Terror Factories

General Pervez Musharraf's much-publicized plans to modernize the country's10,000 religious seminaries have met with little success primarily because ofhis administration's failure to enforce the Madrassa Registration and RegulationOrdinance 2002, which was meant to reform deeni madaris (religiousseminaries) by bringing them into the educational mainstream.

Three years after the first commando President of Pakistan promised sweepingreforms to ensure that the religious schools are not used any further topropagate extremist Islam, the country's traditional religious school systemthat is now rotten to the core, continues to operate as the key breeding groundfor the radical Islamist ideology and as the recruitment centre for terroristnetworks.

The campaign to reform the country's notorious deeni madaris was launchedby General Musharraf in a bid to fight extremism in the aftermath of theSeptember 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States. Many of the Pakistaniswho fought alongside al-Qaeda and Taliban troops in Afghanistan had beeneducated in these religious seminaries, which are spread across thecountry. 

The privately funded Islamic schools are commonplace throughout Pakistan anda majority of them owe their existence to General Zia's Islamisation drive. Thecurriculum offered there is undeveloped and pertains mostly to religiousinstruction. Some of the books taught, including Mathematics, date back hundredsof years. The result is, the madaris graduates simply cannot competeagainst others for employment. Absent any real understanding of society andsocial complexities, they want destruction. They seek to bring society ontotheir own level, and the only thing they identify with is religion.

Yet these madaris do provide free education along with boarding andlodging, and this attracts the poor. There are no exact figures about how many madarismay be operating in Pakistan, but rough estimates suggest that there are someone million students studying in over 10,000 madaris.

Since the beginning of 2002, General Musharraf has campaigned to reform thereligious schools. In a televised address to the nation in January 2002, the generalunveiled a new strategy which would see madaris teach Mathematics,Science, English, Economics and even Computer Science alongside theirtraditional Islamic programme. "My only aim is to help these institutionsovercome their weaknesses and providing them with better facilities and moreavenues to the poor children at these institutions. These schools are excellentwelfare set-ups where the poor get free board and lodge. And very few madarisrun by hardliner parties promote negative thinking and propagate hatred andviolence instead of inculcating tolerance, patience and fraternity", saidMusharraf in his address.

While embarking on several initiatives to combat zealotry and broadeneducational offerings, the Musharraf administration announced a number ofmeasures to make deeni madaris participate in the modernization programme.These reforms included a five-year, $1 billion Education Sector ReformAssistance (ESRA) plan to ensure inclusion of secular subjects in syllabi ofreligious seminaries; a $100 million bilateral agreement to rehabilitatehundreds of public schools by United States Agency for International Development(USAID), besides increasing access to quality education and the enforcement ofMadrassa Registration and Regulation Ordinance 2002 which required deenimadaris to audit their funding and foreign students to register with the government. At the same time, a Federal Madaris Education Board was established to enablethe students at the religious schools to benefit from the national educationsystem by learning Mathematics, English and vocational sciences in addition tothe normal madrassa education.

However, three years down the road since Musharraf's historic January 2002announcement, the so-called modernization campaign has largely failed, andhardly a few cosmetic changes could be introduced in the madrassa system.Most of the religious leaders and Islamist organisations rejected the governmentlegislation requiring religious seminaries to register and broaden theircurricula beyond rote Koranic learning. Under the reform programme, drafted onthe advice of the Bush administration and financed by USAID, special governmentcommittees were constituted to supervise and monitor the educational andfinancial matters and policies of deeni madaris. Most of these schoolsare sponsored by the country's leading religious parties, be it Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam,Jamiat Ulema-Pakistan, or Jamat-e-Islami Pakistan, while manyothers are affiliated with jehadi groups which preach an extremistideology of religious warfare.

The result is that the deeni madaris are increasingly seen as breedinggrounds for the foot-soldiers of the global menace of militant Islam, who aremotivated and trained to wage jehad - be it in Kashmir, Afghanistan,Bosnia, Chechnya, or other parts of the world. Thus the Bush Administrationbelieved that there were madaris in Pakistan that, in addition toreligious training, give military training to their students. Probably actingunder these very apprehensions, the office of US Defence Secretary DonaldRumsfeld leaked in October 2003 a secret memo, perhaps deliberately, to theAmerican media. In the memo, which was actually intended for Rumsfeld's topmilitary and civilian subordinates, the American Defence Secretary wondered:"Is the US capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terroristsevery day than the madrassas and the radical Muslim clerics arerecruiting, training and deploying against America?"

Three months later in January 2004, the International Crisis Group (ICG) reporttitled, Unfulfilled Promises: Pakistan's Failure to Tackle Extremismfurther strengthened the American fears. The report stated: "The failure tocurb rising extremism in Pakistan stems directly from the military government'sown unwillingness to act against its political allies among the religiousgroups. Having co-opted the religious parties to gain constitutional cover forhis military rule, Musharraf is highly reliant on the religious right for hisregime's survival." 

The ICG report observed that Pakistan's failure to close madrassas andto crack down on jehadi networks has resulted in a resurgence of domesticextremism and sectarian violence. "The government inaction continues topose a serious threat to domestic, regional and international security… If theUS and others continue to restrict their pressure on Musharraf to verbalwarnings, the rise of extremism in Pakistan will continue unchecked. Byincreasing pressure on Pakistan, a major source of jehadis will be shutoff and Islamic militancy, as a whole will decrease", the ICG stated in itsconcluding paragraph.

Almost a year later, in December 2004, a report produced by the CongressionalResearch Service (CRS) presented to the American Congress pointed out: 

"Although General Musharraf vowed to begin regulating Pakistan's religious schools, and his government launched a five-year plan to bring the teaching of formal or secular subjects to 8,000 willing madrassas, no concrete action was taken until June of that year, when 115 madrassas were denied access to government assistance due to their alleged links to militancy… Despite Musharraf's repeated pledges to crack down on the more extremist madrassas in his country, there is little concrete evidence that he has done so. According to two observers, most madrassas remain unregistered, their finances unregulated, and the government has yet to remove the jehadist and sectarian content of their curricula. Many speculate that Musharraf's reluctance to enforce reform efforts is rooted in his desire to remain on good terms with Pakistan's Islamist political parties, which are seen to be an important part of his political base."

The Lahore-based Daily Times wrote in its February 25, 2005, editorialtitled 'Madrassa registration has become a joke':

"The National Security Council, we are being told, is going to discuss the issue of registering the madrassas. Might we ask what has happened to the much-touted madrassa registration ordinance 2002? Apparently nothing! …The facts are interesting. Registration forms were sent out to all the madrassas after which the government waited for the seminaries to get themselves registered. That did not happen. The number of madrassas that did register was a bit of a joke. What did the government do? Nothing! Why cannot the all-powerful General Musharraf follow up on an eminently sensible scheme?"

However, a World Bank-sponsored working paper published in February 2005 cameup with a new angle, stating that "enrolment in the Pakistani madrassas,that critics believe are misused by militants, has been exaggerated by media anda US 9/11 report." The study claimed that less than one per cent of theschool-going children in Pakistan go to madrassas, and the proportion hasremained constant in some districts since 2001.

The study titled 'Religious School Enrolment in Pakistan: A Look at theData', conducted by Jishnu Das of the World Bank, Asim Ijaz Khwaja andTristan Zajonc of Harvard University and Tahir Andrabi of Pomona College, soughtto dispel general perceptions that enrolment was on the rise saying: "Wefind no evidence of a dramatic increase in madrassa enrolment in recentyears". The funding for the report was provided by the World Bank throughKnowledge for Change Trust Fund.

The World Bank study found western media reports highly exaggerated in terms ofnumber of student and total religious schools.

"The figures reported by international newspapers such as the Washington Post, saying there were 10 per cent enrolment in madrassas, and an estimate by the International Crisis Group of 33 per cent, were not correct. It is troubling that none of the reports and articles reviewed based their analysis on publicly available data or established statistical methodologies. Bold assertions have been made in policy reports and popular articles on the high and increasing enrolment in Pakistani religious schools".

The study found no evidence of a dramatic increase in madrassa enrolment inrecent years, stating that the share of madrassas in total enrolmentdeclined before 1975 and has increased slowly since then. Since 2001, totalenrolment in madrassas has remained constant in some districts andincreased in others, the report added.

However, the South Asia Director of ICG, Samina Ahmed, has challenged thefindings of the World Bank study, which questioned the validity of madrassaenrolment statistics provided by the ICG and other expert analysts. Ahmed wasquoted in the Dawn newspaper on March 11, 2005, stating:

"The authors (of the World Bank report) have insisted that there are at most 475,000 children in Pakistani madrassas, yet Federal Religious Affairs Minister Ejazul Haq says the country's madrassas impart religious education to 1,000,000 children."

She asserted that the World Bank findings were directly at odds with theministry of education's 2003 directory, which said the number of madrassas hadincreased from 6,996 in 2001 to 10,430. She added that the madrassaunions themselves had put the figure at 13,000 madaris with the totalnumber of students enrolled at 1.5 to 1.7 million.

Questioning the methodology of the World Bank study, Ahmed 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 madrassa 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 themselvesadmitted, but their 2003 educational census was also of little value because itwas based on a representative sample of villages, suggesting madaris weremainly a rural phenomenon. She quoted a 2002 survey conducted by the Instituteof Policy Studies which found that a majority of madrassa students came frombackward areas. "If the findings of the World Bank study were to be takenat face value, then Pakistan and the international community had little cause toworry about an educational sector that glorified jehad and indoctrinatedchildren in religious intolerance and extremism", the ICG directorconcluded.

In short, the Musharraf regime's failure to reform the country's 10,000religious seminaries and to crack down on jehadi networks has resulted ina resurgence of extremism and sectarian violence in the country. The Pakistanimilitary dictator's priority has never been eradicating Islamic extremism, butrather the legitimization and consolidation of his dictatorial rule, for whichhe seems dependent on the clergy. And the mushroom growth of extremists willcontinue unabated until and unless the Mullah-Military alliance in Pakistan iseffectively put to an end.

Amir Mir is Senior Assistant Editor, Monthly Herald, Dawn Group ofNewspapers, Karachi.  Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of theSouth Asia Terrorism Portal