Madressah reforms

It is encouraging to know that the government and some leading ulema involved with madressahs have come to an understanding. Talking to a delegation of the Ittehad-i-Tanzimat-i-Madaris-i-Deenia (ITMD) on Tuesday, President Pervez Musharraf assured the ulema that the government would not interfere in their affairs.

The meeting must be considered important because madressah reforms are something the government is committed to. Even though the madressahs are there in all the Muslim countries, they have always occupied a special position in South Asia.

For centuries, they have produced not only imams for providing religious services to the people; the madressahs have served as centres of Islamic learning, producing some outstanding scholars.

The curriculum consisted of traditional Islamic subjects, including jurisprudence and fiqh. Unfortunately, this syllabus of studies has not kept pace with the changing times and circumstances.

The result is that madressah students find themselves deprived of modern education. Inevitably, this has led to a dichotomy in education, with the madressahs focussing solely on religious subjects, while the mainstream system teaches arts and sciences. As a result, madressah students find themselves unable to compete with the products of mainstream institutions.

An added factor of diversion and disorientation was introduced when the madressahs were politicized as a result of Pakistan's short-sighted Afghan policy in the eighties.

Backed by America, Pakistan under Ziaul Haq turned this country into a base for 'jihad' against the Soviet Union when that country invaded and occupied Afghanistan. Some religious parties took the task even more zealously, and turned many madressahs into centres of recruitment and training for holy warriors.

Under the cover of the anti-Soviet jihad, they became so deeply involved in Afghanistan's faction ridden politics that even after the Soviets pulled out, the religious parties fought a terrible civil war to capture power in Afghanistan. The group that ultimately won was the Taliban, most of whom were the products of Pakistani madressahs.

Needless to say, some sections of the Pakistan army too helped the Taliban in a way that had internal repercussions for Pakistan. Worse, the Taliban allowed Osama bin Laden to turn Afghanistan into a haven for terrorists.

The madressahs now need reforms. The problem is complex, of course. There are too many madressahs, some of them situated in areas where the government's writ does not fully run.

Modernizing this traditional system of thelogical education is not an easy task. There is resistance to the idea of modernization, many madressah managements being unwilling to break out of the traditional mould.

For its part, the government seems convinced of the importance and urgency of reforms on modern lines but wavers when it comes to taking the long delayed initiative. Nevertheless, there is no escaping this task.

With the help of the ulema of the kind the president met on Tuesday, reforms must be initiated. The madressahs need to turn a new leaf and this can only be in the form of modern education along with the traditional subjects.

Armed with modern education and aware that they can have a place under the sun, the students of madressahs are less likely to fall victim to militancy and misguided notions of jihad.

The government needs to pursue the reform programme till its objective has been fully realized because it is linked to its war on terror. It must ensure that no political party or group finds it possible to brainwash the students.

Let the madressahs focus solely on education- both religious and temporal. Here the government must seek the ITMD's cooperation to help maintain the madressahs' non-political character. Rightly handled, madressah managements can be an asset for Pakistan in the fight against terror.

Preparing for worse

With news that most parts of the country are about to face a serious drought in the coming months, the government must put into place an action plan to deal with the situation.

The practice of judicious use of water has to be promoted and enforced in urban areas, particularly in major cities, so that a reasonable balance is maintained between demand and availability.

This will significantly reduce the pressure on water reserves currently held at different reservoirs in the country. WASA in Lahore and the KWSB in Karachi should also ensure that water losses caused by leakage in the transmission and distribution lines is also drastically reduced.

This will save millions of gallons of water that are lost daily. A public awareness campaign should be launched immediately to alert people to the dire situation and to advise them to practice economy in the use of water and to avoid waste.

In the face of the impeding crisis, it will be advisable to impose a ban on the use of water for entertainment and recreational activity like swimming pools, fountains and water parks.

If the situation gets worse, more restrictive measures will have to be adopted to preserve water for drinking and other essential purposes. These can then be followed up with spot checks by different water agencies in the country to ensure that their instructions are being followed properly.

In the rural areas, poor management of existing water networks has to be improved. The plan to line water canals should be undertaken on a priority basis while efforts should be made to develop a consensus on the building of water reservoirs.

Water theft is another problem that needs to be tackled. Catching and punishing water thieves will help curb this crime and prevent losses. A prudent policy on water usage has to be in place in the coming weeks. Only then would it be possible to minimize the hardships and losses that are likely to worsen the crisis of scarcity with the onset of the drought.

Ashfaque Ahmed

The death of Ashfaque Ahmed deprives the country and the Urdu-speaking world of a distinguished short story writer and broadcaster. As a writer, he showed that one could be satirical without being overly malicious; as a broadcaster, he had a rustic intuition that enabled him to talk to the people of the countryside in their own idiom.

Although he was not particularly enamoured of progressive trends in modern Urdu writing, he kept an open mind, delved deeply and voraciously into the literature of all languages and largely kept himself away from controversy.

His story, Gadaria, must rank as one of the finest pieces of its genre in recent times. It showed how the spiritual strain among the various religious communities in the subcontinent had created a unifying bond between them.

The 1965 conflict unleashed a wave of emotionalism on both sides of the border, and Ashfaque Ahmed could not remain unmoved by the upsurge; this inevitably brought him close to the establishment, as it did many other writers.

In Lahore, he and his wife, Bano Qudsia, had become almost an institution and occupied a special place of esteem among writers both old and young. Television provided them with a new channel of creativity, and they had revived the "baithak" tradition, talking to the youth in small gatherings and instructing them in the mores of a civilized Muslim society.

Ashfaque Ahmed was one of the dwindling ranks of senior writers who, whichever side of the political or literary divide they chose, have contributed to literature and culture.