Nursing hatred

Pakistan has started realising the danger of madarsas by the Deobandi path of Islam, says S. Gurumurthy

It is ironical, but true. After Islamabad, the world's only Hindu state, Nepal, is the second hub of Inter-services International (ISI) activity. Something that the Uttar Pradesh government in India realised only after the hijacking of the IC-184 flight from Kathmandu to Kandahar. It realised that its unsupervised borders had become open gates for the ISI to operate through new religious centres that keep coming up overnight on public land.

A drive across the UP-Nepal border districts of Gonda, Balrampur, and Baharaich establishes one thing: that new mosques and mazhars (dargahs) are coming up in unprecedented numbers. So the Uttar Pradesh government passed a law asking those who establish any new place of worship -- whether Hindus or Muslims or Christians take the prior permission of the District Magistrate.And hell broke loose. The `secular' politicians saw a chance to frighten the Muslim mind and reap a harvest of votes. But moving away from India, a look at what is happening in Pakistan is instructive.

A madarsa is a nursery run by Islamic theologians for children. While the Pakistani government has been setting up thousands of madarsas for the last two decades, now it does not know what to do with them. It is attempting to roll back its madarsa agenda. Predictably, this has led to protests. On May 1, nearly a thousand religious leaders angrily reacted to the government's proposal to restrain the madarsas.

Why should Pakistan fear the madarsas? According to a leading Pakistani scholar, ``A network of madarsas was established throughout the country... Together with verses from Koran .. the(se) children were taught to banish all doubts. The only truth was the divine truth... written in the Koran and the hadiths. Virtue lay in unthinking obedience. The aim was clear. These madarsas had a single function. They were nurseries designed to produce fanatics.'' ``The dragon seeds sown in 2,500 madarsas produced a crop of 2,25,000 fanatics ready to kill and die for their faith when ordered to do so by their religious leaders''.

Another scholar said, ``(The) madarsas, religious training schools, breed the Taliban mindset and feed the mills of Islamic fundamentalism and militancy''. And a third scholar adds, In the madarsas ``children are indoctrinated in the military tactics of Jihad''.

These details are contained in the book On the Abyss - Pakistan after the Coup, a compilation of the views of 11 scholars on Pakistan.

The syllabus for these madarsas originated in India, in Uttar Pradesh. More importantly, from Deoband in the state, which has nurtured Deobandi Islam. The Deobandis have been consistently working to remove each and every little pre-Islamic habit in converts to the religion, particularly habits which linked and reminded them of their past. This they have accomplished by issuing fatwas, or religious edicts, asking Muslims to give up links with the Kafirs. This process is continuous, as writer V.S. Naipaul says in his famous book Beyond Faith. It continues till the convert is made to forget his past, his history and his forefathers. And till an unbridgeable divide is created between the converts and their mother society.

For the hardware of terrorism, the software is from Deoband. Another Indian Islamic school, known as Barelvi, promotes a syncretic Islam, which is basically an Arabic faith that preaches co-existence with local cultures. But the Barelvis have virtually lost out to the Deobandis in India as well as in Pakistan.

According to authors mentioned in In the Abyss, the Deobandis have gained ascendancy over all others (page 25, 96-99); they want even the Shias to be declared as heretics and physically exterminated; the Taliban movement is inspired by the Deobandi faith (p 94); the Deobandi militias are waging the low-cost war in Kashmir (p 94); even its usual dissenters are veering round to a consensus based on the Deobandi faith (p 95); the Taliban jurisprudence based on the Deobandi faith is becoming popular in Pakistan (p 96); the Deobandi faith forms the soul of the Talibans in Afghanistan, Harkal-ul-Mujahiddeen and Laskhar-e-Toiba in Pakistan and Osama Bin Laden's outfit (p 96-99).

And according to the latest report of the US State Department Patterns of Global Terrorism, ``The United States has urged Islamabad to close down certain madarsas, or religious schools, that actually serve as conduits for terrorism''.

What the US fears and what Pakistan is frightened about are revered symbols of secularism in India. Here, nobody can discipline them, much less close them down as the US has asked Pakistan to do, and as Pakistan itself wants to do. Many of them are merchants of violent ideas within and without Islam, as they are in Pakistan. Unlike places of worship like a mosque or mazhar, they carry far more respectability as they are `educational' institutions.Pakistan has realised this, but late. It has already started to pay the costs. Perhaps we too will start paying a higher cost in the near future.
 

Back                          Top