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MADRASSA REFORMS: BREAKING THE CYCLE
Moeed Yusuf,
Attempted reforms have been met with resistance from madressah authorities who contested the government’s efforts to increase oversight and control over the sector | Fahim Siddiqui/White Star
This week, the world celebrated International Youth Day. For Pakistan, this year’s theme of “transforming education” could not be more pertinent. As the country continues to rank abysmally on virtually every education indicator, the theme begs a closer look at past and present attempts at reform.
One important but highly contentious aspect of the education debate in Pakistan is the quest to reform the madressah education sector. In May, the PTI government and the Ittehad-i-Tanzeemat-i-Madaris Pakistan (ITMP) — a federation of the main madressah oversight bodies in the country — reached an agreement to bring the deeni madaris into the fold of mainstream education.
Unfortunately, for those of us who have followed the education debate over the years, such pledges have become cliched. Over the past four decades, virtually every government has attempted to move in this direction. Yet, none ended up with much to show for their efforts
If the PTI government is to avoid the fate of its predecessors, it will have to learn the right lessons from previous failures. Chief among them is to avoid approaching the issue as a national security imperative, and instead direct focus to improving education outcomes.
Education is a critical element in a state and society’s responsibility towards ensuring the youth’s healthy transition to adulthood. Pakistan’s 2017 Human Development Report on youth summarises this journey as a combination of three ‘Es’: education, employment and engagement. An educational experience that allows youth to develop the skillsets necessary to acquire a respectable livelihood and empowers them to engage productively within the broader society enables a country to transform its youth bulge into a dividend. The opposite — an environment that leaves large segments of youth marginalised and alienated from mainstream economic, political and social activity — presents a ticking time bomb; it has led youth around the world to seek agency by supporting or participating in violence.
The question of how to enact madressah reforms has continued to plague governments particularly since seminaries were linked in the popular consciousness to rising religious extremism. Ironically, that national security focus may well be the reason all attempts have failed so far...
For it to be sustainable, any attempt at reforming education must therefore target the student’s wellbeing. The end goal: achieving the three ‘Es’.
This is where previous efforts at madressah reform in Pakistan have faltered.
The Madressah Sector
Pakistan inherited around 250 madressahs at the time of independence. While estimates vary, and accurate numbers are difficult to assess, today around 32,000 madressahs cater to between 2.5 to 3.5 million students. The sector employees nearly 75,000 teachers. A large proportion of the madressahs are unregistered.
Majority of the madressahs are loosely run by one of five umbrella network associations, the Wafaqs: Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Arabia (Deobandi); Tanzeem-ul-Madaris (Barelvi); Rabita-ul-Madaris Al-Islamia (Jama’at-i-Islami); Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Salfia (Ahl-i-Hadith); and Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Shia (Shia). Each Wafaq represents its own denomination (maslak). The ITMP is a supra-body where the five Wafaqs notionally converge. In practice, individual madressahs have extreme autonomy. The Wafaqs primarily determine syllabi, administer exams and award degrees.
The Misplaced National Security Approach
For decades, the madressah problem has been viewed through a national security lens. Concern that Pakistan’s post-9/11 militancy problem stems, in part, from madressahs has misplaced the sector’s reform under the national security umbrella. Believing that more formal governance and oversight will break links to extremism, reforms have aimed to attain greater control of the sector. Well-rehearsed fixes involving madressah registration, oversight of finances and revision of curricula have been cornerstones of past attempts at reform. Even though these efforts were presented as means of ensuring holistic education in a more conducive environment for students, these were ancillary concerns that would benefit from the downstream effects of attempts to curb the madressah sector’s extremist links.
,
Viewing madressah reform through a national security lens is not devoid of logic. In 1980, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Pakistani state, allied with the US, encouraged these traditional centres of free religious instruction to give a fillip to its support of the ‘jihad’ next door. The effort also coincided with General Ziaul Haq’s ‘Islamisation’ agenda under which he diverted funds to select madressah networks. The state’s use of Islamist militants for proxy wars through the 1980s and the 1990s allowed both sanctioned and unsanctioned actors a relatively safe space to expand and blossom.
That a minority of madressahs got embedded in the militant milieu during this period was only natural. While the first signs of an internal backlash were evident in the 1990s — when links between growing sectarian hatred and the strictly sect-based teachings of madressahs emerged — it wasn’t until 9/11 that this sector was deemed to be an immediate national security problem. As the US-led ‘War on Terror’ commenced, hundreds of Western scholars took to unpacking the madressah problem purely from a counterterrorism perspective — going far enough to declare Pakistani madressahs as “incubators of violent extremism.” The Musharraf government, also fixated on terrorism post-9/11, approached the issue similarly.
Couched in the language of education reform, the security lens became even more explicit as time went by. Madressah reform was included in the National Action Plan drafted in the aftermath of the Army Public School terrorist attack in 2014 and the 2018 National Internal Security Policy (NISP). Continued international pressure on Pakistan to ‘do more’ on the counterterrorism front, including curbing elicit financial flows to satisfy the Financial Action Task Force, has further entrenched the madressah-extremism link in the popular discourse given that many prominent madressahs depend on undocumented donations from local and foreign sources.
Justified as it may have seemed, given the post-9/11 context, the national security approach was too fixated on the immediate terrorism threat to develop any long-term reform agenda with a focus on student wellbeing. To the contrary, it stigmatised the entire sector even though only a small minority was involved in promoting militancy. This caused widespread resentment among madressah leaders and students. Besides, the reforms never took off.
Each attempted reform was met with resistance from madressah authorities who contested the government’s efforts to register them and increase oversight and control. Lacking cooperation, the state was forced to resort to law-enforcement operations to target extremists linked to the madressahs. While it did score successes in identifying and neutralising extremist institutions and actors, these actions also caused tensions with the madressah authorities who have repeatedly criticised the state for dealing with them as a national security threat rather than educators of some of the poorest children in the country.
The Agosh Al-Khidmat Centre in Peshawar | Abdul Majeed Goraya/White Star
While this critique has merit, especially from the perspective of the millions of law-abiding madressah students, the fact is that the prominent, and thus powerful, madressahs have a strong interest in maintaining autonomy over their management and undocumented financial flows. The Wafaqs derive their power from their monopoly as umbrella organisations of madressahs of their specific maslak. They are solely responsible for administering examinations and awarding degrees; they generate a handsome revenue stream from the madressahs while lobbying the government on their behalf. These madressah-sector leaders fear that the state will use its reform agenda to gradually increase its control over the sector. Thus, they have typically resisted greater government oversight.
The national security approach was too fixated on the immediate terrorism threat to develop any long-term reform agenda with a focus on student wellbeing. To the contrary, it stigmatised the entire sector ...
The state’s national security approach has made it easier for these leaders to stand their ground. Since the state’s narrative about the madressah-extremism link was often indistinguishable from that of the international community, it left itself open to instant criticism for toeing a Western agenda. It also did not help matters by tasking the Ministries of Religious Affairs and Interior and provincial Industries departments to deal with the madressahs on a regular basis. None of these agencies have any experience in or sensitivity to the requirements of education reform, a fact that madressah authorities regularly point to.
As a result, the sector has been beset with extreme mistrust, with the madressah authorities adopting a passive-aggressive attitude in questioning the state’s intentions in seeking reform. Broader reforms centred on student empowerment remain elusive.
Adopting the Education Reform Lens
A reform approach focused on education — and specifically the welfare of students — must have a fundamentally different starting point than a national security perspective. The framing of the problem should be the same as for mainstream education institutions: poor educational outcomes. The caustic narrative that has problematised the madressahs in popular discourse should be disaggregated, with the national security approach reserved for the minority within the sector that is linked to militancy. All other madressah students ought to be imagined as victims of the failure of the madressah authorities and state alike to prepare them to become well-educated, employable, and engaged members of a modern society. This mindset would automatically focus the state’s reform agenda on turning these three ‘Es’ in the students’ favour.
The situation of the madressah sector is truly alarming in this regard.
Madressahs fail miserably in providing quality education. Despite numerous attempts by the state over the years to modernise and expand their curriculum, the majority of madressahs continue to teach a purely religious curriculum. Those that have included mainstream subjects often use obsolete material, sometimes reflecting the knowledge and orientation from a millennium ago. Madressah students are therefore left with little ability to comprehend and analyse contemporary realities in a balanced manner. Many develop a rejectionist approach and struggle to have constructive engagement with out-group peers and other segments of society.
The mode of instruction used in madressahs makes matters worse. Like public schools, madressahs rely on rote memorisation and shun critical thinking. However, in this case, teachers tend to have an exaggerated role in shaping the minds of their pupils. Since madressahs offer free education and room and board, their students are often severed from their families at a very young age. The madressah head embodies the surrogate father figure and, in the absence of the family, commands unquestioned loyalty. Virtually never trained in pedagogy, they not only stick to a purist approach — inculcating beliefs strictly based on their interpretations of religious texts — but force a rejectionist view of the maslaks/sects they disagree with. When madressahs teach their students to argue and debate — munazara — it is meant to equip the pupils to defend the particular maslak’s biases rather than question them.
Next, the nature of madressah education all but assures lack of adequate employability. The government only partially recognises madressah degrees. Only the highest level of the madressah curriculum, the Shahadat-ul-Almiya, is considered worthy of equivalence to a post-graduate degree, but it can, for the most part, only be used for further studies or jobs in the religious services sector. Even beyond the degree equivalence issue, employers are naturally averse to hiring youth with little background in modern education. Madressah students therefore find themselves firewalled in the job market while private schools give students access to powerful and wealthy social networks. Madressah graduates inevitably suffer from an ‘expectation-reality disconnect’: having spent roughly the same amount of time acquiring education as their peers in mainstream schools, they too expect a bright future. And yet, they face structurally ordained discrimination which leaves them frustrated when they look for respectable livelihoods.
Perhaps most disturbing among the three ‘Es’ however is the failure of the madressahs to empower their pupils to engage positively with the society around them. While students are able to form strong in-group bonds, their social networks tend to be limited to individuals with similar reference points; most often these are peers educated in madressahs of the same maslak. Lacking broader exposure, madressah students are often mistrusting and disparaging of other sects and unable to relate to out-group members of society positively.
Add to this the socio-economic stratification of the education system as a whole that inevitably feeds into the tendency to “otherise” out-group peers. Class consciousness has become so acute that youth from different socio-economic strata have virtually no opportunities for meaningful interaction. Lacking any opportunity to gain a genuine appreciation for the lives and backgrounds of madressah students, elite views are informed almost wholly by the national security discourse on madressahs. Elite children consider themselves superior to their madressah counterparts, stereotyping them as backward and viewing the sector as a security risk. Madressah students, on their part, hold the elite responsible for their deprivation and discrimination in society and for espousing Western values that they see as alien, if not antithetical, to their beliefs.
Incidentally, this failure of the state and madressah authorities to enable students to successfully transition to adulthood increases their susceptibility to supporting or perpetrating violence — even when they are educated at the madressahs that have no agenda to support the militant milieu. The absence of a level playing field accentuates frustration and resentment among those left out. In addition, intolerance of diversity, purist belief systems deeply embedded in the curriculum and teaching methods, and absence of positive out-group peer interactions reinforce an exclusionary mindset, a sense of injustice, marginalisation, mutual alienation and distrust in state institutions. These feelings are all known to be common drivers of youth involvement in violence.
Cond/
Moeed Yusuf,
Attempted reforms have been met with resistance from madressah authorities who contested the government’s efforts to increase oversight and control over the sector | Fahim Siddiqui/White Star
This week, the world celebrated International Youth Day. For Pakistan, this year’s theme of “transforming education” could not be more pertinent. As the country continues to rank abysmally on virtually every education indicator, the theme begs a closer look at past and present attempts at reform.
One important but highly contentious aspect of the education debate in Pakistan is the quest to reform the madressah education sector. In May, the PTI government and the Ittehad-i-Tanzeemat-i-Madaris Pakistan (ITMP) — a federation of the main madressah oversight bodies in the country — reached an agreement to bring the deeni madaris into the fold of mainstream education.
Unfortunately, for those of us who have followed the education debate over the years, such pledges have become cliched. Over the past four decades, virtually every government has attempted to move in this direction. Yet, none ended up with much to show for their efforts
If the PTI government is to avoid the fate of its predecessors, it will have to learn the right lessons from previous failures. Chief among them is to avoid approaching the issue as a national security imperative, and instead direct focus to improving education outcomes.
Education is a critical element in a state and society’s responsibility towards ensuring the youth’s healthy transition to adulthood. Pakistan’s 2017 Human Development Report on youth summarises this journey as a combination of three ‘Es’: education, employment and engagement. An educational experience that allows youth to develop the skillsets necessary to acquire a respectable livelihood and empowers them to engage productively within the broader society enables a country to transform its youth bulge into a dividend. The opposite — an environment that leaves large segments of youth marginalised and alienated from mainstream economic, political and social activity — presents a ticking time bomb; it has led youth around the world to seek agency by supporting or participating in violence.
The question of how to enact madressah reforms has continued to plague governments particularly since seminaries were linked in the popular consciousness to rising religious extremism. Ironically, that national security focus may well be the reason all attempts have failed so far...
For it to be sustainable, any attempt at reforming education must therefore target the student’s wellbeing. The end goal: achieving the three ‘Es’.
This is where previous efforts at madressah reform in Pakistan have faltered.
The Madressah Sector
Pakistan inherited around 250 madressahs at the time of independence. While estimates vary, and accurate numbers are difficult to assess, today around 32,000 madressahs cater to between 2.5 to 3.5 million students. The sector employees nearly 75,000 teachers. A large proportion of the madressahs are unregistered.
Majority of the madressahs are loosely run by one of five umbrella network associations, the Wafaqs: Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Arabia (Deobandi); Tanzeem-ul-Madaris (Barelvi); Rabita-ul-Madaris Al-Islamia (Jama’at-i-Islami); Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Salfia (Ahl-i-Hadith); and Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Shia (Shia). Each Wafaq represents its own denomination (maslak). The ITMP is a supra-body where the five Wafaqs notionally converge. In practice, individual madressahs have extreme autonomy. The Wafaqs primarily determine syllabi, administer exams and award degrees.
The Misplaced National Security Approach
For decades, the madressah problem has been viewed through a national security lens. Concern that Pakistan’s post-9/11 militancy problem stems, in part, from madressahs has misplaced the sector’s reform under the national security umbrella. Believing that more formal governance and oversight will break links to extremism, reforms have aimed to attain greater control of the sector. Well-rehearsed fixes involving madressah registration, oversight of finances and revision of curricula have been cornerstones of past attempts at reform. Even though these efforts were presented as means of ensuring holistic education in a more conducive environment for students, these were ancillary concerns that would benefit from the downstream effects of attempts to curb the madressah sector’s extremist links.
,
Viewing madressah reform through a national security lens is not devoid of logic. In 1980, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Pakistani state, allied with the US, encouraged these traditional centres of free religious instruction to give a fillip to its support of the ‘jihad’ next door. The effort also coincided with General Ziaul Haq’s ‘Islamisation’ agenda under which he diverted funds to select madressah networks. The state’s use of Islamist militants for proxy wars through the 1980s and the 1990s allowed both sanctioned and unsanctioned actors a relatively safe space to expand and blossom.
That a minority of madressahs got embedded in the militant milieu during this period was only natural. While the first signs of an internal backlash were evident in the 1990s — when links between growing sectarian hatred and the strictly sect-based teachings of madressahs emerged — it wasn’t until 9/11 that this sector was deemed to be an immediate national security problem. As the US-led ‘War on Terror’ commenced, hundreds of Western scholars took to unpacking the madressah problem purely from a counterterrorism perspective — going far enough to declare Pakistani madressahs as “incubators of violent extremism.” The Musharraf government, also fixated on terrorism post-9/11, approached the issue similarly.
Couched in the language of education reform, the security lens became even more explicit as time went by. Madressah reform was included in the National Action Plan drafted in the aftermath of the Army Public School terrorist attack in 2014 and the 2018 National Internal Security Policy (NISP). Continued international pressure on Pakistan to ‘do more’ on the counterterrorism front, including curbing elicit financial flows to satisfy the Financial Action Task Force, has further entrenched the madressah-extremism link in the popular discourse given that many prominent madressahs depend on undocumented donations from local and foreign sources.
Justified as it may have seemed, given the post-9/11 context, the national security approach was too fixated on the immediate terrorism threat to develop any long-term reform agenda with a focus on student wellbeing. To the contrary, it stigmatised the entire sector even though only a small minority was involved in promoting militancy. This caused widespread resentment among madressah leaders and students. Besides, the reforms never took off.
Each attempted reform was met with resistance from madressah authorities who contested the government’s efforts to register them and increase oversight and control. Lacking cooperation, the state was forced to resort to law-enforcement operations to target extremists linked to the madressahs. While it did score successes in identifying and neutralising extremist institutions and actors, these actions also caused tensions with the madressah authorities who have repeatedly criticised the state for dealing with them as a national security threat rather than educators of some of the poorest children in the country.
The Agosh Al-Khidmat Centre in Peshawar | Abdul Majeed Goraya/White Star
While this critique has merit, especially from the perspective of the millions of law-abiding madressah students, the fact is that the prominent, and thus powerful, madressahs have a strong interest in maintaining autonomy over their management and undocumented financial flows. The Wafaqs derive their power from their monopoly as umbrella organisations of madressahs of their specific maslak. They are solely responsible for administering examinations and awarding degrees; they generate a handsome revenue stream from the madressahs while lobbying the government on their behalf. These madressah-sector leaders fear that the state will use its reform agenda to gradually increase its control over the sector. Thus, they have typically resisted greater government oversight.
The national security approach was too fixated on the immediate terrorism threat to develop any long-term reform agenda with a focus on student wellbeing. To the contrary, it stigmatised the entire sector ...
The state’s national security approach has made it easier for these leaders to stand their ground. Since the state’s narrative about the madressah-extremism link was often indistinguishable from that of the international community, it left itself open to instant criticism for toeing a Western agenda. It also did not help matters by tasking the Ministries of Religious Affairs and Interior and provincial Industries departments to deal with the madressahs on a regular basis. None of these agencies have any experience in or sensitivity to the requirements of education reform, a fact that madressah authorities regularly point to.
As a result, the sector has been beset with extreme mistrust, with the madressah authorities adopting a passive-aggressive attitude in questioning the state’s intentions in seeking reform. Broader reforms centred on student empowerment remain elusive.
Adopting the Education Reform Lens
A reform approach focused on education — and specifically the welfare of students — must have a fundamentally different starting point than a national security perspective. The framing of the problem should be the same as for mainstream education institutions: poor educational outcomes. The caustic narrative that has problematised the madressahs in popular discourse should be disaggregated, with the national security approach reserved for the minority within the sector that is linked to militancy. All other madressah students ought to be imagined as victims of the failure of the madressah authorities and state alike to prepare them to become well-educated, employable, and engaged members of a modern society. This mindset would automatically focus the state’s reform agenda on turning these three ‘Es’ in the students’ favour.
The situation of the madressah sector is truly alarming in this regard.
Madressahs fail miserably in providing quality education. Despite numerous attempts by the state over the years to modernise and expand their curriculum, the majority of madressahs continue to teach a purely religious curriculum. Those that have included mainstream subjects often use obsolete material, sometimes reflecting the knowledge and orientation from a millennium ago. Madressah students are therefore left with little ability to comprehend and analyse contemporary realities in a balanced manner. Many develop a rejectionist approach and struggle to have constructive engagement with out-group peers and other segments of society.
The mode of instruction used in madressahs makes matters worse. Like public schools, madressahs rely on rote memorisation and shun critical thinking. However, in this case, teachers tend to have an exaggerated role in shaping the minds of their pupils. Since madressahs offer free education and room and board, their students are often severed from their families at a very young age. The madressah head embodies the surrogate father figure and, in the absence of the family, commands unquestioned loyalty. Virtually never trained in pedagogy, they not only stick to a purist approach — inculcating beliefs strictly based on their interpretations of religious texts — but force a rejectionist view of the maslaks/sects they disagree with. When madressahs teach their students to argue and debate — munazara — it is meant to equip the pupils to defend the particular maslak’s biases rather than question them.
Next, the nature of madressah education all but assures lack of adequate employability. The government only partially recognises madressah degrees. Only the highest level of the madressah curriculum, the Shahadat-ul-Almiya, is considered worthy of equivalence to a post-graduate degree, but it can, for the most part, only be used for further studies or jobs in the religious services sector. Even beyond the degree equivalence issue, employers are naturally averse to hiring youth with little background in modern education. Madressah students therefore find themselves firewalled in the job market while private schools give students access to powerful and wealthy social networks. Madressah graduates inevitably suffer from an ‘expectation-reality disconnect’: having spent roughly the same amount of time acquiring education as their peers in mainstream schools, they too expect a bright future. And yet, they face structurally ordained discrimination which leaves them frustrated when they look for respectable livelihoods.
Perhaps most disturbing among the three ‘Es’ however is the failure of the madressahs to empower their pupils to engage positively with the society around them. While students are able to form strong in-group bonds, their social networks tend to be limited to individuals with similar reference points; most often these are peers educated in madressahs of the same maslak. Lacking broader exposure, madressah students are often mistrusting and disparaging of other sects and unable to relate to out-group members of society positively.
Add to this the socio-economic stratification of the education system as a whole that inevitably feeds into the tendency to “otherise” out-group peers. Class consciousness has become so acute that youth from different socio-economic strata have virtually no opportunities for meaningful interaction. Lacking any opportunity to gain a genuine appreciation for the lives and backgrounds of madressah students, elite views are informed almost wholly by the national security discourse on madressahs. Elite children consider themselves superior to their madressah counterparts, stereotyping them as backward and viewing the sector as a security risk. Madressah students, on their part, hold the elite responsible for their deprivation and discrimination in society and for espousing Western values that they see as alien, if not antithetical, to their beliefs.
Incidentally, this failure of the state and madressah authorities to enable students to successfully transition to adulthood increases their susceptibility to supporting or perpetrating violence — even when they are educated at the madressahs that have no agenda to support the militant milieu. The absence of a level playing field accentuates frustration and resentment among those left out. In addition, intolerance of diversity, purist belief systems deeply embedded in the curriculum and teaching methods, and absence of positive out-group peer interactions reinforce an exclusionary mindset, a sense of injustice, marginalisation, mutual alienation and distrust in state institutions. These feelings are all known to be common drivers of youth involvement in violence.
Cond/
