Last Friday, the AFR ran an unusual, in-depth feature (“A Radical Education”) on Pakistan’s madrasas (or “terror schools”). (I think the article was first published in the New York Review of Books). Now it’s really difficult to find an article (and such an outstanding read) that looks at Islam’s education system so thoroughly in a way that exposes media misrepresentation.
Again and again we are told by the media that Islam’s education system is to blame for terrorism, or in Bush’s most famous words, the “axis of evil”. Donald Rumsfeld’s memo on the War on Terror made it clear:
Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
There is no doubt that ultra-conservative institutions carrying the banner of terrorism exist. The problem, however, is when generalizations are made that lead to an automatic stereotype of entire Islam. The issue was re-appraised during the aftermath of the London bombings as some of the British Muslim suicide bombers were educated in Pakistan’s madrasas. And because Pakistan’s President, Musharraf, was under (I suspect) enormous political pressure, he banned teaching and literature that “promotes militancy, sectarianism and religious hatred”.
So are madrasas terrorist factories or legitimate learning environments? According to the media, it’s always the former:
The British press has been quick to follow the US lines on madrasas, with the Sunday Telegraph helpfully translating the Arabic word madrasa as terrorist “training school” (it actually means merely “place of education”), which the Daily Telegraph confidently asserted over a double-page spread that the three bombers had all enrolled at Pakistani “Terror Schools”.According to sources at the prime minister’s offices at Downing Street there is in fact no evidence that any madrasa was visited by any members of the cell at any point on their journey. Still less is there any proof that madrasas were responsible for “brainwashing” the trio, as the British press assumed after the bombings.
Apparently, attention seems to be centered on Islamic ideology and its propagation of ‘anti-Western hatred’ in madrasas. This whole issue is intertwined with the media’s reporting on the War on Terror alongside its creation of the ‘Other’. Whether in the US, Britain, or Australia, no one can dispute the fact that the enemy here is terrorism. So the matter transcends the political influence of the media, as Entman defines it (in the reader), and simultaneously jumps on a moral pedestal, defined by cultural/ sociological indicators (as dicussed by Cottle). And the problem when it comes to these implicit and seemingly objective moral dilemmas is that the media will always carry a monopoly of creating a world through its own eyes and accordingly discount Islamic accounts to ultimately maintain the status quo (geez, that sounds so neo-Marxist).
In it is then interesting to contemplate on how the media reports on certain issues from the other side. This has ultimately been made possible through the Al-Jazeera Network. An article, found on their website, for example, drives out dominant myths spread by the Western media (“Islamic schools’ threat ‘exaggerated’”):
Media exaggerationIt said figures reported by international newspapers such as the Washington Post, saying there were 10% enrolment in madrasas.
“It is troubling that none of the reports and articles reviewed based their analysis on publicly available data or established statistical methodologies,” it said.
The research, conducted by Jishu Das of the World Bank, Asim Ijaz Khawaja and Tristan Zajonc of Harvard University and Tahir Andrabil of Pomona College, said “madrasas account for less than 1% of all enrolment in the country”.
“The educational landscape in Pakistan has changed substantially in the last decade,” it said. “But this is due to an explosion of private schools, an important fact that has been left out of the debate on Pakistani education.”
Pakistani officials have maintained that very few madrasas are involved in activities that promote militancy, but Musharraf urged his nation on Saturday to curb misuse of schools.
And media exaggeration seems to be only half the story. Of greater concern are the fine points suppressed by the media. The United States, for example, funded some “notably bloodthirsty madrasa textbooks”. These books, according to the Washington Post (“From US, the ABC’s of Jihad”), are “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings”. Other details shed a positive light on the schools, with some great US academics being madrasa graduates or the promotion women’s empowerment as part of their educational agenda.
I will stop here, but more will soon follow.
