A troubling report on the failure to reform madrassas–the “breeding grounds for jihad” in Pakistan from Dawn.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has virtually shelved a US-aided, multi-million-dollar plan to reform seminaries considered nurseries of jihad, faced with uncooperative Islamists, as the military cracks down on the Taliban.

The government, allied to then US president George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror,’ initiated the project in 2002 in a bid to introduce a more secular curriculum to madrassas, sensing a homegrown threat from extremism.

It was billed as a policy U-turn after military ruler General Ziaul Haq in the 1980s turned many seminaries into breeding grounds for jihad to help the United States raise a fighting force against Soviet invaders in Afghanistan.

The 2002 project sought to introduce computer skills, science, social studies and English into the overwhelmingly religious curriculum at thousands of seminaries or madrassas catering to the sons of the poor and conservative.

‘We had a huge budget of 5,759 million rupees to provide seminary students with formal education but we could not utilise it,’ education ministry spokesman Atiqur Rehman told AFP.

‘The interior ministry held talks with various madrassas…but many of them refused to accept government intervention,’ said Mufti Gulzar Ahmed Naimi, a senior official in the mainstream Sunni clerics alliance, Jamat Ahl-i-Sunnat.

Full report.

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