The
Truth about Madrassas
By Asad Siddiqi
Via Email
Since the revelations that three of the four
future British Muslim suicide bombers visited
Pakistan in the year preceding the July 7 attack,
the British press has been quick to follow the
US line on madrasas, with the Sunday Telegraph
helpfully translating the Arabic word madrasa
as terrorist “training school” (it
actually means merely “place of education”),
while the Daily Mirror confidently asserted over
a double-page spread that the three bombers had
all enrolled at Pakistani “Terror Schools.”
In actual fact, it is still uncertain whether
the three bombers visited any madrasas while they
were in Pakistan: madrasas only entered the debate
because the bombers told their families they were
going to Pakistan to pursue religious studies,
just as they told them they were going to a religious
conference when they set off to bomb London. According
to sources at the prime minister’s offices
in Downing Street there is in fact no evidence
that any madrasa was visited by any members of
the cell at any point on their journey. Still
less is there any proof that madrasas were responsible
for “brainwashing” the trio, as the
British press assumed after the bombings. Instead
there is considerable evidence to show that the
trio was radicalized in Yorkshire through the
Islamist literature and videos that were available
beneath the counter of their local Islamic bookshop.
And while it is now certain that the group made
contact with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, there is no
reason to assume that a madrasa acted as the conduit.
It is estimated that as many as 15 percent of
Pakistan’s madrasas preach violent jihad,
while a few have been said to provide covert military
training. Madrasa students took part in the Afghan
and Kashmir jihads, and have been repeatedly implicated
in acts of sectarian violence, especially against
the Shia minority in Karachi.
Producing cannon fodder for the Taliban and educating
local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as
producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda
terrorists who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated
attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East
Africa, the World Trade Center, and the London
Underground.
A number of recent studies have emphasized that
there is a fundamental distinction between ma-drasa
graduates—who tend to be pious villagers
from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing
little technical sophistication — and the
sort of middle-class, politically literate global
Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around
the world. Most of these turn out to have secular
and technical backgrounds. Neither bin Laden nor
any of the men who carried out the assaults on
America or Britain were trained in a madrasa or
was a qualified alim, or cleric.
By and large, however, madrasa students simply
do not have the technical expertise necessary
to carry out the kind of sophisticated attacks
we have recently seen led by al-Qaeda. Instead
the concerns of most madrasa graduates remain
more traditional: the correct fulfillment of rituals,
how to wash correctly before prayers, and the
proper length to grow a beard. All these matters
are part of the curriculum of studies in the madrasas.
The graduates are also interested in opposing
what they see as un-Islamic practices such as
worshiping at saints’ graves or attending
the laments called marsiyas.
Their focus, in other words, is not on opposing
non-Muslims or the West — the central concern
of the global jihadis — so much as fostering
what they see as proper Islamic behavior at home,
the personal law governing which is a central
subject of madrasa teachings. In contrast, few
al-Qaeda agents seem to have more than the most
perfunctory grasp of Islamic law or learning.
Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence
that bin Laden himself actually despises what
he sees as the nit-picking juridical approach
of the madrasa-educated ulema (clerics), regarding
his own brand of violent Islamism as a wholly
more appropriate answer to the problems of the
Muslim world.
Inside the Madrasas
By William Dalrymple
The New York Review of Books
December 1, 2005
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18514?email
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