The Education War ─ Abolish Fanatical Madrassas
America has to lead the “education war” to teach, advocate and promote democracy and the ideals of the Founding Fathers globally. Especially in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. America must teach the benefits of a constitutional secular democracy as practiced in Turkey, Indonesia and India. Although secularism is losing ground in Indonesia’s new democracy to mobs manipulated by Islamic fundamentalists.
These are countries that have avoided, for the most part, extreme Muslim terrorists because of their secular democratic institutions. India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, is also the world’s largest democracy ─ a thriving secular democracy at that. When compared to neighboring Pakistan, with a smaller Muslim population that educates its children in religious madrasses, the contrast in economic and political development between a secular democratic education and a religious totalitarian education become self-evident.
Madrassas are a hotbed of extremism in Pakistan and Indonesia and must be abolished.
Indonesia is a case study of mosques or schools built and paid for by Saudi Arabia. All the terrorists involved in the Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people in 2003 and 2005 Marriot hotel bombing in Jakarta, were graduates of pesantrens, private Islamic boarding schools. The Al-Mukmin, a pesantren situated in the sleepy village of Ngruki on the outskirts of Solo city is a no frills spartan institution that instills a sense of rigid austerity in 10-16 year olds, seven days a week for most of the year.
In Pakistan, there are more than 10,000 madrassas and they educate an estimated 1.7 million students, while public school enrollment is some 25 million. Most madrassas are still unregistered, their finances unregulated and the government has yet to remove the holy warrior and sectarian content from their curriculum. The standoff in the late spring of 2007 in Islamabad at the Red Mosque, the city’s oldest mosque, between clerics who want to topple the government and army reflects just how widely religious extremism has become. The army will remain in control. President General Pervez Musharraf won’t the minute the army abandons him for its own political survival. Pakistan’s three previous military rulers exited from power under unhappy circumstances, which does not bode well for Musharraf.
Pakistan did deport 1,400 foreign madrassa students and vowed to add science, math and other academic subjects to the schools’ almost wholly religious curriculum, which Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s military dictator, said contributed to a “jihadi culture” in Pakistan. Sounds like the only people who can add up in Pakistan are the military and they learn that at Sandhurst, the elite British college.
Serving for centuries as a main source of learning in Islamic countries, madrassas mushroomed in Pakistan during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Funded by Saudi money and backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, many of these madrassas were turned into recruitment centers for producing thousands of foot soldiers to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and later, the Indian security forces in Kashmir, and now in India itself as the bombings in New Delhi and Mumbai demonstrated, and the U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The teachers at the madrassas reject democracy because it subjects the will of God to popular opinion. Yet for terrorism to be eradicated, its supply of fanatically trained religious extremist foot soldiers has to be stopped and the existing ones have to be able to participate in fair and open democratic elections, so that their anger and frustration can be vented through peaceful means.
These are countries that have avoided, for the most part, extreme Muslim terrorists because of their secular democratic institutions. India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, is also the world’s largest democracy ─ a thriving secular democracy at that. When compared to neighboring Pakistan, with a smaller Muslim population that educates its children in religious madrasses, the contrast in economic and political development between a secular democratic education and a religious totalitarian education become self-evident.
Madrassas are a hotbed of extremism in Pakistan and Indonesia and must be abolished.
Indonesia is a case study of mosques or schools built and paid for by Saudi Arabia. All the terrorists involved in the Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people in 2003 and 2005 Marriot hotel bombing in Jakarta, were graduates of pesantrens, private Islamic boarding schools. The Al-Mukmin, a pesantren situated in the sleepy village of Ngruki on the outskirts of Solo city is a no frills spartan institution that instills a sense of rigid austerity in 10-16 year olds, seven days a week for most of the year.
In Pakistan, there are more than 10,000 madrassas and they educate an estimated 1.7 million students, while public school enrollment is some 25 million. Most madrassas are still unregistered, their finances unregulated and the government has yet to remove the holy warrior and sectarian content from their curriculum. The standoff in the late spring of 2007 in Islamabad at the Red Mosque, the city’s oldest mosque, between clerics who want to topple the government and army reflects just how widely religious extremism has become. The army will remain in control. President General Pervez Musharraf won’t the minute the army abandons him for its own political survival. Pakistan’s three previous military rulers exited from power under unhappy circumstances, which does not bode well for Musharraf.
Pakistan did deport 1,400 foreign madrassa students and vowed to add science, math and other academic subjects to the schools’ almost wholly religious curriculum, which Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s military dictator, said contributed to a “jihadi culture” in Pakistan. Sounds like the only people who can add up in Pakistan are the military and they learn that at Sandhurst, the elite British college.
Serving for centuries as a main source of learning in Islamic countries, madrassas mushroomed in Pakistan during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Funded by Saudi money and backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, many of these madrassas were turned into recruitment centers for producing thousands of foot soldiers to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and later, the Indian security forces in Kashmir, and now in India itself as the bombings in New Delhi and Mumbai demonstrated, and the U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The teachers at the madrassas reject democracy because it subjects the will of God to popular opinion. Yet for terrorism to be eradicated, its supply of fanatically trained religious extremist foot soldiers has to be stopped and the existing ones have to be able to participate in fair and open democratic elections, so that their anger and frustration can be vented through peaceful means.
posted by Peter de Krassel's Custom Maid Politics at 9:17 PM
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