Under the Drones by Shahzad Bashir & Robert D. Crews

Author:Shahzad Bashir & Robert D. Crews [Bashir, Shahzad & Crews, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Military, Afghan War (2001-), Modern, General, 21st Century, political science, International Relations, World, Asian, Religion, islam, Religion; Politics & State
ISBN: 9780674064768
Google: o1jvYqOkC0YC
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-05-28T00:17:26.922523+00:00

9 / Madrasa Statistics Don’t Support the Myth

Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Over the past few years, U.S. and international foreign policy concerns have focused on the rise of extremism in the Islamic world. Pakistan, considered pivotal in the war on terror, is mentioned as a prominent case. There is by now a widespread conventional narrative surrounding the role of the Pakistani educational system in the rise of religious extremism in the country. The general claim is that the public schooling system in Pakistan is failing, especially for the poor. As a result, large numbers are either not enrolling in the state system to begin with or exiting through attrition. Madrasas have proliferated to fill the vacuum as a result of the failure of the Pakistani state and society to provide mainstream schooling opportunities for its children, especially for the poorest segments of the population. This narrative has been presented in the international media and also in policy circles in the United States in many studies. The Af-Pak policy framework developed under the Obama administration has also put particular emphasis on this point.

This narrative is meant to hold true especially in the northwestern province of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. The public imagination has focused on the madrasas as the incubators of the Taliban. In fact, it is Often stated that the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, studied in a madrasa in the North West Frontier Province, now named Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). The fact that the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan are embedded in an integral way in the geography and culture of KPK and are deemed to be the sanctuary of Taliban-led attacks on NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan has meant that the madrasa consistently remains a focus of world attention.

The last population census in Pakistan was conducted in 1998. Pakistan has four provinces—Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), Punjab, Sindh, and Balochistan—and four territories with special status: Azad Jammu Kashmir (AJK), Federally Administered Northern Areas (FANA), Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and Islamabad, the capital territory.1 We have complete data on village characteristics for the four provinces, about 93 percent of the country’s population. Urban areas represent 33 percent of the population. Directly contrary to this general understanding, published and verifiable data sources demonstrate that madrasa enrollment has been quite low across Pakistan.2 Household-level data collected by us in the Learning and Educational Achievement in Punjab Schools project reveal that madrasa enrollment not only was small but also did not follow any consistent pattern across households.3 In fact, there was considerable variation within households in schooling choices and madrasa enrollment. Districts in KPK and Balochistan that border Afghanistan have had slightly higher madrasa prevalence than in the rest of the country. There has been dramatic change in the Pakistani education landscape, but this change is best characterized by a rise in private schooling and not madrasa proliferation.4 These private schools are a grassroots, decentralized phenomenon in large part driven by mom-and-pop entrepreneurs largely unaffiliated with any chains or organizations, religious or otherwise.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.