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‘Dealing with Difference: Religious Education and the Challenge of Democracy in Pakistan’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

MATTHEW J. NELSON
MATTHEW J. NELSON*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XGUK, Tel. 0207-898-4742, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

When is a modern religious education also a modern democratic education? Drawing on research conducted in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (2003–2005), this question is addressed with reference to the views of those who draw upon the resources of local maktabs and madrasas to provide their children with religious and, more specifically, Islamic instruction. Within this group—a group that, I argue, constitutes a clear majority in Pakistan—concerns about religious and sectarian diversity are given special attention. Most parents, stressing the importance of religious unity, conformity, and consensus, believe it's better to ignore these differences ‘for the sake of the nation.’ For those with an interest in combining the terms of Islam, Islamic education, and democracy, however, I argue that these differences cannot be ignored; instead, they must be acknowledged and engaged.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 591 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 See Nelson, Matthew, 2006, ‘Muslims, Markets, and the Meaning of ‘A Good Education’ in Pakistan,’ Asian Survey, 46:5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example, Gutmann, Amy, 1995, ‘Civic Education and Social Diversity,’ Ethics, 105:3, pp. 557–579CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macedo, Stephen, 1995, ‘Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God v. John Rawls,’ Ethics, 105:3, pp. 468–496CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 1995, ‘Multiculturalism for the Religious Right? Defending Liberal Civic Education,’ Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 29, pp. 223–238; Veit Bader, 1999, ‘Religious Pluralism: Secularism or Priority for Democracy?’ Political Theory, 27:5, pp. 597–633; Benjamin Gregg, 2000, ‘Proceduralism Reconceived: Political Conflict Resolution Under Conditions of Moral Pluralism,’ Theory and Society, 31:6, pp. 741–776; and Swaine, Lucas, 2001, ‘How Ought Liberal Democracies to Treat Theocratic Communities?’ Ethics, 111:2, pp. 302–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See also Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1953)Google Scholar.

4 For an account of the research undertaken in 2003, see Nelson 2006.

5 In the context of the interviews, the five definitions of ‘a good education’ were articulated as follows: (a) basic education: ‘Some people say that a good school teaches students how to read and write. In other words, good schools provide students with basic reading skills and basic math skills’; (b) religious education: ‘Some people say that a good schools create good Muslims; in other words, a good school is a school that provides students with strong values and strong religious beliefs’; (c) liberal: ‘Some people say that good schools teach students how to solve problems and think for themselves’; (d) vocational: ‘Some people say that good schools prepare students to find good jobs’; and (e) civic: ‘Some people say that good schools teach students to become good citizens, showing respect for the laws of their country.’

6 See Damis, John, 1974, ‘The Free-School Phenomenon: The Cases of Tunisia and Algeria,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5:4, pp. 434–449CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eickelman, Dale F., 1992, ‘Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies,’ American Ethnologist, 19:4, pp. 643–655CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horvatich, Patricia, 1994, ‘Ways of Knowing Islam,’ American Ethnologist, 21:4, pp. 811–826CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cook, Bradley, 2001, ‘Islam and Egyptian Higher Education: Student Attitudes,’ Comparative Education Review, 45:3, pp. 379–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 When scholars and education-sector reformers hear that parents in Pakistan are inclined to choose a sound religious education for their kids, they're often surprised. At the very least, they find it puzzling that religious schools providing extremely rudimentary educational services could be successful in an increasingly privatized and, thus, an increasingly competitive educational marketplace. In fact, notwithstanding an abundance of convincing cross-national evidence to the contrary—see footnote 6—many scholars assume that local ‘educational’ demands will boil down to specific ‘economic’ demands, completely set apart from the specific question of ‘religion.’ To test this assumption, I decided to take up the notion that private educational choices might amount to carefully considered economic choices. In particular, I asked my respondents if they would be satisfied with their educational options if their children were permitted to choose from among all of the schools currently available in Pakistan ‘except madrasas,’ particularly given the well-known fact (a fact mentioned in the question itself) that ‘madrasa graduates routinely suffer from unemployment.’ In the end, however, 74 percent said that enduring concerns about unemployment notwithstanding, they would not be satisfied ‘without madrasas.’ In fact, every group I met, defined in terms of age, gender, income, and education, included more than 50 per cent who felt that the local madrasa was simply indispensable. This view was particularly prominent among (a) men, (b) younger respondents, (c) those with limited resources, and (d) those with a relatively modest educational background (that is, among the demographic majority).

8 Those who visit their local madrasa on a part-time basis, that is, Groups B1, B3, and B4 (Table 3) rarely self-identify as madrasa students or graduates on survey instruments that fail to inquire about ‘part-time enrolment’ or ‘religious education in the home.’ In fact the religious education of these students tends to remain unreported in the literature.

9 This discovery was confirmed in the context of comparative research involving both Pakistan and Bangladesh. See Nelson, 2008, ‘Religious Education in Non-Religious Schools: A Comparative Study of Pakistan and Bangladesh,’ Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 46:3, pp. 337–361.

10 See Nelson 2008. Andrabi et al. agree that most families are inclined to include both religious and non-religious education in the context of their educational ‘portfolio,’ but they limit this observation to the level of the household, suggesting that, within a given household, it is not uncommon to find one child attending a madrasa and the others enrolled in public or private schools. In many cases, however, this balance extends to the level of individual students; in other words, many students attend both religious and non-religious schools at the same time. Even Andrabi et al. point out that, ‘although the household data can tell us whether a child is enrolled full-time in a madrasa, it cannot tell us if a child goes for an hour on any given day to study the Qur'an.’ See Tahir Andrabi, March 2005, ‘Religious School Enrolment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data,’ Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Working Paper No. RWP05–024; World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3521, p. 4.

11 For a detailed discussion of this policy-oriented literature, see Fair, C. Christine, The Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2008), pp. 1–13Google Scholar. For examples, see Stern, Jessica, ‘Pakistan's Jihad Culture,’ Foreign Affairs (2000), 79:6, pp. 115–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peter Singer, ‘Pakistan's Madrassahs: Ensuring a System of Education not Jihad,’ Analysis Paper 41 (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001); International Crisis Group, ‘Pakistan: Madrassahs, Extremism, and the Military,’ ICG Asia Report 36 (Islamabad, 2002).

12 See Rahman, Tariq, Denizens of Alien Worlds: A Study of Education, Inequality, and Polarization in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

13 See Bergen, Peter and Pandey, Swati, 2006, ‘The Madrasa Scapegoat,’ The Washington Quarterly, 29:2, pp. 117–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Among those with children enrolled exclusively in a madrasa, 80 per cent identified religious education as their top priority. Among those with children enrolled exclusively in a private school, this figure dropped to just 58 per cent. The majority, however, lay in between this 60–80 per cent band. Seventy-three per cent of those with children in a local government school and a madrasa identified religious education as their top educational priority; 62 per cent with children in a private school and a madrasa selected religious education as their top priority. The only outlier involved affluent families with children who studied in a local government or private school and, then, in the afternoon, with a local maulvi at home. Only 51 per cent of this group identified religious education as their top educational priority. Still, each group included more than 50 per cent who felt that religious education should be regarded as a ‘top priority.’

15 For an alternative perspective, see Nasr, S.V.R., 2000, ‘The Rise of Sunni Militancy in Pakistan: The Changing Role of Islamism and the Ulama in Society and Politics,’ Modern Asian Studies, 34:1, pp. 139–180CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also 2000, ‘International Politics, Domestic Imperatives, and the Rise of the Politics of Identity: Sectarianism in Pakistan, 1979–1997,’ Comparative Politics, 32:2, pp. 179–190.

16 Nayyar, A.H. and Salim, Ahmed, The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan (Islamabad: Sustainable Development Policy Institute, 2004)Google Scholar; Saigol, Rubina, ‘Boundaries of Consciousness: The Interface between the Curriculum, Gender, and Nationalism,’ in Khan, N.S., Saigol, R.S., and Zia, A.S, eds., Locating the Self: Reflections on Women and Multiple Identities (Lahore: ASR, 1994)Google Scholar; Saigol, Rubina, Symbolic Violence: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Society (Lahore: SAHE, 2000)Google Scholar.

17 See Nelson 2008. See also Aziz, K.K., The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan (Lahore: Vanguard, 2004)Google Scholar.

18 See Malik, Jamal, ‘Dynamics Among Traditional Religious Scholars and Their Institutions in Contemporary Pakistan,’ in Grandin, Nicole and Gaborieau, Marc, eds., Madrasa: La Transmission du Savoir dans le Monde Musulman (Paris: Editions Argument, 1997), pp. 168–82Google Scholar; Zaman, Mohammad Qasim, 1998, ‘Sectarianism in Pakistan: The Radicalization of Sunni and Shi'i Identities,’ Modern Asian Studies, 32:3, pp. 689–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Ulema in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton, 2002); Syed Vali Reza Nasr, 2000, ‘The Rise of Sunni Militancy’; Yoginder Sikand, March-April 2004, ‘Ecumenism and Islam's Enemy Within,’ Himal South Asia, <http://www.himalmag.com/2004/march_april/opinion_3.htm>

19 ‘In some countries,’ notes Robert Hefner, ‘the resulting fragmentation of authority . . . has pluralized social power and been a force for democratization.’ But in others, ‘the struggle has often abetted the ascent of a “neofundamentalism” hostile to pluralism.’ In fact, he notes, ‘religious politics in Muslim countries today often lead to heightened demands for a unitary profession of the faith.’ ‘Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 27 (1998), pp. 91–92. For Hefner, these demands for a unitary profession of the faith tend to proceed ‘from above,’ provoking calls for pluralism ‘from below.’ My research indicates that these demands for a unitary profession of the faith emerge ‘from below’ as well.

20 As Tariq Rahman points out, ‘there was much more acrimonious theological debate among the Shi'as and Sunnis and among the Sunnis themselves during British rule than is common nowadays. . . . The followers of the main debaters sometimes exchanged invectives and even came to blows,’ he writes, ‘but [they] never turned to terrorism as witnessed in Pakistan's recent history.’ Denizens, p. 85. Today it seems that discussion and debate are actively discouraged, leading to ‘politics by other means’ (violence). In fact a persistent failure to ‘acknowledge the elephant in the living room’ appears to be closely related to the scourge of sectarian violence.

21 For a more detailed account of ikhtalaaf, or difference, in Islam and the problems associated with it, see Taha Jabir al ‘Alwani, ‘The Ethics of Disagreement in Islam’ (Herndon, VA: The International Institute of Islamic Thought) <http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/humanrelations/alalwani_disagreement/>

22 See also Peletz, Michael G., ‘Islam and the Cultural Politics of Legitimacy: Malaysia in the Aftermath of September 11’ in Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Hefner, Robert W., ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 240–272Google Scholar. According to Peletz, ‘there is a strong current throughout the entire Muslim community in Malaysia that questioning any aspect of Islam could well lead to divisions within the ummah, and that exposing or widening divisions of the latter sort amounts to “letting down the side” and thus an erosion of Muslim . . . sovereignty, which is necessarily tantamount to treason.’ In other words, he notes, ‘there is an overdetermined reluctance to debate the ontological status of apostasy and many other issues linked to religion,’ p. 261.

23 See also al-Azmeh, Aziz, ‘Populism Contra Democracy: Recent Democratist Discourse in the Arab World,’ in Salame, Ghassan ed., Democracy without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Taurus, 1994), pp. 112–129Google Scholar.

24 When a colleague (Christopher Candland, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College) prepared a questionnaire with questions regarding sectarianism on it, the photocopier in Islamabad simply removed those questions. Apparently, the photocopier felt that these questions regarding sectarianism should not be asked. See comments made during a panel devoted to ‘Madrasa Education in South Asia’ (San Francisco: Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, 9 April 2006).

25 See also Peletz, pp. 264–265.

26 See Khaled Ahmed, ‘Deoband-Barelvi War Amid Clerical Lying,’ The Daily Times (Lahore), 23 May 2006; see also ‘Sorry, Your Extremism is Showing,’ The Daily Times, 12 May 2006; ‘How We Deny Sectarianism and Then Pay for It,’ The Daily Times, 4 September 2006.

27 See Peletz, p. 263.

28 Khaled Ahmed, ‘Deoband-Barelvi War’; Imtiaz Ahmed, ‘Sectarian Menace and Perpetual Denial,’ The News (Islamabad), 18 April 2006, p. 1.

29 The term fitna is widely used, often with reference to the emergence of bitter sectarian rivalries following the death of the Prophet Mohammad in 632CE; the assassination of the second caliph Uthman in 656CE; and, finally, the martyrdom of Hussein, the son of the fourth caliph Ali, in 680CE. See Kepel, Gilles, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

30 For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see McDonough, Kevin, 1998, ‘Can the Liberal State Support Cultural Identity Schools?’ American Journal of Education, 106:4, pp. 463–499CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also D.G.L, 1985, ‘The Myth of Religious Neutrality by Separation in Education,’ Virginia Law Review, 71:1, pp. 127–172. For an attempt to spell out the terms of religious regulation in keeping with the terms of religious pluralism, see Sacken, Donald M., 1988, ‘Regulating Nonpublic Education: A Search for Just Law and Policy,’ American Journal of Education, 96:3, pp. 394–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maimon Schwarzschild, 1988, ‘Value Pluralism and the Constitution: In Defense of the State Action Doctrine,’ The Supreme Court Review, pp. 129–161. For concerns about the effect of ‘too much’ pluralism, see Wilkinson, J. Harvie III, 1995, ‘The Law of Civil Rights and the Dangers of Separatism in Multicultural America,’ Stanford Law Review, 47:5, pp. 993–1026Google Scholar; Blacker, David, 2000, ‘Proceduralism and the Orthodox Backlash against Students’ Rights,’ American Journal of Education,’ 108:4, pp. 318–355CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See Government of Pakistan, December 2006, ‘Education in Pakistan: A White Paper,’ pp. 53–54.

32 See Marty, Martin, When Faiths Collide (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 70, 76–81Google Scholar.

33 This reconceptualisation of the relationship between Islam and civic pluralism has been articulated by different scholars in different ways. See, for example, Mohammad Allama Iqbal, 1934, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Oxford); Rahman, Fazlur, 1982, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)Google Scholar; 2000, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism, Ebrahim Moosa, ed. (Oxford: Oneworld); Abdolkarim Soroush, 2000, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (Oxford); Abdulaziz Sachedina, 2001, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford), Khaled M. Abou el Fadl, 2001, And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses (Lanham, MD: University Press of America); and so on.