University of Jihad

The Straits Times/December 15, 2002

In parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, where there is a sharp divide between the rich and powerful, and the poor and marginalised, madrasahs have become a refuge for those for whom modernity has brought little solace.

Husaun Haqqani examines how geo-politics, sectarian conflicts and poverty have transformed religious schools in his country into breeding grounds for hatred and violence.

As a nine-year-old boy, I knelt on the bare floor of the neighbourhood madrasah (religious school) in Karachi, Pakistan, repeating the Quranic verse, 'Of all the communities raised among men you are the best, enjoining the good, forbidding the wrong, and believing in God.'

Hafiz Gul-Mohamed, my teacher, made each of the 13 boys in our class memorise the verse in its original Arabic.

Some of us also memorised the translation in our own language, Urdu. 'This is the word of God that defines the Muslim umma (community of believers),' he told us repeatedly. 'It tells Muslims their mission in life.' He himself bore the title hafiz (the memoriser) because he could recite all 114 chapters and 6,346 verses of the Quran.

Most students in Gul-Mohamed's class - like I - joined the madrasah to learn basic Islamic teachings and to be able to read the Quran. I completed my first reading of it by age seven.

Gul-Mohamed carried a cane, as all madrasah teachers do, but I don't recall him ever using it. He liked my curiosity about religion and had been angry with me only once: I had come to his class straight from my English-language school, dressed in the school's uniform: white shirt, red tie, and beige trousers. 'Today you have dressed like a farangi (European). Tomorrow, you will start thinking and behaving like one,' he said. 'And that will be the beginning of your journey to hell.'

Hafiz Gul-Mohamed read no newspapers and did not listen to the radio. He owned few books. 'You don't need too many books to learn Islam,' he once explained to me when I brought him his evening meal.

'There is the straight path, which is described in the Quran and one or two commentaries, and there are numerous paths to confusion. I have the books I need to keep me on the straight path.'

He had never seen a movie and advised me never to see one either. The only time he had allowed himself to be photographed was to obtain a passport for the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the hajj. Television was about to be introduced in Pakistan, and Gul-Mohamed found that prospect quite disturbing.

One hadith (or saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed) describes 'song and dance by women lacking in virtue' coming to every home as one of the signs of apocalypse. Television, Gul-Mohamed believed, would fulfill that prophecy, as it would bring moving images of singing and dancing women into every home.

The madrasah I attended, and its headmaster, opposed the West, but in an apolitical way. He knew the communists were evil because they denied the existence of God.

The West, however, was also immoral. Westerners drank alcohol and engaged in sex outside of marriage. Western women did not cover themselves. Western culture encouraged a mad race for making money. Song and dance, rather than prayer and meditation, characterised life in the West. Gul-Mohamed's solution was isolation. 'The umma should keep away from the West and its ways.'

Changing Times

But these were the 1960s.

Although religion was important in the lives of Pakistanis, pursuit of material success rather than the search for religious knowledge determined students' career choices.

Everyone in my madrasah class dropped out after learning the essential rituals. I remained a part-time student for almost six years, but eventually I needed to devote more time to regular studies that would take me through to college.

Gul-Mohamed was disappointed that I did not seek a sanad (diploma) in theology, but he grudgingly understood why I might not want a degree in theology from a parallel education system:

'You don't want to be a mullah like me, with little pay and no respect in the eyes of the rich and powerful.'

And so it was for much of the four decades before the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, a period when policymakers were more interested in the thoughts of Western-educated Muslims responsible for energy policy in Arab countries than those of half-literate mullahs trained at obscure seminaries.

But Taleban leaders, who had ruled Afghanistan since the mid-1990s, were the products of madrasahs in Pakistan, and their role as protectors of al Qaeda terrorists has generated keen interest in their alma maters.

A few weeks after Sept 11, I visited Darul Uloom Haqqania (Centre of Righteous Knowledge), situated on the main highway between Islamabad and Peshawar, in the small town of Akora Khattak.

Taleban leader Mullah Omar had been a student at Haqqania, and the madrasah, with 2,500 students aged five to 21, has been called 'the University of Jihad'.

And at Haqqania, I saw that the world of the madrasah had changed since I last bowed my head in front of Hafiz Gul-Mohamed.

In a basement room with plasterless walls adorned by a clock inscribed with 'God is Great' in Arabic, nine-year-old Mohammed Tahir rocked back and forth and recited the same verse of the Quran that had been instilled into my memory at the same age: 'Of all the communities raised among men you are the best, enjoining the good, forbidding the wrong, and believing in God.'

But when I asked him to explain how he understands the passage, Tahir's interpretation was quite different from the quietist version taught to me.

'The Muslim community of believers is the best in the eyes of God, and we must make it the same in the eyes of men by force,' he said. 'We must fight the unbelievers and that includes those who carry Muslim names but have adopted the ways of unbelievers.

'When I grow up, I intend to carry out jihad in every possible way.'

Tahir does not believe that al Qaeda is responsible for Sept 11 because his teachers have told him that the attacks were a conspiracy by Jews against the Taleban. He also considers Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden great Muslims 'for challenging the might of the unbelievers'.

The remarkable transformation and global spread of madrasahs during the 1980s and 1990s owes much to geopolitics, sectarian struggles, and technology, but the schools' influence and staying power derive from deep-rooted socio-economic conditions that have so far proved resistant to change.

Now, with the prospect of madrasahs churning out tens of thousands of would-be militant graduates each year, calls for reform are growing. But anyone who hopes for change in the schools' curriculum, approach, or mind-set is likely to be disappointed.

In some ways, madrasahs are at the centre of a civil war of ideas in the Islamic world. Westernised and usually-affluent Muslims lack an interest in religious matters, but religious scholars, marginalised by modernisation, seek to assert their own relevance by insisting on orthodoxy.

A regular education costs money, but madrasahs are generally free. Poor students attending madrasahs find it easy to believe that the West, loyal to uncaring and aloof leaders, is responsible for their misery and that Islam as practised in its earliest form can deliver them.

The Madrasah Boom

Madrasahs have been around since the 11th century, when the Seljuk Vizier Nizam ul-Mulk Hassan bin Ali Tusi founded one in Baghdad to train experts in Islamic law.

Islam had become the religion of a large community, stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. But apart from the Quran, which Muslims believe to be the word of God revealed through Prophet Mohammed, no definitive theological texts existed.

The dominant Muslim sect, the Sunnis, did not have a clerical class, leaving groups to follow whomever inspired them in religious matters.

Sunni Muslim rulers legitimated their rule through religion, depending primarily on an injunction in the Quran binding believers to obey the righteous ruler.

Over time, it became important to seek religious conformity and to define dogma to ensure obedience of subjects and to protect rulers from rebellion. Nizam ul-Mulk's madrasah was intended to create a class of ulema, muftis, and qazis (judges) who would administer the Muslim empire, legitimise its rulers as righteous, and define an unalterable version of Islam.

Abul Hassan al-Ashari, a ninth-century theologian, defined the dogma adopted for this new madrasah (and the tens of thousands that would follow) in several polemical texts, including The Detailed Explanation In Refutation Of The People Of Perdition And The Sparks: Refutation Of Heretics And Innovators.

This canon rejected any significant role for reason in religious matters and dictated that religion be the focus of a Muslim's existence.

The madrasahs adopted a core curriculum that divided knowledge between 'revealed sciences' and 'rational sciences'. The revealed sciences included study of the Quran, hadith, Quranic commentary, and Islamic jurisprudence. The rational sciences included Arabic language and grammar to help understand the Quran, logic, rhetoric, and philosophy.

Largely unchanged and unchallenged, this approach to education dominated the Islamic world for centuries, until the advent of colonial rule, when Western education penetrated countries previously ruled by Muslims.

Throughout the Middle East, as well as in British India and Dutch-ruled Indonesia, modernisation marginalised madrasahs. Their graduates were no longer employable as judges or administrators as the Islamic legal system gave way to Western jurisprudence.

Muslim societies became polarised between madrasah-educated mullahs and the economically-prosperous, Western-educated individuals attending modern schools.

But the poor remained faithful. The failings of the post-colonial elite in most Muslim countries paved the way for Islamic political movements such as alIkhwan al-Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood) in the Arab world, Jamaat-e-Islami (the Islamic Party) in South Asia, and the Nahdatul Ulema (the Movement for Religious Scholars) in Indonesia.

These movements questioned the legitimacy of the Westernised elite, created reminders of Islam's past glory, and played on hopes for an Islamic utopia.

In most cases, the founders of Islamic political movements were religiously-inclined politicians with a modern education. Madrasahs provided the rank and file.

The Iranian revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, both in 1979, inspired a profound shift in the Muslim world - and in the madrasahs. Iran's mullahs had managed to overthrow the shah, undermining the idea that religious education was useless in worldly matters. The image of men in turbans and robes running a country provided a powerful demonstration and politicised madrasahs everywhere.

Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary regime promised to export its revolutionary Shiite ideas to other Muslim states. Khomeini invited teachers and students from madrasahs in other countries to Tehran, and he offered money and military training to radical Islamic movements.

Iranians argued that the corrupt Arab monarchies must be overthrown just as Iranians had overthrown the shah. Iran's Arab rivals decided to fight revolutionary Shiite fundamentalism with their version of Sunni fundamentalism.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries began to pour money into Sunni madrasahs that rejected the Shiite theology of Iran, fund ulema who declared the Shiite Iranian model unacceptable to Sunnis, and call for a fight against Western decadence rather than Muslim rulers.

In the midst of this conflict, and the madrasah boom it spawned, the United States helped create an Islamic resistance to communism in Afghanistan, encouraging Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states to fund the Afghan resistance and its supporters throughout the Muslim world.

Pakistan's military ruler at the time, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, decided to establish madrasahs instead of modern schools in Afghan refugee camps, where 5 million displaced Afghans provided a natural supply of recruits for the resistance.

The refugees needed schools; the resistance needed mujahideen. Madrasahs would provide an education of sorts, but they would also serve as a centre of indoctrination and motivation.

Solution or problem?

General Zia's model spread throughout the Muslim world. Maulana Samiul Haq, headmaster of the Haqqania madrasah, is a firebrand orator who led anti-U.S. demonstrations soon after the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.

When asked if he thought it appropriate to involve his five- and six-year-old charges in political demonstrations, Haq remarked, 'No one is too young to do the right thing.'

Later, he added, 'Young minds are not for thinking. We catch them for the madrasahs when they are young, and by the time they are old enough to think, they know what to think.'

Students and teachers carried militant Islamic ideology from one madrasah to another. On one of the walls of the madrasah of my youth, someone had written the hadith 'Seek knowledge even if it takes you as far as China.'

Across the road from the madrasah at Haqqania, some of Tahir's classmates have written a different hadith: 'Paradise lies under the shade of swords.'

The success of General Zia's experiment led to the creation of similar free schools in places as diverse as Morocco, Algeria, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Muslim immigrants in Europe and North America established madrasahs alongside their mosques, ostensibly to teach religion to their children. Islam requires Muslims to set aside 2.5 per cent of their annual savings as zakat (charity), and religious education is one area on which zakat can be spent.

Madrasahs do not need huge funds to run, though. Teachers' salaries are low, the schools need no funding for research, and books are handed down from one generation to the next.

Madrasahs have proliferated with zakat and financial assistance from the Persian Gulf states.

In fact, some classrooms at Haqqania have a small inscription informing visitors that Saudi Arabia donated the building materials for the classroom.

Modern technology has also played a role, whether by creating international financing networks or new methods of spreading the message, such as through online madrasahs.

Pakistan had 244 madrasahs in 1956. By the end of last year, the number had risen to 10,000. As many as 1 million students study in madrasahs in Pakistan, compared with primary-school enrolment of 1.9 million.

Most Muslim countries allocate insignificant portions of their budgets for education, leaving large segments of their growing populations without schooling. Madrasahs fill that gap, especially for the poor.

The poorest countries, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Yemen and Indonesia, boast the largest madrasah enrolments.

Classes at Haqqania are free, as are meals, which are quite basic. Tahir, the seventh of nine children, likes being at the madrasah because it provides him an education without costing his parents anything.

He lives in a crowded dormitory of 40 to 50 students, sleeping on rugs and mattresses on the floor. He spends most of the day memorising texts, squatting in front of a teacher who memorised them in a similar fashion as a child.

''God has blessed me as I am learning His word and the teaching of His Prophet,' Tahir told me. 'I could have been like others in the refugee camp, with no clothes and no food.'

Tahir's teacher carries a cane and often can be brutal. One madrasah in Pakistan has resorted to the practice of chaining students to pillars until they memorise the day's lesson. But compared with life in a squalid refugee camp, the harshness of the madrasah probably is a blessing.

Tahir's day begins with the pre-dawn prayer and a breakfast comprising bread and tea; it ends with the night prayer and a dinner of rice and mutton. And if Tahir does well at the madrasah and earns a diploma, he can expect to find a job as a preacher in a mosque.

No Turning Back

An estimated 6 million Muslims study in madrasahs around the world, and twice that number attend maktabs or kuttabs (small Quranic schools attached to village mosques). An overwhelming majority of these madrasahs follow the quietist tradition, teaching rejection for Western ways without calling upon believers to fight unbelievers.

The few that teach violence, however, drill in those beliefs firmly. The militant madrasah is a relatively new phenomenon, the product of mistakes committed in fighting communism in Afghanistan. But even the quietist madrasah teaches a rejection of modernity while emphasising conformity and a mediaeval mind-set.

The Muslim world is divided between the rich and powerful, who are aligned with the West, and the impoverished masses who turn to religion in the absence of adequate means of livelihood.

This social reality makes it difficult for the madrasahs to remain unaffected by radical ideas, even after the militancy introduced during the last two decades disappears. Cutting off outside funding might help, but because of their modest expenses, madrasahs can survive without assistance from oil-producing states.

Legitimising secular power structures through democracy might reduce the political influence of madrasahs. But that influence is unlikely to wane dramatically as long as madrasahs are home to a theological class popular with poor Muslims.

And the fruits of modernity will need to spread widely before dual education systems in the Muslim world will come to an end.

Muslim states are now calling upon Western governments to support madrasah reform through financial aid. The proposed recipe for reform is to add contemporary subjects alongside the traditional religious sciences in madrasah curriculum. But madrasahs will probably survive these reform efforts, just as they survived the introduction of Western education during colonial rule.

Can learning science and maths, for example, change the worldview shaped by a theology of conformity? I asked Tahir if he is interested in learning math. He said, 'In hadith, there are many references to how many times Allah has multiplied the reward of jihad. If I knew how to multiply, I would be able to calculate the reward I will earn in the hereafter.'