There is good in Pakistan’s madaris

How virulent are they? This week I arrived unannounced at one of the largest madaris in Lahore, a city that sits close up to the Indian border and provides a base for an assortment of militant groups, some prepared to use violence¹ without compunction.

I purposely chose a madrasa of the Deobandi school of Islamic belief, which is considered to be close to the ultra-fundamentalist Wahabism² of Saudi Arabia. This madrasa, Jamia Ashrafia, has 1,200 boys, who spend two years at the age of 10 doing little else but learning the Qur’an by heart. Some later go on to government schools to learn from a wider curriculum, some return at the age of 16 or 18 to study Islamic theology up to university level.

Everything is free, the atmosphere is convivial and the quarters, grouped around a mosque, are roomy and airy. Inside the mosque, small group of boys giggled and recited their way through the pages of the Qur’an. Financing is all raised insight Pakistan from donations, the madrasa’s accountant told me. Accompanied by a university professor who read the Urdu notices pinned to various boards and walls, we could find not one word of an extremist pitch. One said simply, “Even a smile is charity.” We left convinced, as one teacher told us, that the school has no truck with violence and even forbids teachers to use corporal punishment. “Even if a pupil decides to use his pen as a stick and poke someone, we are against it,” he said.

May be I was hoodwinked, but I don’t think so. I checked out their reputation and it stands up well.

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It is right that the government is now pushing for registration of the madaris, watching more carefully the outside money (often Saudi) that finances some of them and expelling, as it did after the London bombings, some of it foreign students. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. After all in the centuries before imperial conquest, the madaris were the major source of Islamic learning. Our mortarboards, tassels, academic robes and rituals of the oral defense of a written thesis can all be traced back to them.

By all means make them better and broader in what they teach, but to seek their abolition would only be one more blow to the self-esteem and urge for self-betterment of the very poor of this fraught but forward-looking country.

Jonathan Power

The Nation, Islamabad

World Focus, p15

Friday, December 9, 2005

Reproduced from International Herald Tribune

^{1, 2} The writer fails to prove such accusations, though. (Editor)