Musharraf And The Madrassa Madness

Pervez Musharraf, Chief Executive of Pakistan, is in a quandary. In October 1999he overthrew the venal and corrupt regime of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tobring the military back into power after a brief hiatus of democracy. Since the constitutional coup of 1954, Pakistan has stumbled with a rulingclass keener to aggrandize itself by any means rather than build the productivecapacity of the nation toward, perhaps, a future divestment of riches to thepeople - what we generally call "development."

Musharraf's act in 1999, then, was not so much a return to dictatorship asperhaps an attempt by a secular, almost Kemalist, wing of the Pakistani militaryto stave off both the corruptions of the landlord-mercantilist regime and thehowls of the theocratic fascists. Political critic Aijaz Ahmad describesMusharraf as a man "of the more liberal, secular wing: officers of the oldstamp. But it may be too late for such as them. There are others, of a differentpersuasion, waiting in the wings to overwhelm them."

Indeed, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the unfolding of the crisis inAfghanistan will provide those men in the wings with an opportunity.

President G. W. Bush offered the Pakistani government the first ultimatum on theroad to war: provide military access to your airspace and your soil or else youwill be treated as a state that harbors terrorists. The punishment for that willbe swift. Musharraf deliberated, and then conceded.

The second ultimatum was to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Give up bin Laden, orelse we will shift rubble from one valley of your emirate to another. Theconduit for this was a high-level Pakistani team, people from the Inter-ServicesIntelligence (ISI) that was created, as it happens, during the Afghan wars ofthe 1980s to harness intelligence from all agencies, but to work in coordinationwith (but really under the control of) the CIA.

General Mahood Ahmed, head of the ISI, sat with the Taliban at Kandhahar andintimated that if bin Laden is not given up, the bombardment will surely begin.The Taliban is clear that it will not act unless the Organization of Islamic Countries makes a formal demand, and if it is shown certain evidence of a linkbetween the WTC and bin Laden. In Pakistan, foreign minister Abdul Sattar hopes for a miracle.

It is being argued that at least Bush had the decency to ask for bin Laden. Clinton's administrationrained hellfire on Afghanistan on 20 August 1998 without permission from anyone.

Meanwhile the media has begun talking, inevitably, about the madrassas, thoseinstitutions of learning set up in Pakistan to impart theological education. Itis here, we are told, that the hard-core Islamists are being produced, peoplesuch as the Taliban, but also those who are self-proclaimed jehadis in Kashmir,Chechnya and elsewhere. The madrassas, in the eyes of the media and ofUS-Europe, becomes one of the manifestations of evil incarnate, of Islam as thehighest form of contemporary fanaticism and primitivism.

But only last year, an influential US policy analyst and former State Departmentman, Stephen P. Cohen wrote this in the Wall Street Journal (AsianEdition, 23 October 2000): "some madrassas, or religious schools, areexcellent." Admittedly he said that "others are hotbeds for jihadistand radical Islamic movements," but these are only about twelve percent ofthe total. These, he said, "need to be upgraded to offer their students amodern education."

And why shouldn't Cohen, who is in the news again as an expert on fanaticism andSouth Asia, write like this? After all, then presidential candidate G. W. Bush(and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman) went on and on about faith basededucation, about vouchers and school choice.

In a sense Pakistan could have shown the US the way since it has alreadydestroyed its secular public institutions in favor of the choice of theocraticfascism. And with the recent fulminations from televangelist Jerry Falwell andPat Robertson (about how gays and lesbians, civil libertarians and other suchsymbols of promiscuousness have forced God to turn his back on the US, and send9/11 as a wake-up call), we can be sure that faith-based schools and charitypromise to Talibanize all of us.

And again, like so much else, the destruction of Pakistani education is not justthe fault of a corrupt and unprincipled ruling elite. It bears within it atleast two other forces.

The first agent of change in Pakistan has been the visible hand of theInternational Monetary Fund. Pakistan is cotton country, with two thirds of itsexports tied to this sector, but most of it is low-value added unprocessedcotton or low-count yarn that is sent off to the advanced industrial states fora 19th century style turn around - export cheap raw materials, import expensivefinished products.

• In 1993, Pakistan, abandoned by a general global decline in the profitmargins from cotton, turned to the IMF for aid and initiated the StructuralAdjustment Policy (SAP) that has now become legendary around the world.

• A month before the coup of 1999, Nawaz Sharif's finance minister Ishaq Dartold the press that "the government has done everything possible. We haveprovided the conducive environment" for foreign investors. Aggressive actsof neoliberalism became the hallmark of the regime. "Distortions," such as public institutions, came under attack fromthe IMF and Pakistan's already weak education sector came under fiscal pressure. 

• A weak educational infrastructure moved much of the lower middle class towardprivate education in the low to moderate cost madrassas. 

• On 24 February 1955, only afew months since President Ghulam Mohammed disbanded the constitutionalgovernment (28 October 1954), Pakistan joined those other votaries of the"free world" in the Baghdad Pact: places such as the Kingdom of Iraq,the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. 

• Five yearslater, Pakistan tied its hands to the United States in the Central TreatyOrganization (CENTO), a US-run alliance of states in west Asia. But for severaldecades the US did not provide the kind of support expected by Pakistan, so muchso that at a CENTO conference on 30 April 1963, then foreign minister ZulfikarAli Bhutto attacked the United States' aid policies to India as opposed to itsindifference toward Pakistan.

• It was only with the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Ayatollahsto power, as well as with the Soviet entry into Afghanistan, both in 1979, thatPakistan became important to the United States. 

All those years of waiting paidoff for the ruling class, because for a brief instant, during the 1980s, the USseemed to be in the country to stay. Giddy with expectation, the Pakistani elitewelcomed the transformation of the society, created the ISI for the CIA's use inAfghanistan, and then pushed ahead all manner of neoliberal cruelties on analready impoverished nation.

Certainly the per capita income increased duringthese years, but class inequality widened beyond imagination. Even those at theWorld Bank who collect these statistics became horrified.

By the time Afghanistan crumbled into the hands of the Taliban in 1996, Pakistanhad already been abandoned by the US, like a tired warhorse sent off to pasturewithout so much as a bag of oats. Congress stopped the sale of F-16 aircrafteven after Pakistani hard currency had changed hands; sanctions for this or thatplagued the US-Pakistan relationship, as the US tried to disentangle from itsally and reach out to the emergent market of one billion Indians. 

In 1995, slowGDP growth and high inflation forced the Pakistani government to curtail the IMFprograms, thereby losing loans and other revenue supports. The government turnedon its people again, this time with a devaluation of the rupee by seven percent(this over and above a three percent gradual depreciation), a seven percentincrease in oil prices and the imposition of a five to ten percent regulatoryduty on imports, as well as a tighter monetary policy. The macro indicatorssmiled, and so did the IMF, but the mass of the population entered an economicsinkhole.

No wonder, then, that US-style capitalism seems so remote and unreasonable,because while the dollar elite make good in the cities, the rupee masses seem torun up against the walls of the local madrassa. In 1995, the year of thedownfall, UNESCO reported that almost two thirds of the adults in Pakistan areilliterate, and of women, the number rises to three quarters. The working-classand peasantry do not have access to any education, and the vibrant free press inPakistan (it has been so since 1987, although there are always attempts tocurtail it) has produced excellent work on the disenfranchisement of this vastsection of humanity. 

The dollar elite holds a monopoly to the finest schools andcolleges, and many of them find their way to colleges in Europe-US since theprofits of the mercantilist-landlord set-up enable them to pay full freight. Thelower middle class and whatever exists of the middle class does not have accessto either decent public education or to the English-medium private schools. Theygo to the madrassas.

"As Pakistan's state-run educational system steadily collapsed,"writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, "these madrassas became the onlyavenue for boys from poor families to receive the semblance of aneducation." 

By the late 1980s, the madrassas already numbered over thirtythousand (with about a third of them registered with the government), and mostof them existed even then along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Thesemadrassas claim their lineage from the 1860s when an Islamic seminary was formedin Deoband (northern India), a lineage that is textually conservative and, inits current incarnations as orthodox as Saudi Wahhabism. 

The Deobandis filledthe interstices of Pakistani society, notably in the sphere of education, andtheir political agencies turned their attention more to armed rebellion than toelectoral politics. While the Jama'at-i-Ulema-i-Islam, the political wing of theDeobandis (whose main arm is the Jama'at-I-Islami), drew a virtual blank in theotherwise boycotted elections of 1985, the same formation mobilizes over twohundred thousand cadres to its annual conventions (latterly close to half amillion people come to its conferences). The Lashkar-e-Toyeba, perhaps the mostorthodox of the Right and one that only draws three percent of its followersfrom the madrassas, calls upon four hundred thousand to its annual conventionsat its home base in Muridke. This power translated into political capital in1993 when Benazir Bhutto welcomed Jama'at cadre into her government. Elections,therefore, are of no interest to the Jama'at when it already controls the baseof Pakistani society.

What seems to bother many people is that the terrorists of 9/11 were older andbetter educated than one expects. But this should not be a surprise because themadrassas attract the lower middle to middle class, mainly boys with poorprospects of class advancement or even of class maintenance. The Jama'at and theTehrik Minhaj-ul-Quran draw from this class set, while the Tanzeem-ul-Ikhwan,according to writer Arif Jamal, appeals to retired army officers who retreatinto the world of the middle class. 

Not only, therefore, are key people in thearmy part of these formations, but many analysts make the case that the rank andfile and junior officers took their own education in the madrassas alongsidethose who became professional jehadis and it is this lot that will not takeMusharraf's concessions to the US and against the Taliban easily. The madrassashave close ties with the Taliban as well as the rank and file of the Pakistaniarmy, and any resentment against US-driven globalization that one has, the othershares. This is Musharraf's quandary.

To put Kashmir on the agenda as a bargaining chip was perhaps a way to mollifythe rank and file, perhaps avert a certain coup if the US does bomb the Talibanfrom Pakistan. One wonders if the US State Department has considered the costsof this exercise. A coup in Pakistan, not tomorrow or the next day, but soon; aTalibanist regime in Pakistan, and the Taliban, bombed, but like Saddam, stillin the saddle. 

Meanwhile in India, we are still stuck with a coalitiongovernment led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the mirror image of the Jama'at.All these theocratic regimes have at least one thing in common: they haveslammed the brakes on the dialectics of history. Unwilling to see thecontradictions of social life in the modern world, most of them, like the USpresident, tend to divide the world into Good and Evil, in stark moralcategories that fails to capture the mess of human life. 

If those whom youdisagree with are Evil, then nothing remains for you to do than to kill them.Theocratic fascism of the Bush-Taliban-Hindutva variety wants to slam the brakeson the dialectics of history. With nuclear weapons and macho, downtroddenreligiosity in the mix, the future looks mighty bleak. 9/11, then, may berelegated to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as compared to what camenext, the mustard gas trenches that wiped out a generation of Europeans.

(The author is Associate Professor and Director, International StudiesProgram, 214 McCook, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA)