Pakistan's problem child recites the Koran

London Telegraph ^ | October 29, 2007 | Colin Freeman

[Son of Dis]

Like many younger pupils at Karachi's Jamia Binoria madrassa, 12-year-old Imran Mohammed is a shy, quietly spoken child who is all but tongue-tied in front of his elders. One thing can get him talking though – for hours if need be.

"God is one and he is our creator," he intones, his faltering voice suddenly breaking into fluent Arabic. "He has not given birth of anyone, nor did anyone give birth of him."

It is a verse from the Koran, a tiny part of four entire chapters he has learnt by heart since arriving at the madrassa, or religious school, two years ago. Four chapters is roughly 60 pages, and to recite it fully – as he can do – takes up to two hours.

However, when it comes to non-religious learning, such as the alphabet or multiplication tables, Mohammed is somewhat behind for his age. Asked to add 10 and 11 together, he uses his fingers to reach the right answer, and the only words he can write are his own name and his father's.

For much of the past two decades, though, this has been what passes as education for hundreds of thousands of young Pakistanis. With secular, state schools all but non existent in much of the country – six million children never see a classroom – growing numbers of parents "opt out" their children for religious education instead.

That, though, is what makes Pakistan's estimated 20,000 madrassas the country's biggest threat. By teaching religion to the exclusion of almost everything else, they are blamed for training a generation of youngsters whose only job prospects lie in preaching and zealotry, fuelling the Islamic fundamentalism that many Pakistanis fear could turn their country into another Afghanistan. The more militant madrassas are also accused of recruiting volunteers for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, among them Britons such as Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan, who are thought to have attended them before going on to commit the July 7 London bombings in 2005.

How to tackle the madrassas' influence is one of the major challenges facing the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who returned from exile two weeks ago in a bid to regain office. But it has already proved beyond Pakistan's president, Gen Pervez Musharraf, whose pledge to rein in militant madrassas in the wake of the July 7 incident has run into fierce opposition from Pakistan's religious establishment.

"The madrassas have always been with us, just as religious schools once dominated Europe centuries ago," said Taj Haider, a political adviser to Ms Bhutto. "But while the European ones began teaching science and other higher learning to compete with secular schools, that has not happened in Pakistan. Our public sector education has fallen behind so badly that the madrassas feel no competition."

Certainly, for Mohammed's parents, the madrassa was the obvious choice. He and his younger brother Irfan, 11, were among 400 children taken in by Jamia Binoria after their village was destroyed by the earthquake that devastated Pakistan in 2005, killing nearly 80,000.

The madrassa, which runs many charity programmes and is regarded as more modern than most, offers them not just free teaching but also free boarding in its cell-like, concrete block dormitories – meaning two fewer mouths to feed for the boys' struggling family.

Its head, Mullah Ghulam Rasool, says his 5,000 students learn no militancy. "It's strictly religious education, we keep them away from politics," he insists. However, when discussing politics, it becomes clear where his sympathies lie. Muslims, he says, have a right to fight British and US troops in Afghanistan because coalition forces are "killing innocent people". The Taliban, for all their medieval backwardness, never did that, he believes. And September 11 It might have been al-Qaeda, might have been the Jews, but either way, was no excuse for America to "terrorise the whole world".

However, it is in everyday life, rather than jihad and martyrdom, where the madrassa's teachings part company with modern Pakistan. Its mullahs staff a website called "fatwah online", where pupils post questions for religious guidance on moral dilemmas.

The answers from the Islamic agony uncles are unrelentingly forbidding: television should be avoided except for religious programmes; unmarried men and women should never chat on the internet; women should not work and should always wear the veil outside the home.

The number of madrassas in Pakistan has increased 20-fold since 1971, and have an estimated 1.5 million students today. Their growth and radicalisation was a by-product of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when both US and Saudi cash flooded in to encourage the jihad against Russian troops. Today, what were once just schools for the most destitute have become an entire parallel education system, offering schooling for up to 10 years.

Mullah Rasool says his teachers do their best to teach the basics of literacy and numeracy, and if they had the money would do more, helping train future doctors and engineers. "If the boys can memorise 300 pages of the Koran, they could do wonders in a modern school," he said. "But the system has collapsed: often there are no teachers, or no discipline. We are all they have."

Few in Pakistan would argue. Up to one in five state schools lie empty because of a lack of money to pay teachers, some of whom are barely qualified. The literacy rate is 49 per cent. Mr Haider, whose sister runs a village schools project in a rural area outside Karachi, recalls how of 400 people she recently asked to sign a register, all but eight did so with their thumbprints.

As long as that remains the case, he says, neither Ms Bhutto nor anybody else will have the moral authority to tell the madrassas how to operate. "We have to put our own house in order first," he said. "Anybody who thinks madrassas are bad needs just to wander into a government school."