[Reader-list] [arkitectindia] William Dalrymple on Madrasas in Pakistan

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William Dalrymple on Madrasas in Pakistan
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 










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