Author: Husain Haqqani
Publication: Foreign Policy
Date: November-December 2002
URL: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_novdec_2002/Islam.html
For centuries, young men have gathered
at Islamic seminaries to escape Western influences and quietly study Islamic
texts that have been handed down unchanged through the ages. But over the
last two decades, revolution, Great Power politics, and poverty have combined
to give the fundamentalist teachings at some of these Madrasas a violent
twist. And now, in one of globalization's deadlier ironies, these "universities
of jihad" are spreading their medieval theology worldwide.
As a 9-year-old boy, I knelt on
the bare floor of the neighborhood madrasa (religious school) in Karachi,
Pakistan, repeating the Koranic 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, the Koran teacher,
made each of the 13 boys in our class memorize the verse in its original
Arabic. Some of us also memorized 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 memorizer) because he could
recite all 114 chapters and 6,346 verses of the Koran.
Most students in Gul- Mohamed's
class joined the madrasa to learn basic Islamic teachings and to be able
to read the Koran. Only a handful of people in Pakistan spoke Arabic, but
everyone wanted to learn to read the holy book. I completed my first reading
of the Koran by age seven. I was enrolled part time at the madrasa to learn
to read the Koran better and to understand the basic teachings of Islam.
Gul-Mohamed carried a cane, as all
madrasa 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
Koran 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 madrasa 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,
characterized life in the West. Gul-Mohamed's solution was isolation. "The
umma should keep away from the West and its ways."
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 madrasa class dropped out after learning
the essential rituals. I remained a part-time student for almost six years
but eventually 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 September 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 Taliban leaders, who had ruled
Afghanistan since the mid-1990s, were the products of Madrasas in Pakistan,
and their role as protectors of al Qaeda terrorists has generated keen
interest in their alma maters. A few weeks after September 11, I visited
Darul Uloom Haqqania (Center of Righteous Knowledge), situated on the main
highway between Islamabad and Peshawar, in the small town of Akora Khattak.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been a student at Haqqania, and the madrasa,
with 2,500 students aged 5 to 21 from all over the world, has been called
"the University of Jihad." The texture of life in the madrasa still has
elements that represent a continuum not over decades but over centuries.
But at Haqqania, I saw that the world of the madrasa 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, 9- year-old
Mohammed Tahir rocked back and forth and recited the same verse of the
Koran 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 September 11 because
his teachers have told him that the attacks were a conspiracy by Jews against
the Taliban. 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 Madrasas during the 1980s and 1990s owes much to geopolitics,
sectarian struggles, and technology, but the schools' influence and staying
power derive from deep-rooted socioeconomic conditions that have so far
proved resistant to change. Now, with the prospect of Madrasas 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, Madrasas
are at the center of a civil war of ideas in the Islamic world. Westernized
and usually affluent Muslims lack an interest in religious matters, but
religious scholars, marginalized by modernization, seek to assert their
own relevance by insisting on orthodoxy. A regular education costs money
and is often inaccessible to the poor, but Madrasas are generally free.
Poor students attending Madrasas find it easy to believe that the West,
loyal to uncaring and aloof leaders, is responsible for their misery and
that Islam as practiced in its earliest form can deliver them.
The madrasa Boom
Madrasas have been around since
the 11th century, when the Seljuk Vizier Nizam ul-Mulk Hassan bin Ali Tusi
founded a seminary 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 Koran, 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 of believers to follow whomever inspired them in
religious matters. But Sunni Muslim rulers legitimated their rule through
religion, depending primarily on an injunction in the Koran 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 madrasa was intended to create a
class of ulema, muftis, and qazis (judges) who would administer the Muslim
empire, legitimize 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 madrasa (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 Madrasas adopted a core curriculum that
divided knowledge between "revealed sciences" and "rational sciences."
The revealed sciences included study of the Koran, hadith, Koranic commentary,
and Islamic jurisprudence. The rational sciences included Arabic language
and grammar to help understand the Koran, 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, modernization marginalized Madrasas.
Their graduates were no longer employable as judges or administrators as
the Islamic legal system gave way to Western jurisprudence. Muslim societies
became polarized between madrasa-educated mullahs and the economically
prosperous, Western-educated individuals attending modern schools and colleges.
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 al-Ikhwan 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 Westernized
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. Madrasas
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 Madrasas. Iran's mullahs had managed to overthrow
the shah and take power, undermining the idea that religious education
was useless in worldly matters. Although Iranians belong to the minority
Shiite sect of Islam, and their Madrasas have always had a more political
character than Sunni seminaries, the image of men in turbans and robes
running a country provided a powerful demonstration effect and politicized
Madrasas everywhere.
Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary
regime promised to export its revolutionary Shiite ideas to other Muslim
states. Khomeini invited teachers and students from Madrasas in other countries
to Tehran for conferences and parades, 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 own version of Sunni fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia and other
gulf countries began to pour money into Sunni Madrasas 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 madrasa 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, Gen. Mohammed
Zia ul-Haq, decided to establish Madrasas 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. Madrasas would provide an education of sorts,
but they would also serve as a center of indoctrination and motivation.
General Zia's model spread throughout
the Muslim world. Maulana Samiul Haq, headmaster of the Haqqania madrasa,
is a firebrand orator who led anti-U.S. demonstrations soon after the beginning
of the war in Afghanistan. When I asked if he thought it appropriate to
involve his 5- and 6-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 Madrasas 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 madrasa to another. On one of the walls of the madrasa of my youth,
someone had written the hadith "Seek knowledge even if it takes you as
far as China." Across the road from the madrasa 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 Madrasas alongside their mosques, ostensibly
to teach religion to their children. Islam requires Muslims to set aside
2.5 percent of their annual savings as zakat (charity), and religious education
is one area on which zakat can be spent. Madrasas 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.
Madrasas have proliferated with
zakat and financial assistance from the gulf states. (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 Madrasas.
Pakistan had 244 Madrasas in 1956. By the end of last year, the number
had risen to 10,000. As many as 1 million students study in Madrasas in
Pakistan, compared with primary-school enrollment of 1.9 million. Most
Muslim countries allocate insignificant portions of their budgets for education,
leaving large segments of their growing populations without schooling.
Madrasas fill that gap, especially for the poor. The poorest countries,
such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Yemen, and Indonesia, boast the
largest madrasa enrollment.
Classes at Haqqania are free, as
are meals, which are quite basic. Tahir, the seventh of nine children,
likes being at the madrasa 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 memorizing texts, squatting in front of a teacher who memorized
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
can often be brutal. One madrasa in Pakistan has resorted to the practice
of chaining students to pillars until they memorize the day's lesson. But
compared with life in a squalid refugee camp, the harshness of the madrasa
probably is a blessing. Tahir's day begins with the predawn 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 madrasa 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 Madrasas around the world, and twice that number attend maktabs
or kuttabs (small Koranic schools attached to village mosques). An overwhelming
majority of these Madrasas 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
madrasa is a relatively new phenomenon, the product of mistakes committed
in fighting communism in Afghanistan. But even the quietist madrasa teaches
a rejection of modernity while emphasizing conformity and a medieval 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 Madrasas 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, Madrasas
can survive without assistance from oil-producing states.
Legitimizing secular power structures
through democracy might reduce the political influence of Madrasas. But
that influence is unlikely to wane dramatically as long as Madrasas 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 madrasa reform through financial aid. The
proposed recipe for reform is to add contemporary subjects alongside the
traditional religious sciences in madrasa curriculum. But Madrasas will
probably survive these reform efforts, just as they survived the introduction
of Western education during colonial rule. Can learning science and math,
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."
(Husain Haqqani is a Pakistani columnist
and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.)
