Madrassa versus enlightenment -by Khaled Ahmed

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Madrassa versus enlightenment -by Khaled Ahmed

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Sunday, May 10, 2009...........

..extract...(for full text see below the extract)...



The Aga Khan Board controversy started when President Musharraf signed an executive order (the Presidential Ordinance of November 8, 2002; CXIV/2002) inducting the Aga Khan University Examination Board (AKUEB) into the national education system. The AKUEB was selected due to its excellent record in higher learning and would join the existing 24 examination boards nationwide. It was given the task of upgrading and modernising the declining standards of education and of holding examinations for private educational institutions.

The religious parties objected because the Aga Khan’s followers are Ismailis who are not accepted as Muslims in the conservative circles. They added to the suspicion of examinership the involvement of the US in funding. USAID, in funding some of the educational programmes of the Aga Khan Foundation, including a $4 million grant for the establishment of the examination board, raised the hackles of opponents of the Ismailis.

Sectarian politics was once again sparked by rhetoric from the leading madrassa Dawat wal Irshad in Muridke. In the internet edition of its weekly publication Ghazwa (November 4, 2004), the madrassa warned against the converting the Northern Areas into an Ismaili state. Hafiz Saeed wrote: “Musharraf is working on making the Northern Areas an Ismaili state. He has been pressured by Christina Rocca (former US assistant secretary of state for South Asia) to hand over Kashmir to Prince Karim Aga Khan so that he could annex it with the Northern Areas and make it his fiefdom”. Author Ali thinks that this kind of conspiracy-mongering by the madrassa was “disturbingly similar to the campaign against the Ahmedis”. (p.113)

The book finds the jihadists also providing self-selected surveys against Ismailis. Thus the Daily Jasarat reported (December 19, 2004): According to a survey by the Islami Jamiat-e Tulaba (IJT), 854,000 people have rejected the Aga Khan Board examination system called AKB. There was only a certain amount of popularity of AKB in Sindh while elsewhere 93.02 per cent rejected the AKB. Director of the Khair-ul-Madaris in Multan, Maulana Hanif Jalandhari, accused the government of inconsistency — trying to give independence to the Aga Khan Boa while restricting madrassa procedures.

However, the major difference between the Aga Khan Board and the madrassa system is that the exam criteria for the Aga Khan programme, and indeed all private schools, are still subject to government approval, whereas the madrassa programmes at present have no government oversight (p.113). But madrassas have other leverage too because of the support they get from the religious parties. In March 2004, the MMA, the alliance of five religious parties, disrupted National Assembly proceedings and staged a walkout protesting the exclusion of certain Quranic verses from the new edition of a state-prescribed biology textbook.

The clerics threatened the government upon which the federal education minister Zubaida Jalal immediately clarified that no chapter or verses relating to jihad or Holy War or shahadat (martyrdom) had been deleted from textbook and that the particular verse referring to jihad had only been shifted from the biology textbook for intermediate students (Classes XI and XII) to the matriculation level course (Class X). Why should jihad or shahadat be mentioned in a biological textbook? (p.115)

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http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2009_pg3_5

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Book review: Madrassa versus enlightenment —by Khaled Ahmed

Islam and Education: Conflict and Conformity in Pakistan’s Madrassas;

By Saleem H Ali: OUP 2009;

Pp214; Price Rs 495

Saleem H Ali has emerged as an informed and credible commentator on Pakistan, writing his column in Daily Times especially on things relating to Pakistan’s radicalising religious institutions. This book has come out of his fieldwork in Pakistan and is a valuable addition to our knowledge of the madrassa systems here.

At the time of independence in 1947, there were only 137 madrassas in Pakistan. According to a 1956 survey, there were 244 madrassas in all of Pakistan (excluding East Pakistan). While there is no comprehensive census of madrassas in Pakistan at present, a reasonable estimate based on Ali’s review of multiple empirical and journalistic sources would suggest that there between 12,000 and 15,000 madrassas in Pakistan, with an enrolment of around 1.5 and 2 million.

In contrast, there are approximately 15,000 government schools with an enrolment of around 16 million, and 35,000 secular private schools with an enrolment of 6 million, and 25,000 auqaf or mosque schools (not madrassas) with an enrolment of around 1.5 million (p.25). There are other sources inside Pakistan who insist that the madrassa is too large and too variegated to be counted accurately; they say total number of madrassas could go up to 22,000!

Do we hate madrassas? Some of us do because we can’t seem to convince anyone that they are dangerous. Those who sympathise with them despite clear research-proved evidence of extremism in them consciously support the expanding ability of the madrassas to reject the state of Pakistan. The xenophobic mindset is in the ascendant. Those who hate foreign-linked institutions far outnumber those who are leery of the madrassas.

The Aga Khan Board controversy started when President Musharraf signed an executive order (the Presidential Ordinance of November 8, 2002; CXIV/2002) inducting the Aga Khan University Examination Board (AKUEB) into the national education system. The AKUEB was selected due to its excellent record in higher learning and would join the existing 24 examination boards nationwide. It was given the task of upgrading and modernising the declining standards of education and of holding examinations for private educational institutions.

The religious parties objected because the Aga Khan’s followers are Ismailis who are not accepted as Muslims in the conservative circles. They added to the suspicion of examinership the involvement of the US in funding. USAID, in funding some of the educational programmes of the Aga Khan Foundation, including a $4 million grant for the establishment of the examination board, raised the hackles of opponents of the Ismailis.

Sectarian politics was once again sparked by rhetoric from the leading madrassa Dawat wal Irshad in Muridke. In the internet edition of its weekly publication Ghazwa (November 4, 2004), the madrassa warned against the converting the Northern Areas into an Ismaili state. Hafiz Saeed wrote: “Musharraf is working on making the Northern Areas an Ismaili state. He has been pressured by Christina Rocca (former US assistant secretary of state for South Asia) to hand over Kashmir to Prince Karim Aga Khan so that he could annex it with the Northern Areas and make it his fiefdom”. Author Ali thinks that this kind of conspiracy-mongering by the madrassa was “disturbingly similar to the campaign against the Ahmedis”. (p.113)

The book finds the jihadists also providing self-selected surveys against Ismailis. Thus the Daily Jasarat reported (December 19, 2004): According to a survey by the Islami Jamiat-e Tulaba (IJT), 854,000 people have rejected the Aga Khan Board examination system called AKB. There was only a certain amount of popularity of AKB in Sindh while elsewhere 93.02 per cent rejected the AKB. Director of the Khair-ul-Madaris in Multan, Maulana Hanif Jalandhari, accused the government of inconsistency — trying to give independence to the Aga Khan Boa while restricting madrassa procedures.

However, the major difference between the Aga Khan Board and the madrassa system is that the exam criteria for the Aga Khan programme, and indeed all private schools, are still subject to government approval, whereas the madrassa programmes at present have no government oversight (p.113). But madrassas have other leverage too because of the support they get from the religious parties. In March 2004, the MMA, the alliance of five religious parties, disrupted National Assembly proceedings and staged a walkout protesting the exclusion of certain Quranic verses from the new edition of a state-prescribed biology textbook.

The clerics threatened the government upon which the federal education minister Zubaida Jalal immediately clarified that no chapter or verses relating to jihad or Holy War or shahadat (martyrdom) had been deleted from textbook and that the particular verse referring to jihad had only been shifted from the biology textbook for intermediate students (Classes XI and XII) to the matriculation level course (Class X). Why should jihad or shahadat be mentioned in a biological textbook? (p.115)

The book sees that ‘highly negative material is presented regarding minority religious groups’, particularly Hindus and Jews. This is what the government needs to correct, ‘but hate mongering should not be conflated with an immediate reduction in Islamic curricular content as it is likely to lead to neither policy being implemented’. Both hate speech and Islamic content have collectively been the focus of extensive criticism in Pakistan by secular NGOs such as the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), whose report titled Subtle Subversion (2004) had created quite a storm in Pakistan (p.115).

Saleem H Ali says: “When I interviewed Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi [of Red Mosque or Lal Masjid] in the winter of 2004, he came across as someone who regarded most foreign researchers with suspicion and felt that Islamabad was being indoctrinated by foreign elements. There was little doubt that this was a madrassa with a mission of sanctimonious reform of the urban corridors of power. The governing board of madrassas was well aware of this radicalisation but kept a low profile on the matter until early 2007 when they finally expelled the Red Mosque family of madrassas from their board.” (p.173)

Maulana Ghazi’s students had taken out their anger several years earlier on the local market in Islamabad containing Melody Cinema after the killing of a notable religious cleric to send a message to the government which was never really interested in reading them. After the 2007 confrontation, the author was handed a flier by a youth lamenting the Red Mosque siege and calling for a national uprising against the government.

The pamphlet contained the other exhortation of a caliphate and termed readership in Urdu as ‘Ahl-e-Quwwat’, meaning ‘People of Power’, and exhorted them to join together to establish the authority of Islam, indicating that ‘no other form of governance was acceptable to them’. The note was signed Hizb-al-Tahrir — a well-known militant organisation that has its roots in the United Kingdom.

Author Ali recommends that all madrassas may be shown the Quranic verse Sura 2 Verse 52 which states quite clearly that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’ (p.177), but the fact is that during the Lal Masjid showdown a TV reporter did ask the danda-bearing girls of the seminary about this very verse. The answer was rehearsed: it applies only to the non-Muslims. In other words, the concessionary verse is for the non-Muslims. Once you become a Muslim, you will be coerced against munkiraat and coerced in favour of marufaat. And this goes into far more detail than just pornography. You can be whipped for shaving.

One agrees with the author when says: “Like the famous Stockholm prisoner, many in the Frontier became so entranced with these intellectual incarcerators that they actually began to like them. The educated class began to believe that somehow the fanatics must be correct — for they had a contorted courage of conviction that made them appear like mythical super-heroes.” *
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