http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_26-7-2005_pg3_2
COMMENT: The madrassa industry Ishtiaq Ahmed
The international jihad recruited idealist young Muslim men from all over the
world for the Afghan war. Some of them went to the madrassas. This industry has
now gone bust. Those who needed its products for fighting Communism are now
selling off their shares. The Pakistani investors should watch out
The bomb blasts of July 7, 2005 have been connected to religious schools known
as madrassas in Pakistan which, according to the British police, three of the
four suicide bombers visited recently. Their families have also confirmed that
the visits did take place. For once the market for conspiracy theories about a
Jewish-Hindu-Christian diabolical plot to defame Islam and Muslims may have a
short life-span, although I have already received a barrage of emails, denying
with amazing bull-headed obstinacy that the suicide bombers were British
Muslims of Pakistani origin. Some totally wacky theories suggest that the three
men of Pakistani-origin worked for the British intelligence which orchestrated
the attacks to create a scare of Muslim terrorism.
One of the suicide bombers, Muhammad Siddiq Khan, left behind a 14-month old
daughter and a young wife. There is little doubt in my mind that Siddiq and his
three younger comrades were idealists who had been brainwashed to believe that
their faith and the ummah needed their supreme sacrifice. Whereas their mentors
have yet not been traced and the entire network has not been uncovered, the
fact remains that the jihadi factories (called madrassas) churning out a
nihilistic worldview are still in business in Pakistan.
We were told by no less than President Pervez Musharraf in January 2002 when he
first publicly announced his about-turn on jihad that the madrassas had been
doing useful work, providing shelter, food and religious education to children
from poor families who had no means of supporting themselves. Consequently he
did not plan to dismantle them, but that those which preached extremism and
terrorism would be closed down.
On the surface, such a description sounded sympathetic. Of course the general
and his buddies never thought that it is not written in the stars that millions
of Pakistani families should continue to remain poor and destitute so that they
can only turn to the madrassas for help.
Neither did he mention that until the Afghan jihad was taken up by Pakistan,
there were few madrassas in Pakistan and they took in only as many pupils as
were needed by the mosques. Caring for the poor was not their agenda. The
madrassas corresponded roughly to the number of mosques under the control of
different sub-sects of Deobandis, Barelwis, Ahl-e-Hadith, Shia and so on. In
1956 there were only 244 madrassas in Pakistan. Recent estimates range from
13,000 to 15,000 with an enrolment of 1.5 to two million (unpublished report by
Dr Saleem Ali, Islamic Education and Conflict: Understanding the Madrassahs of
Pakistan).
The syllabi taught in those traditional madrassas was woefully archaic since
much of it was based on assumptions that the earth was flat and the sun and
moon rotated around it, while the stars were fixed lights in the seven-tier
heaven. The laws and moral values taught also corresponded to a static
worldview that made any notion of progress beyond the severely segregated
societies of the 7th to 12th centuries impossible to grasp, much less accept.
But in all honesty such madrassas produced generally decent, hardworking and
frugal prayer leaders and minor and major scholars of Islam. I remember that
the Maulvi Sahib in our immediate Deobandi mosque was a thorough gentleman and
a good human being. The Barelwi maulvi a little further down the road was also
a wonderful man. Their silly rivalries provided much amusement and both had a
sense of humour.
But things were never the same once the Afghan jihad started. The joint
CIA-Saudi initiative resulted in a proliferation of madrassas, regardless of
the genuine need for maulvis. Thanks to the CIAs 51 million US dollar grant to
the University of Nebraska to produce pictorial textbooks glorifying jihad,
killing, maiming and bombing other human beings was made sufficiently
entertaining. Sadism could now be cultivated as a virtue. That was when
madrassa doors were opened to the mass of the poor.
The new education they received was to hate the Russians, later generalised
to include any non-Muslim. Jews, Hindus and Christians figured prominently and
out of it came the expression of a Yahud-Hunud-Nasara conspiracy against Islam.
The phrase had never existed previously but because of its Arabic sounds, it
went readily to the hearts and minds of the Islamists. The Buddhists did not
fit into the Yahud-Hunud-Nasara formula. But the Taliban by destroying the
Buddha statues at Bamiyan indicated that even Buddhists were against Islam and
therefore their symbolic presence in Islamic Afghanistan had to be annihilated.
Until then, the children of the poor were deliberately kept poor so landlords
had a regular supply of rural workers whose labour and sweat could be exploited
for a pittance. Thats why establishing regular secular schools in the rural
areas was strongly resisted. The urban poor also never got to school, ending up
either as cheap industrial workers or as lumpen elements doing odd tasks in the
informal sector of urban economies.
The need for warriors against the Soviets in Afghanistan meant that a portion
of the cheap but plentiful labour force of young men could easily be converted
into fodder for jihad in Afghanistan or, later in the Indian-administered
Kashmir or used against other targets in India and against religious and ethnic
minorities in Pakistan.
The poor are fodder for war and jihad anywhere in the world though they need
leadership and education, technical and otherwise. So, the international jihad
also recruited idealist young Muslim men from all over the world for the Afghan
war. Some of them went to the madrassas and were trained to hate anyone who did
not fit into a narrow and regimented worldview. This industry has now gone
bust. Those who needed its products for fighting Communism are now selling off
their shares. The Pakistani investors should also watch out.
Some naïve scholars believe that dismantling the madrassas is undemocratic
since it violates the freedoms of association and speech and expression. I
wonder if the Ku Klux Klan cannot invoke this democratic right to propagate its
ideology all over the USA and establish racist madrassas. The absurdity of such
arguments need not be stressed.
Instead, people should demand that all Pakistani children should receive free
and compulsory education based on human rights and all the literary and
technical skills needed to create a humane, just and progressive Pakistan.
Reformed syllabi based on both rationalist and sacred sciences monitored by the
state should be taught in a reasonable number of religious seminaries. It would
be best to bring all mosques and madrassas under direct state supervision.
The author is an associate professor of political science at Stockholm
University. He is the author of two books. His email address is [EMAIL
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