Madrassah reform is key to terror war

In recent weeks, some experts have challenged the conventional wisdom about the flagship of Islamic education in Pakistan - madrassahs, those schools where members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban once trained, and which have been called jihad factories, schools of hate, and breeding grounds for terror.

The revised assessments cite new information like the recent World Bank report, which offers compelling statistical proof that since the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani madrassahs have been reported to account for anywhere from 1 to 33 percent of all school enrollments.

Some commentaries in leading publications have made similar arguments about the influence of these schools, suggesting they don't produce terrorists capable of attacking the West.

To be sure, these scholars are correct in pointing out that official statistics are sparse, reports clash, and Islamic education is not monolithic.

But a total denial of the madrassah problem is equally misguided. The madrassah effect is real and visible.

For good reason, Muslim schools in many countries have come to represent much that is wrong with Islam today. Such schools, in Pakistan for example, have produced terrorists in the past; many across the Muslim world currently promote religious intolerance and encourage sectarian violence; and there is ample reason to fear that, in the long run, the fundamentalism emanating from madrassahs in Pakistan and similar Islamic schools elsewhere will eventually threaten Western interests in the region.

The United States, of all nations, cannot shirk responsibility for the madrassah quandary. Following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-majority Gulf nations bankrolled militant madrassahs in Pakistan to counteract the growing presence of Shiite fundamentalism in the region. And later that year, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the Pakistani government - funded primarily by the US and Saudi Arabia - to erect a number of radical madrassahs along the Afghan border to repel the "godless communists."

These schools housed and educated millions of displaced refugees, while supplying the Afghan resistance with a steady stream of mujahideen - many of whom would later become leaders in the Taliban.

But US accountability does not end there: From 1986 to 1992, the University of Nebraska (with funding from the US Agency for International Development) produced a series of primary school textbooks that indoctrinated young Muslims in the importance of jihad.

Among the fourth-grade math lessons was this: "The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second.... If a Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian's head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead."

Madrassahs in Pakistan totaled a few hundred in 1947; by the end of the Afghan War in 1989, there were several thousand.

It may be true that most madrassahs do not mass-produce international terrorists intent on attacking the US. But closer examination of countries like Pakistan reveals that the madrassah phenomenon has been problematic in other ways.

Recent research funded by the United States Institute of Peace found a strong correlation between madrassah proliferation and sectarian violence in certain areas of Pakistan - particularly in Ahmedpur East, a district in the southern part of the province of Punjab.

Page: 1 | 2