ISLAMABAD, Dec 3: ‘Madrasah reform’, which disappeared from the national agenda after Gen Pervez Musharraf quit the scene four years ago, resurfaced at the launch of a book, Madrasah Reform and State Power in Pakistan, here on Monday. Author Sultan Ali's remark, at the outset of his researched work, that “reforming madrasahs in Pakistan actually means reforming the entire society” interested the scholars and experts invited to the launch by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS), a political foundation of Germany.

“We did not initiate his research,” FNS director Olaf Kellerhoff informed the gathering introducing the author. FNS was approached to help publish the book, which it did, he said.

Dr Hugh van Skyhawk, who supervised Ali's MPhil thesis at the Quaid-i-Azam University, traced the history of madrasah system as it evolved in the Indian subcontinent over the centuries. British colonialists were amazed at the Muslim people spurning modernity and standing “aloof in pride and poverty”, he said.

However, changed times demand new interpretation of the Islamic concepts through Ijtihad, he said.

Poet Iqbal at the intellectual level, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah at the political level, recognised that and said so in conceiving the idea of Pakistan and founding the state, he noted. Both wanted the Muslim society rid of elitism and rigidity and promote the spirit of tolerance.

It fell to Gen (retired) Asad Durrani, a former ISI chief and ambassador to Germany, and Khalid Masood, the head of the Islamic Research Institute at the International Islamic University Islamabad, to evaluate the book more deeply and make the most telling remarks on the subject it deals with.

“But for the madrasahs, one whole Afghan generation would have gone uneducated,” declared Gen Durrani. Almost 90 per cent of the Taliban leadership had gone through liberal curriculums, he said.

Before 9/11, about 17 per cent of the militants came from the madrasahs and the rest from the secular system. But 9/11 changed everything and the focus of Western critics again came on the madrasahs, he said.

Gen Durrani found the religious-secular percentages in a Pakistan police report on the 12,500 madrasahs in Pakistan while researching for his speaking assignment at a seminar on New Forms of Terrorism held in Germany in late 1997. The seminar organisers were worried about cyber terrorism in the future.

“Give computers to madrasah students and every cyber crime today would be pinned on the madrasahs in Pakistan,” he said.

Gen Durrani rated the Pashtun militants above the so-called Punjabi Taliban. “So much I can say from history,” the former ISI chief and diplomat said, pointedly recalling the Afghan Taliban’s comment on their Punjabi supporters’ foolhardy attitude to jihad: “They would lead us to doom.”

Gen Durrani has also written the foreword of the book. He notes that the author attributes the failure of attempts to bring the seminaries in Pakistan into the mainstream to “the lack of commitment on the part of the bureaucracy and non-cooperation by the clergy” but “his remark that ‘truth is that there is nothing secular in (the formal curriculum of) Pakistan Studies, English and Urdu’ says a great deal”.

Gen Durrani found Sultan Ali's work rich in historical detail but also “perfunctory” when dealing with the prevailing perceptions.

“The Washington Times and Ahmed Rashid have been profusely quoted as unimpeachable sources but not enough effort has been made to corroborate (or contradict) their narratives through fieldwork or reference to diverse sources”, he said.

Similarly, scholar Khalid Masud noted that “every research comes from a perspective”. Post-9/11 research works presented madrasahs either breeding ground of terrorists or defended them from the perspective of freedom and peace.

Madrasahs enjoyed the status of a service industry under Muslim monarchs but lost that status under the British colonialist rule.

Today they don't need government patronage and so not in its control.

“They have become commercial, some using English as the medium of instruction. They are the new resource centre for some political parties,” said the scholar, observing that “the spirit of preservation is the strongest form of conservatism”.