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20  c h a p t e r 1 Madrassahs little known, much discussed Although none of the nineteen hijackers who rammed passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 came from Islamic educational institutions, media attention turned to madrassahs immediately after the terror attacks. The U.S. media insisted that Islamic religious schools were partly to blame, for they instill hatred in the minds of young people who later become the recruits of terrorist organizations. The so-called War on Terrorism launched by the U.S. administration in response to the tragic events of 9/11 instantly identified madrassahs as one of the principal battlegrounds. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times reporter and analyst, after visiting the now-infamous madrassah in Peshawar where Taliban leaders including Mullah Omar had been schooled, wrote on 13 November 2001 that “the real war for peace in this region . . . is in the schools.”1 George Tenet, then director of the CIA, commented on 9 March 2002 before the Senate Armed Services Committee that All of these challenges [the connection between terrorists and other enemies of this country; the weapons of mass destruction they seek to use against us; and the social, economic, and political tensions across the world that they exploit in mobilizing their followers] come together in parts of the Muslim world, and let me give you just one example. One of the places where they converge that has the greatest long-term impact on any society is its educational system. Primary and secondary education in parts of the Muslim world is often dominated by an interpretation of Islam that teaches intolerance and hatred. The graduates of these schools—madrasas—provide the foot soldiers for many of the Islamic militant groups that operate throughout the Muslim world.2 In a similar vein, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked in a memo on 16 October 2003, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more madr assahs 21 terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”3 Rumsfeld’s concerns were echoed by his deputy Paul Wolfowitz in the same week. In a speech at Georgetown University on 30 October 2003, Wolfowitz described madrassahs as “schools that teach hatred, schools that teach terrorism” while providing free, “‘theologically extremist’ teachings to ‘millions’” of Muslim children. The above comments of three prominent U.S. officials demonstrate that the link between madrassahs and terrorism has become a matter of serious concern for the administration. They also demonstrate that the relationship between madrassah education and terrorism is being viewed in a very simplistic manner, drawing on perceptions derived from “generalisations and oversimplifications of a complex phenomenon.”4 The most obvious link between terrorism and madrassah education came from the then ruling regime of Afghanistan—the Taliban, who were the products of this type of Islamic education and had been providing a safe haven to Usama bin Laden and his transnational terror network al-Qaeda at the time of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The Taliban, described as followers of an extreme-conservative variant of Islamic thought, grew out of the madrassah education system in Pakistan during and after the civil war in Afghanistan.5 In late 2001, as U.S. forces were driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan , discussions on the means to prevent a recurrence of this phenomenon became a staple of the media. Reporters from around the globe descended on remote places of Pakistan and India to look for the birthplace and spiritual home of the Taliban, and analysts never tired of recommending actions to combat them in the long run.6 This led to extensive media reporting on madrassahs, but in similar fashion, with nearly identical description of the madrassahs and their students: “Spartan classrooms in which children rocked back and forth reciting passages from the Koran” and “common to most of these schools . . . [are] students ’ and teachers’ unwavering support for Osama bin Laden, and their hostility toward the West, Jews, Hindus, and particularly the United States.”7 Thus, in the post-9/11 period, previously little-known educational institutions called madrassahs became a significant part of the public discourse, thanks to extensive media coverage. These institutions were now seen through the lens of global security and judged by recent history—almost in unison from common people to media pundits to policy makers—to be breeding grounds for terrorism. But how did the U.S. policy makers...

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