Madarsas: Nurturing young Islamic hearts and hatreds

[Guest guest]

Title: Madarsas: Nurturing young Islamic hearts and hatreds

>Author: Rick Bragg

>Publication: New York Times

>October 14, 2001

>

>PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 13 ˜ A thousand years ago, in the days of the

>camel caravans, storytellers gathered here in the tea shops and brought

>the outside world and all its thoughts and ideas to the bazaar. As the

>vendors hawked silk, spice and rich tapestries and traders herded beasts

>through streets thick with smoke from cooking fires, travelers from

>distant lands and differing religions told stories about moguls, magic,

>wit and wisdom. In time, the bazaar came to be known as Qissa Khwani ˜

>the Bazaar of the Storytellers.

>

>Now, the streets are still choked with donkey carts and meat still

>sizzles on open pits, but the vendors are poor men selling simple

>things. Blaring car horns drown out all other sound, just as the

>teachers and students in the Islamic seminaries that surround this

>bazaar have drowned out all conflicting ideas, all unacceptable

>thoughts.

>

>The storytellers no longer come. There is just one story now, at least

>one acceptable story. It is the one taught in the seminaries, called

>madrassas, that have become incubators in Pakistan for the holy warriors

>who say they will die to defend Islam and their hero, Osama bin Laden,

>from the infidels. In many of the 7,500 madrassas in Pakistan, inside a

>student body of 750,000 to a million, students learn to recite and obey

>Islamic law, and to distrust and even hate the United States.

>

>"Jihad," shouted a little boy, from a high window in a madrassa just

>steps from the Khwani Bazaar. He grinned and waved as foreign

>journalists snapped his photograph, but, on the streets below, older

>students had massed for demonstrations that would end in clouds of tear

>gas and smoke from burning tires, as young men jumped through fire to

>prove their faith and ferocity.

>

>President Bush and diplomats from the West have taken great pains to

>point out that the war on Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban of Afghanistan

>is not a war on Islam, but in many madrassas here in Pakistan ˜

>especially those near the border with Afghanistan ˜ militant Muslims

>lecture students that the United States is a nation of Christians and

>Jews who are not after a single terrorist or government but are bent on

>the worldwide annihilation of Islam.

>

>The madrassas' sword is in the narrow education they offer, and the

>devotion they engender from students from the poorest classes who,

>without them, would have nowhere to go, or go hungry.

>

>At the Markaz Uloom Islamia madrassa in Peshawar, Muhammad Sabir, 22,

>motioned to the eerily quiet compound, devoid of students. Final exams

>are over, he said. The scholars, many of them, have left to fight

>against the United States. "They have gone for jihad," said Mr. Sabir, a

>student there. "It is our moral and religious duty." He said the words

>automatically, woodenly, as if repeating his elder's recitation of the

>Koran.

>

>"There is no practical training of terrorists here," said Asif Qureishi,

>an Islamic scholar and the son of Maulana Mohd Yousaf Qureishi, who

>heads the Darul-Uloom Ashrafia madrassa in Peshawar. There are no

>weapons, no knives or guns, no weapons training. The madrassas hone only

>the mind, he said.

>

>"We prepare them for the jihad, mentally," said Mr. Qureishi, whose

>duties at the madrassa include the call to prayers. In a small room at

>the madrassa, students nodded appreciatively at his words. Some were no

>more than 10.

>

>"The minds are fresh," he said. In his tiny office, a bag of rice rests

>against a wall. Outside the door, a student hefts the carcass of a

>slaughtered goat.

>

>What the students hear, in compounds that range from spartan to squalid,

>is a drumbeat of American injustice, cruelty and closed-mindedness ˜ the

>United States is just that way, the elders say.

>

>"They send cruise missiles against gravestones," said Al-Sheikh Rahat

>Gul, the stick-thin, 81-year-old maulana who heads Markaz Uloom Islamia

>in Peshawar, a madrassa with about 250 students.

>

>The Americans kill only innocents, said the maulana, a large pair of

>thick-lensed, black-framed glassed sitting crookedly on his head. "The

>Koran forbids the killing of females, children, elders and cattle," he

>said. "That is war. That is not holy war." Sons of Islam must answer

>that tyranny with holy war, he said.

>

>He condemns the World Trade Center attack but dismisses any connection

>to this part of the world. "The Jews have done this," he said, calling

>the attacks a plot by Israel to draw the world into war. "And the Hindus

>are just like them."

>

>It is repeated madrassa by madrassa, every few city blocks, the company

>line of the militants and the poorer classes from which they come,

>spreading out from the student body to the shops and foot traffic.

>

>Maulana Gul proudly points to a cartoon on the back of a pamphlet at his

>madrassa that shows Afghanistan encircled by a chain, and the chain is

>secured by a padlock that is labeled "United Nations." Inside the chain

>are weeping children. Hands reach from all directions with offerings of

>food, money and grain, hands are grabbed at the wrist by other hands

>labeled "U.S.A.," preventing that aid from getting to the starving

>people.

>

>In the madrassas, students ranging in age from 7 or 8 to men over 20 are

>taught a strict interpretation of the Koran, including the duty of all

>Muslims to rise up in jihad. There are no televisions and some madrassas

>do not even allow transistor radios. There are no magazines or

>newspapers except those deemed acceptable by the elders. The outside

>world is closed to them, and many of the students seem puzzled when

>asked if they mind that. Their teachers, most of them respected elders,

>tell them what they need to know, the students said.

>

>Almost all the leadership of the Taliban, including Mullah Muhammad

>Omar, was educated in madrassas in Pakistan ˜ most of them in a single

>madrassa, Jamia Darul Uloom Haqqania in Akora Khatak in the Northwest

>Frontier Province of Pakistan. The anti-American protests that have

>filled the streets in Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi have been

>planned in madrassas ˜ their maulanas, the elders who run the schools,

>are the spiritual hub of the protests.

>

>In Quetta, after the United States began its missile attacks on the

>Taliban, 300 Afghans who had attended madrassas in Pakistan crossed the

>border to join the jihad. Every day, said madrassa students, Pakistanis

>slip over the border to join them.

>

>"The madrassas indulge in brainwashing on a large scope, of the young

>children and those in their early teens," said Arasiab Khattak, chairman

>of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who stressed it is unfair to

>say that all madrassas are the same. Some are more militant than others.

>

>But along the border with Afghanistan, the vast majority of madrassas

>have become an assembly line for the jihad. Even the scholars themselves

>and their teachers say that this is so.

>

>Almost all the students come from poor families who cannot afford any

>other education in a country that spends about 90 percent of its budget

>on debt service and the military and almost nothing on public schools.

>

>A large family, said Mr. Khattak, often sends two or three sons to a

>madrassa because it cannot afford to feed them. "There is no access to

>the regular education system," he said.

>

>The madrassas, often supported by donors from other Islamic states like

>Saudi Arabia, offer a narrow education ˜ many of them do not teach

>science, math, languages or any history beyond that in the Koran ˜ but

>do offer students food and a place to sleep. In madrassas, children from

>the hardest poverty in Pakistan and orphans from wars in Afghanistan,

>get enough to eat.

>

>Here, the difference between poverty and wealth is apparent on a

>person's feet. If someone wears sandals made of leather, they have at

>least some wealth. The poorest wear mass-produced sandals made of

>plastic. At the doors to the madrassas here ˜ no one enters any office

>or classroom wearing shoes ˜ rows of plastic sandals sit just outside

>the doors.

>

>There have been madrassas in Pakistan for hundreds of years, austere

>stone and brick schools ˜ built around a mosque ˜ where students spend

>as many as eight years being instructed in the Koran. They learn by

>parroting their mullahs, who recite the Koran. There are no questions,

>no discussion.

>

>In the past quarter-century, said experts on the madrassas, jihad has

>become more than a lesson to recite.

>

>In the 1980's, students left these madrassas to fight against the Soviet

>Union in Afghanistan ˜ including many Pakistanis, some of whom have an

>ethnic and tribal kinship to the Afghans. In the 1990's students became

>foot soldiers and leaders in the Taliban. Now, they form an army around

>Osama bin Laden.

>

>In the hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11,

>students described how they ran through the sprawling Jamia Darul Uloom

>Haqqania compound celebrating, stabbing the fingers on one hand into the

>palm of the other, to simulate a plane stabbing into a building.

>

>The morning after the attacks, elders at the madrassa, which translates

>to "The University of All Righteous Knowledge," summoned students to

>study hall. The elders explained what had happened. "No, no, not

>Muslims," said Fazal Ghani, 22, an Afghan, as he passed on his teachers'

>explanation of who had caused the deaths of thousands. "This was

>Yehudi," the Jews. "trying to discredit Islam." He tried to express his

>sympathy for the victims of the bombings, saying "Bad, bad," but he

>could not stop smiling.

>

>His teachers had explained that, even though the Jews flew the planes

>into the towers, it was Allah's will. Allah, the teachers said, put the

>idea in the minds of the Jews.

>

>Allah, in his wisdom, knew that the Muslims would perhaps be briefly

>discredited, the students said, but that when the truth came out, it

>would ultimately destroy the Jews.

>

>Radios are allowed at this madrassa, and some of the students had held

>radios to their ears all night, listening to news reports. But that was

>just noise, just electricity. The truth, the only truth, came from the

>madrassa's teachers.

>

>"The wrath of God," the teachers had said.

>

>But until recent violent demonstrations in Pakistan ˜ planned in the

>madrassas and carried out, at least in part, by students ˜ there was no

>government condemnation. Just two weeks ago, the Pakistan president,

>Pervez Musharraf, was calling them "misunderstood organizations," that

>were actually welfare systems to aid the poor. He has since jailed

>several of the madrassas' leaders, after demonstrations in Quetta and

>Karachi left businesses ablaze.

>

>Maulana Khalid Banori, who heads Darul-Uloom Sarhad in Peshawar, sees

>himself as a college superintendent. Students at his madrassa study

>science, math and English, and can use credits earned here to apply for

>graduate schools, or they can use their education to qualify for civil

>service jobs. He said he wants his students to have a well-rounded

>education, but one based in the teachings of Islam.

>

>He hopes the violence will end, that the terrorism will end. It will, he

>said, as soon the Americans stop committing it.

>

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