Madrassas are not the only parallel system

Before proceeding, let us set the backdrop with a concrete fact.  The overall literacy figure in Pakistan — and this includes the barely literate as well as those who have learnt to read and write their names — is 57 per cent.  The picture is bleak. But it becomes even bleaker when we see the mutual isolation of ‘educated’ Pakistanis. To begin with, a gross classification divides the literate population into three groups which exist in mutual intellectual isolation: liberals, conservatives, and those who have been denied the ability to articulate their own condition or their own bearings in history. But here is a word of caution: the labels ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are only to be roughly employed in this case; they do not necessarily denote clearly thought-out, informed or learned doctrinal positions. The safest thing to assume is that Pakistanis so labeled speak in that particular idiom — whether clearly understood or not — which one finds in the named ideologies or philosophical stances.

But this is a gross classification. As we refine it, we see that the picture becomes messier and messier. The ‘liberals’ are generally — but not exclusively — educated in what in standard parlance would be called ‘modern-secular’ institutions, which comprise of mainstream colleges and universities. Vocal partisans of the mainstream group refer to them charitably and approvingly by descriptive appellations such as “forward-looking”, “rational” and of course, “modern”. The “conservatives”, on the other hand, lying on the periphery in terms of official power and authority, those who have a degree of explicit and often rather unsophisticated ideological rigidity, are generally but not exclusively schooled in madrassas.

It ought to be noted at the very outset that madrassas undertake not only purely academic instruction, offering along with it — now necessarily — a range of professional training for the performance of religious functions. Often misleadingly called “seminaries”, madrassas operate with a consciously forged Islamic identity with a view to generating better Muslims. This leads us to a further taxonomic complication: the three “literate” communities we have identified and loosely labeled — namely, liberals, conservatives and the inarticulates — reflect almost perfectly Pakistan’s socio-economic classes. It is hard to imagine well-to-do businessmen, diplomats, lawyers or ministers even thinking of sending their children to madrassas.

These divisions do not, of course, correspond to any differences in people’s abilities, talents, intelligence or creativity. Nor do these classifications necessarily mark any hierarchy or gradations of what one would call academic or intellectual excellence. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, one of the most formidable scholars of Pakistan, perhaps the most formidable to gain an international reputation, was Fazlur Rahman — himself a madrassa product and son of a madrassa-educated mosque imam. This founder of the famous Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad rose to the stature of Harold H. Swift Distinguished service Professorship of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago and received the prestigious Levi Della Vida award for excellence in scholarship presented by UCLA. In the entire history of Pakistan, no scholar of the humanities trained throughout in an official college or university has so far attained such high academic station. There are other similar cases as well.

In the same vein, we need to understand that vocational work has only recently become the mainstay of madrassas. Traditionally, while the production of this kind of religious service personnel has certainly remained an integral part of the madrassa curriculum, it was not its chief calling. Rather, the main focus had been intellectual, to rear and groom a body of personages we call Ulama. Indeed, certain madrassa-based schools of thought preoccupied themselves exclusively with rational and philosophic disciplines and did not earn their livelihoods as religious functionaries at all. They were primarily thinkers and intellectuals. An eminent case of this rational theoretical trend is the redoubtable Khayrabadi logical-philosophical school, which has all but disappeared and is all but forgotten as well. The writings of Muhammad Qasim Zaman of Princeton and Asad Ahmed of Berkeley are most instructive here.

It ought to be kept in view that a major shift in madrassa focus has taken place in most recent times, particularly after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan at the turn of the 1980s. Today, with a few exceptions, madrassas are not typically generating an alternative intellectual class, a class arising from a non-Western curricular world. They are giving to the society only what may be called vocationally-trained personnel for carrying out rituals and religious services, prepared without any rigorous academic quality control. Small wonder, then, that there exists today a sharp contrast between a university graduate and a madrassa graduate. The latter turns out to be inarticulate in comparison, rather ill-trained, and does not speak in the current idiom of our globalized era.

Given the correlation between socioeconomic status and enrolment in madrassas, the second thing to take note of is this: the ideologies formed in these institutions today, disenfranchised as they are, arise in the context of poverty, powerlessness and often the lack of nurturing family support. In this regard, it is important to keep in view that, unlike mainstream public education institutions and the majority of private ones, a high percentage of madrassas are residential schools charging nominal fees, if at all, providing full board to their student body — and therefore they exercise a more profound and an all-embracing impact on the lives of students. Typically, madrassas are also involved in social work, providing shelter to orphan boys and running free medical clinics. This further deepens the contrast between this peripheral educational-moral world of madrassas and the world of Pakistan’s mainstream educational system.

Furthermore, there exists an apartheid within this apartheid. To begin with, when we come to the mainstream universe, we find two further fissures: on the one hand, public institutions run by the government and on the other hand, a massive parallel body of private institutions, either run by entrepreneurs for making profit or by philanthropists for serving the cause of education.  Moreover, there exist on paper many primary government schools which lack a proper building fit for human use; if they do have buildings of their own, they stand in dilapidated disrepair and abject neglect. The fees charged by many of these public schools in Pakistan are nominal indeed, as they cater to the lowest rungs of the lower middle class. But when we turn to the private primary and secondary schools, more complications arise. Pakistan has a plethora of mainstream private schools, found virtually in very urban alley or in every neighbourhood. The quality, mission and fee structure of these private sector institutions vary enormously. In other words, there exist those private schools whose fee is just a few times larger than those of their public counterparts, while there exist elite academies affordable only by the very wealthy whose fees are as high as a massive 140 times that of a typical government school.

Among these private educational enterprises, one finds those that are barely any better than the public ones. Yet at the same time there are those high-class private schools whose academic quality, discipline, and social training are uncompromisingly rigorous and superior, comparable to any top school in the Western world. The private sector mission varies widely as well: some are run by Christian missionaries, some continue to operate as leftovers from British colonial times. Their products show equally wide variations in the value of their training, their subsequent careers and their ideological leaning.

The apartheid within apartheid goes even deeper. While madrassas and mainstream schools differ entirely from each other in their curricula and testing systems, within mainstream schools themselves there are to be found many incompatible curricular systems, examination mechanisms and certification policies.

When we include madrassas in our rough and broad survey, we observe several different basic educational systems running in Pakistan. If we bear in mind also that madrassas themselves severally follow a whole variety of curricula, with their many rival creed-based leanings, the number of these systems will swell manifold in our reckoning. As we have noted above, in terms of academic quality there exists an intractable complex web with an enormously wide spectrum of gradations within and across the systems.

Out of this chaotic field, four major incommensurable communities vie in the embodiment of Pakistan’s literate minority: the elite English-medium private school graduates; those who emerge from the lower standard Urdu medium government schools; the madrassa-educated community; and finally those inarticulate barely educated crowds who attend the lowest quality academies — whether public, or private or of the madrassa genre. These four groups inhabit what are virtually four different universes — they speak in different idioms, they move in different social groups, the foods they eat and the clothes they wear are dissimilar, and their careers and life aspirations manifest deep class divides. The formal language of one of them, the elite, is English, whereas the language of the rest is the national language Urdu. This is the portrait of a fragmented society.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th,  2015.

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