KARACHI: The Sindh government has announced forming of a committee to resolve the longstanding dispute over registration of religious schools and handed over the draft of an agreement to the representatives of the Ittehad-i-Tanzeemat-i-Madaris Pakistan (ITMP) on ways to getting madressahs into the mainstream educational system, officials said on Monday.

A government spokesman said that during a meeting with the representatives of the boards of various schools of thought, Senator Dr Qayyum Soomro, adviser to the chief minister on Auqaf and religious affairs, announced that the government would set up a coordination committee, which would also include officials of the madressahs boards belonging to different schools of thought and sects.

The spokesman said the ITMP representatives were given a draft agreement by Dr Soomro in which the religious boards were asked to agree to the inclusion of compulsory contemporary subjects in the curricula of matriculation (equivalent to Sanaviyya Aamma in madressahs) and intermediate (equivalent to Sanaviyya Khassa).

If agreed, all five boards in the ITMP will be independent to design the content of religious education and continue to work towards ensuring that their education will improve and develop a ‘positive social attitude’ so that the ‘religious hatred and extremism should be curbed’.

The contemporary compulsory subjects will be in accordance with syllabus prescribed by the government.

The draft agreement said the government was determined to give formal legal status to the five boards of the ITMP through an act of legislature or executive order like other education boards. After extension of legal recognition the five boards would be linked with the ministry of education, it said.

Among several other points in the agreement, every affiliated madressah of the five boards would abide by the Societies Registration Act 1860 and would get registered under it.

The provincial government, on the other hand, pledged that it would make the registration procedure convenient and easy but no madressah should teach or publish any literature which promoted militancy or spread sectarianism.

Officials hoped they would achieve a way forward with the document they had given to the ITMP.

Published in Dawn August 11th, 2015

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