Author: Rick Bragg
Publication: The New York Times
- International Section
Date: October 14, 2001
URL: http://nytimes.com/2001/10/14/international/asia/14SCHO.html?pagewanted=1
SCHOOLS
Nurturing Young Islamic Hearts
and Hatreds
[P] ESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 13 ?
A thousand years ago, in the days of the camel caravans, storytellers gathered
here in the tea shops and brought the outside world and all its thoughts
and ideas to the bazaar. As the vendors hawked silk, spice and rich tapestries
and traders herded beasts through streets thick with smoke from cooking
fires, travelers from distant lands and differing religions told stories
about moguls, magic, wit and wisdom. In time, the bazaar came to be known
as Qissa Khwani ? the Bazaar of the Storytellers.
Now, the streets are still choked
with donkey carts and meat still sizzles on open pits, but the vendors
are poor men selling simple things. Blaring car horns drown out all other
sound, just as the teachers and students in the Islamic seminaries that
surround this bazaar have drowned out all conflicting ideas, all unacceptable
thoughts.
The storytellers no longer come.
There is just one story now, at least one acceptable story. It is the one
taught in the seminaries, called madrassas, that have become incubators
in Pakistan for the holy warriors who say they will die to defend Islam
and their hero, Osama bin Laden, from the infidels. In many of the 7,500
madrassas in Pakistan, inside a student body of 750,000 to a million, students
learn to recite and obey Islamic law, and to distrust and even hate the
United States.
"Jihad," shouted a little boy, from
a high window in a madrassa just steps from the Khwani Bazaar. He grinned
and waved as foreign journalists snapped his photograph, but, on the streets
below, older students had massed for demonstrations that would end in clouds
of tear gas and smoke from burning tires, as young men jumped through fire
to prove their faith and ferocity.
President Bush and diplomats from
the West have taken great pains to point out that the war on Mr. bin Laden
and the Taliban of Afghanistan is not a war on Islam, but in many madrassas
here in Pakistan ? especially those near the border with Afghanistan ?
militant Muslims lecture students that the United States is a nation of
Christians and Jews who are not after a single terrorist or government
but are bent on the worldwide annihilation of Islam.
The madrassas' sword is in the narrow
education they offer, and the devotion they engender from students from
the poorest classes who, without them, would have nowhere to go, or go
hungry.
At the Markaz Uloom Islamia madrassa
in Peshawar, Muhammad Sabir, 22, motioned to the eerily quiet compound,
devoid of students. Final exams are over, he said. The scholars, many of
them, have left to fight against the United States. "They have gone for
jihad," said Mr. Sabir, a student there. "It is our moral and religious
duty." He said the words automatically, woodenly, as if repeating his elder's
recitation of the Koran.
"There is no practical training
of terrorists here," said Asif Qureishi, an Islamic scholar and the son
of Maulana Mohd Yousaf Qureishi, who heads the Darul-Uloom Ashrafia madrassa
in Peshawar. There are no weapons, no knives or guns, no weapons training.
The madrassas hone only the mind, he said.
"We prepare them for the jihad,
mentally," said Mr. Qureishi, whose duties at the madrassa include the
call to prayers. In a small room at the madrassa, students nodded appreciatively
at his words. Some were no more than 10.
"The minds are fresh," he said.
In his tiny office, a bag of rice rests against a wall. Outside the door,
a student hefts the carcass of a slaughtered goat.
What the students hear, in compounds
that range from spartan to squalid, is a drumbeat of American injustice,
cruelty and closed-mindedness ? the United States is just that way, the
elders say.
"They send cruise missiles against
gravestones," said Al-Sheikh Rahat Gul, the stick-thin, 81-year-old maulana
who heads Markaz Uloom Islamia in Peshawar, a madrassa with about 250 students.
The Americans kill only innocents,
said the maulana, a large pair of thick-lensed, black-framed glassed sitting
crookedly on his head. "The Koran forbids the killing of females, children,
elders and cattle," he said. "That is war. That is not holy war." Sons
of Islam must answer that tyranny with holy war, he said.
He condemns the World Trade Center
attack but dismisses any connection to this part of the world. "The Jews
have done this," he said, calling the attacks a plot by Israel to draw
the world into war. "And the Hindus are just like them."
It is repeated madrassa by madrassa,
every few city blocks, the company line of the militants and the poorer
classes from which they come, spreading out from the student body to the
shops and foot traffic.
Maulana Gul proudly points to a
cartoon on the back of a pamphlet at his madrassa that shows Afghanistan
encircled by a chain, and the chain is secured by a padlock that is labeled
"United Nations." Inside the chain are weeping children. Hands reach from
all directions with offerings of food, money and grain, hands are grabbed
at the wrist by other hands labeled "U.S.A.," preventing that aid from
getting to the starving people.
In the madrassas, students ranging
in age from 7 or 8 to men over 20 are taught a strict interpretation of
the Koran, including the duty of all Muslims to rise up in jihad. There
are no televisions and some madrassas do not even allow transistor radios.
There are no magazines or newspapers except those deemed acceptable by
the elders. The outside world is closed to them, and many of the students
seem puzzled when asked if they mind that. Their teachers, most of them
respected elders, tell them what they need to know, the students said.
Almost all the leadership of the
Taliban, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, was educated in madrassas in Pakistan
? most of them in a single madrassa, Jamia Darul Uloom Haqqania in Akora
Khatak in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. The anti-American
protests that have filled the streets in Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta and
Karachi have been planned in madrassas ? their maulanas, the elders who
run the schools, are the spiritual hub of the protests.
In Quetta, after the United States
began its missile attacks on the Taliban, 300 Afghans who had attended
madrassas in Pakistan crossed the border to join the jihad. Every day,
said madrassa students, Pakistanis slip over the border to join them.
"The madrassas indulge in brainwashing
on a large scope, of the young children and those in their early teens,"
said Arasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan,
who stressed it is unfair to say that all madrassas are the same. Some
are more militant than others.
But along the border with Afghanistan,
the vast majority of madrassas have become an assembly line for the jihad.
Even the scholars themselves and their teachers say that this is so.
Almost all the students come from
poor families who cannot afford any other education in a country that spends
about 90 percent of its budget on debt service and the military and almost
nothing on public schools.
A large family, said Mr. Khattak,
often sends two or three sons to a madrassa because it cannot afford to
feed them. "There is no access to the regular education system," he said.
The madrassas, often supported by
donors from other Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, offer a narrow education
? many of them do not teach science, math, languages or any history beyond
that in the Koran ? but do offer students food and a place to sleep. In
madrassas, children from the hardest poverty in Pakistan and orphans from
wars in Afghanistan, get enough to eat.
Here, the difference between poverty
and wealth is apparent on a person's feet. If someone wears sandals made
of leather, they have at least some wealth. The poorest wear mass-produced
sandals made of plastic. At the doors to the madrassas here ? no one enters
any office or classroom wearing shoes ? rows of plastic sandals sit just
outside the doors.
There have been madrassas in Pakistan
for hundreds of years, austere stone and brick schools ? built around a
mosque ? where students spend as many as eight years being instructed in
the Koran. They learn by parroting their mullahs, who recite the Koran.
There are no questions, no discussion.
In the past quarter-century, said
experts on the madrassas, jihad has become more than a lesson to recite.
In the 1980's, students left these
madrassas to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan ? including
many Pakistanis, some of whom have an ethnic and tribal kinship to the
Afghans. In the 1990's students became foot soldiers and leaders in the
Taliban. Now, they form an army around Osama bin Laden.
In the hours after the attacks on
the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, students described how they ran through
the sprawling Jamia Darul Uloom Haqqania compound celebrating, stabbing
the fingers on one hand into the palm of the other, to simulate a plane
stabbing into a building.
The morning after the attacks, elders
at the madrassa, which translates to "The University of All Righteous Knowledge,"
summoned students to study hall. The elders explained what had happened.
"No, no, not Muslims," said Fazal Ghani, 22, an Afghan, as he passed on
his teachers' explanation of who had caused the deaths of thousands. "This
was Yehudi," the Jews. "trying to discredit Islam." He tried to express
his sympathy for the victims of the bombings, saying "Bad, bad," but he
could not stop smiling.
His teachers had explained that,
even though the Jews flew the planes into the towers, it was Allah's will.
Allah, the teachers said, put the idea in the minds of the Jews.
Allah, in his wisdom, knew that
the Muslims would perhaps be briefly discredited, the students said, but
that when the truth came out, it would ultimately destroy the Jews.
Radios are allowed at this madrassa,
and some of the students had held radios to their ears all night, listening
to news reports. But that was just noise, just electricity. The truth,
the only truth, came from the madrassa's teachers.
"The wrath of God," the teachers
had said.
But until recent violent demonstrations
in Pakistan ? planned in the madrassas and carried out, at least in part,
by students ? there was no government condemnation. Just two weeks ago,
the Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, was calling them "misunderstood
organizations," that were actually welfare systems to aid the poor. He
has since jailed several of the madrassas' leaders, after demonstrations
in Quetta and Karachi left businesses ablaze.
Maulana Khalid Banori, who heads
Darul-Uloom Sarhad in Peshawar, sees himself as a college superintendent.
Students at his madrassa study science, math and English, and can use credits
earned here to apply for graduate schools, or they can use their education
to qualify for civil service jobs. He said he wants his students to have
a well-rounded education, but one based in the teachings of Islam.
He hopes the violence will end,
that the terrorism will end. It will, he said, as soon the Americans stop
committing it.
