PAKISTAN: Arrests Put Spotlight on Reforms in Religious Schools

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Muddassir Rizvi

ISLAMABAD, Sep 30 2003 (IPS) - While Islamic schools and government officials remain in a tussle over 19 Asian students recently arrested for supposed links to terrorist groups, these detentions have put the spotlight back on the issue of reforms in Pakistan’s religious schools.

Thus far, the managements of two ‘madrasah’ or Islamic schools in the southern port city of Karachi are threatening to move court against the arrest of 19 students, saying the action was without evidence and meant to impress Islamabad’s friends in the west.

“The arrest of six Indonesians and 13 Malaysians, all ‘madrasah/ students, in multiple raids through September was illegal and was just another move by the Pakistan’s military-backed government to appease the West,” Allama Abdullah Ghazi, chief of Tehrik Ahle Hadith, which runs 17 Salafi religious schools in the country, said in a telephone interview with IPS.

Salafi, the Saudi Wahabi version of Islam, is one of the five ideological divisions along which the ‘madrasah’ or Islamic sector in Pakistan is organised.

“All these students have permission from their governments to study in Pakistan, as against what the government agencies have been claiming,” he explains. “We are looking into legal options to challenge the government’s action in the court of law.”

But officials maintain that the arrests were made after indications that these students had links with international terrorism networks and were engaged in activities damaging to Pakistan’s interests.

One of the students in custody is said to be the brother of Hambali, who was arrested in Thailand in August and has been linked to the October bombings in Bali.

“They were arrested from religious schools for their undesirable activities aimed against the interest of Pakistan,” said Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema, who heads the Crisis Management Cell at Pakistan’s home ministry in Islamabad. “They are under interrogation. Once that is complete, we will deport them to their respective countries.”

But the bigger picture in this bickering remains what Pakistani officials say is the propagation of extreme views and intolerance in some of the Islamic schools – for years a target of reform that the government has been trying to carry out.

For instance, the Pakistani government promised to regulate the ‘madrasah’ sector following the Sep. 11 attacks.

However, stiff resistance from the clergy and religious political parties has prevented government attempts to regulate the ‘madrasah’ with regard to their curriculum – which officials want standardised with the general education system – and sources of funding.

“Madrasah are playing an important role in the Pakistani society. Not only they are serving the educational needs of the poorest of the poor, they are also essential for preserving the religious identity of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” said Maulana Syedul Arfeen, who is on a ‘madrasah’ faculty in the north-western city of Peshawar.

“These religious schools have always worked without the government support and their autonomy has always been their strength,” he asserted. ”We won’t allow the government to interfere in our matters, particularly with regard to curriculum as what we teach is the word of God and divine knowledge.”

“If we are teaching the importance of ‘jihad’ to our students, it is essentially the word of God. ‘Jihad’ against all types of oppression is a religious duty for all Muslims,” he added.

According to the Islamabad-based Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), there are 6,761 ‘madrasah’ in Pakistan, with up to 1.06 million students enrolled in them. Government figures, however, say there are 11,000 ‘madrasah’ with 1.5 to 1.8 million students.

Critics call many ‘madrasah’ the source of sectarian divisions in the country. Such violence in Pakistan has left thousands of people dead over the past decade.

More worrisome are the results of a survey on religious educational institutions conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies, which found that 20 percent of ‘madrasah’ students had no tolerance for other sects.

When asked “what are women’s rights and how are they different from the rights of men”, 45 percent of the students said women are lesser than men and 14 percent said they should be subordinate to men. Only 11 percent of the interviewees said men and women are equal.

The survey reveals that only nine percent of ‘madrasah’ students believe that television, dish antennas, cable television and Internet are good sources of information. Forty-four percent declared them the cause of spread of indecency and immorality; and 30 percent said they lead people to intellectual slavery of the west.

These trends, coupled with international pressure, forced the military government last year to announce a series of measures to control the functioning of the religious schools.

The lynchpin of government’s plans is the Deeni Madaris (Voluntary Registration and Regulation) Ordinance 2002. After its approval by the federal government in June last year, the then military government circulated it for consultations. But the clergy and various ‘madrasah’ unions rejected it.

This ordinance, though inadequate as it only required voluntary registration, would have resulted in the registration and regulation of the functioning of ‘madrasah’.

It also included stringent restrictions on the foreign grants, donations and aid to registered Islamic schools and disallowed the admission of foreign students or the appointment of foreign teachers without permission from the Ministry of Interior.

The then military government gave into the pressure of the clergy, leaving the thorny matter for the elected government to decide.

In its March 2003 report to the Counter Terrorism Committee of the United Nations, the Pakistan government said: “The Ministry of Religious Affairs in consultation with the Ministry of Interior prepared the Deeni Madaris Ordinance. Following recent elections and the formation of the National Assembly, the draft law has to be approved by the Parliament.”

However, there has been no headway on the issue of the ‘madrasah’ reforms and regulation since then.

“The government is busy in tackling the constitutional crisis. It does not have time to address other matters. They have not even appointed a minister to head this ministry as yet,” commented a high official of the religious affairs ministry, who requested anonymity.

Thus, while the military-backed government engages the religious parties in a dialogue over the persisting constitutional crisis, it procrastinates on regulating the ‘madrasah’ for the fear of derailing any political deal with the clergy it needs for its political survival.

It, however, has initiated a non-intrusive Madrasah Reforms Project, administered by the education ministry, to introduce modern subjects such as mathematics, social studies, general science and computers in the curriculum of the religious schools.

As many as 8,000 religious schools and 1.5 million students are supposed to benefit from the project over five years.

“These schools must be registered, their curricula revised and their funding sources checked and monitored, which is an improbable task given the political clout of the religious parties under the Musharraf regime,” said Najum Mushtaq, who authored a report on the subject for Brussels-based International Crisis Group’ report.