BOOK REVIEW: The madrassa puzzle in Pakistan —by Khaled Ahmed
The Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan; By C Christine Fair; Vanguard Books Lahore 2009; Pp145; Price Rs 500
On the face of it, no madrassa looks either jihadi or sectarian, but research has shown that the seminarians are more narrow-minded and intolerant than the pupils of normal schools
Christine Fair served at the Centre for Conflict Analysis and Prevention of the United States Institute of Peace, and currently is a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation. She is co-author of Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S Interim Security Assistance (USIP Press, 2006).
According to an estimate in Jang (January 6, 2006), there were 11,221 religious seminaries (madrassas) in Pakistan in the year 2005. This number had grown from 6,761 in 2000. This meant that in the five years that also saw the terrorist attack of 9/11, the apostatising seminaries had almost doubled in Pakistan. There were 448 madrassas for women too.
The largest number of madrassas, 8,191, belonged to Wifaqul Madaris Arabiya, 1,952 to Tanzimul Madaris and 381 to Wifaqul Madaris Shia. The majority seminaries are Deobandi. For instance, in Punjab 444,156 pupils are Deobandi as opposed to 199,733 Barelvi, 34,253 Ahle Hadith and 7,333 Shia. The largest number of madrassas is not in Lahore but Bahawalpur, then in Lahore, in Bahawalnagar and Faisalabad.
It is accepted that South Punjab is home to the most aggressive and poisoned of all madrassas. South Punjab stretches from Jhang to Bahawalpur, dotted with madrassas that private citizens from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait fund generously, thinking they are spreading the message of Islam. This is the region where the countryside is dominated by feudal lords with large landholdings and cities teeming with the poor masses controlled by jihadi groups.
Only in Dera Ghazi Khan, the origin of the dreaded clerics of Lal Masjid in Islamabad, there are 185 registered madrassas, of which 90 are Deobandi (with a total of 324 teachers), 84 are Barelvi (with a total of 212 teachers), six are Ahle Hadith (107 teachers) and five are Fiqh-e-Jafaria (10 teachers). Multan is the traditional base of madrassas, while Rahimyar Khan and Bahawalpur have seen their proliferation in recent years.
Together with Peshawar, Islamabad is the most vulnerable city as far as the possibility of a sudden takeover by the Taliban is concerned. Islamabad was supposed to have 80 madrassas just two years ago. Reported in Jang (June 18, 2009), the government had discovered that there were 260 madrassas in Islamabad, out of which one dozen were illegal. Some madrassas were busy spreading hatred against the armed forces of Pakistan. One Jamia Masjid Qasimiya in F-8/3 and its leader Ehsanullah Khan were warned by government to give up these activities in 15 days.
Ms Fair thinks that in some ways the madrassas in the Islamic world are the centre of a civil war of ideas. Westernised and usually affluent Muslims lack an interest in religious matters, but religious scholars, marginalised by modernisation, seek to assert their own relevance by insisting on orthodoxy. She writes: “Poor students attending madrassa find it easy to believe that the West, loyal to uncaring and aloof leaders, is responsible for their misery and that Islam as practiced in its earliest form can deliver them.”
But she is careful to point out that a study had revealed that terrorists in involved in the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in Africa, the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Bali nightclub bombing, and the London bombings in July 2005 were not madrassa graduates. The masterminds of the attacks had had university degrees. (p.5) In a survey she scans, of the 141 mujahideen in the data set, the vast majority served and died in Kashmir. Of these mujahideen, only nineteen were reportedly recruited at a madrassa—the same number recruited at a public school.
But she can’t completely absolve the madrassa of all blame. She says: “Available evidence suggests that madrassas are important sources of supply of suicide attackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Attacks in Afghanistan are relevant because many are attackers from madrassas in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reasons for this are not quite clear. In the case of Afghanistan, the validity of suicide attacks as an acceptable means of warfare are contested, with many Afghans seeing them as suicide rather than a legitimate mode of waging jihad.” (p.68)
According to her the registered madrassas in Pakistan number just over 6,700. Since a Pakistani will usually accept 20,000 as the total number, one must assume that the state will have a tough time registering those that stand outside the record. One reason could be the condition of rendering annual audit account, telling the government how much money was contributed by whom.
She finds the madrassas in the following order: Wafaq-ul-Madaris Arabia Pakistan (Deobandi) founded in 1959 in Multan; Tanzeem-ul-Madaris (Barelvi) founded in 1960 in Lahore; Wafaq-ul-Madaris Salafia (Ahl-e-Hadith) founded in 1955 in Faisalabad; RabitatuI Madaris Islamiya (Jama’at-e Islami) founded in 1983 in Mansoora Lahore; and Wafaq-ul-Madaris (Shia) founded in 1959 in Lahore.
Fair also finds the terrorists better educated than the average Pakistani: “Of those thirty-three madrassa products, 27 attended a madrassa for four or fewer years, and most also attended public schools. In contrast, 82 of the 141 were very well educated by Pakistani standards, with at least a matriculation qualification tenth-grade education, in stark contrast to the average level for Pakistani males. Only 9 of the 141 had no formal education, the militants in this sample were much better educated than the average Pakistani male.” (p.69)
She finds that many madrassas refuse to accept government funding because they think the money is coming from America. She discovered it to be true as “the amount allocated to Pakistan through USAID exactly equals the funding pledged by the government to the religious sector”. (p.86)
The madrassas insisted to her that there was no evidence that their students were involved in illegal activities. She could recall that the younger brother of Hanbali, Al Qaeda’s organiser in Southeast Asia, and mastermind of the Bali blasts, was arrested along with 17 people from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Burma, and in raids on three madrassas in Karachi.
Fair writes: “I did confirm during fieldwork that substantial numbers of foreign students from Africa, Europe and the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Central, South, and Southeast Asia were at many of the madrassas visited. In fact, Jamia Banuria at SITE in Karachi still has a large foreign students’ section, and one can still visit its Website to obtain information about applying for the foreign students’ programme’.” (p.90)
Some facts are well known about the madrassa background of some jihadi leaders. For instance, the leader of Jamia Banuria, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, was the patron of both Harkatul Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Muhammad and inclined more to the latter as the two bickered and split. The leader of Jaish, Maulana Masood Azhar, was his student at Jamia Banuria. So was the leader of Sipah Sahaba, Maulana Azam Tariq.
Shamzai headed many madrassas and was funded generously by Saudi Arabia. On the face of it, no madrassa looks either jihadi or sectarian, but research has shown that the seminarians are more narrow-minded and intolerant than the pupils of normal schools. *
