Inside Islam's ''terror schools''

Madrasas are Islamic colleges accused by the US of incubating terrorism and the attacks of 9/11. From Pakistan, William Dalrymple investigates the threat.

Inside Islam's ''terror schools''
Cover story
William Dalrymple
Monday 28th March 2005

In retrospect, the idea that madrasas are one of the principal engines of this global Islamic terrorism appears to be another American assumption that begins to wobble when subjected to serious analysis.

It is certainly true that many madrasas are fundamentalist in their approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the least pluralistic and most hardline strains of Islamic thought. It is also true that some madrasas can be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil violence: just as there are some yeshivas (religious schools) in settlements on the West Bank that have a reputation for violence against Palestinians, and Serbian monasteries that sheltered some of the worst of that country's war criminals, so it is estimated that as many as 15 per cent of Pakistan's madrasas preach violent jihad, while a few have even been known to provide covert military training.

Some have done their best to bring about a Talibanisation of Pakistan: madrasa graduates in Karachi have been behind acts of violence against the city's Shia minority, while in 1998, madrasa students in Baluchistan began organising bonfires of TVs and attacked video shops. In this, however, they have so far had limited success. Indeed, the bestselling video in Baluchistan last year was a pirate tape that showed a senior Pakistani MP in flagrante with his girlfriend. The tape, which had been made by the MP himself, had been stolen by his political enemies and circulated around the province, with the expectation that it would destroy his career. However, so impressive was the MP's performance in the video that he was re-elected with a record majority; I recently met him looking very pleased with himself in Islamabad, where he says the tape has transformed his political fortunes.

It is now becoming clear, however, that producing cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, and the World Trade Center. A number of recent studies have emphasised that there is an important and fundamental distinction to be made between most madrasa graduates - who tend to be pious villagers from economically impoverished backgrounds, possessing very little technical sophistication - and the sort of middle-class politically literate global salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular, scientific or technical backgrounds and very few actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200503280010

...letting facts confuse the issue. :hi:

What some may see as zigzag may well turn out to be tacking against the wind!

;-)