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Written by Hank Berger

Published: 26 November 2005

The historian William Dalrymple, who lives in New Delhi, discusses Islamic madrasas in the new number of the New York Review of Books.  -- As is so often the case, it turns out that what is said about madrasas in the mainstream media of the West is a mythic fantasy with little relation to reality.  --  To begin with, one of the reasons there are so many madrasas in Pakistan is that there has been a "near collapse of government schooling" there.  --  As for their ideological role, Dalrymple writes that in general "the link between madrasas and international terrorism is far from clear-cut, and new research has been published that has challenged the much-repeated but intellectually shaky theory of madrasas being little more than al-Qaeda training schools."  --  In fact, "a number of recent studies have emphasized that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between madrasa graduates -- who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication -- and the sort of middle-class, politically literate global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world.  Most of these turn out to have secular and technical backgrounds.  Neither bin Laden nor any of the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on America or Britain were trained in a madrasa or was a qualified alim, or cleric."  --  The media like to portray those carrying out attacks as people with a medieval mindset, but "[a]s the French scholar Gilles Kepel puts it, the new breed of global jihadis are not the urban poor of the third world so much as 'the privileged children of an unlikely marriage between Wahhabism and Silicon Valley, which al-Zawahiri visited in the 1990s. They were heirs not only to jihad and the umma but also to the electronic revolution and American-style globalization.'"  --  The recent study entitled Understanding Terror Networks by Mark Sageman, a former CIA official, concludes that "Islamic terrorism, like its Christian and Jewish predecessors, is a largely bourgeois enterprise."  --  Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are often at cross-purposes with the madrasas:  "[T]here is a growing body of evidence that bin Laden himself actually despises what he sees as the nit-picking juridical approach of the madrasa-educated ulema (clerics)."  --  Madrasas have not, historically, been a den of obscurantism:  "Throughout much of Islamic history, madrasas were the major source of religious and scientific learning, just as church schools and the universities were in Europe.  Between the seventh and twelfth centuries, madrasas produced free-thinking luminaries such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina, and al-Khwarizmi.  They also produced America's bestselling poet throughout the 1990s, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet of love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was trained as a Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught Sharia law in a madrasa in Konya.  It is true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought and spirituality characteristic of the ulema of his day, but he did so as an insider, from within the system."  --  If Westerners were not so ignorant of Islam, they might recognize the absurdity of their notions, for "[i]n the entire Koran there are only about two hundred verses directly commanding believers to pray and three times that number commanding the believers to reflect, to ponder, and to analyze God's magnificence in nature, plants, stars, and the solar system.  The oldest and greatest of all the madrasas, the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good claim to being the most sophisticated school in the entire Mediterranean world during the early Middle Ages.  Indeed the very idea of a university in the modern sense -- a place where students congregate to study a variety of subjects under a number of teachers -- is generally regarded as an innovation first developed at al-Azhar.  In The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, George Makdisi has demonstrated how terms such as having 'fellows' holding a 'chair,' or students 'reading' a subject and obtaining 'degrees,' as well as practices such as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even mortar boards, tassels, and academic robes, can all be traced back to the practices of madrasas."  --  It was largely as a response to Western colonialism that in the mid-19th century a less enlightened kind of madrasa appeared, and "[i]t was, unfortunately, these puritanical Deobandi madrasas that spread throughout North India and Pakistan in the twentieth century, and that particularly benefited from the patronage of General Zia ul-Haq and his Saudi allies in the 1980s. Ironically, the U.S. also played an important part in this harnessing of madrasas for holy war as part of the Afghan jihad," turning these schools to military purposes.  --  Demands to shut down the madrasas are simply untenable:  "To close them down, without first attempting to build up the state sector, would relegate much of the population to a state of ignorance.  It would also be tantamount to instructing Muslims to stop educating themselves about their religion, hardly the best strategy for winning the war for Muslim minds." ...

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