January 22, 2004

The recent raids on madressahs in Punjab have raised a number of questions regarding the link between religious extremism and of these institutions, says Omar R. Quraishi

In Lahore earlier this month, the central executive of the Jamaat-i-Islami passed a resolution according to which the party said “it was an open secret that the West is scared of seminaries [madressahs] and their products”. This was the reason, the party resolution said further, that the West was putting all its efforts to “destroy the moral and ideological basis of these religious schools”.

The resolution was adopted a day after the Punjab police raided several madressahs in Lahore, Sargodha, Faisalabad and Bahawalpur and picked up 35 suspects. The police and the government officially denied the arrests or the raids.

But several newspapers carried confirmation from “sources” saying that the raids had been done after investigators had found evidence that those behind the assassination attempts on President Musharraf had links to some banned jihadi groups, notably the former Jaish-i-Muhammad (rechristened as the Khuddamul Islam), and to those who were behind the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Some newspapers reported that up to 60 people were picked up and around a quarter of these were released after initial questioning.

Quite understandably, the JI was quite upset about these raids on the seminaries. The federal government’s attempts at changing (or modernizing) the curriculum of the madressahs was severely criticized and the implication was that all this was being done under the dictates of Western powers.

The resolution also referred to NGOs as a favourite target of the religious parties which were described as being invariably ‘western’ and being in a position to preach whatever they wanted to. One wonders why the JI ignores the hatred and bigotry that one gets to hear at rallies held by religious parties, or the calls to kill ‘kafirs’ routinely made by prayer leaders all over the country in the name of preaching religion.

There is no denying that madressahs have been around in Pakistan (and in undivided India before 1947) for a long time, and fill a gap in education, especially for children from financially weak backgrounds. However, that does not mean that they should be above criticism. A graduate of today’s madressah system, in all likelihood, will have a worldview that is quite at odds with that of someone who has studied in a mainstream school.

The quality of education in a mainstream government school is nothing to write home about, but at least the student is exposed to subjects that have some practical and perhaps vocational value. In the case of madressahs, the graduates will be as those investigating the attacks on the president have found out more than willing to lay down their lives (along with those of other people) for some misguided cause.

The JI, the JUI and their allied parties surely know all too well that the foundations of Taliban rule in Afghanistan lay (among other places) in the madressahs of Pakistan, in places like Maulana Samiul Haq’s seminary in Akora Khattak and the one in Karachi’s Binori Town mosque, under the leadership of Mufti Nizamudin Shamzai.

Now that the Taliban are on the run, it is only natural that the Pakistan government will do whatever it can to apprehend them. And if, in the past, there were any doubts about that commitment, surely the two assassination attempts on the life of the president would, or should, have laid rest to all that.

In any case, many of our madressahs are not exactly beacons of tolerance and humanity, and those who graduate from them often have a superior view of their own beliefs and faith, not only in terms of solidity but also of correctness. They also believe that such views need to be imposed, with force if necessary, on the rest of society. The only problem, and a big one at that, is that much of these views are harsh and extremely retrogressive, and seek basically to establish stringent control over the lives and, one would argue, even the minds of ordinary people.

Why should the government leave such institutions out of the pale of regulation or monitoring when the same exemption is not given to mainstream (or secular) educational institutions? Besides, what do those who run the madressahs have to hide if the government wants to take steps to regulate them?

As far as the raids are concerned, will either the JI or the JUI deny the fact that their exists a definite link between madressahs and those who believe in carrying out acts of violence to achieve their aims of Islamizing society, something that has been documented by the arrests of many extremists who were tried and convicted of carrying out violent acts of terrorism in the name of religion?

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