DENIZENS OF ALIEN WORLDS

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CHAPTER-5
MADRASSAS
The madrassas are associated with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan some of
whom were students of these institutions (see Rashid 2000). They have also been much in
the news for sectarian killings and supporting militancy in Kashmir, They are considered
the breeding ground of the Jihadi culture–a term used for Islamic militancy in the
English-language press of Pakistan (Singer 2001; Haqqani 2002; Ahmad 2000: 191-192).
There was not much writing on the madrassas before the events of Nine Eleven in
Pakistan. J.D. Kraan, writing for the Christian study Centre, had provided a brief
introduction (Kraan 1984) Later, A.H. Nayyar, an academic, had updated this
introduction arguing that sectarian violence was traceable to madrassa education (Nayyar
1998). Both had used only secondary sources. Later, the present writer wrote an
language-teaching in the madrassas (Rahman 2002). The book also contained a survey of
the opinions of madrassa students on Kashmir, the implementation of the Sharia, equal
rights for religious minorities and women, freedom of the media, democracy etc (Rahman
2002: Appendix 14). The seminal work on the ulema, and also the madrassas in which
they are trained, is by Qasim Zaman (2002). This is an excellent study of how the
traditional ulema can be differentiated from the Islamists who react to modernity by
attempting to go back to fundamentalist, and essentially political, interpretations of Islam.
The ulema or the Islamists in Pakistan have been writing, generally in Urdu, in
defence of the madrassas which the state sought to modernize and secularize. Two recent
books, a survey by the Institute of Policy Studies (patronized by the revivalist, Islamist,
Jamat-i-Islami) of the madrassas (IPS 2002) and a longer book by Saleem Mansur Khalid
(Khalid 2002), are useful because they contain much resent data. Otherwise the Pakistani
ulema’s work is polemical and tendentious. They feel themselves besieged increasingly
by Western (Singer 2001) and Pakistani secular critics (Haqqani 2002; Ahmad 2000:
191-192) and feel that they should defend their position from the inside rather than wait
for sympathetic outsiders to do it for them (as by Sikand 2001).
There is hardly any credible information on the unregistered madrassas.
However, those which are registered are controlled by their own central organizations or
boards. They determine the syllabi, collect a registration fees and an examination fees.