Khaled Ahmed - Madrassa as mainstream: Religious seminaries have made literacy toxic in Pakistan
Some retired generals
regularly appearing on TV in Pakistan — the army chief is on record saying they
are not briefed by the army — have been recommending the “mainstreaming” of
religious elements, dubbed “terrorist” at the UN. They presume that the
“mainstream” is “normal” and “harmless”. Some mainstreaming was visible during
the last election which brought Imran Khan’s
Tehreek-e-Insaf to office. The “parties” fronting such madrassas, as the
terrorist-declared Lashkar-e-Taiba, did rather well by cutting into the vote
bank of the rightwing Pakistan Muslim League, which lost the election and was
pilloried for “corruption”.
Notwithstanding the
FATF ban on some madrassa-based non-state actors, the madrassa is powerful in
Pakistan. Because of the decades of “jihad” in Afghanistan, they became
well-funded because their graduates brought home “power” along with the money
from “outside”. One madrassa became so powerful that it took on the state,
General Pervez Musharraf in fact. He took on the Lal Masjid madrassa of
Islamabad which was visited often by “messengers” from the army of Osama bin Laden.
In 2007, after Lal
Masjid attacked massage parlours in Islamabad for being “un-Islamic”, Musharraf
decided to “correct” the madrassa, only to have his commandos killed by the
“mujahideen”. His Operation Silence destroyed the seminary, killed the brother
of Maulana Abdul Aziz, the head of the madrassa, while the “Islamised” people
of Islamabad disliked the Operation. The commando unit that carried out the
operation was attacked by a suicide-bomber at its Haripur headquarters, killing
15 soldiers. Al Qaeda declared the foundation of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan
(TTP) in response to Operation Silence.
The madrassa was
actually “mainstream”; General Musharraf and his army were not. After nearly a
decade, Musharraf went into exile while Maulana Abdul Aziz stayed put, amply
rewarded by a Supreme Court compensatory verdict. In 2017, on the eve of the
election that was to replace the government of Nawaz Sharif, Abdul Aziz
threatened to observe the Martyrs’ Day for “900 innocent girl seminarians”
killed by Musharraf. Backed by the Taliban, he was the most powerful person in
Pakistan. When Islamabad tried to talk “peace” with the Taliban, the latter
chose Maulana Abdul Aziz and Imran Khan as their “vakils” (lawyers)... read more:
