Army chief paints gloomy picture of Pakistan’s religious schools

Pakistan’s army chief has questioned the quality of religious schools that have cropped up across the country, saying poor education was holding the nation back.

Speaking on Thursday at a youth conference in Quetta, the capital of the southwestern province of Baluchistan, General Qamar Javed Bajwa said the concept of religious education needs to be “revisited.”

Bajwa said society has “lost the essence of madrassas,” though he added that he is not against them in principle.

A madrassa education in Pakistan is inadequate because it does not prepare students for the modern world, he said.

A perplexing issue

Criticism of the influential madrassas by an army chief are rare but their modernization remains a thorny issue.

Qamar Javed Bajwa is seen during the handover ceremony in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, November 29, 2016. /Pakistan Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR)/Handout via REUTERS

Pakistani Senator Nuzhat Sadiq said the government is trying to revamp madrassas as part of a national action plan and progress has been made.

But she told CGTN Digital on Friday that the government is willing to make further changes to bring more improvements.

Madrassas are often blamed for the radicalization of youngsters in Pakistan where many terror attacks since 2000 have been blamed on militant Islamist outfits in the country of 207 million people.

In 736 such attacks, at least 956 people were killed in Pakistan in 2016, according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) released last month.

Madrassas associated with radicalizing youths have been on the security services' radar for some time. But fearing a religious backlash, the authorities have only shut down a handful of schools, said a Reuters report.

Limited choice

Bajwa said he was recently informed that 2.5 million students were enrolled at Deobandi madrassas, a reference to a Sunni Muslim sub-sect that shares the beliefs of the strictly orthodox Wahhabi school of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula.

"So what will they become: will they become Maulvis (clerics) or they will become terrorists?" Bajwa questioned, saying it was impossible to build enough mosques to employ the huge number of madrassa students.

"We need to look (at) and revisit the concept of madrassas... We need to give them a worldly education," he said. “Most of them are just teaching theology. So what are their chances? What is their future in this country?"

“Sufficient progress”

Elaborating on the government's efforts, Senator Sadiq said it is trying to match madrassas’ curriculum with that of public schools.

“We understand that people send their children to madrassas," she said, "because they get free education, free meals, and accommodation.”

The government is giving incentives to encourage parents to send their children to public schools, she added.

"Of course, there are challenges, but progress is being made," she said, referring to efforts in the eastern province of Punjab.

Implications for CPEC

Madrassas have often been linked to Pakistan’s internal security that is important for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the 56-billion-US-dollar project which aims to revamp the country’s communications framework.

China is our all-weather friend and for the CPEC projects there is a heavy security in place, said Senator Sadiq.

“We have no tolerance for terrorism,” she said. “We need to do more, not for others but for ourselves. We need a safer Pakistan, for which the nation is on the same page. We need to get stronger.”

Pakistan has deployed 15,000 security personnel to protect projects under the umbrella of the CPEC.

What are Madrassas?

The madrasses mostly teach Islamic theology only but provide the only education available to millions of poor children in a country, where, according to the government’s statistics, 22.6 million children are not in formal education.

They are often built adjacent to mosques and underpin Islamization efforts by religious hardliners.

Pakistan has over 20,000 registered madrassas, though there are believed to be thousands more unregistered ones, according to Reuters. Some are single-room schools with a handful of students studying the Koran.

The military last year proposed a plan to deradicalize religious hardliners by "mainstreaming" some into political parties.

Though Islamist hardliners have never made considerable gains in elections, they hold great power in the society, an example of which was a sit-in they staged last month near the capital Islamabad. A newly formed ultra-religious party (the Tehreek-e-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah Pakistan) paralyzed the city for nearly three weeks.

(CGTN&REUTERS)