Madrassas not producing militants: Report

According to a US think tank report madrassas are not fueling militancy in Pakistan. PHOTO: AP

ISLAMABAD: Madrassas in Pakistan are not stoking militancy, a report by a leading US think-tank concluded on Thursday.

The Brookings Institution report says that while religious schools are often cited as a cause of extremism, they “appear not to be a major risk factor”, BBC reported.

The report says that fewer than 10 per cent of Pakistani students attended madrassas. It says that the real cause of militancy is the poor public education system.

Report co-author Rebecca Winthrop, a Brookings fellow, said that the number of militant madrassas was not increasing. She said that most Pakistani parents preferred not to send their children to school at all rather than to enroll them in madrassas. “We should really leave the question of the role of Islam in the Pakistan education system to the Pakistanis to debate. This is not something that I think is fruitful if outsiders – us here in the US – start weighing in on.”

The study found that the most urgent priority was to increase the supply of schools in Pakistan, where a literacy rate of 56 per cent is among the lowest outside of sub-Saharan Africa.

Unemployment is one of the main causes of militancy, the report says.

The researchers said that low enrolment rates were “a risk factor for violence” and that demand for education inside Pakistan “far exceeded the government’s ability to provide it”. “The almost exclusive focus on madrassas as a security challenge – which is especially prevalent in the west – needs to be corrected,” the report said.