Effort to rein in madrassas begun

Pakistan’s education minister said yesterday that her nation’s campaign to rein in thousands of unofficial Islamic schools, seen as a prime recruiting ground for Muslim radicals, will require a decade or more.

Education Minister Zubaida Jalal also cautioned against an idea floated by some in the Bush administration to funnel private donations to Islamic schools with a pro-Western outlook.

“We are making good progress, but you can’t hope to see real results in just two or three years. It doesn’t happen that way, much as we would all like to see it,” Mrs. Jalal said in an interview.

“We are talking about changing attitudes and mind-sets of children who have 10 to 12 years of schooling ahead of them,” she added.

The network of private Pakistani schools, known as madrassas, became the focus of global attention in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Many prominent Islamic fundamentalist militants, including a large number of senior ministers in the ousted Taliban regime of Afghanistan, were alumni of the Pakistani schools, which received substantial funding from Saudi and other Arab sources and promoted a particularly strict, anti-Western version of Islam.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a leaked memo last month, suggested creating a private foundation to channel funds to pro-Western Islamic schools. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has proposed a similar effort.

When asked about the idea, Mrs. Jalal said: “I would very much hope they wouldn’t do that.”

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in January 2002 announced a wide-ranging effort to revamp the curriculum, financing and oversight of the schools, many of which were formed because the officially sanctioned local public school was either weak or nonexistent.

Mrs. Jalal became Mr. Musharraf’s point woman in the campaign, instantly putting her on the ideological front lines in the global war on terror.

During a brief visit to Washington this week, she had private talks with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca, and senior members of Congress — an unusually high-powered lineup for a visiting education minister.

In an interview at the residence of Pakistan’s ambassador yesterday, she said the campaign against extremist madrassas “has raised a lot of sensitivities in our country.”

Powerful Islamic educational boards, which had grown used to operating with little or no government oversight of their schools, have accused the Musharraf government of bowing to U.S. pressure in the crackdown.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Islamic party with branches across Central and South Asia, charged in a pamphlet last year that “the colonialists are changing Pakistan’s own education system so that Pakistani youth conform to colonialist standards.”

Story Continues →