Musharraf Vows to Revamp Madrassas

Jan. 15, 2002 -- Over the past three months, the Institute of Islamic Studies in Islamabad, Pakistan, has seen a number of strange visitors walk through its gates.

Since the U.S. military campaign began in neighboring Afghanistan, Western journalists have visited the Islamic educational establishment for a close-up view of the sort of religious schools, or madrassas, that spawned the hard-line Taliban.

And though Badruddin — a school official who goes by one name — says he knows what's on their minds, he nevertheless ushers camera crews into the school to check out the three computers and the math and English classes that the school is so proud of.

"There is disinformation in America," he says simply. "Many journalists come here, but they do not find anything here, not even a knife."

While few of the estimated 8,000 madrassas functioning across Pakistan provide military training on their premises, many madrassas have been known to foster a conservative, often limited, sometimes misguided education that has fostered religious extremism across parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Like most developing countries, Pakistan is a nation of contradictory images. While the elite educate their children in prestigious private educational establishments in the cities, the bulk of Pakistan's 145 million people have a choice of either a struggling public education system or madrassas.

Funded largely by donations from Islamic institutions and individuals abroad — primarily from Saudi Arabia — and providing free education, boarding and lodging, for most Pakistanis, madrassas function as a de facto welfare system that few non-governmental organizations, let alone the Pakistani government, can match.

But images of young boys swaying to the din of Koranic verses recited by rote during class and populating anti-America rallies after class have alerted the international community to the dangers of indoctrination some madrassas pose.

And now that the military campaign in Afghanistan has put Pakistan back in diplomatic and economic business with billions of dollars of economic aid and developmental loans coming its way, the pressure is on the Pakistani government to do something about the madrassas.

Musharraf Rises to the Challenge

It's a challenge Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf publicly shouldered over the weekend when he delivered a keynote speech vowing to take on, among other things, the country's madrassa system.

In an apparent effort to address domestic and international concerns, Musharraf acknowledged the importance of madrassas, noting that he had often defended them in his speeches in the West, but, he maintained, the time has come for a major revamp.

"We have formulated a new strategy for madaris [sic] and there is need to implement it so as to galvanize their good aspects and remove their drawbacks," said Musharraf in his hourlong speech.

Under the new measures, all mosques and madrassa students will have to be registered, foreign students and teachers have to provide documentation before March 23 or face expulsion and schools have been urged to reform their curriculum.

Although exact figures on madrassas are hard to come by, experts estimate that 34,000 of the 600,000 boys and young men attending madrassas in Pakistan are foreigners, mostly Afghans and Arabs.

In his speech to the nation, a stern but relaxed-looking Musharraf declared the time had come for madrassas to include math, science and English classes in their curriculum. The changes, he vowed, would enable madrassa students to compete for university seats and jobs in a new, improved Pakistan that would have no patience for religious extremism.

Nice Words, But What About Implementation?

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is made up of a patchwork of regional, tribal and ethnic groups, and it draws its national character on a religious — or a Muslim — identity. This makes the balance between modernity and the clergy — called the ulema in Pakistan — a fine one.

But while most experts have welcomed Musharraf's attempts to revamp the system, experts on the region say they are familiar with the rhetoric and would prefer to see action, not words.

"My broad reaction to the speech is that it's a hopeful one," said Zia Mian, researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. "But the root of the problem still remains and the problem is a crisis of governance."

Mian notes that cracking down on the religious extremism that has plagued Pakistan since the 1980s has been on Musharraf's agenda ever since he came into power in a military coup in Oct. 1999. But, he says, "There have been no great achievements in the areas that he has promised to change. As a dictator, he faces no opposition to these policies, the question is can he implement them?"

A Crisis in the Public Education System

While part of the solution for the madrassa issue appears to lie in increased central control, others point to the crisis in the public school system as an additional obstacle.

A list of ills plaguing the public education system reads a lot like those haunting most developing countries, except that the combination of poverty and corruption, coupled with Pakistan's failure to establish a democratic system of governance, appears to have exacerbated the crisis.

Muhammad Yusuf Chohan, a former senior adviser to the Pakistani Ministry of Education, rattles off the list: "High dropout rates, poor teacher training, corruption in the examination system, lack of basic infrastructure and poor parent participation."

At the heart of the matter is the complete breakdown of the Pakistani primary education system, says Shahrukh Khan, executive director of the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute. "One of the biggest problems is a complete loss of confidence in the education system."

Khan notes that educated, well-to-do Pakistanis have for the most abandoned the public school system for elite urban private institutions. For the poor, the only alternative is, "the other stream of private education — namely the madrassas — where the curriculum extends to medieval subjects like studying the Koran and some Arabic-oriented classes, which does nothing to empower their students to cope with the modern world."

Taking the Exams

Even more upsetting, according to Mian, is the fact that in a country where 57 percent of the population is illiterate, madrassa students are a comparatively privileged group.

"Madrassas don't address the really poor because they can't afford to lose the income their children can provide. They cater to parents who don't require their children's labor power and want their kids to succeed," said Mian. "Students emerge from madrassas with low-level skills that will at least enable them to become imams [priests] or if they have access to capital, they can become shopkeepers and taxi drivers and at least earn a livelihood."

In the current system, madrassas fall under the purview of the Ministry for Religious Affairs, not the Ministry for Education, although there are reports that Musharraf might issue an ordinance making them the responsibility of the Ministry for Education.

A foreseeable goal of the new system, according to Chohan, is to ensure that every religious institution prepares its students for standardized examinations at different levels that would enable them to gain admission in higher-level educational institutions or universities.

A system of certification for madrassas that enables students to enter Islamic studies programs in state universities does exist, but there are few madrassas that actually prepare or even encourage students to take the examinations.

A Matter of Geography

Located in the comparatively subdued suburban environs of the capital city with a curriculum that includes English classes and three computers for student use, the Institute of Islamic Studies is one of the better-regarded madrassas whose students compete for university seats.

But the picture gets bleaker out of the cities and especially in the provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province. Often referred to as border or tribal provinces, most Pakistani officials admit to having little success in being able to control or even administer these areas.

The educated in the relatively well-off Punjab and Sindh provinces are the largest personnel contributors to Pakistan's brain-drain to the West.

But while the solution for combating brain-drain is a long term one of offering enough opportunities to work as "pull" factors, experts note that at the very least, madrassas should be able to equip their students to take on the future.

"The problem is that these madrassas don't produce people who have a vision of the future," says Mian. "So, the solutions that nostalgia has to offer is attractive because their education does not even empower them to see the future."