pakistan’s

From Religious Education to Sectarian Competition
My own research does not stress the link between education and employment. Instead I focus
on an equally crucial link between education and the formation of ideas, drawing attention to
the link between “hybrid” secular and religious enrollments and the formation of sectarian
ideas. 24 In public as well as non-elite private schools, government-sanctioned curricula designed
to prepare local students for government-sanctioned exams emphasize the “unifying” potential of
Islam: “We have faith in one God, one Prophet, and one [holy] book,” notes one Urdu-language
textbook, “so it’s binding on us that we should be one as a nation also. We are all Pakistanis now:
not Balochis…not Sindhis…not Pathans.” 25 Indeed, in keeping with the Islamic ideology of
Pakistan and constitutional language seeking to avoid any encouragement of sectarian prejudice
(Article 33), Pakistani public and non-elite private schools make no effort to acknowledge any
form of doctrinal difference.
Within most madaris, however, the prevailing tendency runs the other way. Students
are trained to recognize fine-grained doctrinal differences as matters of “proper belief.” In
fact the value of Sunni over Shia beliefs, Sunni Deobandi over Sunni Barelvi beliefs, and so
on is continually reinforced via munazaras (debates) and the extracurricular practice of radd
(doctrinal disputation).
These differences between “school” and “madrasah” curricula are striking. But their significance
for the cultivation of ideas lies in the degree to which Pakistan’s expanding lower-middle classes
engage in hybrid forms of education. My own research shows that the ot-cited World Bank
statistic indicating that less than 2% of all madrasah enrollment amounts to full-time residential
enrollment is broadly correct. 26 Yet, having said this, an additional 8% appear to call the mullah
from their local madrasah to teach their children at home, while a further 69% are engaged in parttime
study involving maktab- or madrasah-based enrollment during the morning or aternoon. 27
In fact, moving away from the World Bank’s conclusions, I found that a clear majority of every
demographic group in Pakistan favors some combination of religious and secular enrollment in
maktabs or madaris and schools. This is, of course, exactly the trend that entrepreneurial educators
like Bano’s enterprising mullah have sought to tap.
This trend of hybrid enrollment, however, serves as a powerful driver of ideas. In practice, most
students simply combine the ideas they encounter in school with those they encounter in their
maktab or madrasah, insisting with their school curriculum that Pakistan is an Islamic state in
which “there is only one Islam” and, then, moving over to the curriculum they encounter in their
maktab or madrasah, that that “one Islam” is the sectarian Islam associated with a particular
mullah. This is the sort of mindset that spurs a popular but competing sense of sectarian affiliation
in Pakistan. 28
24 Matthew Nelson, “Ilm and the Individual: Islamic Education and Religious Ideas in Pakistan,” in Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity
and Daily Life, ed. Robin Jeffrey and Ronojoy Sen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 161–80; and Nelson, “Dealing with Difference,”
591–618.
25 Quoted in Nelson, “Ilm and the Individual,” 165.
26 Ibid. Note that full-time enrollment, including nonresidential enrollment, is closer to 6%.
27 A “maktab” is a rudimentary mosque-based Quranic school.
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28 See Nelson, “Dealing with Difference.”
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