Lost youth
Pakistan’s madrassas fill a void but fuel militancy
BY SABRINA TAVERNISE
Mohri Pur: The elementary school in this poor village is
easy to mistake for a barn. It has a dirt floor and no lights and
crows swoop through its glassless windows. Class size recently hit 140, spilling
students into the courtyard.
But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs
have not. With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have
turned to madrassas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while
pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.
The concentration of madrassas here in southern Punjab has
become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The
schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorising of the Koran, creating
a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.
In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have
struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended
madrassas.
"We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep
the country," said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan, an independent organisation. "It’s red alert for Pakistan."
President Obama said in a news conference (on April 29) that he
was "gravely concerned" about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the
government did not "seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services:
schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority
of the people".
He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan
for non-military purposes, including education. Since the September 11 attacks,
the United States has given Pakistan a total of $680 million in non-military
aid, according to the state department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for
the military.
But education has never been a priority here and even Pakistan’s
current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past
efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and
a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.
"This is a state that never took education seriously," said
Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. "I’m very
pessimistic about whether the educational system can or will be reformed."
Pakistani families have long turned to madrassas, and the
religious schools make up a relatively small minority. But even for the majority
who attend public school, learning has an Islamic bent. The national curriculum
was Islamised during the 1980s under General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, a military
ruler who promoted Pakistan’s Islamic identity as a way to bind its patchwork of
tribes, ethnicities and languages.
Literacy in Pakistan has grown from barely 20 per cent at
independence 61 years ago and the government recently improved the curriculum
and reduced its emphasis on Islam.
Failures in education
But even today only about half of Pakistanis can read and write,
far below the proportion in countries with similar per capita incomes, like
Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school and
of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to UNESCO. Girls’
enrolment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.
"Education in Pakistan was left to the dogs," said Pervez
Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad who is an
outspoken critic of the government’s failure to stand up to spreading Islamic
militancy.
This impoverished expanse of rural southern Punjab, where the
Taliban have begun making inroads with the help of local militant groups, has
one of the highest concentrations of madrassas in the country.
Of the more than 12,000 madrassas registered in Pakistan, about
half are in Punjab. Experts estimate that the numbers are higher: when the state
tried to count them in 2005, a fifth of the areas in this province refused to
register.
Though madrassas make up only about seven per cent of primary
schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public
education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of
people live.
The public elementary school for boys in this village is the
very picture of the generations of neglect that have left many poor Pakistanis
feeling abandoned by their government.
Shaukat Ali, 40, a tall man with an earnest manner who teaches
fifth grade, said he had asked everyone for help with financing, including
government officials and army officers. A television channel even did a report.
"The result," he said, "was zero."
A government official responsible for monitoring schools in the
area, Muhamed Aijaz Anjum, said he was familiar with the school’s plight. But he
has no car or office and his annual travel allowance is less than $200; he said
he was helpless to do anything about it.
With few avenues for advancement in what remains a feudal
society, many poor Pakistanis do not believe education will improve their lives.
The drop-out rate reflects that.
One of Mr Ali’s best students, Muhamed Arshad Ali, was offered a
state scholarship to continue after the fifth grade. His parents would not let
him accept. He quit and took up work ironing pants for about 200 rupees a day,
or $2.50.
"Many poor people think salaried jobs are only for rich people,"
Mr Ali said. "They don’t believe in the end result of education."
Safety net against despair
In Punjab, the country’s most populous province, the despair and
neglect have opened a space that religious schools have filled.
"Madrassas have been mushrooming," said Zubaida Jalal, a member
of Parliament and former education minister.
The phenomenon began in the 1980s when General Zia gave
madrassas money and land in an American-supported policy to help Islamic
fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
The Islamic schools are also seen as employment opportunities.
"When someone doesn’t see a way ahead for himself, he builds a mosque and sits
in it," said Jan Sher, whose village in south-western Punjab, Shadan Lund, has
become a militant stronghold, with madrassas now outnumbering public schools.
Poverty has also helped expand enrolment in madrassas, which serve as a safety
net by housing and feeding poor children.
"How can someone who earns 200 rupees a day afford expenses for
five children?" asked Hafeezur Rehman, a caretaker of the Jamia Sadiqqia
Taleemul Koran madrassa in Multan, the main city in South Punjab. The school
houses and feeds 73 boys from poor villages.
Former president, Pervez Musharraf, tried to regulate the
madrassas, offering financial incentives if they would add general subjects. But
after taking the money, many refused to allow monitoring. "The madrassa reform
project failed," said Javed Ashraf Qazi, a retired general who served as
education minister at the time.
Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, says he is acutely
aware of the problem and is trying a different approach, recently setting aside
$75 million to build free model schools in 80 locations close to large madrassas,
a tactic Lt General Qazi had also proposed.
In the district that includes Mohri Pur, a mud-walled village of
about 6,000 where farmers drive on dirt roads in tractors and donkey carts piled
high with sticks and grasses, there are an estimated 200 madrassas, one-third
the number of public schools, said Mr Anjum, the education official.
Non-religious private schools have also sprouted since the
1990s. They have better student-teacher ratios but only the most exclusive – out
of reach of most middle-class Pakistanis – offer a rigorous, modern education.
Mr Ali, the fifth grade-teacher, says the madrassas have changed
Mohri Pur. They are Deobandi, adherents of an ultra-orthodox Sunni school of
thought that opposes music and festivals, which are central aspects of Sufism, a
tolerant form of Islam that is traditional here.
There were no madrassas in Mohri Pur in the late 1980s when Mr
Ali began teaching. Now there are at least five. Most are affiliated with a
branch in the neighbouring town of Kabirwala of Darul Uloom, a powerful Deobandi
seminary founded in 1952, whose leaders in other parts of Pakistan have links to
the Taliban.
Fear and respect
Several local residents said they believed the Kabirwala
seminary was dangerous. Some of its members were involved in sectarian violence
against Shiites in the 1990s, they said.
Even if the madrassas do not make militants, they create a world
view that makes militancy possible. "The mind-set wants to stop music, girls’
schools and festivals," said Salman Abid, a social researcher in southern
Punjab. "Their message is that this is not real life. Real life comes later" –
after death.
On a recent Thursday, the Kabirwala seminary was buzzing with
activity. Officials showed rooms full of boys crouched over Korans, reading and
rocking. A full kitchen had an industrial-sized bread oven. Flowers adorned
walkways. The foundation ground for a new dormitory had been broken.
There was also a girls’ section, with its own entrance, where
hundreds of young women chanted in unison after directions from a male voice
that came from behind a curtain. "We have a passion for this work," said Seraj
ul-Haq, a computer teacher who is part of the family that founded the seminary.
Teachers preach restrictions. February’s newsletter set out a list of taboos:
Valentine’s Day. Music. Urban women "wearing imported perfume". Talking about
women’s rights.
Suicide bombings were neither encouraged nor condemned.
The ideology may be rigid but it offers the promise of respect,
a powerful draw for lower-class young men.
Abed Omar, 24, had little religious education before he was
inspired by a sermon at the seminary last year. Better educated than most, he
began to work in his family’s sweetshop.
Restless and unfulfilled, he joined a conservative Islamic
group, paying about $625 to travel with them around the country for four months
on a preaching tour. The group, Tablighi Jamaat, taught him that Islam forbids
music and speaking with women. (He would speak to this reporter only through a
male colleague.) American officials suspect that the group is a stepping stone
to the Taliban. Pakistani officials say it is peaceful.
Now when Mr Omar visits his friends, "they turn off their tape
players and give me their seat," he said, a smile lifting his face, which, in
the practice of some conservative Islamists, has a bushy beard but no moustache.
He is frustrated by a lack of opportunity and at how much of
Pakistan’s bureaucracy requires political connections, which he does not have.
"There is no merit," he said. His faith gives him hope. "I want to make everyone
a preacher of Islam," Mr Omar said brightly, eating honey-soaked fritters in his
family’s shop.
He knows about 100 people in his town who have done a four-month
tour like his. As for those who sign up for less, he said "they are countless".
Waqar Gillani contributed reporting from Mohri Pur and Lahore,
Pakistan.
(Sabrina Tavernise is an American journalist who is currently
the Istanbul bureau chief of
The New York Times. This article was published in The New York Times
on May 3, 2009.)
Courtesy: The New York Times;
www.nytimes.com
|