Rounding Out the Seminary Curricula

Pakistan wants its madrasas to include history, languages and science so students become educated men, and not just Islamic zealots.

Los Angeles Times/January 3, 2002
By David Lamb

Peshawar, Pakistan -- The young men who sat cross-legged on the rug, squeezed into a semicircle around the seminary's principal, are the mullahs of tomorrow. Most are poor and from the countryside and not yet old enough to have full, bushy beards.

On the admission applications they clutched in their hands, they had agreed not to smoke, get "English-style" haircuts, question decisions of the seminary or join political movements. They had promised to bathe at least once a week, be respectful of teachers, keep the school clean and be good Muslims.

Abdur Rahmad, 17, waited nervously for his turn. He ran his hand over the few hairs on his chin. He had, he said, already memorized half the Koran on his own but knew that his study of Islam was far from complete. When the principal asked him what he would do with the knowledge that awaited him here, Abdur answered, "I will return to my village in Afghanistan and be a teacher of Islam." Over the years, tens of thousands of students like Abdur have gone forth from Pakistan's estimated 5,000 madrasas, or seminaries, armed with the narrowest interpretation of a religion that in more than 1,400 years has never undergone a renaissance or a reformation. Some went as teachers to rally the fervor of Islam, others to fight in Afghanistan.

The schools have turned Pakistan into a factory for moujahedeen, or holy warriors.

With the U.S.-led war on terrorism now in its fourth month, the madrasas have become a source of concern to Pakistan's government, which wants them to broaden their curricula to include history, languages and science so graduates become educated men dedicated to national development, and not just religious zealots and a source of moujahedeen.

The 700-student Darrul-ulloom Sarhad madrasa in Peshawar is no exception. Principal Sahibzada Ahmad Banoori's father founded the madrasa more than 50 years ago; then, as now, the foot soldiers of Islam who left the school after three or four years of free education would have learned to recite all 77,934 words of the Koran by heart, although that was about all they would have learned. The recitation in Arabic takes about 10 hours.

Now, the madrasas, stung by a national crackdown on extremism, have agreed to offer a more well-rounded education--somewhat reluctantly.

"We teach only the goodness of Islam and don't teach hate against any nation or other religion," Banoori said after the students left to find classrooms on the first day of school. "We never encouraged or gave incentives to students so they would become moujahedeen. Of course, if they made that choice on their own, it is out of our hands."

Undeniably, however, Pakistani officials point out, anti-Western sentiments are nurtured in the madrasas.

The madrasas do not offer military training, but in a country where anyone can buy a Kalashnikov rifle on the open market for $250, that instruction is readily available elsewhere. What they do offer is such an unworldly and narrow view of life that students invariably consider anything non-Muslim as anti-Islam and godless. This leads to cries for jihad.

Islam--which translates as "submission" to God--has five obligations: accepting one God and Muhammad as his prophet; daily prayer; giving alms to the needy; fasting during the holy month of Ramadan; and making the hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca.

Some include a sixth pillar: jihad. Although the word has ominous overtones in the West, jihad merely means to struggle for Islam. One can wage a jihad against poverty or illiteracy. Only in its extreme does it refer to war.

"Religious fanatics sit idly in the mosques and madrasas," said Jafri Abul Hasan, a retired journalist. "They don't have jobs. They're influenced, even brainwashed, by mullahs. The fact is, they really don't know what they're doing. The mullah says, 'Do this, do that,' and they do it. But this isn't the Islam the vast majority of us believe in or practice."

Hasan points out that most of the world's 1 billion Muslims embrace the tolerance and compassion of a religion that bears many similarities to Christianity. Muslims accept Jesus Christ as a prophet (though not as the son of God) and venerate Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jacob and Job. They believe in the resurrection of the body and in the concept of heaven and hell. One major difference in Islam is that the prophet Muhammad was entirely mortal and did not perform miracles.

"There were volunteers from every madrasa in Pakistan who went to fight against the Soviets and later for the Taliban," said one mullah, Maulana Jalic Jan. "Some used to spend their summer vacations fighting. Then they'd go back to school.

"This isn't surprising, because thousands of Muslims are being killed every day in wars led by the West and no one takes notice. But if a few Christians or Jews are killed somewhere, everyone is up in arms."

One irony in the increasing prominence of the madrasas is that their growth was, to a large degree, the result of CIA efforts during the Cold War.

The CIA saw Islam as an important force against the Soviets, and with U.S. backing, the madrasas became the training ground for the fighters who defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1989 after nearly a decade of war. That success further emboldened young fanatics to believe that their faith was stronger than the military might of any superpower.

"You Americans created this phenomenon, and now you're trying to figure out how to deprogram it," a Pakistani intelligence officer said.