Registration of seminaries

The clerical establishment has long, and mostly successfully, fought off any attempt by the state to regulate madrassas and makatib across the country. The National Action Plan (NAP) may be about to change that as registration and monitoring of curriculum in these establishments is one of the 20 key action points within the NAP. It has now emerged that there are thousands of seminaries with around 300,000 students on the rolls that have never been registered with the Ittehad-e-Tanzeemat-e-Madaris Pakistan. There is no record of who founded them, using what money from what source, and no oversight of what is being taught within them. With the government attempting to grapple with the Hydra of extremism and terrorism, that has to be a matter of grave concern. In Islamabad alone, there are 31 unregistered madrassas and every one of them is built on encroached land, meaning that at least in theory, the Capital Development Authority is entitled to raze them to the ground as it chooses. Even the Jamia Hafsa, adjacent to Lal Masjid, has failed in the basic registration criteria.

Officials who are seeking data on madrassas have found that those operating in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa refused to cooperate with them. Some members of the seminary boards had themselves refused to comply in respect of regulating their syllabus — a refusal that dates back to the Musharraf era, whose government was the last one to make any attempt to regulate madrassas. If the nettle of registration and moreover regulation of the contents of curricula is finally being grasped, then it is much to be welcomed. The clerical establishment can no longer expect to operate without greater transparency and accountability. They — for better or worse — educate millions of children and the state is right to require that a uniform standard of education is imparted to them. The religious political parties have protested loudly that they are being ‘victimised’. They would protest at any attempt to bring order to dangerous chaos and are best ignored. Register or close, and demolish those on encroached land. Now is not the time for soft options.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 10^th,  2015.

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