Over the years we have posted many articles about Pakistan’s Islamic schools, showing how they are an ever-fertile breeding ground for jihadists. Here is yet another. Its heading reads: “Pakistan’s Islamic schools have been accused of fomenting extremism. But, while their curriculum is avowedly narrow — Koran-memorisation all day, every day — their mullahs are at pains to distance themselves from violence.” I wonder if it occurred to the Telegraph editors that spending all day, every day memorizing a book that exhorts believers to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them” (9:5), “strike the necks” of unbelievers (47:4), make war against Jews and Christians (9:29), beat disobedient wives (4:34) and the like might do a good bit to foment “extremism” in itself.
Well, at least they aren’t reading the Book of Joshua, eh, Ralph? I guess that explains why so many more violent extremists are turned out by Baptist Sunday schools than by these madrassas, eh?
“By the book,” from the Telegraph, with thanks to all who sent this in:
…Estimates vary, but according to the Pakistan government’s religious-affairs ministry, up to 1.5 million of Pakistan’s 30 million school-age children study in the country’s Islamic schools, or madrassas. Mostly they are the children of the poor, who choose the madrassa over failing government schools.
Except for a handful of establishments that have agreed to ‘modernise’ a curriculum first introduced in the late-17th century, Pakistan’s madrassas teach only one subject — the Koran. At this typical urban madrassa, the Jamia Anwaria, in a lower-middle-class suburb of northern Lahore, the pupils are devoting themselves to a single, all-enveloping task — namely committing to memory the more than 6,000 verses of Islam’s holy book.
All of them. By heart. During that period all other subjects and ambitions — maths, science, history and humanities — must be put on hold.
Only about 40 per cent of the average class will succeed. A few of these will go on to higher learning, studying the hadith and sunnah, the sayings and example of the Prophet Mohammed, which explain the words they learnt by rote as children. An even smaller number will enter the religious establishment, to become clerics and teachers themselves.
It is, by any definition, a narrow education and one that has been the focus of growing world attention for its role in fomenting the kind of narrow, anti-Western ideology that is at the heart of the current inter-national jihad being waged in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.
The fact that two of the July 7 London bombers visited madrassas in Pakistan before the attack — and the current investigation into Pakistani links to the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic flights from Heathrow — has once again raised questions over the significance of Pakistan’s madrassas in the fight against Islamist terrorism.
However, contrary to the impression sometimes given by the popular press in the West, madrassas are educational institutions, not military training camps. The only gun on view at the Jamia Anwaria is an ancient shotgun belonging to a security guard dozing on a chair outside….
What a silly, naive paragraph. There are no guns, thus there is no military training. It appears that the Telegraph also never considered the possibility that the madrassas play a role in indoctrination and recruitment, in the service of the same jihad that those undergoing military training are hoping to advance.
The size of the task confronting the students, or talibs, becomes clearer when the madrassa’s leader, a genial cleric called Mohammed Khalid Anwari, who fulfils the dual roles of maulana (mullah) and head teacher, explains that none of the children can understand a single word of the sacred book they are learning.
This phenomenon recurs, of course, everywhere that Muslim students are not native speakers of Arabic. And even Arabs today don’t speak 7th-century Qur’anic Arabic. It is quite common for even devout Muslims in some places not to have any clear idea of what the Qur’an actually says — which accounts for some, but not all, of the people who indignantly deny what I report here and in my books about the teachings of Islam.
The Koran is an Arabic text, but the students, many of whom have received basic education before entering the madrassa, are literate only in Urdu. The two languages share an almost identical script, which allows the children to read the words, but not understand them….
And what if one of these younger children were curious enough to ask about the meaning of the words? ‘If they ask, I tell them the meaning,’ the teacher explains. ‘But usually they don’t ask. Sometimes, when they first arrive, they want translation, but over the passage of time they stop asking questions.
It is not required to understand.’ It is this blind faith and obedience required from all students that marks out the madrassa. Secular Pakistanis scornfully describe it as a ‘medieval mindset’ which Pakistan’s increasingly powerful religious establishment uses to control the minds of the masses.
Korans wrapped in cloth
In the Jamia Anwaria a list of school rules hangs in the maulana’s office: students are forbidden from reading newspapers, playing games inside the madrassa or any ‘personal activity’. In the classroom they must read only the Koran.
Idle chatter or fooling about of any kind is not tolerated. Outside class they are permitted to play cricket (the maulana has been known to umpire) or other games. However, by the standards of many rural madrassas this is considered liberal, and even dangerous, practice.
To succeed, the maulana explains, requires great discipline, which is inculcated by a school time-table that reads like that of a Victorian English public school. The chanting and memorising begin at 7am, continuing unbroken until 11.30am. Then there is a break for lunch, which is cooked by the female students, says the maulana, to help them learn how to be ‘dutiful wives’.
The boys, who eat, study and pray separately from the girls, race upstairs to a landing above the mosque where they devour platefuls of pilau rice, scooped up with their hands.
They sit on both sides of a long, thin plastic tablecloth with one leg tucked beneath the other. Everyone sits in identical fashion — ‘because that is the way the Prophet sat,’ the maulana explains proudly.
At 2pm the chanting of verses starts again for another three hours. At 5pm there is two hours of play-time, during which the children either sleep or stretch their legs outside. At 7pm there is another hour’s study before dinner is served.
Only then do the exhausted students go to bed. Some go home to their parents, who are mostly shopkeepers and poor merchants, while those who live at the madrassa sleep on rush mats laid out in a simple room above the mosque.
In order to better understand the ideology that underpins institutions like the Jamia Anwaria we visit one of Lahore’s oldest and most historic madrassas, the Khuddum-ud-Deen, to which the Jamia Anwaria is affiliated. The madrassa is run by the Deobandi movement, the same radical sect of Islam that created the Taliban, who, until they were ejected in 2001, strove to establish a ‘model’ Islamic state in Aghanistan.
The Deobandis, formed in the 19th century by a group of Islamic scholars who wanted to purify Islam from the corrupting influences of Hinduism, remain a powerful force in fundamentalist Islam. They are devoted to the establishment of a broad Islamic state, openly espousing what one liberal Pakistani think-tank, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, described in a report on Pakistan’s education system as an ‘exclusionary and sectarian worldview’.
The madrassa’s leader, Maulana Ajmal Qadri, who is widely revered by his followers as a Muslim pir (saint), makes no apology for his beliefs. ‘In our madrassas, we teach the Koranic jihad,’ he says. ‘This refuses to admit the supremacy of anyone, or any power, but Allah. We believe that the Muslim way is the supreme way, that the Islamic principle is best and that what the rest of the world does is not up to the mark.’
And so begins a two-hour disquisition on the failings and corruptions of the West that are a familiar part of thousands of sermons delivered every Friday — the Muslim holy day — to the faithful masses across Pakistan.
Read it all.