and Kashmir jihads, and have been repeatedly implicated in acts of
sectarian violence, especially against the Shi'ite minority in Karachi.
It is now becoming very clear, however, that producing cannon fodder for the
Taliban and educating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing
the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the
horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East
Africa, the World Trade Center and the London Underground.
Indeed, a number of recent studies have emphasized that there is a fundamental
distinction to be made between madrassa graduates - who tend to be pious
villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical
sophistication - and the sort of middle-class, politically literate global
Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of these
turn out to have secular and technical backgrounds. Neither Osama bin Laden nor
any of the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on America or Britain were
trained in a madrassa or was a qualified alim, or cleric.
The men who planned and carried out the September 11 attacks have often been
depicted in the press as being "medieval fanatics". In fact, it would be more
accurate to describe them as confused but highly educated middle-class
professionals. Mohammed Atta was an architect; Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's
chief of staff, was a pediatric surgeon; Ziad Jarrah, one of the founders of
the Hamburg cell, was a dental student who later turned to aircraft
engineering; Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, was a product of the
London School of Economics.
As the French scholar Gille Kepel puts it, the new breed of global jihadis are
not the urban poor of the third world so much as "the privileged children of an
unlikely marriage between Wahhabism an Silicon Valley, which [Ayman]
al-Zawahiri visited in the 1990s. They were heirs not only to jihad and the
umma but also to the electronic revolution and American-style globalization."
[3]
This is also the conclusion drawn by the most sophisticated analysis of global
jihadis yet published: Understanding Terror Networks by a former Central
Intelligence Agency official, Marc Sageman. Sageman examined the records of 172
al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, and his conclusions have demolished much of the
conventional wisdom about who joins jihadi groups: two thirds of his sample
were middle-class and university-educated; they are generally technically
minded professionals and several have a PhD. Nor are they young hotheads: their
average age is 26, most of them are married, and many have children. Only two
appear to be psychotic. Even the ideologues that influence them are not trained
clerics: Sayyid Qutb, for example, was a journalist. Islamic terrorism, like
its Christian and Jewish predecessors, is a largely bourgeois enterprise.
Peter Bergen of John Hopkins recently came to similar conclusions when he
published his study of 75 Islamist terrorists involved in anti-Western attacks.
According to Bergen, 53% of the terrorists had a university degree, while "only
52% of Americans have been to college." [4] Against this background, it should
not have come as a surprise that the British Muslim bombers attended
universities and that one drove a Mercedes.
It is true that there are several examples of radical madrassa graduates who
have become involved with al-Qaeda: Maulana Masood Azhar, for example, leader
of the jihadi group called Jaish-e-Muhammad and an associate of bin Laden,
originally studied in the ultra-militant Binori Town madrassa in Karachi. A
madrassa dropout took part in last year's bombing of Musharraf's convoy. In
Indonesia, the Bali bombings were the work of the Lashkar-i-Jihad group, which
partially emerged from a group of Salafi madrassas in Indonesia.
By and large, however, madrassa students simply do not have the technical
expertise necessary to carry out the kind of sophisticated attacks we have
recently seen led by al-Qaeda. Instead the concerns of most madrassa graduates
remain more traditional: the correct fulfillment of rituals, how to wash
correctly before prayers, and the proper length to grow a beard. All these
matters are part of the curriculum of Koranic studies in the madrassas. The
graduates are also interested in opposing what they see as unIslamic practices
such as worshiping at saints' graves or attending the Shi'ite laments called
marsiyas, for the death of the Prophet's son-in-law Ali at the battle of
Kerbala. [5]
Their focus, in other words, is not on opposing non-Muslims or the West - the
central concern of the global jihadis - so much as fostering what they see as
proper Islamic behavior at home, the personal law governing which is a central
subject of madrassa teachings. In contrast, few al-Qaeda agents seem to have
more than the most perfunctory grasp of Islamic law or learning. Moreover,
there is a growing body of evidence that bin Laden himself actually despises
what he sees as the nit-picking juridical approach of the madrassa-educated
ulema (clerics), regarding his own brand of violent Islamism as a wholly more
appropriate answer to the problems of the Muslim world.
This was graphically illustrated when, shortly after September 11, bin Laden
told a group of visiting Saudis that the "youths who conducted the operations
did not accept any fiqh [school of Islamic law] in the popular term, but they
accepted the fiqh that the Prophet Mohammed brought". It is a telling quote:
bin Laden showing his impatience with legal training and the inherited
structures of Islamic authority. The hijackers, he implied, were taking
effective practical action rather than sitting around discussing legal texts.
As such he set himself up as a challenge to the madrassas and the ulema,
bypassing traditional modes of religious study and looking directly to the
Koran for guidance.
A brilliant discussion of bin Laden's usurpation of the role of the
madrassa-based ulema can be found in the illuminating essay Landscapes of the
Jihad, by Faisal Devji, who teaches at the New School. Devji points out just
how deeply unorthodox bin Laden is, with his cult of martyrs and frequent talk
of dream and visions, all of which derive from popular, mystical, and Shi'ite
Islamic traditions, against which the orthodox Sunni ulema have long struggled.
Moreover, bin Laden and his followers "routinely attack the most venerable
clerics and seminaries, accusing them of being slaves of apostate regimes ...
They also issue their own legal opinions or fatwas without possessing the
learning or clerical authority to do so."
All this highlights how lacking in intellectual sophistication the debate about
al-Qaeda still is. Again and again, we are told that terrorism is associated
with poverty and the basic, Koranic education provided by madrassas. We are
told that the people who carry out this work are evil madmen who hate our
wealth and our freedoms, and that no debate is possible as they "aim to wipe us
out" (as one British cabinet minister told the BBC after the attacks on
London). That the hostility of the Islamists may have links with US foreign
policy in the Middle East, especially the Anglo-American adventures in Iraq and
Afghanistan, is consistently denied, despite the explicit video testimony to
the contrary by both Zawahiri and Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the London
bombers. [6]
In reality, al-Qaeda operatives tend to be highly educated and their aims
explicitly political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiques, has always been
unambiguous about this. As he laconically remarked in his broadcast timed to
coincide with the last US election, if it was freedom they were against,
al-Qaeda would have attacked Sweden. The men who planned the September 11
attacks were not products of the traditional Islamic educational system, even
in its most radical form. Instead they are graduates of Western-style
institutions. They are not at all the proteges of the mullahs.
Obscured debate
The debate about the alleged links between madrassas and terrorism has tended
to obscure both the madrassas' long histories and the differences among them.
Throughout much of Islamic history, madrassas were the major source of
religious and scientific learning, just as church schools and the universities
were in Europe.
Between the 7th and 12th centuries, madrassas produced free-thinking luminaries
such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina and al-Khwarizmi. They also produced America's
bestselling poet throughout the 1990s, the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet of
love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was
trained as a Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught Sharia law in a
madrassa in Konya. It is true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought and
spirituality characteristic of the ulema of his day, but he did so as an
insider, from within the system.
None of this should be a surprise. In the entire Koran there are only about 200
verses directly commanding believers to pray and three times that number
commanding the believers to reflect, to ponder and to analyze God's
magnificence in nature, plants, stars and the solar system. The oldest and
greatest of all the madrassas, the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good
claim to being the most sophisticated school in the entire Mediterranean world
during the early Middle Ages. Indeed the very idea of a university in the
modern sense - a place where students congregate to study a variety of subjects
under a number of teachers - is generally regarded as an innovation first
developed at al-Azhar.
In The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, George
Makdisi has demonstrated how terms such as having "fellows" holding a "chair",
or students "reading" a subject and obtaining "degrees", as well as practices
such as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even mortar boards, tassels and
academic robes, can all be traced back to the practices of madrassas.
It was in cities not far from Islamic Spain and Sicily - Salerno, Naples,
Bologna and Montpellier - that the first universities in Christendom were
developed, while the very first college in Europe, that of Paris, was founded
by Jocius de Londoniis, a pilgrim newly returned from the Middle East. [7]
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars such as Adelard of Bath would
travel to the Islamic world to study the advanced learning available in the
madrassas. Alvaro of Cordoba, a Mozarab, or Christian living under Muslim rule,
wrote in the 14th century:
My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study
the work of Muslim theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them,
but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be
found who reads Latin commentaries on Holy scripture? At the mention of
Christian books they disdainfully protest that such works are unworthy of their
notice.
When the Mongol invasions destroyed the institutions of learning in the Islamic
heartlands, many learned refugees fled to Delhi, turning northern India for the
first time into a major center of scholarship. By the time of the Mughal
emperor Akbar in the 16th century, the curriculum in Indian madrassas blended
the learning of the Islamic Middle East with that of the teachings of Hindu
India, so that Hindu and Muslim students would together study the Koran (in
Arabic), the Sufi poetry of Sa'adi (in Persian), and the philosophy of Vedanta
(in Sanskrit), as well as ethics, astronomy, medicine, logic, history and the
natural sciences. Many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for
example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), were the products of
madrassas.
However, following the collapse of Islamic self-confidence that accompanied the
deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1858,
disillusioned scholars founded an influential but narrow-minded Wahhabi-like
madrassa at Deoband, a 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital in Delhi.
Feeling that their backs were against the wall, the madrassa's founders reacted
against what they saw as the degenerate ways of the old elite. The Deoband
madrassa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out
anything Hindu or European from the curriculum. [8]
It was, unfortunately, these puritanical Deobandi madrassas that spread
throughout North India and Pakistan in the 20th century, and that particularly
benefited from the patronage of General Zia ul-Haq and his Saudi allies in the
1980s. Ironically, the US also played an important part in this harnessing of
madrassas for holy war as part of the Afghan jihad, with the CIA financing the
production by the US Agency for International Development of some notably
bloodthirsty madrassa textbooks "filled", according to a Washington Post
report, "with violent images and militant Islamic teachings".
One page showed a picture of a jihadi carrying a gun, but with his head blown
off, accompanied by a Koranic verse and a tribute to the mujahideen who were
"obedient to Allah ... Such men will sacrifice their wealth and their life to
impose Islamic law." When the Taliban came to power, these textbooks were
distributed for use in schools. [9] At the height of the Afghan jihad, Ronald
Reagan is said to have praised mujahideen madrassa students as "the moral
equivalent of the founding fathers [of America]".
It is certainly true that many madrassas in Pakistan have an outdated
curriculum: some still teach geometry from Euclid and medicine from Galen.
Emphasis is put on rote learning rather than the critical study of the Koran,
and considerable prestige is still attached to becoming a hafiz - knowing the
Koran by heart. Deobandi madrassas teach that the sun revolves around the earth
and some even have special seating for the invisible Islamic spirits, the
djinns. [10] This is, however, by no means the case with all madrassas, some of
which are surprisingly sophisticated.
In Karachi, the largest madrassa is the Dar ul-Uloom. Its green lawns resemble
a cross between a five-star hotel and a rather upmarket university campus. It
is clean an prosperous-looking: well-watered gardens and palm trees give onto
smart, well-kept classrooms and computer rooms; all around, embalmed in
scaffolding, new libraries and dormitories rise from the ground
Inside, the atmosphere was earnest and scholarly. In room after room, students
sat cross-legged on carpets, reading from Korans that lay open before them,
resting on low wooden bookstands. In others students were listening intently as
elderly maulanas expounded to them commentaries on the meaning of verses in the
Koran and the Hadiths, the traditions of the prophets. A computer room was
filled with bearded men struggling with the mysteries of using Urdu and Arabic
versions of Microsoft Word and Windows XP; in the senior years, I learned, all
essays are expected to be typewritten on computers and handed in as printouts.
Of course some other madrassas lack such equipment.
After the beheading of Daniel Pearl, I had taken the precaution of informing
the British consulate about my movements; but there was nothing threatening
about the Dar ul-Uloom. The students were almost all eager, friendly and
intelligent, if somewhat intense. When I asked one bearded student what music
he listened to on his new cassette player, he looked at me with horror: the
machine was only for listening to sermons. All music was banned.
Puritanical it may be, but it is clear that the Dar ul-Uloom, like many
Pakistani madrassas, performs an important service - especially in a country
58% of whose population, and 72% of whose women, are illiterate - indeed half
of the population never sees the inside of a school.
Madrassas are often backward in their educational philosophy, but they provide
the poor with a real hope of advancing themselves. In certain traditional
subjects - such as rhetoric, logic and jurisprudence - the teaching can be
excellent. And although they tend to be ultra-conservative, only a small
proportion of them are militant. To close them down, without first attempting
to build up the state sector, would relegate much of the population to a state
of ignorance. It would also be tantamount to instructing Muslims to stop
educating themselves about their religion, hardly the best strategy for winning
the war for Muslim minds.
You don't have to look far from Pakistan to find a madrassa system that has
effectively engaged with the problems of both militancy and educational
backwardness. For although India was originally the home of the Deobandi
madrassas, such colleges in India have no record of producing violent
Islamists, and are strictly apolitical and quietist. Indeed, several of modern
India's greatest scholars - such as the Mughal historian Muzaffar Alam of the
University of Chicago - are madrassa graduates.
An important study of the madrassas of India by the Hindu scholar Yoginder
Sikand, Bastions of the Believers, demonstrates how forward-looking and dynamic
some madrassas can be. In the southwest Indian state of Kerala, for example,
Sikand found a chain of educational institutions run by the Mujahid group of
professionals and businessmen which aim to bridge the differences between
modern forms of knowledge and the Islamic worldview.
The Mujahid group has been at the forefront of Muslim women's education in
Kerala, and in many of their madrassas girls outnumber boys by a considerable
margin. Mujahid intellectuals have written extensively about women's rights
from an Islamic perspective, and Sikand quotes the Zohra Bi, the principal of
one of the group's colleges: "Islam is wrongly thought of as a religion of
women's oppression," she told him. "Through our work in the college we want to
show that Islam actually empowers Muslim women."
This would seem to confirm that it is not madrassas per se that are the problem
so much as the militant atmosphere and indoctrination taking place in a handful
of notorious centers of ultra-radicalism, such as the Binori Town madrassa in
Karachi, whose students are taught that jihadism is legitimate and noble. Some
graduates have allegedly been involved in the ongoing insurgency in
Afghanistan. The question remains, however, whether Musharraf's government has
the will to carry out the necessary reforms that would reproduce the success of
madrassas in India.
So far attempts at reforming Pakistan's more militant madrassas have proved at
best halfhearted. Immediately after the London bombings there were around 250
arrests in Pakistani madrassas, and there have been some attempts at curbing
the attendance of foreign students: an estimated 1,400 non-Pakistanis have been
expelled since July. Some statements have also been made about standardizing
the syllabus and encouraging madrassas to teach some modern subjects.
However, the more extreme madrassas have been able to resist the enforcement of
even these mild measures; recently, fewer than half of Pakistan's madrassas
complied when asked to register as educational institutions with the
authorities. To date, the Pakistani government, far from having found ways of
curbing the excesses of the more radical madrassas, does not even possess exact
statistics about the number of madrassas in the country. Moreover, the military
government's close alliance with the Islamist parties, which now virtually
control two of Pakistan's provinces, prevents Musharraf from acting more
strongly against the extremist madrassas. As a result not even one militant
madrassa has yet been closed.
Such militant madrassas are, however, likely to create more problems for
Pakistan's internal security than for the safety of Western capitals. For that,
as the July 7 London bombings showed, rather than blaming seminaries in
Pakistan we would do better to examine the Islamic extremism blossoming on our
own campuses, and the way that the excesses of American and British foreign
policies can fatally alienate so many previously moderate Muslims and lead to
violence at home as well as in Muslim lands.
Notes
[1] There is considerable disagreement over the number of madrassas in Pakistan
and the proportion of the country's students they educate. Most authorities
agree that the number has greatly increased in recent years, and a widely
quoted report by the International Crisis Group in July 2002 indicated that
there could be as many as 10,000 in Pakistan educating over a million and a
half students. This was, however, challenged by a March 2005 World Bank report
based on government census figures that puts the figure much lower and
suggested that less than 1% of all Pakistanis were educated in madrassas. There
now seems to be some consensus that the ICG slightly exaggerated the scale of
the problem, while the World Bank report seriously underestimates it. A recent
survey by Saleem Ali of the University of Vermont argues that the true figure
probably stands somewhere between these two reports. See Saleem H. Ali,
"Islamic Education and Conflict: Understanding the Madrassahs of Pakist
an", a paper presented at the US Institute of Peace, June 24, 2005.
[2] Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, p 93; see the
review by Max Rodenbeck, "The Truth About Jihad", The New York Review, August
11, 2005, which also discusses several other books mentioned in this article.
[3] Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, p 112.
[4] Peter Bergen, "The Madrasa Myth", The New York Times, June 14, 2005.
[5] See Olivier Roy, "Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?" in Fundamentalism
Reborn: Afghanistan and the Taliban, edited by William Maley (New York
University Press, 1998). See also Barbara Metcalfe's excellent "Piety,
Persuasion and Politics: Deoband's Model of Social Activism", in The Empire and
the Crescent: Global Implications for a New American Century, edited by Aftab
Ahmad Malik (Amal, 2003), p 157.
[6] On September 1, al-Jazeera aired a video recorded by Mohommad Sidique Khan
before his suicide bombing. His statement included the following words: "Your
democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against
my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly
responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my
Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets.
And until you stop the bombing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will
not stop this fight. We are at war."
[7] George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and
the West (Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
[8] The Deobandis have received an excellent study in Barbara Daly Metcalf's
great magnum opus, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900
(Princeton University Press, 1982). See also Jamal Malik, Colonisation of
Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan (New Delhi: Manohar,
1988).
[9] There is a full report on these textbooks on the Washington Post Web site
by Joe Stephens and David B Ottaway, "From US, the ABC's of Jihad," March 23,
2002, at www.washingtonpost .com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22 ?language=printer.
[10] See the superb discussion in Yoginder Sikand's recent Bastions of the
Believers: madrassas and Islamic Education in India.
William Dalrymple is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and
lives in New Delhi. His most recent book, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in
Eighteenth-Century India, won the Wolfson Prize for history.
(Copyright 2005, New York Review of Books.)
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