Seif
27-03-05, 13:22
Inside Islam's ''terror schools''
Cover story
William Dalrymple
Monday 28th March 2005
Madrasas are Islamic colleges accused by the US of incubating terrorism and the attacks of 9/11. From Pakistan, William Dalrymple investigates the threat
Halfway along the dangerous road to Kohat - deep in the lawless tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and where Osama Bin Laden is widely believed to be sheltering - we passed a small whitewashed shrine that had recently been erected by the side of the road: "That is where the army ambushed and killed two al-Qaeda men escaping from Afghanistan," said Javed Paracha. "Local people soon began to see the two martyrs in their dreams. Now we believe that they are saints. Already many cures and miracles have been reported. If any of our women want to ask anything special from God, they first come here."
He added: "They say that each shahid [martyr] emitted a perfume like that of roses. For many days a beautiful scent was coming from the place of their martyrdom."
Javed Paracha is a huge, burly tribal leader with a granite outcrop of nose jutting from a great fan of grey beard. In many ways he is the embodiment of everything that US policy-makers most fear and dislike about this part of the Muslim world. For Paracha is a dedicated Islamist, as well as a wily lawyer who has successfully defended al-Qaeda suspects in the Peshawar High Court. In his fortress-like stronghouse in Kohat he sheltered wounded Taliban fighters - and their frost-bitten women and children - fleeing across the mountains from the American Daisy Cutters at Tora Bora, and he was twice imprisoned by General Musharraf in the notorious prison at Dera Ismail Khan. There he was kept in solitary confinement while being questioned - and he alleges tortured - by CIA interrogators. On his release, he found his prestige among his neighbours had been immensely enhanced by his ordeal. His proudest boast, however, is building the two enormous madrasas he founded and financed, the first of which he says produced many of the younger leaders of the Taliban.
"They are the biggest madrasas in the [North-West] Frontier," he told me proudly after stopping to say a prayer at the al-Qaeda shrine. "The books are free. The food is free. The education is free. We give them free accommodation. In a poor and backward area like this, our madrasas are the only form of education. The government system is simply not here. "
Paracha got back in the car - the vehicle sinking to the left as he lowered himself into the back beside his two armed bodyguards - and added: "There are 200,000 jobless degree holders in this country. Mark my words, a more extreme form of the Taliban is coming to Pakistan. The conditions are so bad. The people are so desperate. They are waiting for a solution that will rid them of this feudal-army elite. The people want radical change. We teach them in the madrasas that only Islam can provide the justice they seek."
For better or worse, the sort of madrasa-driven change in political attitudes that Javed Paracha is bringing about in Kohat is being reproduced across Pakistan. An Interior Ministry report revealed recently that there are now 27 times as many madrasas in the country as there were in 1947: from 245 at the time of independence the number has shot up to 6,870 in 2001. The religious tenor of Pakistan has been correspondingly radicalised: the tolerant Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now deeply out of fashion, overtaken by the sudden rise of the more hardline reformist Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi strains of the faith that are increasingly dominant over swaths of the country.
The sharp acceleration in the number of these madrasas first began under General Zia, and was financed mainly by Saudi donors (though ironically the US also played a role in this as part of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad). Since the oil boom of the early 1970s a policy of exporting not just petroleum, but also hardline Wahhabism, became a fundamental tenet of Saudi foreign policy, partly a result of a competition for influence with Shia Iran. Although some of the madrasas were little more than single rooms attached to village mosques, others are now very substantial institutions: the Darul Uloom in Baluchistan is now annually enrolling some 1,500 boarders and a further 1,000 day-boys.
Altogether, there are now an estimated 800,000 to one million students enrolled in Pakistan's madrasas: an entire, free Islamic education system existing parallel to the increasingly moribund state sector, in which a mere 1.8 per cent of Pakistan's GDP is spent on government schools. The statistics are dire: 15 per cent of these schools are without a proper building; 52 per cent without a boundary wall; 40 per cent without water; 71 per cent without electricity. There is frequent absenteeism of teachers; indeed, many of these schools exist only on paper.
This education gap is the most striking way in which Pakistan is lagging behind India, a country in which 65 per cent of the population is literate, and the number rises every year. Only this year, the Indian education system received a substantial boost of state funds in the government Budget; but in Pakistan the literacy figure is well under half (it is currently 42 per cent), and falling. The collapse of government schooling has meant that many of the country's poorest people who want their children's advancement have no option but to place the children in the madrasa system where they are guaranteed a conservative and outdated, but nonetheless free education.
Madrasas are now more dominant in Pakistan's educational system than they are anywhere else; but the general trend is common across the Islamic world. In Egypt the number of teaching institutes dependent on the Islamic Al-Azhar University increased from 1,855 in 1986 to 4,314 ten years later. The Saudis have also stepped up funding in Africa: in Tanzania alone they have been spending $1m a year building new madrasas. In Mali, madrasas now account for around a quarter of children in primary schools. Seen in this wider context, Paracha and his educational endeavours in Kohat raise a number of important questions: how far are these madrasas the source of the problems that culminated in the Islamist attacks of 9/11? Are madrasas simply terrorist factories? Should the west be pressing US client states such as Pakistan and Egypt simply to close the whole lot down?
In the panic-striken aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the answers to these questions seemed obvious. Donald Rumsfeld, among a number of US politicians, fingered madrasas as terror-incubators and centres of hatred, responsible - so he said - for propagating anti-Americanism across the Islamic world. There were many good reasons for people jumping to this assumption. The terrifyingly ultra-conservative Taliban regime was unquestionably the product of Pakistan's madrasas. Much of the Taliban leadership was trained at just one madrasa: the Haqqaniya at Akora Khattak, between Islamabad and Peshawar. The director, Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight.
But as we now know, in the aftermath of 9/11, a great many of the assumptions that people made about Islamist terrorism have proved with hindsight to be quite spectacularly ill-founded, the result of inadequate and partial understanding of the complexities of the contemporary Islamic world.
There was, first of all, widespread misunderstanding about the nature of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden's organisation has turned out not to be some structured multinational organisation; still less was it the state-sponsored puppet - with Osama moving to the tug of Saddam's Ba'athist string-pulling - that was depicted by the neo-cons and their media mouthpieces (in this country, Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph and the equally credulous Murdoch Times) as they attempted to justify attacking Iraq.
Instead, as Giles Kepel, the leading French authority on Islamists, puts it in his important study, The War For Muslim Minds: "al-Qaeda was [and is] less a military base of operations than a database that connected jihadists around the world via the internet . . . this organisation did not consist of buildings and tanks and borders but of websites, clandestine financial transfers and a proliferation of activists ranging from Jersey City to the paddies of Indonesia". This central failure to understand the nature of al-Qaeda was the reason that the US attempted to counter it with such unsuitable policies: by targeting nations it considered sponsors of terrorism, so inadvertently turning itself into al-Qaeda's most effective recruiting agency.
In the same way, it was maintained that al-Qaeda's grievances were unconnected to America's Middle Eastern policies. This also proved to be quite wrong. From al-Qaeda's "Declaration of War Against the Americans", issued in 1996, Bin Laden had announced that his grievance was not cultural or religious, but very specifically political: he was fighting to oppose US support for the House of Saud and Israel. As he told the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir: "America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq. The Muslims have a right to attack America in reprisal . . . The targets were icons of America's military and economic power."
In retrospect, the idea that madrasas are one of the principal engines of this global Islamic terrorism appears to be another American assumption that begins to wobble when subjected to serious analysis.
It is certainly true that many madrasas are fundamentalist in their approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the least pluralistic and most hardline strains of Islamic thought. It is also true that some madrasas can be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil violence: just as there are some yeshivas [religious schools] in settlements on the West Bank that have a reputation for violence against Palestinians, and Serbian monasteries that sheltered some of the worst of that country's war criminals, so it is estimated that as many as 15 per cent of Pakistan's madrasas preach violent jihad, while a few have even been known to provide covert military training.
Some have done their best to bring about a Talibanisation of Pakistan: madrasa graduates in Karachi have been behind acts of violence against the city's Shia minority, while in 1998, madrasa students in Baluchistan began organising bonfires of TVs and attacked video shops. In this, however, they have so far had limited success. Indeed, the bestselling video in Baluchistan last year was a pirate tape that showed a senior Pakistani MP in flagrante with his girlfriend. The tape, which had been made by the MP himself, had been stolen by his political enemies and circulated around the province, with the expectation that it would destroy his career. However, so impressive was the MP's performance in the video that he was re-elected with a record majority; I recently met him looking very pleased with himself in Islamabad, where he says the tape has transformed his political fortunes.
It is now becoming clear, however, that producing cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, and the World Trade Center. A number of recent studies have emphasised that there is an important and fundamental distinction to be made between most mad- rasa graduates - who tend to be pious villagers from economically impoverished backgrounds, possessing very 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, scientific or technical backgrounds and very few actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.
Cover story
William Dalrymple
Monday 28th March 2005
Madrasas are Islamic colleges accused by the US of incubating terrorism and the attacks of 9/11. From Pakistan, William Dalrymple investigates the threat
Halfway along the dangerous road to Kohat - deep in the lawless tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and where Osama Bin Laden is widely believed to be sheltering - we passed a small whitewashed shrine that had recently been erected by the side of the road: "That is where the army ambushed and killed two al-Qaeda men escaping from Afghanistan," said Javed Paracha. "Local people soon began to see the two martyrs in their dreams. Now we believe that they are saints. Already many cures and miracles have been reported. If any of our women want to ask anything special from God, they first come here."
He added: "They say that each shahid [martyr] emitted a perfume like that of roses. For many days a beautiful scent was coming from the place of their martyrdom."
Javed Paracha is a huge, burly tribal leader with a granite outcrop of nose jutting from a great fan of grey beard. In many ways he is the embodiment of everything that US policy-makers most fear and dislike about this part of the Muslim world. For Paracha is a dedicated Islamist, as well as a wily lawyer who has successfully defended al-Qaeda suspects in the Peshawar High Court. In his fortress-like stronghouse in Kohat he sheltered wounded Taliban fighters - and their frost-bitten women and children - fleeing across the mountains from the American Daisy Cutters at Tora Bora, and he was twice imprisoned by General Musharraf in the notorious prison at Dera Ismail Khan. There he was kept in solitary confinement while being questioned - and he alleges tortured - by CIA interrogators. On his release, he found his prestige among his neighbours had been immensely enhanced by his ordeal. His proudest boast, however, is building the two enormous madrasas he founded and financed, the first of which he says produced many of the younger leaders of the Taliban.
"They are the biggest madrasas in the [North-West] Frontier," he told me proudly after stopping to say a prayer at the al-Qaeda shrine. "The books are free. The food is free. The education is free. We give them free accommodation. In a poor and backward area like this, our madrasas are the only form of education. The government system is simply not here. "
Paracha got back in the car - the vehicle sinking to the left as he lowered himself into the back beside his two armed bodyguards - and added: "There are 200,000 jobless degree holders in this country. Mark my words, a more extreme form of the Taliban is coming to Pakistan. The conditions are so bad. The people are so desperate. They are waiting for a solution that will rid them of this feudal-army elite. The people want radical change. We teach them in the madrasas that only Islam can provide the justice they seek."
For better or worse, the sort of madrasa-driven change in political attitudes that Javed Paracha is bringing about in Kohat is being reproduced across Pakistan. An Interior Ministry report revealed recently that there are now 27 times as many madrasas in the country as there were in 1947: from 245 at the time of independence the number has shot up to 6,870 in 2001. The religious tenor of Pakistan has been correspondingly radicalised: the tolerant Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now deeply out of fashion, overtaken by the sudden rise of the more hardline reformist Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi strains of the faith that are increasingly dominant over swaths of the country.
The sharp acceleration in the number of these madrasas first began under General Zia, and was financed mainly by Saudi donors (though ironically the US also played a role in this as part of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad). Since the oil boom of the early 1970s a policy of exporting not just petroleum, but also hardline Wahhabism, became a fundamental tenet of Saudi foreign policy, partly a result of a competition for influence with Shia Iran. Although some of the madrasas were little more than single rooms attached to village mosques, others are now very substantial institutions: the Darul Uloom in Baluchistan is now annually enrolling some 1,500 boarders and a further 1,000 day-boys.
Altogether, there are now an estimated 800,000 to one million students enrolled in Pakistan's madrasas: an entire, free Islamic education system existing parallel to the increasingly moribund state sector, in which a mere 1.8 per cent of Pakistan's GDP is spent on government schools. The statistics are dire: 15 per cent of these schools are without a proper building; 52 per cent without a boundary wall; 40 per cent without water; 71 per cent without electricity. There is frequent absenteeism of teachers; indeed, many of these schools exist only on paper.
This education gap is the most striking way in which Pakistan is lagging behind India, a country in which 65 per cent of the population is literate, and the number rises every year. Only this year, the Indian education system received a substantial boost of state funds in the government Budget; but in Pakistan the literacy figure is well under half (it is currently 42 per cent), and falling. The collapse of government schooling has meant that many of the country's poorest people who want their children's advancement have no option but to place the children in the madrasa system where they are guaranteed a conservative and outdated, but nonetheless free education.
Madrasas are now more dominant in Pakistan's educational system than they are anywhere else; but the general trend is common across the Islamic world. In Egypt the number of teaching institutes dependent on the Islamic Al-Azhar University increased from 1,855 in 1986 to 4,314 ten years later. The Saudis have also stepped up funding in Africa: in Tanzania alone they have been spending $1m a year building new madrasas. In Mali, madrasas now account for around a quarter of children in primary schools. Seen in this wider context, Paracha and his educational endeavours in Kohat raise a number of important questions: how far are these madrasas the source of the problems that culminated in the Islamist attacks of 9/11? Are madrasas simply terrorist factories? Should the west be pressing US client states such as Pakistan and Egypt simply to close the whole lot down?
In the panic-striken aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the answers to these questions seemed obvious. Donald Rumsfeld, among a number of US politicians, fingered madrasas as terror-incubators and centres of hatred, responsible - so he said - for propagating anti-Americanism across the Islamic world. There were many good reasons for people jumping to this assumption. The terrifyingly ultra-conservative Taliban regime was unquestionably the product of Pakistan's madrasas. Much of the Taliban leadership was trained at just one madrasa: the Haqqaniya at Akora Khattak, between Islamabad and Peshawar. The director, Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight.
But as we now know, in the aftermath of 9/11, a great many of the assumptions that people made about Islamist terrorism have proved with hindsight to be quite spectacularly ill-founded, the result of inadequate and partial understanding of the complexities of the contemporary Islamic world.
There was, first of all, widespread misunderstanding about the nature of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden's organisation has turned out not to be some structured multinational organisation; still less was it the state-sponsored puppet - with Osama moving to the tug of Saddam's Ba'athist string-pulling - that was depicted by the neo-cons and their media mouthpieces (in this country, Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph and the equally credulous Murdoch Times) as they attempted to justify attacking Iraq.
Instead, as Giles Kepel, the leading French authority on Islamists, puts it in his important study, The War For Muslim Minds: "al-Qaeda was [and is] less a military base of operations than a database that connected jihadists around the world via the internet . . . this organisation did not consist of buildings and tanks and borders but of websites, clandestine financial transfers and a proliferation of activists ranging from Jersey City to the paddies of Indonesia". This central failure to understand the nature of al-Qaeda was the reason that the US attempted to counter it with such unsuitable policies: by targeting nations it considered sponsors of terrorism, so inadvertently turning itself into al-Qaeda's most effective recruiting agency.
In the same way, it was maintained that al-Qaeda's grievances were unconnected to America's Middle Eastern policies. This also proved to be quite wrong. From al-Qaeda's "Declaration of War Against the Americans", issued in 1996, Bin Laden had announced that his grievance was not cultural or religious, but very specifically political: he was fighting to oppose US support for the House of Saud and Israel. As he told the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir: "America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq. The Muslims have a right to attack America in reprisal . . . The targets were icons of America's military and economic power."
In retrospect, the idea that madrasas are one of the principal engines of this global Islamic terrorism appears to be another American assumption that begins to wobble when subjected to serious analysis.
It is certainly true that many madrasas are fundamentalist in their approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the least pluralistic and most hardline strains of Islamic thought. It is also true that some madrasas can be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil violence: just as there are some yeshivas [religious schools] in settlements on the West Bank that have a reputation for violence against Palestinians, and Serbian monasteries that sheltered some of the worst of that country's war criminals, so it is estimated that as many as 15 per cent of Pakistan's madrasas preach violent jihad, while a few have even been known to provide covert military training.
Some have done their best to bring about a Talibanisation of Pakistan: madrasa graduates in Karachi have been behind acts of violence against the city's Shia minority, while in 1998, madrasa students in Baluchistan began organising bonfires of TVs and attacked video shops. In this, however, they have so far had limited success. Indeed, the bestselling video in Baluchistan last year was a pirate tape that showed a senior Pakistani MP in flagrante with his girlfriend. The tape, which had been made by the MP himself, had been stolen by his political enemies and circulated around the province, with the expectation that it would destroy his career. However, so impressive was the MP's performance in the video that he was re-elected with a record majority; I recently met him looking very pleased with himself in Islamabad, where he says the tape has transformed his political fortunes.
It is now becoming clear, however, that producing cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, and the World Trade Center. A number of recent studies have emphasised that there is an important and fundamental distinction to be made between most mad- rasa graduates - who tend to be pious villagers from economically impoverished backgrounds, possessing very 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, scientific or technical backgrounds and very few actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.