Analysis: Counting Pakistan's madressahs

Mirza Khurram Shahzad

Published 17 minutes ago

Children reciting Quran at a seminary.—AP/File

FOLLOWING last month’s attack on Army Public School in Peshawar, the government is making renewed efforts to bring madressahs under some kind of state control. In a recent statement to the media, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had said that 90 per cent madressahs have no link to terrorism (leaving 10 per cent that potentially do). The process of regulating madressahs, as was the case earlier when previous governments attempted similar interventions, is far from simple.

For one, no one seems to have a clear idea of how many madressahs there are in the country, registered as well as unregistered. While the spokesperson for the interior ministry estimates 20,000 registered and 40,000 unregistered madressahs, the Ittehad-i-Tanzeemat-i-Madaris-i-Deenia (ITMD), the umbrella group representing five major sects in Pakistan, claims that the number of registered madressahs in the country is 26,000 and that of unregistered 4,000. The ITMD’s general secretary and spokesman, Maulana Mohammad Hanif Jalandhri, says that three million students are enrolled in madressahs affiliated with the organisation.

Also read: Madressah reform

As part of the National Action Plan against terrorism, the interior ministry has asked the ministry of religious affairs the number of total madressahs in the country and the latter is trying to calculate the figure. So far the list, on which two officials of the ministry are working, carries the figure of 16,757.

“It’s all in a mess,” comments a senior official of the religious affairs ministry when asked about the registration criteria. “Everyone has different numbers.” He compares the role of his ministry to that of a post office, “getting the figures from provinces and passing them on to the interior ministry”. The rest, he says, is the interior ministry’s job and he doesn’t know what that is.

“The madressahs are registered with the ministry of industries and department of evacuee property,” says the director general of the ministry of religious affairs, Manzoor Ahmed Khairi. He feels that despite the repeated claims by the government that the new policy will bring all seminaries under government check, doing so will not be easy.

The spokesperson for the interior ministry, Adil Sattar, says that they have asked the provinces for “suggestions regarding the audit of seminaries, for the identification of their sources of funding and the checking of their curriculum”. He says that the process will take “at least three to four months” and that while “there are clear instructions to start the process immediately”, there has not been any mention of the date by which it should be completed. He adds that the interior ministry “will form a national strategy and then ask the provinces to execute it”. However, till they receive input from the provinces they can’t say “what exactly that strategy will be”.

The government, in similar exercises in the past, has tried to regulate the seminaries but with little success.

In the early 2000s, the retired Gen Pervez Musharraf government issued an ordinance to set up the Madressah Education Board. The aim was to regulate all privately owned religious seminaries and turn them into model schools with uniform syllabus approved by the authorities.

Not a single madressah though accepted the board, and according to a senior official of the ministry of religious affairs, only three government-established seminaries are under its control. Afraid of a possible backlash, the government has not pushed seminaries to accept the board.

Another past attempt to deradicalise madressahs saw the government doling out millions of rupees in purchasing computers for them and recruiting teachers for subjects such as English, Mathematics, Pakistan Studies and Urdu. However, since the madressahs refused to accept the government board and the authorities dared not take any action against them, they could not be monitored. Jalandhri says that they have their own “independent boards and don’t need supervision”. Nevertheless, he says that they had “consultations with the government in 2004-05, and occasionally later, about the curriculum”.

Questioning the government’s ability to monitor the madressahs, Jalandhri says that “they are unable to monitor and check their own formal schools, how can they check us”.

Executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies Imtiaz Gul points out that education is the “state’s responsibility”. Across the world, he says, “there are guidelines for curriculums which do not cause social disharmony but here there are no such guidelines.”

The need, Gul says, is for a “comprehensive registration law, uniform standardised law on madressahs to bring them under one ambit and address the issue of security and terrorism”.

The resolve is there, he feels, “but whether they can translate this resolve into an action that is another question”.

Published in Dawn January 13th , 2015

http://www.dawn.com/news/1156667/analysis-counting-pakistans-madressahs

Imran and Reham: 2015's defining wedding shoot

Intimate and understated. Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan married television presenter Reham Khan at his residence in Bani Gali on January 8 in a simple, no frills ceremony.

Imran donned a sherwani made by a local tailor for the wedding, while the beaming bride donned an ivory Maheen Kardar Ali (of Karma) ensemble.

Below are just a few exclusive photographs of the 'Naya Couple', courtesy photographer Belal Khan of Belal Kh@n Photography.

Imran Khan chose to wear a simple cream sherwani. — Photo by Belal Khan

Reham Khan shares a meal with Madrassa children.— Photo by Belal Khan

Imran had decided against having a grand Valima ceremony and chose to distribute food to less privileged children— Photo by Belal Khan

Reham Khan with Mufti Saeed at his Madrassa.—Photo by Belal Khan

The newly wed at their photo shoot. — Photo by Belal Khan

Reham Khan's photo shoot after the wedding ceremony.— Photo by Belal Khan

The newly married couple..— Photo by Belal Khan

The new bride at her wedding ceremony.— Photo by Belal Khan

The couple pose with guests at the wedding.— Photo by Belal Khan

Photos by Belal Khan

http://www.dawn.com/news/1156543/imran-and-reham-2015s-defining-wedding-shoot

Selective action the wrong approach

Editorial

Updated about 12 hours ago

.—AFP/File

OF the 72 banned militant groups in Pakistan, many are of the religiously inspired variety — precisely the category that the National Action Plan focuses on. But, according to a report in this newspaper yesterday, the interior ministry is drafting a plan to focus on a very small sub-set of the banned groups.

The immediate question: why? The political and military leadership has, particularly after the Peshawar massacre, been clear that the era of differentiating between militant groups operating on Pakistani soil is over.

No more good Taliban/bad Taliban, no more good militant/bad militant, and no difference between those attacking state and society today and those who harbour designs to eventually do so.

Take a look: Govt to act against ‘violent banned outfits’ only

Even as the leadership made those statements, there were doubts whether they had the will to follow through on them. Now, it appears, the doubts were well founded and possibly true.

The report in this newspaper yesterday quoted officials in the interior ministry as having claimed that in the so-called first phase action would only be taken against groups that have taken up arms against the Pakistani state.

Consider the many reasons why a narrow focus on a sub-set of religiously inspired militant groups is a bad idea. To begin with, if each of those militant groups in that particular category does not represent a threat to the Pakistani state and society, why is it on the banned list in the first place?

Surely, when the classification was originally made, it was done because each of those groups was either directly implicated in violence or was advocating violence.

After the Peshawar massacre, with a national consensus against militancy and terrorism, what reason could there be to delay action against groups that embrace violence and operate on Pakistani soil?

Perhaps an argument could be made that operationally it is preferable for the law-enforcement apparatus to start at the top of the list, with the very worst offenders, and then methodically make its way down.

However, there is a danger in that approach, specifically that delaying action at this stage will translate into no action later. Given the very large number of militant organisations here, there will always be a reason to delay action against certain groups.

It is also the identity of the banned groups against which action may be delayed that is revealing. Anti-India and pro-Kashmir groups with long-standing links to the army-led security establishment may not have a reason to take up arms against the state, but they are still very much incubators of hate and extremism.

With vast networks of mosques, madressahs and welfare organisations, those groups have penetrated deep into society, from where they pump poisonous ideologies and hateful messages into the bloodstream of this country.

Consider also the reality that in the not too distant past, most of the leadership of the banned TTP and likeminded groups was not considered a serious threat to the Pakistani state. If Pakistan is to win the fight against militancy, all militant groups must be dismantled.

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2015

http://www.dawn.com/news/1156429/selective-action-the-wrong-approach