March, 11 2005	Friday	29 Muharram 1426

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ISLAMABAD, March 10: The South Asia director of the International Crisis Group (ICG) has challenged the findings of a World Bank-funded study which argued that madressahs accounted for less than one per cent of all school enrolment in Pakistan and that there was no evidence of a dramatic increase in enrolment in recent years.

The ICG director, Samina Ahmed, challenged the findings of the study done by different analysts which questioned the validity of madressah enrolment statistics provided by the ICG and other expert analysts.

“The authors insist there are at most 475,000 children in Pakistani madressahs, yet Federal Minister for Religious Affairs Ejazul Haq says that the country’s madressahs impart religious education to 1,000,000 children,” said Ms Samina.

She said the findings were directly at odds with the ministry of education’s 2003 directory, which said the number of madressahs had increased from 6,996 in 2001 to 10,430. She said the Madressah unions themselves had put the figure at 13,000 with the total number of students enrolled at 1.5 to 1.7 million.

Taking the ministry of education figure of an additional 3,434 madressahs since 2001, it is highly implausible that enrolment in madressahs has also not grown, she said.

Questioning the methodology of the WB funded study, she said, “the trouble is that the authors based their analysis on three questionable sources: the highly controversial 1998 census; household surveys that were neither designed nor conducted to elicit data on madressah enrolment, and a limited village-based household educational census conducted by the researchers themselves in only three of 102 districts.”

She said the 1998 census was not only out of date as the authors themselves admitted, but their 2003 educational census was also of little value because it was based on a representative sample of villages, suggesting madressahs were mainly a rural phenomenon.

She quoted a 2002 survey conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies and a 2002-03 survey conducted by Tariq Rehman, which found that a majority of madressah students came from backward areas.

Ms Ahmed said the authors of the study had overlooked the domestic and international implications of the problem. She said the problem had its roots in the era of Gen Ziaul Haq in which the JUI and other Deobandi parties, with state patronage, used their madressahs to recruit party members as well as volunteers for domestic and regional Jihad.

She said the rise of Jihadi and sectarian violence in Pakistan was closely linked to the madressah boom and the close ties between local and transnational extremists would continue to pose a threat to the state till such time the country’s decision- makers acknowledged they had a problem that had to be dealt with urgently.

She said if the findings of the paper, titled “Religious school enrolment in Pakistan: A look at the data,” were to be taken at face value, then Pakistan and the international community had little cause to worry about an educational sector that glorified Jihad and indoctrinated children in religious intolerance and extremism.