Pakistan: Deradicalising Our Universities - by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Last week’s exposure
of a terrorist hive inside Karachi University (KU) prompted a remediation
proposal by the chairman of the Higher Education Commission. His solution: if
parents "switch off TV and internet early at night and send children off
to bed", university students could be shunted away from terrorism. (The
reference to adult students as bachas [children] is not unusual-university-going
adults are generally considered kids incapable of independent thought.)
If flippant, this
proposal trivialises terrorism. But if meant seriously, one fears for the
future. HEC’s current counterterrorism strategy is to establish a
"directorate of students" within universities so that challenges
faced by "students and staff would be registered, analysed and
resolved". Extracurricular
activities-football and cricket chiefly-will supposedly keep students away from
guns and bombs. Should one laugh or cry?
Down the chain of
command it’s no better: Karachi University’s vice chancellor denied
responsibility even after being presented police evidence that a terrorist network
Ansarul Sharia Pakistan (ASP) was operating from KU. The ASP has killed several
policemen and a retired army colonel. But the vice chancellor and KU’s faculty
say terrorism is the security agencies headache, not theirs. Security agencies
disagree, having encountered well-educated terrorists now for many years. The
police chief says the ASP’s head and fellow militants received BSc/MSc degrees
from the applied physics department at KU. Others are from various universities
in Karachi and Balochistan. The unsuccessful assassination attempt on Sindh
Assembly’s leader of the opposition led to one suspected attacker being killed.
He held a PhD. Football and cricket are supposed to keep students away from guns and bombs.
Should one laugh or cry?
GHQ is worried-as it
should be after losing thousands of soldiers in anti-terrorist operations. So
last May ISPR organised a meeting ‘The role of youth in rejecting extremism’.
It was addressed by the COAS and DG ISPR. The COAS demanded “cleansing these
barbarians from their potholes”. Surprisingly, some well-respected liberal
voices were also invited to address the army audience. But disappointingly-judging
from contents posted by ISPR-their meandering analyses did not point to
anything actionable. The exception came from the single invited student speaker
(who I’ll mention later).
Why is terrorism
growing by leaps and bounds in Pakistani universities and colleges? Common
sense-not rocket science or high erudition-is enough for an answer. What must
be done is also pretty clear. First, dismiss the
activist preacher-professor. He wields authority over captive audiences and
broadcasts his message inside classes and outside. Students from various
universities complain that some begin class with long prayer recitations, turn
briefly to whatever technical subject they are paid to teach, and then return
to proselytising. Certain radical websites and Facebook pages are suggested as
follow-ups. How rampant is this?
There’s abundant anecdotal evidence, present and past, but no real data. I got
to know well in the 1980s an activist colleague at Quaid-i-Azam University (I
quite liked this Columbia-educated guy!). A staunch Jamaat-i-Islami member, he
left for jihad in Afghanistan. Little else was known until one day some newspapers
reported his arrest for having facilitated the attack on GHQ in 2009. As with
Ehsanullah Ehsan-the man who oversaw the Army Public School massacre-official
silence means one cannot say exactly what has happened to these individuals.
They may well be thriving.
No less dangerous are
certain ‘motivational’ guest speakers. Brought weekly onto campus by jihadist
professors colluding with sympathetic university administrators, they stir up
students with concocted conspiracy theories and jingoistic hype. Earlier years
saw the fanatical laal topi wala who described Hindus as paleed (unclean), 9/11
as a Jewish conspiracy, and called for eternal war with the West. Presently
popular speakers hide their militancy under a fig leaf. University
administrators-in cases I am aware of-fiercely resist deradicalisation speakers
from visiting their campuses.
Second, the boundary
between religious devotion and religious radicalism is blurry and badly needs
demarcation. While there is deep reluctance to debate religious issues,
ignoring them doesn’t make them vanish. Surely fighting with arguments is
better than with guns. Take the case of
Ansarul Sharia Pakistan. The organisation’s name bespeaks its goal-that to make
Pakistan a Sharia state. Although deemed terrorist, ASP shares this objective
not just with banned organisations like TTP, Al Qaida, and the militant Islamic
State group but also with legal parliamentary parties such as JUI-F and JI.
Indeed, a PEW survey showed 86 per cent of young Pakistanis want Sharia. So, on
democratic grounds, what precisely did ASP do wrong?
Until such questions
are satisfactorily debated, young minds will remain befogged. Universities are
precisely where these debates must happen. Confusion can be reduced through
properly moderated open discussions. Student unions must be unbanned, albeit conditionally. Depoliticisation and
reduction to helpless apathy-such as Mashal Khan’s lynching being left
undiscussed on any campus except at QAU-is not the answer. Consider that KU is
pondering whether to demand a police certification from each new student
applicant. So imagine that a student is interviewed for his political views. He
knows he’ll be in trouble if he says Pakistan should be secular. But after the
ASP crackdown he might now be in hotter water if he says he wants Sharia. His
safest bet is to claim that he is tabula rasa-a blank slate to be written upon
at will. Is such apathy good?
Third, culturally
deprived young Pakistanis are desperate for joy and freedom. The lone student
invited to the GHQ meeting was brilliant. This hijab’ed young woman from
Islamia College (Peshawar) spoke wistfully of a Peshawar that her generation
has never known-one where there were cinemas, sports galas, fun fairs, and
declamation contests. Her dad tells her that doctors from Khyber Medical
College (both females and males) could once set up a fun fair on campus. Yes,
there were music events, theatres, colours, and poetry. Even dancing! Cultural
desertification is now so total that no foreign tourist wants to-or dares-visit.
Nature is said to
abhor a vacuum. The likes of Taliban, Al Qaeda, and IS through their less
violent cousins such as JI and JUI-S are filling the cultural vacuum on
campuses. No, Mr HEC Chairman, please wake up! Sleep is not an option.
There’s real work to be done.
