Lessons from God Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
Peshawar, PAKISTAN – Rows of adolescent boys kneel in an open marble courtyard, dwarfed by the oversized, yellowing Arabic texts opened before them. Murmuring under white knit prayer caps, their small bodies sway in rhythm with their hafiz (memorization of the verses of the Koran by rote). The entryway is adorned by a faded poster of Mulana Sami al-Haq, the owner of the sprawling grounds of the Dar al-Haqqania Madrassa and principal administrator to its 3,000 students. Shrouded in green, he holds a Quran in one uplifted arm and a Kalashnikov in the other.
Scenes like this one strike fear in the hearts of local and Western politicians alike, who fear that madrassas in this troubled country are the breeding grounds for the next generation of Islamic terrorists.
Older students like these study for high degrees in Islamic Law or Arabic Literature, but job opportunities in these fields are scarce.
Photo: Alex Stonehill.
“Madrassas are a permanent problem in our society,” said Afrasiab Khattak, General Secretary of Pakistan’s Awami National Party. “As long as they exist, they will produce terror.” Secular leaders like him know al-Haq as a key supporter of the Taliban and accuse him of sending thousands of boys only a few years older than these across the border to Afghanistan to meet their destiny in battle against American soldiers. They see the thousands of Islamic religious schools here in North West Frontier Province and throughout the country as a threat to Pakistan’s future and the possibility of stability in the region.
But madrassas have a long history in Pakistani society, even prior to the recent emergence of radical strains of Islam, and today close to 70 percent of children receive at least some part of their education in a religious setting. In a country with a literacy rate that barely scrapes in at 20 percent by some estimates, and where few families have the money to send children to private or government schools, the free education that madrassas offer is often the only option.
But it is more than simple economic need that draws students to madrassas. In this highly religious society, where the government is often seen as unstable and corrupt, mullahs and religious leaders like al-Haq have a reputation as more reliable providers of social services like education. While only a tiny percentage of Pakistanis actually pay their income tax, all practicing Muslims – more than three quarters of the population – pay zakat, 2.5 percent of personal income that must be devoted toward alms. Zakat produces almost 70 billion rupees ($1.16 billion) a year in private philanthropy, much of which goes toward the funding of madrassas like Dar al-Haqqania.
“Mosques and madrassas are the key stakeholders in Pakistan’s civil society,” said Tahseen Ullah Khan, chief coordinator of the National Research and Development Foundation. “They are the institutions that must be used to promote social development.”
With this goal in mind, Khan has spearheaded the Salaam Project, which aims to reform the religious sector from the inside out. The goal of the project is to build new mosques and madrassas, starting in areas devastated by last year’s earthquake, and use these religious institutions to promote social development and provide civic education through a human rights-based curriculum.
“If we were to open secular schools, no locals would contribute to them – all the money would have to come from outside and the institutions would not be trusted locally,” said Khan, who was educated partly in a madrassa himself. “Religious institutions are the only way we can reach the people who are most vulnerable to manipulation by extremists.”
Khan’s office is piled high with booklets with titles like "Islam and Women’s Rights," "Ulama (Islamic Scholars) and Development," and "The Religious Foundations of Jihad," all written and published by Khan himself. These tracts go directly to the source, quoting the hadith (recorded sayings and actions of the prophet) and the Quran in an effort to show how the true messages of Islam have been manipulated to suit the private agendas of extremists. He hopes to engage established religious scholars and teachers into the efforts of the Salaam Project using personal ties in the community, and to provide them with trainings on how to use Islam to approach crucial social issues and break down prejudices against non-Muslims.
Rashid al-Haq displays Dar al-Haqqani's registration book. Students here range in age from 10 to 42.
Photo: Alex Stonehill.
Although the Salaam Project still exists mostly in the mind of Khan and a small cadre of supporters, it is already proving to be a dangerous undertaking for him. He says his home has been attacked twice in recent years, aggression which he believes was a direct reaction to his work for religious reform. In the most recent attack, his 2-year-old son was held at gunpoint for more than two hours while the house was ransacked. Though the assailants were Afghani, Khan says he suspects that they were hired by the ISI, the Pakistani army’s intelligence service.
Whether or not his suspicions are true, the ties between religious extremists, the Pakistani Military and the Musharaf government seem to be common knowledge in Pakistan.
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After 9/11, when Pakistan was first engaged as an ally in the War on Terror, Musharaf took public steps to regulate madrassas, introducing a plan to register all of the country’s religious schools and channel funding toward reforming their curriculum. Khan believes this was a hollow political move meant only to appease the West, and says it only succeeded in superficial gains.
“Musharaf’s own ministers publicly refused to implement these policies, and they ended up giving this funding to the same old religious leaders without backing it up with any oversight,” he argues. “The same old ideas were there, but now maybe they had a computer in the school to help them execute it.”
Back at the Dar al-Haqqania Madrassa, 30 kilometers outside of Peshawar, Sami al-Haq’s son Rashid, a teacher at the school and editor of its newspaper, denies claims that his students are being taught extremism. He says he resents the steady stream of journalists that have visited, who he says unfairly paint Dar al-Haqqania as a fundamentalist madrassa. But a talk with one of the younger students here reveals opinions that most Americans would describe as extreme.
"When an Islamic government was imposed in Afghanistan, there was peace, justice and equality" says Hassan, 15, fresh from his hafiz class, who says he hopes to become an engineer. “I would like to see a Taliban-style government here in Pakistan.”
Although Rashid admits that study of secular subjects is important if graduates hope to secure a job outside the religious sphere, he believes that madrassas are only responsible for training Islamic scholars or providing the religious dimensions of a well-rounded education. He adds that many of his students also attend secular schools to learn worldly subjects – though this option is only open to those who can afford it – and he claims that his school follows the government curriculum when they do teach non-religious subjects.
“We are already doing more than we are supposed to do here,” Rashid said. “Secular education is the responsibility of the government, and they aren’t living up to that responsibility.”
But with the Pakistani government firmly in the hands of a military that saps the vast majority of the budget for its own purposes, it seems unlikely that it will take up this responsibility in the near future. With almost half of the country living below the poverty line, even nominally free government schools remain out of reach for many students who can’t afford the hidden costs of books and uniforms. Secular private schools are an even more costly option generally reserved only for the small middle and upper classes. Despite all of their practical shortcomings and limited prospects for post-graduation employment, madrassas remain an attractive option, even if only for the economic relief the free room and board offers to an overburdened family.
Given the grim realities of the Pakistani education system, an innovative project like Salaam may be the only workable solution. But bringing aboard religious leaders like Sami al-Haq – who Khan is already building a relationship with – is going to be a tough first step.
“Mosques and madrassas are the only effective institutions we have in our society,” Khan explains at a late-night gathering of secular academics, religious scholars and businessmen who are all backing the Salaam Project. "The fact is that Islam is not going away – our only hope is to reform it."
UPDATE April 2009:
The ouster of the Musharaf regime, and a new civilian government in Pakistan has done little to improve access to education in Pakistan. Madrassas are still a popular alternative to failing government schools and inaccessible private schools, and they are still accused of training insurgents. CLP journalists visited Taseen Ullah Khan in Peshawer in April 2009. He had abandoned the Salaam project in response to the worsening security situation in Northwest Pakistan, and had refocused his efforts on bringing international attention to the high levels of civilian casualties in the war among the Taliban, the Pakistani Military and U.S. Drones.
This video was produced for the VJ Movement with support from the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.