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In The Name of Allah

 

 

 

“If Allah assists you, then there is none that can overcome you, and if He forsakes you, who is there then that can assist you after Him? And on Allah should the believers rely.” (The Holy Qur’an 3:160)

 

 

 

By Nadeem Malik

Islamabad: A day begins with prayers before sunrise at a madrassa. Young students sitting cross-legged, rock back and forth reciting verses from the holy Quran. They pledge unity and entreat success for the Ummah (nation).

Just across the Khyber Pass, Haqania is one of many such schools in the North West Frontier city of Peshawar. Darul Uloom Haqania, the most prestigious religious school, boasts to be the breeding ground of entire Taleban leadership. Maulana Samiul Haq, with henna beard, is the founding father of this largest South Asian seminary.

There are estimated 10-15 thousand such madrassas across Pakistan. These schools, largely occupied by destitute Afghans and poor Pakistanis, are run on individual charities and donations. During the Afghan Jehad days American CIA, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States also generously financed these seminaries. Some estimates suggest CIA also recruited almost 30,000 Jehadis from the Middle East to fight against the Soviets, and channeled billions of dollars to run the entire operation.

The religious schools are operated in the old medieval tradition, for the most orthodox persuasion of the Afghan students known as Talebans, who enforced an authoritative and archaic version of Islam, but it was what they had studied. The top army brass of General Ziaul Haq, former military dictator, promoted these religious schools, which were mere 1700 in the entire country in 1979 at the start of the Afghan war. The wounded and bruised Afghan refugees of war-ravaged country sent their young ones to these schools for years during the jehad days, without any mourning for their dead ones.

When the Red Army retreated from Afghanistan, Americans quickly abandoned their front-line allies, as a result there was factional fighting among Afghans for another ten years till the Americans attacked in 2001. Since then it is Taliban verses the American-led coalition forces.

In recent years, when the World Bank started preparing Country Assistance Strategies for Pakistan, it estimated 15-20 percent of the Madaris were involved in military related teachings and training. The World Bank maintained that the radicalization of some of these institutions (Madaris) started with their politicization during the 1980s. “With active support from the Zia regime (1977-88), Madaris with extremist administrations were established along the Pakistan-Afghan border,” the Bank stated. The objective, it said, was to form a cadre of religiously motivated ‘Mujahideen’ to fight in Afghanistan and provide political support to Zia’s regime.

Madaris degrees were made equivalent to degrees obtained from formal universities. This, the Bank observed, facilitated recruitment of Madaris students into the civil service, leading to the state’s accommodation of activities encouraging religious intolerance and sectarian divides. The contribution of the Mujahideen to the Afghan victory, poverty, falling standards of public education, and weak governance, account for much of the success of the Madaris in the 1990s, the Bank said. Since they provide free boarding and lodging, they became popular with the parents of poor children. “Marginalized, the graduates from the non-mainstreamed Madaris (those which did not include the formal education curricula) with no career-oriented education resorted to violence to influence the country’s policies.” Successive governments did little to restrain them or bring them into the mainstream education system.

There are also conflicting reports about the number of students that go to the religious schools. International organizations, like the Washington and the International Crisis Group (ICG) put the number at somewhere between one to 1.7 million. A detailed of study on Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data, conducted by Jishnu Das of the World Bank, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc of the Harvard University and Tahir Andrabi of Pomona College found western media reports highly exaggerated in terms of number of student and total religious schools.

It estimated that less than one percent of the school going children in Pakistan go to madrassas (religious schools), and it remains constant in some districts since 2001. Some studies point out that (Berman and Stepanyan 2003), as a percentage of total enrollment, madrassa enrollment in Pakistan is roughly equivalent to that in Bangladesh and Côte d’Ivoire and much less than in India (two states only) or Indonesia.

The study noted that the household data in Pakistan tells whether a child is enrolled full-time in a madrassa, but not whether a child goes for an hour on any given day to study the Quran. Therefore this data does not confound full-time with part-time attendees—a child who attends a public school during the day and a madrassa in the evening is recorded as enrolled in a public school. This is an important distinction since parents might use a modicum of madrassa or mosque based education to teach their children about religion. The study indicated that around 200,000 children were enrolled full-time in madrassas before 2001.

“Madrassa enrollment declined from 1940 to 1980 but increased during the religion-based resistance to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979. The largest jump in madrassa enrollment is for the cohort aged 10 in the period 1989-93—coinciding with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Taliban.”

The study also quoted the 9/11 Commission Report, saying it used secondary sources without proper validation. “Pakistan's endemic poverty, widespread corruption, and often ineffective government create opportunities for Islamist recruitment. Poor education is a particular concern. Millions of families, especially those with little money, send their children to religious schools, or madrassas. Many of these schools are the only opportunity available for an education, but some have been used as incubators for violent extremism. According to a Karachi's police commander, there are 859 madrassas teaching more than 200,000 youngsters in his city alone.”

The study demanded evidence for projecting the notion that madrassa enrollment rates are high and increasing, and the popularity of madrassas should be understood as a response by the poor to the government’s inability to provide public education and social welfare Madrassas offer religious education, in some cases maths and languages as well, charge nothing for providing shelter, clothes and food. Irrespective of the fact how many number of religious students are, who is going to take this responsibility?

Pakistan had launched an extensive crackdown against extremist groups, also targeting religious schools, in the changed global political and security scenario in the post-September period. This led to banning of several armed groups and arrests of hundreds of activists. In addition, half-hearted efforts were made to reform the Madaris education system. However, the growing pressures after the July-seven blasts in London had led to a new more crucial phase, necessitating reforms with real implementation, like provision of books, teachers and funds to introduce new curricula.

However, what Pakistan is being asked to do is not an easy task. Pakistani society suffered a lot after offering unstinted support to the US, first during the US-led Jehad against the Soviets and now against the Talibans.

"Few countries suffered as much from terrorism in 2004 as Pakistan, and few did as much to combat it," says the latest US State Department publication on Country Reports on Terrorism 2004. The report clearly acknowledged that Pakistan cracked down (in 2004) on several groups that had been active in the Kashmir insurgency, detaining the head of Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM) for several months and arranging the extradition of the head of Harakat ul-Jihad-I-Islami (HUJI)."

In Pakistan, the US, under its Anti-Terrorist Assistance (ATA), trained Special Investigation Group (SIG) arrested members of a terrorist organization that had twice attempted to assassinate President Musharraf and had detonated two car bombs near the US Consulate General in Karachi. The SIG also arrested 12 terrorists involved in the attempted assassination of then Prime Minister-designate Aziz.

The report stated that al-Qa'ida declared the government of Pakistan to be one of its main enemies, and called for its overthrow. The government of Pakistan continues to pursue al-Qa'ida and its allies aggressively through counterterrorist police measures throughout the country and large-scale military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the rugged Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps units destroyed key al-Qa'ida safe havens in South Waziristan Agency (part of the FATA), killing over 100 foreign terrorists and dispersing several hundred more. "These operations significantly degraded al-Qa'ida's command and control capabilities in the region, but at a cost of approximately 200 Pakistani servicemen killed in action."

In the tribal areas, Pakistani security services are cooperating closely with the United States and other nations in a successful campaign to eliminate terrorism both within Pakistan and abroad. Over 600 suspected operatives of al-Qa'ida and other groups have been killed or captured by Pakistani authorities since September 2001. Individuals detained in 2004 have provided leads that aided investigations by security agencies around the world.

Information-sharing with the United Kingdom and Pakistan led to the disclosure and disruption of al-Qa'ida attack planning against US financial institutions. In 2004, the capture of so-called al-Qa'ida communications expert and Heathrow bomb plot suspect Naeem Noor Khan in July was seen a significant development, beside others.

A report of the UPI claimed Tuesday that Pakistan has also permitted sleuths of Scotland Yard to investigate Naeem Noor Khan to know about the contacts of three suicide bombers, who visited Pakistan for about three-months.

Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer flew into the southern city of Karachi together in November 2004. They spent three months in the country before heading back to the UK in February this year. Hasib Hussain arrived in Karachi in July last year. A vast majority of the religious schools in Pakistan is not involved in militancy. At least they are not involved in international terrorist activities. A small fraction could be due to involvement of intelligence agencies, including that of CIA, to produce a military machine to fight the Soviets.

Religious schools have played a vital role through the history. Some great names, like Imam Ghazali and Mujaddid Alf-e Sani were products of same institutions. However, it was failure of the religious scholars, ass well as the vested interest of the ruling elite, which constrained these institutions to just the basic religious education. They failed to meet the challenges of transition to the modern education.

Recently a working paper released by a leading international financial institution about the service delivery problems in Pakistan correctly explained the issue. “The elites will oppose mass education because the more educated the population the greater the pressures for democratization, and the greater the threat to the power of these privileged groups. Their monopoly position is dependent on keeping their constituents backward.” Education and health spending in Pakistan is one of the lowest in the world.

ENDS.