Governor, Khost Residents Celebrate Madrassa Project Start

Could someone explain why this is a "good thing" to be doing with our money and warriors in Afghanistan....

ANALYSIS - madrassas
A madrassa is an Islamic religious school. Many of the Taliban were educated in Saudi-financed madrassas in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism, a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam which is rooted in Saudi Arabia.

Around the world, Saudi wealth and charities contributed to an explosive growth of madrassas during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets.
During that war (1979-1989), a new kind of madrassa emerged in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region -- not so much concerned about scholarship AS MAKING WAR ON INFIDELS.

The enemy then was the Soviet Union, today it's America. Here are analyses of the madrassas from interviews with Vali Nasr, an authority on Islamic fundamentalism, and Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (For more on the role of madrassas in producing militant Islamists, see the story of Haroun Fazul.)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html

Semper Fi

Don't like madrassas's? Do something.
Central Asia Institute Mission:
http://www.ikat.org/
To promote and provide community-based education and literacy programs,
especially for girls, in remote mountain regions of Central Asia.
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The power of the pen
Roseville native builds schools to use education against terrorism
By Jon Lentz, News Editor

Greg Mortenson has quite a story to tell.

In an experience that changed his life, the Roseville native narrowly failed in his 1993 attempt to climb the world’s second-highest mountain, Pakistan’s treacherous K2.

Three years later, he was kidnapped for eight days in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In 2003, he escaped a gun fight between feuding Afghan warlords by hiding in a truck under putrid animal hides.

But for all his adventures, Mortenson’s most impressive feat may be his ongoing battle to reduce illiteracy in some of the most remote and poverty-stricken Muslim regions in the world.

Mortenson’s tale of hope is told in a best-selling new book, “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time,” which he co-authored.

The book chronicles Mortenson’s work building schools for Muslim children — usually girls — in poor mountain villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan that are often breeding grounds for terrorism.

“The despot mullahs are the only literate people there, and they can control large swaths of land with that power,” Mortenson said in an interview last week. “The mullahs don’t fear the sword or the bullet, but they definitely fear the pen.”
As founder and director of the Montana-based Central Asia Institute, Mortenson has helped build 55 schools and educate 22,000 students in the region since 1993. The emphasis is on teaching and empowering Muslim girls who have the least access to education, he said.

He often has to work with various shady characters, opium warlords and extremist mullahs, but having that dialogue is necessary to get the schools built, Mortenson said.
“I have to do that to bring about change in the communities people live in.” He adds, “They want education everywhere I go.”

The Roseville connection
Now a resident of Bozeman, Mont., Mortenson will be returning to Roseville on April 2 to speak at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church. He’s on tour to promote his new book, which reached No. 14 on the New York Times Bestseller List last week.
Born in Roseville, Mortenson and his parents moved to Africa in 1958 when he was 3 months old. His father, Irvin, established a hospital, Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center, on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. His mother, Jerene, founded the Moshi International School there to teach the children of the international medical staff.
“Greg went to school there, so he learned a lot about other cultures right from the beginning,” said his mother, Jerene, now a Little Canada resident. “I think a lot of the reason for his success is he’s culturally aware.”

Greg and his family moved back to Roseville in 1973, and in 1975 he graduated from Alexander Ramsey (now Roseville) High School. Competing in high school sports helped him adjust to the American culture. He has fond memories of football coach Lars Overskei, who was his mentor in high school.

After serving as a medic in the U.S. Army in Germany and graduating from the University of South Dakota, Mortenson worked as a nurse while pursuing his passion for climbing mountains.

Life-changing journey
In 1993, Mortenson set out to climb K2 to honor his sister Christa, who had died the year before after a long struggle with epilepsy.

Near the top of the peak, Mortenson was weak and disoriented, and stumbled back down the mountain for four days.

“On the way out, I was emaciated and exhausted and emotionally spent,” he said. “After the fifth day, I stumbled into a little village called Korphe. There I was befriended and nursed back to health.”

The level of poverty and illiteracy in the Pakistani village was shocking: one out of three babies died by the age of 1, and the literacy rate there was about 2 percent, Mortenson said. The villagers asked him to help, and he promised to return.

He sent out hundreds of hand-typed letters and applied for dozens of grants, but had only one response. It wasn’t until a group of elementary students in River Falls, Wis., raised $623 in pennies that the effort took off.

“When I was able to tell the story about the kids, the adults started giving the dollars,” Mortenson said.

Greg’s mother, Jerene, who was the principal at River Falls Elementary School, traveled to Pakistan in 1997 to see the first school her son organized in Korphe.

“When I first saw the school he had built, I just cried,” she said. “I knew how hard he had worked to build this, and how the students at the elementary school had raised the money. It was a very thrilling moment.”

One school at a time
Now Mortenson spends several months a year visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan. He said he wrote the book so his children could understand why he’s gone so often, and to give hope to Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because he saw people living in fear.

His message is that through education the threat of terrorism can be conquered.

“In Islam, when a young boy goes on jihad — it could be a good thing like getting a job or going to university, but it could be a bad thing like terrorism — he needs the permission and blessing from his mother,” Mortenson explained. Muslim women who are educated are much less likely to condone terrorism.

“It costs a dollar per month per child in Afghanistan to educate them,” he said. “It’s really interesting, to bring change within the society. It takes time, because you educate the girls and then they become mothers. It takes some time, but it’s definitely worth the investment.”

http://www.rosevillereview.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=769

© 2006 Lillie Suburban Newspapers

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