Inside Islam's ''terror schools''
Cover story
William Dalrymple
Monday 28th March 2005
http://www.newstatesman.com/200503280010
Madrasas are Islamic colleges accused by the US of incubating terrorism and
the attacks of 9/11. From Pakistan, William Dalrymple investigates the
threat
Halfway along the dangerous road to Kohat - deep in the lawless tribal belt
between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and where Osama Bin Laden is widely
believed to be sheltering - we passed a small whitewashed shrine that had
recently been erected by the side of the road: "That is where the army
ambushed and killed two al-Qaeda men escaping from Afghanistan," said Javed
Paracha. "Local people soon began to see the two martyrs in their dreams.
Now we believe that they are saints. Already many cures and miracles have
been reported. If any of our women want to ask anything special from God,
they first come here."
He added: "They say that each shahid [martyr] emitted a perfume like that of
roses. For many days a beautiful scent was coming from the place of their
martyrdom."
Javed Paracha is a huge, burly tribal leader with a granite outcrop of nose
jutting from a great fan of grey beard. In many ways he is the embodiment of
everything that US policy-makers most fear and dislike about this part of
the Muslim world. For Paracha is a dedicated Islamist, as well as a wily
lawyer who has successfully defended al-Qaeda suspects in the Peshawar High
Court. In his fortress-like stronghouse in Kohat he sheltered wounded
Taliban fighters - and their frost-bitten women and children - fleeing
across the mountains from the American Daisy Cutters at Tora Bora, and he
was twice imprisoned by General Musharraf in the notorious prison at Dera
Ismail Khan. There he was kept in solitary confinement while being
questioned - and he alleges tortured - by CIA interrogators. On his release,
he found his prestige among his neighbours had been immensely enhanced by
his ordeal. His proudest boast, however, is building the two enormous
madrasas he founded and financed, the first of which he says produced many
of the younger leaders of the Taliban.
"They are the biggest madrasas in the [North-West] Frontier," he told me
proudly after stopping to say a prayer at the al-Qaeda shrine. "The books
are free. The food is free. The education is free. We give them free
accommodation. In a poor and backward area like this, our madrasas are the
only form of education. The government system is simply not here. "
Paracha got back in the car - the vehicle sinking to the left as he lowered
himself into the back beside his two armed bodyguards - and added: "There
are 200,000 jobless degree holders in this country. Mark my words, a more
extreme form of the Taliban is coming to Pakistan. The conditions are so
bad. The people are so desperate. They are waiting for a solution that will
rid them of this feudal-army elite. The people want radical change. We teach
them in the madrasas that only Islam can provide the justice they seek."
For better or worse, the sort of madrasa-driven change in political
attitudes that Javed Paracha is bringing about in Kohat is being reproduced
across Pakistan. An Interior Ministry report revealed recently that there
are now 27 times as many madrasas in the country as there were in 1947: from
245 at the time of independence the number has shot up to 6,870 in 2001. The
religious tenor of Pakistan has been correspondingly radicalised: the
tolerant Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now deeply out of fashion,
overtaken by the sudden rise of the more hardline reformist Deobandi,
Wahhabi and Salafi strains of the faith that are increasingly dominant over
swaths of the country.
The sharp acceleration in the number of these madrasas first began under
General Zia, and was financed mainly by Saudi donors (though ironically the
US also played a role in this as part of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad).
Since the oil boom of the early 1970s a policy of exporting not just
petroleum, but also hardline Wahhabism, became a fundamental tenet of Saudi
foreign policy, partly a result of a competition for influence with Shia
Iran. Although some of the madrasas were little more than single rooms
attached to village mosques, others are now very substantial institutions:
the Darul Uloom in Baluchistan is now annually enrolling some 1,500 boarders
and a further 1,000 day-boys.
Altogether, there are now an estimated 800,000 to one million students
enrolled in Pakistan's madrasas: an entire, free Islamic education system
existing parallel to the increasingly moribund state sector, in which a mere
1.8 per cent of Pakistan's GDP is spent on government schools. The
statistics are dire: 15 per cent of these schools are without a proper
building; 52 per cent without a boundary wall; 40 per cent without water; 71
per cent without electricity. There is frequent absenteeism of teachers;
indeed, many of these schools exist only on paper.
This education gap is the most striking way in which Pakistan is lagging
behind India, a country in which 65 per cent of the population is literate,
and the number rises every year. Only this year, the Indian education system
received a substantial boost of state funds in the government Budget; but in
Pakistan the literacy figure is well under half (it is currently 42 per
cent), and falling. The collapse of government schooling has meant that many
of the country's poorest people who want their children's advancement have
no option but to place the children in the madrasa system where they are
guaranteed a conservative and outdated, but nonetheless free education.
Madrasas are now more dominant in Pakistan's educational system than they
are anywhere else; but the general trend is common across the Islamic world.
In Egypt the number of teaching institutes dependent on the Islamic Al-Azhar
University increased from 1,855 in 1986 to 4,314 ten years later. The Saudis
have also stepped up funding in Africa: in Tanzania alone they have been
spending $1m a year building new madrasas. In Mali, madrasas now account for
around a quarter of children in primary schools. Seen in this wider context,
Paracha and his educational endeavours in Kohat raise a number of important
questions: how far are these madrasas the source of the problems that
culminated in the Islamist attacks of 9/11? Are madrasas simply terrorist
factories? Should the west be pressing US client states such as Pakistan and
Egypt simply to close the whole lot down?
In the panic-striken aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the
answers to these questions seemed obvious. Donald Rumsfeld, among a number
of US politicians, fingered madrasas as terror-incubators and centres of
hatred, responsible - so he said - for propagating anti-Americanism across
the Islamic world. There were many good reasons for people jumping to this
assumption. The terrifyingly ultra-conservative Taliban regime was
unquestionably the product of Pakistan's madrasas. Much of the Taliban
leadership was trained at just one madrasa: the Haqqaniya at Akora Khattak,
between Islamabad and Peshawar. The director, Sami ul-Haq, still proudly
boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would
simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight.
But as we now know, in the aftermath of 9/11, a great many of the
assumptions that people made about Islamist terrorism have proved with
hindsight to be quite spectacularly ill-founded, the result of inadequate
and partial understanding of the complexities of the contemporary Islamic
world.
There was, first of all, widespread misunderstanding about the nature of
al-Qaeda. Bin Laden's organisation has turned out not to be some structured
multinational organisation; still less was it the state-sponsored puppet -
with Osama moving to the tug of Saddam's Ba'athist string-pulling - that was
depicted by the neo-cons and their media mouthpieces (in this country,
Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph and the equally credulous Murdoch Times) as
they attempted to justify attacking Iraq.
Instead, as Giles Kepel, the leading French authority on Islamists, puts it
in his important study, The War For Muslim Minds: "al-Qaeda was [and is]
less a military base of operations than a database that connected jihadists
around the world via the internet . . . this organisation did not consist of
buildings and tanks and borders but of websites, clandestine financial
transfers and a proliferation of activists ranging from Jersey City to the
paddies of Indonesia". This central failure to understand the nature of
al-Qaeda was the reason that the US attempted to counter it with such
unsuitable policies: by targeting nations it considered sponsors of
terrorism, so inadvertently turning itself into al-Qaeda's most effective
recruiting agency.
In the same way, it was maintained that al-Qaeda's grievances were
unconnected to America's Middle Eastern policies. This also proved to be
quite wrong. From al-Qaeda's "Declaration of War Against the Americans",
issued in 1996, Bin Laden had announced that his grievance was not cultural
or religious, but very specifically political: he was fighting to oppose US
support for the House of Saud and Israel. As he told the Pakistani
journalist Hamid Mir: "America and its allies are massacring us in
Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq. The Muslims have a right to attack
America in reprisal . . . The targets were icons of America's military and
economic power."
In retrospect, the idea that madrasas are one of the principal engines of
this global Islamic terrorism appears to be another American assumption that
begins to wobble when subjected to serious analysis.
It is certainly true that many madrasas are fundamentalist in their approach
to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the least pluralistic and most
hardline strains of Islamic thought. It is also true that some madrasas can
be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil
violence: just as there are some yeshivas [religious schools] in settlements
on the West Bank that have a reputation for violence against Palestinians,
and Serbian monasteries that sheltered some of the worst of that country's
war criminals, so it is estimated that as many as 15 per cent of Pakistan's
madrasas preach violent jihad, while a few have even been known to provide
covert military training.
Some have done their best to bring about a Talibanisation of Pakistan:
madrasa graduates in Karachi have been behind acts of violence against the
city's Shia minority, while in 1998, madrasa students in Baluchistan began
organising bonfires of TVs and attacked video shops. In this, however, they
have so far had limited success. Indeed, the bestselling video in
Baluchistan last year was a pirate tape that showed a senior Pakistani MP in
flagrante with his girlfriend. The tape, which had been made by the MP
himself, had been stolen by his political enemies and circulated around the
province, with the expectation that it would destroy his career. However, so
impressive was the MP's performance in the video that he was re-elected with
a record majority; I recently met him looking very pleased with himself in
Islamabad, where he says the tape has transformed his political fortunes.
It is now becoming clear, however, that producing cannon-fodder for the
Taliban and graduating 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, and the World Trade Center. A number of recent studies have
emphasised that there is an important and fundamental distinction to be made
between most mad- rasa graduates - who tend to be pious villagers from
economically impoverished backgrounds, possessing very 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, scientific or technical backgrounds and very few
actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.
The men who planned and carried out the Islamist attacks on America - all
but four of them were Saudi citizens - 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 and a town-planning expert; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin
Laden's chief of staff, was a paediatric surgeon; Ziad Jarrah, one of the
founders of the Hamburg cell, was a dental student who later turned to
aircraft engineering; while Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of the Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, had studied at the LSE and was the product of
the same British public school that produced the film-maker Peter Greenaway.
Such figures represent a clash of civilisations occurring not so much
between civilisations, as the author Samuel Huntingdon would maintain, but
rather within individuals, products of the sort of cultural dislocation and
disorientation that accompanies accelerating economic change and
globalisation. As Kepel puts it, the new breed of global jihadis are not the
urban poor of the developing world, so much as "the privileged children of
an unlikely marriage between Wahhabism and Silicon Valley".
This is also the conclusion drawn by the most sophisticated analysis of
global jihadis to be published in recent years: Marc Sageman's Understanding
Terror Networks. Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA man who
worked in Pakistan during the 1980s. In his study, he closely examined the
lives 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 PhDs. Nor are they young
hotheads: their average age is 26, most of them are married, and many have
children. Only two appear to be obviously psychotic. It seems that Islamic
terrorism, like its Christian predecessor, remains a largely bourgeois
endeavour: "These are truly global citizens," writes Sageman, "familiar with
many countries - the west as well as the Middle East - and able to speak
several languages with equal facility . . . Even their ideologues are not
trained clerics: [Sayyid] Qutb [for example] was a journalist."
It is true that there are exceptions, and the line between these two
different worlds is certainly porous. There are several examples of radical
madrasa graduates who have become involved with al-Qaeda. By and large,
however, madrasa students simply do not have the technical expertise or
conceptual imagination necessary to carry out the sort of attacks we have
seen al-Qaeda pull off in the past few years. Instead, the concerns of most
madrasa graduates remain far more traditional - what the French Islamist
expert Olivier Roy calls "neo-fundamentalism": the correct fulfilment of
rituals, how to wash correctly before prayers, the proper length to grow a
beard and how high above the ankles you should wear your salwar kameez. As
the laws of the Taliban regime revealed, they are obsessed with the public
covering of women, which they regard as essential to a morally ordered
society. Their focus, in other words, is not on opposing non-Muslims or the
west - the central concern of the salafi jihadis - so much as on fostering
what they see as proper Islamic behaviour at home and attempting to return
to - as they see it - the pristine purity of the time of the Prophet.
That there are huge variations in the tone and quality of madrasa education
should not be surprising. Throughout much of Islamic history, madrasas were
the major source of religious and scientific learning, just as the church
schools and the universities were in Europe. The quality and tone of their
education is determined by the nature of their curricula, which have always
varied widely.
Between the seventh and 11th centuries, madrasas produced free-thinking
luminaries such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina and al-Khwarizmi. The oldest and
greatest madrasa of them all, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, has good claim
to being the most sophisticated institution of learning in the entire
Mediterranean world during the early Middle Ages. The very idea of a
university in the modern sense - a place of learning 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.
When the Mongol invasions destroyed the major institutions of learning in
the central Islamic heartlands, many learned refugees fled to Delhi, turning
northern India for the first time into a major centre of scholarship. By the
time of Akbar, the third Mughal emperor of India, the curriculum in Indian
madrasas blended the learning of the Islamic Middle East with that of the
indigenous teaching of Hindu India, which resulted in the incredibly
broad-minded and pluralistic high civilisation of the Mughal period.
However, following the collapse of Indo-Islamic self-confidence that
accompanied the deposition and exile of the last emperor, Bahadur Shah
Zafar, in 1858, disillusioned scholars founded an influential but
depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north
of the former Mughal capital. Reacting against what the founders saw as the
degenerate ways of the old elite, which had allowed the British to defeat
Muslim power in such a catastrophic manner, the Deoband madrasa went back to
Koranic basics, rigorously stripping out anything Hindu or European from the
curriculum of the college. It was, unfortunately, these puritanical
Deoband-type madrasas that spread throughout northern India and Pakistan in
the course of the 20th century, and which particularly benefited from the
patronage of Zia and his Saudi allies in the 1980s.
It is certainly true that many madrasas in Pakistan have outdated curricula:
some still teach Euclidian geometry and medicine from the Roman physician
Galen of Pergamum. Emphasis is put on the rote learning - rather than
critical study - of the Koran. Jessica Stern of Harvard recently testified
before a US Senate House committee that "in a school that purportedly
offered a broad curriculum, a teacher I questioned could not multiply seven
times eight". This is, however, by no means the case with all madrasas, some
of which are surprisingly sophisticated places.
In Karachi, the largest madrasa is the Darul Uloom. To get there, you pass
from the rich middle-class areas of the city centre, with their low, white
bungalows and sprawling gardens, going through progressively more run-down
suburbs until you find yourself in a depressing industrial wasteland of
factories and warehouses, punctuated by the belching smokestacks of
brickworks. Out of this Pakistani apocalypse rises the almost surreal
spectacle of Darul Uloom. Its green lawns resemble a cross between a
five-star hotel and a rather upmarket, modern university campus.
After what happened to Daniel Pearl, I had been warned about the dangers of
visiting madrasas, and had gone to the elaborate lengths of informing the
British Consulate about my movements; but in reality there was nothing
remotely threatening about Darul Uloom. The students were almost all eager,
smart, friendly and intelligent, if somewhat intense and puritanical. When,
on a visit to the dormitory block, I asked one bearded student what music he
listened to on his shining new ghetto-blaster, he looked at me as if I had
just asked him about his favourite porn video. The machine, he informed me,
was only for listening to tapes of sermons. All music was banned.
Puritanical it may be, but it is clear that the Darul Uloom performs, as do
many Pakistani madrasas, an important service - especially in a country
where 58 per cent of the vast population, and 72 per cent of women, are
illiterate and half the population never see the inside of a school at all.
Madrasas may not be cutting-edge in their educational philosophy, but they
do provide the poor with a way of gaining literacy and a real hope of
advancing themselves. In certain traditional subjects - such as rhetoric,
logic, jurisprudence and Arabic grammar - the teaching can be outstanding.
Although they tend to be ultra-conservative, it has been repeatedly shown
that only a small proportion are obviously militant. To close them down
without attempting to build up the state sector would simply relegate large
chunks of the population to illiteracy and ignorance. It would also be
tantamount to instructing Muslims to stop educating themselves about their
religion - hardly the best strategy for winning hearts and minds.
You don't have to go far from Pakistan to find a madrasa system that has
effectively tackled both the problems of militancy and of educational
backwardness. Although India was originally the home of the Deobandi
madrasas, such colleges in India have no track record of producing violent
Islamists, and are strictly apolitical and quietist. Their degree of success
can be measured from the fact that Jamia Milia University in New Delhi, at
least 50 per cent of whose intake comes from a madrasa background, is
generally reckoned to be one of India's most prestigious and successful
centres of higher education.
According to Seema Alavi, one of India's brightest young historians, who now
teaches at Jamia, there is little difference between her students educated
at secular schools and those educated in madrasas - except perhaps that
those from madrasas are better able to memorise coursework, but are less
practised at analysing and processing information: years of rote-learning
has both its pros and its cons. But there is no sense that those students
from Indian madrasas are more politically radical or less able to cope with
a modern urban environment than their contemporaries from secular
institutions. Several of India's greatest scholars - such as the celebrated
Mughal historian Muzaffar Alam of Chicago University - are madrasa
graduates.
If this is right, it would seem to confirm what other researchers have
observed, that it is not madrasas per se that are the problem, so much as
the militant atmosphere and indoctrination taking place in a handful of
notorious centres of ultra-radicalism such as Binori Town or Akora Khattak.
The question remains, however, whether General Musharraf's government has
the strength and the willpower to see through the necessary reforms and
replicate the success of madrasas across the border in India. So far,
attempts at taming Pakistan's more militant madrasas have proved
half-hearted. There have been some attempts to curb the attendance of
foreign Islamic students at Pakistani madrasas, and noises were made about
standardising the syllabus and encouraging some modern subjects.
Nevertheless, the more extreme have been able to resist the enforcement of
even these mild measures: only 1 per cent of the country's madrasas complied
when asked to register with the government.
In Islamabad, I went to see Pervez Hoodbhoy, an expert on education and the
author of an important study of the madrasas. Hoodbhoy teaches at
Quaid-e-Azam University, the Pakistani Oxbridge, and as we sat in the
spacious campus, he described the depressing changes he had witnessed since
joining the staff in the 1970s. Not only had there been a general decline in
educational standards, he said, but beards, burkas and hijabs, unknown in
the early 1980s, were now the norm. He estimated that only one-third of his
students now resist showing some visible sign of their Islamic propriety.
"And this," he added, "is by far the most liberal university in Pakistan.
"There is definitely a change in the temper of this society," he said. "The
students are much less interested in the world and show much less curiosity
- instead we have this mad, unthinking rush towards religiosity, and the
steady erosion of the liberal elite."
I asked Hoodbhoy about his prognosis for the future.
"I am very anxious," he said. "The state educational system has reached the
point of collapse. The only long-term solution has to be improved secular
government schools: at the moment they are so bad that even where they
exist, no one will willingly go to them.
"But the biggest problem we have," he continued, "is the US. Their actions
in Iraq and Afghanistan have hugely strengthened the hands of the extremists
and depleted the strength of those who want to see a modern,
non-fundamentalist future for this country. Before the invasion of Iraq, I
called the US ambassador and warned her: if you attack Saddam, you may gain
Iraq, but you'll lose Pakistan. I hope I was wrong - but I fear that I may
yet be proved right."
William Dalrymple's most recent book, White Mughals (Harper Perennial), won
the Wolfson Prize for History. A stage version by Christopher Hampton has
just been commissioned by the National Theatre
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current
and cultural affairs <https://www.newstatesman.com/000SUBSCRIBE.htm>
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