Islamic Education in Pakistan: Second Year Report A Preliminary Draft

Introduction Pakistan it was that first drew the attention of the world to the madrassas – Islam’s most enduring institution for the reproduction of a class of the custodians of Islamic learned tradition – and Pakistan it is that continues to hit the international headlines implicating these madrassas in radical religiopolitical rhetoric, sectarian violence, militancy, and even outright terrorism. As I write these lines (July 5th 2007), the showdown between the Pakistan security forces and the two fire-brand administrators of Lal Masjid and Hafsa Female Madrassa, Maulana Abdul Aziz and his brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi -along with their more than five thousand male and female students – is about to reach its (anti)climax. Commentators on TV channels are asking the same question again and again: how come that these thousands of young men and women who had come to the Lal Masjid complex and its affiliated madrassas for learning the teachings of the Quran and Hadith have turned into moral vigilantes terrorizing the Islamabad neighborhoods with their moral crusade -setting fire to the music, videos and DVD stores, punishing women on charges of illicit sex, establishing their own courts to dispense “Islamic justice,” kidnapping police officials in broad day light, snatching weapons from the law enforcement agents, and raiding a massage parlor and kidnapping nine of its Chinese female employees? For several weeks in March and April of 2007, people in Pakistan watched the female students of Hafsa Madrassa, covered in head-to-toe burqas, on their TV screens, occupying a children’s library, carrying long bamboo sticks and Kalashnikovs, screaming slogans of jihad, and threatening to undertake “fidayeen” (suicide) attacks if the security forces try to forcibly dislodge them from the library.