Radical School Reform

Mohammed Adil is 11 years old, can’t subtract and can write only seven letters of the English alphabet. But he can recite lengthy verses of the Koran in carefully memorized Arabic.

Syed Gul is the same age. He can add, subtract and multiply simple numbers and scrawl out all the letters of the English alphabet. But he flubs verses from the Islamic holy book.

The difference between the two Pakistani boys is as simple as it is deceptive: Mohammed attends a religious seminary, or madrasa, and Syed a government-run public school in this frontier city near the Khyber Pass.

The assumption that Mohammed is destined to embrace the reactionary Islamic views of neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban movement while Syed will become a free-thinking democrat is virtually an axiom of the grass-roots war on terrorism in Pakistan and much of the Muslim world.

The truth is far more nuanced. Both boys share greater-than-even odds of entering adulthood functionally illiterate and without the skills to compete in a 21st century global economy, according to UNICEF figures. For girls, the odds are worse.

In Pakistan’s rush to win its way back into the West’s good graces, President Pervez Musharraf announced a plan to drain the breeding ground for Muslim extremists by reforming radical madrasas that have sent their graduates off on jihads outside Pakistan.

In the process, the campaign is unearthing a shameful truth: Pakistan can make atomic bombs but cannot educate its 68 million children, many of whom abandon the poor nation’s underfunded public schools and flock to the room, board and faith offered by fundamentalist schools, most of which are funded by foreign philanthropies.

“What skills?” asked Abdullah Khan, principal of the Akhunabad public elementary school that Syed attends here in Peshawar. “Their parents don’t care about their academic life. They only want them to be able to read and write just a little bit.”

Down a narrow unpaved street, below a faded Coca-Cola sign, a blind mullah shrugs at the same question as he squats with his young charges on a collage of threadbare prayer mats. “I can’t afford to teach them computers or modern subjects,” said Qari Katchkul Ahmad, who drills the Koran into 50 boys and 180 girls who recite, eat and sleep at his cold and dimly lighted madrasa.

Like many other mullahs here, Ahmad says he instills in his students not politics but the strict tenets of brotherly love that are central to Islam.

But Musharraf, and many of his Western allies, is suspicious of such mosque-based schools.

“Mosques are being misused for propagating and inciting hatred against each other’s sect and beliefs and against the government too,” Musharraf warned in a speech in January. “Do we want Pakistan to become a theocratic state? Do we believe that religious education alone is enough for governance, or do we want Pakistan to emerge as a progressive and dynamic Islamic welfare state? The verdict of the masses is in favor of a progressive Islamic state.”

Musharraf gave Pakistan’s madrasas, also known as madaris, an end-of-March deadline to register with the federal government and a year-end deadline to begin teaching math, science, the English language and Pakistani studies, if they don’t already do so. No penalty was mentioned for failing to meet the goals, though he already has ordered the demolition of a dozen illegally constructed mosques and madrasas in Islamabad, the capital.

Now that bureaucrats closer to the minefields of Pakistan’s Muslim identity are implementing Musharraf’s rules, they appear to be substantially softening the policy.

“There is no coercive element to it,” insisted S. M. Zaman, chairman of the Pakistan Madaris Education Board, the federal entity that certifies and regulates religious schools. “The existing madaris don’t have to get involved.”

To be sure, madrasas have turned out top scholars throughout the Muslim world, and their alumni in Pakistan have become government ministers and businesspeople. A 12-year course of study at some of the better madrasas in this nation renders a certificate that carries as much cachet in the academic and working worlds as a master’s degree in Arabic or Islamic studies.

But many of these schools have forsaken what once was a broad course of study for a reactionary curriculum penned in the 19th century, known as Deobandism.

As a result, the students who leave these institutions react to the secularism of the modern world in draconian ways, Zaman said.

Not everyone buys into the theory that madrasas are the cradle of extremism. Osama bin Laden comes from a wealthy Saudi family and studied economics and management at a Saudi university. Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, accused of masterminding the kidnapping and slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was raised in a London suburb and schooled in Britain’s finest private institutions, including the London School of Economics.

“Islamic radicalism, fundamentalism and revivalism is a middle-class intelligentsia phenomenon,” Tariq Rahman, a professor of linguistics and South Asian studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, wrote recently in a Pakistani daily newspaper. “The conservative syllabi of the madrasas are about the medieval age. The new subjects are about the modern world. It is, indeed, the exposure to the new which has politicized the madrasas, not the continuation of the old.”

In this mountainous region that shares both ethnic heritage and a porous border with Afghanistan, the question of what drives extremism is far from academic.

“It’s a 50-50 story,” said Imtiaz Gilani, education minister of Northwest Frontier Province, where Peshawar is located. “There are a lot of madrasas that in our books are genuine madrasas. They are providing a service to extremely poor people by giving them schooling, board and lodging. They are really philanthropic organizations, and we have no problem with those. Then there are madrasas that are giving militant training and little more. There is some problem with what to do with these other schools.”

So far, Gilani has done nothing about the estimated 3,700 madrasas in the province sprinkled throughout urban areas, such as Peshawar, and the remote mountains ruled by tribal leaders. “I have not been ordered or given a clear line to go into the field,” he said. “It’s federal policy and they are fine-tuning it.”

Gilani assures that when the time comes, ending the military training conducted at some madrasas will leave the extremist movements to “die a natural death.” He notes that religious leaders failed last fall to muster impressive crowds to protest the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan. Lately, they have expressed only muted opposition to changing curricula.

Some of the more openly reprobate madrasas, meanwhile, seem to be sensing the changing political winds.

The vast Haqqania school about 25 miles east of Peshawar, which boasts of having educated 95% of the Afghan Taliban leadership, has vowed to bar Afghan students from registering, according to Gilani. A roadside fortress with onion-domed spires, Haqqania is a sprawling and well-funded campus reminiscent of a parochial high school.

Mohammed Adil’s storefront school lies closer to the norm. It has one classroom that doubles as a boys’ dormitory. Four open latrines with six cold-water faucets serve as a lavatory and laundry area. There is no furniture, and students sit on worn prayer mats, listening to hours of recitation by teachers as their slim torsos bob to the cadence of verse in Arabic.

Syed Gul’s public school is no palace either. Built with German funds in 1997, Akhunabad is a three-story concrete building with slogans such as “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves” painted on its sides. During a recent visit, there was a power blackout, an occurrence that Khan, its principal, said is common. There are only enough chairs and desks for the fourth- and fifth-grade classes. Students who found chairs to sit in an open courtyard took exams under the wan light of a cloudy sky.

There are as many as 40 students to a class, and most have to share worn textbooks, Khan said. Teachers, even with master’s degrees, make about $65 a month. By the time the provincial school system pays them, it is left with about 10% of its $166-million annual budget, according to Gilani. That doesn’t leave much to buy furniture, let alone put roofs over the 422 euphemistically named “shelterless” schools where teachers instruct out in the elements.

It is no surprise to Gilani that enrollment in the province’s 22,375 public elementary schools has declined during the last three years and stands at 49% of the population in that age group, while private schools, both secular and religious, have flourished. “People are finding going to our schools is probably not worth their time, “ Gilani acknowledged.

Time will tell if Pakistan can make either kind of education worthwhile to Mohammed and Syed, who grew up amid the ideological rubble left after the U.S.-backed moujahedeen struggle in Afghanistan. To do so, Gilani wants to steal back a term from the liturgy of extremism.

“Jihad has become a bad word, because religious bigots have been associated with it,” Gilani said. “But jihad literally translates as struggle, and I am on a jihad to increase literacy.”