Calls for Pakistan madrassas to widen curriculum
Updated
To many foreign observers, Pakistan is the global centre of extremist Islam, and its madrassas - or religious seminaries - are where the violence starts. However, this kind of scaremongering hides a more complex reality.
Presenter: Mustafa Qadri in Pakistan
Speaker: Professor Qibla Ayaz, Peshawar University; Abdul Ghani, organiser of education conference in Islamabad; Azi Hussain, International Centre for Religion and Diplomacy in Washington DC
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QADRI: There are believed to be 2 million madrassa students in several thousand seminaries throughout Pakistan. But exact figures are hard to verify because most operate independent of government supervision. Although madrassas have ominous connotations in the West, the term merely refers to any of a variety of schools that teach classical Arabic and Islamic scripture. For the poorest families madrassas play an important role in ensuring children are supervised, fed and taught to read and write while parents, often illiterate, are busy at work. Madrassas have played this role in the subcontinent since at least the 7th century when Islam first spread to the region on a mass scale. In centuries past, before the establishment of secular education, madrassas were centres of legal scholarship as well as scientific and philosophical learning. But there is no doubting that today the intellectual fervour in Pakistan's madrassas has declined. Professor Qibla Ayaz from Peshawar University explains:
AYAZ: The core problem is that their main emphasis is on the traditional curriculum and they do not know actually some of the modern disciplines that have been introduced in the education field.
QADRI: In recent years there have been increasing attempts to reform Pakistan's much-maligned madrassas. At a conference in Islamabad, I spoke to religious scholars like Ayaz about attempts to broaden the curriculum in Pakistan's seminaries. Here is what Abdul Ghani, one of the conference organisers, had to say.
GHANI: This is a programme to help madrassas in Pakistan... so that they can produce the people who could play a very valuable role in the socio-economic development of the nation.
QADRI: According to Professor Ayaz, madrassas can play a critical role in Pakistan's democratisation.
AYAZ: We think the teachers of the religious seminaries play a very important role in promotion of good values in the society. But they need some further capacity building in certain areas, like how to develop effective methods of teaching, how to understand the needs of the students - like in the field of counselling, conflict resolutions. There's a need to make them more aware of human rights, the rights of minorities, non-Muslims citizens... and, you know, these sorts of topics we want to share with them to increase and enhance their capacity."
QADRI: The programme, funded by the International Centre for Religion and Diplomacy based in Washington DC, seeks to promote scientific and social disciplines, critical thinking, and dialogue among the different religious sects in Pakistan.
AZI HUSSAIN: We have done a lot of madrassa training the last five years, about 2,500 ulema have been trained through our programme. We used this approach before - thinking critically, using tools - by the end of our workshop they basically say, you know, we do need to change our curriculum, and how do we change our curriculums. And in fact they become really energised and want to start to teach English, Maths, Science, modern subjects... There's always some resistance. They never know where we're coming from, we're American agents, what is our agenda? But you can relatively easily overcome that once you engage them. The key is to get them in the room, talk to them, and then that resistance can be overcome. But if you don't do that, that kind of conspiracy stuff just takes on a life of its own.
QADRI: It may seem like a novel approach to the extremism problem, but attempts at reforming Pakistan's madrassas represent a return to their traditional role as centres of learning and dialogue. Mustafa Qadri, Connect Asia.
