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October 24, 2001
Extreme Islamic schools seen as source of Taliban troops
Schools not teaching `real fundamentals,' Muslim activist says
WASHINGTON (CNS) — Muslims in the United States point to schools in Pakistan that teach a radical fundamentalist approach to Islam as one source of anti-American and anti-Western attitudes fueling support for accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.
Traditional Islamic schools, known by their Arabic name of "madrasahs,'' have been cited by organizations such as Human Rights Watch as serving as major recruitment centers for the Taliban.
"This recruitment is performed openly,'' a recent Human Rights Watch report said. "Some Pakistani government officials have repeatedly admitted knowledge of the paramilitary activities of the religious schools.''
Despite the Pakistani government's official "discomfort'' with the practice, the report said, "significant numbers of recruits (from the schools), traveling in trucks and buses, regularly cross into Afghanistan from Pakistan in order to fight with the Taliban ... without any interference from Pakistani border officials.''
Muslim leaders from around the world have considered sending Islamic scholars to debate Taliban leaders about the fundamentalist type of Islam they promote, said Azizah Al-Hibri, a University of Richmond, Va., law professor and founder of Karamah, a Muslim women's human rights organization.
"The problem is the Taliban is looked at (by many Muslim scholars) as not religious, but political,'' Al-Hibri said. "It's too hot to try to handle it religiously.''
Islamic scholars in the United States and abroad have decried efforts by bin Laden and his supporters to justify terrorist attacks on the United States as righteous efforts to defend Islam. The scholars say Islam does not condone killing hostages or attacks on innocent civilians such as the hijackings in which planes were crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.
At an October press conference in Washington called to discuss stereotypes of Islam, Al-Hibri said Muslims in other parts of the world are recognizing that they need to begin addressing how young people in countries such as Pakistan are being educated in fundamentalist madrasahs.
In a November 2000 report, Foreign Affairs Magazine quoted Pakistan's interior minister, Moinuddin Haider, as saying "the brand of Islam they are teaching is not good for Pakistan. Some, in the garb of religious training, are busy fanning sectarian violence, poisoning people's minds.''
The magazine noted that, increasingly, the madrasahs are financed by wealthy outsiders, including individuals and organizations in Saudi Arabia and Iran, which limits the government's ability to supervise what they teach.
The result, according to the magazine and the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis of New Delhi, India, is that parents send their children to madrasahs thinking they will receive an education that emphasizes the Koran but includes other subjects.
Instead, some of the schools ignore math, science and other secular subjects, offering only religious instruction with a focus on the concept of "jihad'' as an obligation to armed pursuit of justice. Most Muslims equate "jihad'' primarily with an inner struggle to avoid evil in order to please God.
"I had handed over my son to the school so that he would learn the Koran, not the handling of guns,'' the father of a 13-year-old in Karachi, Pakistan, was quoted as saying in a report of the Institute for Defense Studies. Without his parents' knowledge, the boy visited Afghanistan with other students from his madrasah.
The report said the boy came back insisting that he wished "to be martyred in jihad in Afghanistan.''
In Washington, Al-Hibri said the answer to the use of madrasahs as recruiting programs for the Taliban is not to close down all religious schools — especially when there are few state-run alternatives.
"The answer is not that we don't want madrasahs,'' she said. "But that we need more of them — good ones. The problem with the so-called fundamentalists today is that they're not teaching the real fundamentals.''
Foreign aid that might help fund less extreme education programs has been sparse, Al-Hibri said, especially when it comes to money that might go to schools with a religious orientation.
"We need to change the way of thinking so it's OK to be a religious school'' and receive U.S. funding, she said.
Catholic Relief Services, which operates school support programs around the world — often using funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development — has few education initiatives in the region, according to CRS spokesman Joe Carney.
In the past, in collaboration with German Caritas, CRS has had some education programs in Afghanistan, though they concentrated on things like making it possible for girls to attend schools, he said. Those programs sometimes are operated at Islamic schools. CRS is the U.S. Church's overseas relief program, as Caritas is an outreach of other national bishops' conferences.
In Pakistan, CRS education efforts are primarily of a support nature, such as encouraging parent-teacher collaboration, providing food and helping women and girls obtain an education, Carney said.
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