Madrassah reform is key to terror war

Most madrassahs in Ahmedpur are operated by Deobandi Muslims, a Sunni sect that holds extremely intolerant views of other Muslims. In areas of Ahmedpur where Deobandi and Shiite madrassahs flourish, sectarian violence runs especially high.

The research also found that Deobandi madrassahs appear to radicalize surrounding non-Deobandi madrassahs: only in areas with a heavy Deobandi presence do non-Deobandi madrassahs encourage sectarian violence.

Though the problem in Ahmedpur is most immediately a local one, this trend has already spread to other regions of the globe. Just last month, police in Indonesia found caches of weapons in an Islamic school outside Ambon City on the Maluku Islands, where sectarian clashes between Muslims and Christians killed 5,000 people between 1999 and 2002.

Islamic schools commit no actual crime by teaching only the Koran and Islamic law. After all, every religion has its version of faith-based schooling.

But it is easy to see how the madrassah effect can have international reach - even aside from the outdated school curricula offered by almost all madrassahs, which in itself should underline concerns that these schools are at the very least graduating thousands of students unemployable outside the religious sector and hard-pressed to function in a globalized economy.

Since joining the US-led war on terror, the Pakistani government has repeatedly vowed to stamp out religious intolerance and Islamist extremism by eradicating hate literature and incorporating the national academic curriculum into the Islamic schools.

But these efforts have been met with resistance all around. Madrassah administrators insist that the function of Islamic schools is to train future clerics, not modern professionals. Some policymakers assert that the national curriculum is no more tolerant or modern than what is already taught by the madrassahs. Skeptics have also questioned President Musharraf's commitment to madrassah reform, suggesting he has little incentive to alienate a seemingly large part of his political base.

It is plain wrong to suggest that failing education systems in Muslim countries do not constitute a long-term threat to the West, or that the West does not have an obligation to help fix them.

Madrassahs are not a terrorism problem, per se. And as part of a vital tradition in Islam, many of them deserve our respect. But without reform, madrassahs at best will continue to produce generations of graduates ill-suited to function in modern society and intolerant of other religious sects. At worst, those graduates will become international terrorists.

Regardless, the consequences are most certainly severe - for the Muslim world especially, but for the global community as well.

US financial commitment to Pakistan's education-reform efforts indicates how important these initiatives are to American interests. They should be applauded as necessary efforts in combating Islamic extremism, the real focus of the war on terror.

• Abigail Cutler is a reporter/researcher for The Atlantic Monthly. Saleem Ali teaches at the University of Vermont and is a research scholar at Brown University. He is the author of a forthcoming US Institute of Peace study on Pakistan's madrassahs.

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