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Pakistan's Quranic schools churn out cannon-fodder for terrorism

The call to prayer wails. Young boys put aside their study of the Quran to shake out their prayer rugs and kneel, face down, toward Mecca.

For these students, life is simple.

Their days are spent praying and studying the Quran, the Muslim holy book.

But when they leave Pakistan's exploding number of small, private religious schools, they have few skills that will help them get jobs. Many remain unemployed, surviving on occasional manual labour.

Some people believe the schools are creating a growing pool of Pakistanis easily recruited to extremist Islamist causes.

Most of the Quran students come from the poorest families, who send their children because the institutions feed and care for them as well as provide an education.

But the education is often limited. Many of the schools teach only the Quran and stress the responsibilities of Muslims to fight for Islam.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's government tried to reduce government funds to the religiuos schools and current prime minister Nawaz Sharief sought to regulate curriculum. But the efforts were derailed by small right-wing religious parties.

The authorities say nearly 4,000 religious schools are registered in the country, with 540,000 students. But thousands more of unregistered schools are believed to exist, turning out students who go on to fight for Islamic parties in Afghanistan's civil war and may be ready to join other militant movements.

Nasrullah Babaar, who as Pakistan's former interior minister was in charge of the national police, views some religious schools as "hotbeds of terrorism.''

"All this is a carryover from the Afghan jihad (holy war),'' he said in an interview. Now, he said, some graduates are involved in fighting between Shiite and Sunni Muslim groups that has caused hundreds of deaths in recent years.

"The fact is that it affects the entire society ... You can see the result in the sectarian clashes that take place,'' Babaar said. "It wouldn't be happening otherwise.''

Teachers at Markaz-Uloom-e-Islamia, a combination of school and mosque, say they teach their students the Quran and the obligation to fight for Islam at home and abroad.

Such schools graduated thousands of Afghan Mujahedeen, "freedom fighters" who battled the soviet red army in the 1980s in Afghanistan. And now they boast of schooling the men who make up the backbone of the Taliban religious army that has won control of most of Afghanistan in recent years.

"There are not only Afghan Taliban but there are also Pakistan Taliban ... There are no frontiers in Islam,'' said Qari Shabir Ahmed, head teacher at Markaz-Uloom-e-Islamia.

The Taliban authorities have imposed a restrictive vision of Islamic law in Afghanistan that forbids most forms of light entertainment and bars women from working, girls from going to school and men from mingling with women other than their wives.

The Taliban movement works for an Islamic revolution. The religious right wing, while weak in parliament, has traditionally been the catalyst for street demonstrations that have toppled governments.

In Peshawar in September, religious leader Fazle-ur-Rehman warned that his group was ready to lead a revolution. Thousands of banner-waving young men demanding a government based on Islamic teachings massed for Rehman's speech.

At a religious school in Akora Khattak, outside Peshawar, Sami ul-Haq, a Muslim cleric and senator in the upper house of parliament, issued a religious edict threatening to launch a holy war if the government signs the nuclear test ban treaty.

Many militants want the country to continue development of nuclear weapons, both as a deterrent to longtime enemy India and as an equalizer for the Islamic world in its dealings with the West.

For students at the religious schools their commitment is to the Quran. Their teachers tell them that means enforcing their version of Islam with whatever it takes, including violence.

"We are struggling for Islam in Pakistan like in Afghanistan,'' said one 17-year-old student, Abdul Ghaffar. "It is our duty to enforce it using any means.''

UNI

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