ISLAMABAD, April 12: The Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa standoff has prompted the government to speed up efforts to finalise a revised plan for Madressah reforms to make it more acceptable to seminaries.
Most of the 13,000 seminaries had rejected the ‘Madressah Reforms’ introduced by the government by describing it an attempt to secularise their education system on the behest of the United States and only a few hundred institutions adopted government instructions on new system.
An official source said that a meeting was due in the next few days which would discuss new recommendations made for the reforms. The official said that the main focus of the revised plan would be taking all stakeholders on board, removing apprehensions that the project had only been started to persuade religious schools to teach more worldly subjects than their mainstay of Islamic education.
Similarly, seminaries were sceptical about the control of the government after registration, information required for their registration and contents of the subjects taught to students.
The government embarked on mainstreaming Madressahs under which subjects like English, General Science and Maths were to be introduced and necessary training provided to teachers.
There was also a strong perception among religious leaders that the US had provided financial assistance to Pakistan for carrying out Madressah reforms, as American policy makers have been claiming that the madressah were behind the ever increasing extremism in the country. However, the education ministry had repeatedly clarified that the project would be carried out through indigenous financial resources.
Started back in 2003 after the promulgation of Madressah Reforms Ordinance-2002, a project worth Rs6 billion could not produce the desired results, as majority of the seminaries refused to accept government’s assistance. At present over 1.5 million students were enrolled with 13,000 Madressahs in the country.
This information was revealed by Education Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi in a presentation made to probationers of the Civil Service Academy, Lahore, on the status of education.
The presentation was made in the first week of the ongoing month on the basis of information collected in the National Education Census (NEC). Punjab took lead with 5,459 seminaries followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh 1,935; Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA) 1,193; Balochistan 769; AJK 586; Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (Fata) 135; and Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) 77.
However, under the heading of Madressahs which refused to provide any information to ministry officials the NWFP topped the list with 275 seminaries disagreeing with the government’s initiative for collecting data about the number of their students and teachers.
In Punjab 159 madressahs refused cooperation with the ministry, followed by Sindh with 119; Balochistan 99; Fata 43; FANA 39; AJK 77; and ICT 15.
The Madressahs covered in the NEC have affiliation with three different boards called Wafaq which controls 28 per cent of the total seminaries; Tanzeem 22 per cent; and Rabta 7 per cent; and other small organisations look after 8 per cent, whereas the rest of the 35 per cent are run independently without any affiliation.
