Re: An interesting survey of Pakistan “Jihadi” population…
Tariq rahmans work is considered the definitive work on madrassahs in Pakistam.
to answer your core question PP…the cruelty of the well educated is always far worse than that of the uneducated. I used to be a firm supporter of technocrats..and this was at a ttime when Moeen Qureshis brief caretaker government had upstaged BB and NS. Unfortunately the closer i saw them..while i appreciated individuals competence and hard work..in the end there was an element of detachment from the people which could borderline on being cruel.
To put it in perspective most fascists and fundamentalists are often well read and ferociously dedicated to a cause..they often dehumanise their opponents to get support from the people.
Another book on the madrassah network is Zahid Hussains
Nursery for Jihad
An in-depth look at the incestuous relationship between Pakistan’s jihadis and the all-powerful ISI.
Zahid Hussain describes how young boys are trained to become jihadis.
Sporting white turbans, the young men listened in silence to the concluding sermon at the graduation ceremony. “Being watchmen of your religion, you are naturally the first target of your enemies,” declared a frail, black-turbaned Maulana Samiul Haq. His long grey beard coloured with henna, the fiery cleric was the head of Pakistan’s leading institution for Islamic learning, Darul Uloom Haqqania. Situated in the town of Akora Khattak on the Grand Trunk Road near Peshawar, the radical seminary, often described as the university of jihad, in September 2003 turned out another class of young Pakistanis and Afghans ready to wage a holy war against the enemies of their religion.
Banners showing Kalashnikov rifles and tanks adorned the walls of the seminary. Some posters carried slogans in support of bin Laden and the holy war. “It is your sacred duty to defend your faith before everything else,” exhorted Haq, a member of parliament and the leader of an alliance of six Islamic parties that ruled the North West Frontier Province. In his mid-sixties, the cleric took pride in having met bin Laden. “He is a great hero of Islam,” he told me a week after 9/11, showing off photographs of himself posing with the Saudi militant.
Thousands of students, teachers and religious leaders assembled within a tented ground inside the sprawling campus broke into frenzied chants of “jihad, jihad” and “Allah is the greatest” as a message from the Taliban’s fugitive supreme commander, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was read out to them. The school’s support for radical Islamic movements was not a secret. It had been the cradle of the Taliban militia that ruled Afghanistan for more than five years. Many of its leaders, including several cabinet ministers, had graduated from the school. It had also been a recruiting centre for dozens of Pakistani militant groups fighting Indian forces in Kashmir. Many of the school’s three thousand students were from Afghanistan and former Soviet Central Asia. Some had taken part in the ‘holy wars’ in Afghanistan and Kashmir. “Jihad is an essential part of Islam,” Haq asserted.
The proliferation of jihadist organisations in Pakistan over the previous two decades had been the result of a militant culture espoused by radical madressahs like Darul Uloom Haqqania. Thousands of madressahs across the country became hubs for militancy and religious extremism, having a spill-over effect and presenting a serious threat to Pakistan’s internal security. Pakistani madressahs were once considered centres for basic religious learning. They were mostly attached to local mosques. The more formal ones were used for educating the clergy. The development of simple, sparse religious schools into training centres for Kalashnikov-toting religious warriors was directly linked with the rise of militant Islam. Many of the religious parties operating the madressahs turned to militancy, courtesy of the US-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan. From waging jihad against infidels in that foreign land, taking on perceived enemies of Islam at home was just a small step away. The influx of huge sums of money and a growing sense of power transformed the mullah’s image from that of a docile and humble man to a mafia thug with a four-wheel-drive jeep and armed bodyguards. The influence of mullahs with local Pakistani leaders had also become formidable. Successive governments ignored their activities out of political expediency and also because most of the foreigners supporting them were “brotherly Muslim” countries.
The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 opened up the first wave of foreign funding for madressahs in Pakistan. Fearful of growing Iranian influence and the spread of revolution, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and some other oil-rich Muslim countries started pumping money into hardline Pakistani Sunni religious organisations willing to counter the supposed Shia threat. Millions of dollars were poured into setting up madressahs across the country, particularly in the Balochistan province, bordering Iran. The Islamisation process started by General Ziaul Haq’s regime in 1979 also contributed to the mushrooming of madressahs. For the first time in Pakistani history, the state started providing financial support for the expansion of religious education from Zakat and Ushr funds. The Islamisation of education and levying of Islamic taxes had a profound long-term effect.
Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, had been treated as a private matter in most Muslim states. General Zia’s regime broke with that tradition by deducting it from bank accounts each year during the Islamic holy month of Ramazan. The substantial amount raised by Zakat was used to finance the traditional religious schools, most of them belonging to the Deobandi movement, which is akin to Saudi Wahabism. Zakat did little to improve the lot of millions of Pakistanis living in abject poverty. The only visible consequence was the transformation of the religious landscape of the nation. The foreign and govemment-funded madressahs also became the main centres for spreading sectarian hatred. Saudi Arabian patronage, especially of the more radical Ahle Hadith madressahs, played a major role in worsening the situation.
Madressahs also had a key place in Pakistani religious and social life. Most of the seminary students came from the poorest sections of Pakistani society and were provided with free religious education, lodging and meals. The influx of the impoverished rural population to the madressahs was a major reason for their growth, with Punjab and the North West Frontier Province having the highest number of religious seminaries. Divided along sectarian and political lines, religious seminaries were largely controlled by the two main branches of Sunni Islam in South Asia — the Deobandi and the Barelvi. Ahle Hadith or Wahabi Muslims had their own schools, as did the Shias. The religious doctrinal differences among these sects were irreconcilable. Most of the madressahs were centuries apart from the outside world. Generally the students were poor, from broken homes, or were orphans. Conditions in schools were regularly condemned by human rights groups as crowded and inhumane. The students were often subjected to a regimen as harsh as any jail, and physical abuses were commonplace. In many schools, students were put in chains and iron fetters for the slightest violation of rules. There were almost no extracurricular activities and television and radio were banned. Teaching was rudimentary and students were taught religion within a highly rigorous and traditional perspective, giving them a deeply retrograde world-view.
At the primary stage, madressah pupils learnt to read, memorise and recite the Quran. Exegeses of the holy script and other branches of Islamic studies were introduced at the higher stages of learning. Though the focus was on religious learning, some institutions also taught elementary mathematics, science and English. The most dangerous consequence of the content and style of teaching in religious schools was that the people that emerged could do nothing apart from guide the faithful in rituals that demand no experts. Job opportunities for madressah graduates were few and narrow. They could only work in mosques, madressahs, the parent religious sectarian party, or its affiliate businesses or organisations.
The education imparted by traditional madressahs often spawned factional, religious and cultural conflict. It created barriers to modern knowledge, stifled creativity and bred bigotry, thus laying the foundation on which fundamentalism — militant or otherwise — was based. Divided by sectarian identities, these institutions were, by their very nature, driven by their zeal to outnumber and dominate rival sects. Students were educated and trained to counter the arguments of opposing sects on matters of theology, jurisprudence and doctrines. Promoting a particular sect inevitably implied the rejection of other sects, sowing the seeds of extremism in the minds of the students. The literature produced by their parent religious organisations promoted sectarian hatred and was aimed at proving the rival sects as infidels and apostates. The efforts by the successive government to modernise madressah curricula and introduce secular subjects failed because of stiff resistance from the religious organisations controlling the religious schools.
The rise of jihad culture since the 1980s gave madressahs a new sense of purpose. As a result, their numbers multiplied and the clergy emerged as a powerful political and social force. At independence in 1947, there were only 137 madressahs in Pakistan; in the next 10 years their number rose to 244. After that, they doubled every 10 years. A significant number remained unregistered and therefore it was hard to know precisely how many there were. Government sources put the figure at 13,000, with the total enrolment close to 1.7 million. The vast majority of students were between five and 18 years old. Only those advancing into higher religious studies were older. According to the government’s own estimates, 10 to 15 per cent of the madressahs had links with sectarian militancy or international terrorism. The trail of international terror often led to the madressahs and mosques.
Madressahs were basically conservative institutions before they were radicalised during the 1980s Afghan jihad. The growing army of extremists fought the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad alongside Arabs and Afghans. They later served the cause of jihad from Kashmir to Chechnya to Bosnia, Egypt and Yemen. At the height of the Afghan jihad — 1982-1988 — more than 1,000 new madressahs were opened in Pakistan, mostly along the borders with Afghanistan in the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan. Almost all belonged to hardline Sunni religious parties like the Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam (JUI) and the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which were Zia’s political allies as well as partners in the Afghan jihad. Their location in the two border provinces, which had close cultural, linguistic and sectarian affinities with Afghan Pakhtoons, made it easier to motivate the pupils to fight for their brethren in distress.
These madressahs did not conduct military training or provide arms to students, but encouraged them to join the ‘holy war’. The purpose was to ensure a continued supply of recruits for the Afghan resistance. The message was simple: all Muslims must perform the duty of jihad in whatever capacity they could. It was the responsibility of the Pakistani military, particularly the ISI, to provide training to the recruits in camps inside Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal region. As the Afghan jihad progressed, so did the influence of the jihadists coming out of these madressahs. The USA indirectly — and sometimes directly — promoted militancy, the culture of jihad and supported the clergy in its war against communism.
Special textbooks were published in Dari and Pushto by the University of Nebraska-Omaha and funded by USAID with an aim to promote jihadist values and militant training. Millions of such books were distributed at Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani madressahs, where students learnt basic maths by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles. The same textbooks were later used by the Taliban in their madressahs.
As General Zia attempted to consolidate his authority through Islamisation at home and jihad in Afghanistan, the madressah system was profoundly transformed. The Islamisation process nurtured many, often mutually hostile, varieties of fundamentalism. In a society where many sects coexisted, the measures representing the belief of the dominant sect acted as an identity marker, heightening sectarian divisions and promoting sectarian conflicts. As a result, sectarian divisions were militarised. The zealots began to look inwards and fight a new jihad against sectarian rivals, particularly the Shias. The madressah phenomenon drew international attention, particularly following the rise of the conservative Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The movement was largely the product of hundreds of seminaries in the Pakhtoon belt on the border with Afghanistan.
The link between madressahs and the Afghan jihad is exemplified by the Darul Uloom Haqqania madressah. Founded in 1947 by Haq’s father, Maulana Abdul Haq, a well-respected Islamic scholar belonging to the Deobandi order, Darul Uloom Haqqania developed into a centre for pan-Islamism with the beginning of the Afghan war. It saw a huge expansion with the support of the government and funds from abroad. Like other Deobandi institutions, Darul Uloom was controlled by a faction of JUI, a mainstream religio-political party that was part of a six-party conservative alliance known as Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA). The party became an important part of the Afghan jihad. The seminary traditionally had a large number of students from Afghanistan, but they increased considerably with the influx of Afghan refugees.
By 1985, about 60 per cent of the students in the seminary were Afghans. It also attracted students from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. From the beginning of the Afghan jihad, the school had relaxed the rules concerning attendance, allowing the students to take time off to participate in the ‘holy war’. The seminary, however, drew immense international attention in the 1990s with the emergence of the conservative Taliban movement. Thousands of Afghan, as well as Pakistani students crossed the border into Afghanistan to join the Islamic militia. In 1997 the school was closed for several months to allow the students to participate in the Taliban’s war to capture Afghanistan’s northern province of Mazar-i-Sharif. Such a large-scale cross-border movement would not have been possible without the collusion of Pakistani intelligence agencies.
Just months before the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the school hosted a conference of Islamic parties and militant groups to express solidarity with bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Masked gunmen in camouflage guerrilla outfits stood guard as Islamic leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan congregated at the sprawling auditorium on January 9, 2001, vowing to defend bin Laden and to launch a holy war against the West. Besides the 300 leaders representing various radical Islamic groups, the meeting was also attended by a former army chief, General Aslam Beg, and a former ISI chief, General Hamid Gul. They declared it a religious duty of Muslims all over the world to protect the Saudi dissident whom they described as a “great Muslim warrior”. One of the objectives of the assembly was to press Islamabad not to comply with UN sanctions against the Taliban. Interestingly, the military government, which had banned political parties holding public rallies, did not try to stop the conference. No action was taken against the militants for the public display of weapons. They obviously had the backing of the intelligence agencies. Islamic seminaries and clerics had never been as numerous and so powerful in Pakistan.
Excerpted with permission from
Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam
By Zahid Hussain
Vanguard Books (Pvt) Ltd 72-FCC Gulberg-4, Lahore
Tel: 042-5875622
Fax: 042-5751025
[email protected]
ISBN 978-969-402-507-0
220pp. Rs595