THE government has been going around in circles where madressah reform is concerned. Its weak attempt at getting these religious schools to agree to uniform control by the state bore little fruit, and the emphasis is now on another old favourite of the authorities: curriculum reform. On Friday, the federal minister for religious affairs stressed the necessity of educational standards at seminaries matching mainstream trends, but there has been little discussion on how to implement such recommendations. This, more or less, sums up the government’s indecision regarding the subject of madressahs.
It is a case of officials not wanting to take the risks entailed. Like the Musharraf regime and the PPP set-up before it, the PML-N government has been reluctant, to the point of being afraid, to deal with the problem. Even though the NAP consensus was expected to empower the PML-N to undertake reform, the campaign to do so has been helter-skelter. There have been several slogans and words about the need to upgrade the seminaries and about the basic principle of streamlining the sources of their finances and ideally creating a system where the state itself allocates the funds. And the talk about curriculum reform has been unending. Nevertheless, there has been growing realisation in this debate that madressahs are not simply the result of the failure of the ‘secular’ education system. Growing conservatism in society is a big factor in the mushrooming of madressahs across the country.
There have been so many assessments of the reasons why the reform campaign has failed to take off. Let us add to it a fundamental assertion. Pakistan is still some distance away from understanding a basic fact about these religious schools. The country seeks to deal with — albeit half-heartedly — the seminaries through the five boards that represent five schools of thought or sects in Islam. What is still not accepted is that underneath there are so many divisions. There are a large number of seminaries that work as satellites without any outside control and aided by their own sources of finances. They consider themselves as not answerable administratively to the board they might be linked to in theory on the basis of schools or sects. This is against the old norm where seminaries belonging to a school of thought or sect would be under the administrative influence of an order or individual. Authorities wanting change will have to find a direct route to the madressah down the road before it can be brought under a chain of command. As far as the question of sources of funding for the madressahs is concerned, there is no group more capable of keeping an eye on this and on seminaries in general than the state’s own people at the grass roots: the local governments. www.dawn.com/news/1304368/madressah-reform
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