Foot of the Classes

Michael Young | January 6, 2004

Husain Haqqani, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written an article on Muslim religious schools, or Madrasas, in Pakistan for Foreign Policy magazine.

Haqqani writes that the Madrasas filled a gap left open by poor Muslim states:

As many as 1 million students study in Madrasas in Pakistan, compared with primary-school enrollment of 1.9 million. Most Muslim countries allocate insignificant portions of their budgets for education, leaving large segments of their growing populations without schooling. Madrasas fill that gap, especially for the poor. The poorest countries, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Yemen, and Indonesia, boast the largest madrasa enrollment.

Haqqani goes on to argue that the religious schools promote a quietist form of Islam, "teaching rejection for Western ways without calling upon believers to fight unbelievers"; but he also believes that the ambient poverty in which they thrive "makes it difficult for the Madrasas to remain unaffected by radical ideas..." Indeed, it was in the Madrasas of Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan that the Taliban movement initially grew.

Is he hopeful that Madrasas can be marginalized? It's a mixed bag:

Legitimizing secular power structures through democracy might reduce the political influence of Madrasas. But that influence is unlikely to wane dramatically as long as Madrasas are home to a theological class popular with poor Muslims. And the fruits of modernity will need to spread widely before dual education systems in the Muslim world will come to an end.

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|1.6.04 @ 1:01AM|#

That's funny, Kevin, I thought the transformation of the average person into a passive client was primarily a project of the nanny staters housed in the Democratic Party.

|1.6.04 @ 1:04AM|#

Holy shit, Kevin! So since I homeschool my kids, I'm no better than the ragheads??!!!

You're spot on about the professionalization, though. Whenever I discuss homeschooling with public school parents, I always pose questions to them about how in good conscience they can leave their kids' education in the hands of total strangers, and do they really know what and how their children are being taught. Their replies usually begin with a variant of, "But those people are professionals..."

Kevin Carson|1.6.04 @ 2:23AM|#

Tom,

Not necessarily--content certainly counts for something. But I'm not sure what the ideological content is in the government schools over there, so there's really no control. I'd guess it's something along the lines of "sit down, shut up, and do what you're told." Anyway, just guessing, I'd expect madrasa alumni to have a higher literacy rate than their government schools' output.

R.C. Dean,

Where do you think the neocons came from? They're (their Scoop Jackson wing, anyway) just Art Schlesinger's "Vital Center" warmed over. You can go back forty years or so and look at the stuff New Class liberals like Adolph Berle and Daniel Bell were saying, and it's hard to tell it from what Irving Kristol is saying now. For that matter, you can read the stuff written at The New Republic (the original New Class venue) during WWI, and it sounds almost exactly like what Bill Kristol was writing about Serbia.

|1.6.04 @ 3:12AM|#

Kevin,

I often hear anti-homeschoolers (and the ignorant) complain about how religious homeschoolers (not us) often have their children memorize parts of the Bible. Hey, I answer, at least those kids can (A) read a book and (B) remember what they read. Both dying concepts in our public schools.

s.m. koppelman|1.6.04 @ 8:36AM|#

I guess this is what happens when you leave education to market forces.

|1.6.04 @ 9:00AM|#

More sweat shops!
Fewer Madrasas!

|1.6.04 @ 9:47AM|#

So which is it - do the madrasas promote a quietist form of Islam, or are they incubators for the Taliban and the like? He seems to be trying to have it both ways.

Kevin Carson|1.6.04 @ 12:48PM|#

s.m. koppelman,

Ironically, I had a similar reaction, but from the opposite viewpoint. It sounds like Haqqani wants to marginalize or discourage self-organized education by the lower classes, and to feed their children into a state educational system that can process them with the state's values.

That's very similar to what happened in England by the end of the nineteenth century: working class education and mutual aid organizations were marginalized or suppressed, and replaced by "professionalized" state services. If you read Kropotkin's chapter in "Mutual Aid" on contemporary Europe, or E.P. Thompson's material on working class organizations, you have to wonder how they did so much without the supervision of a suited authority figure behind a desk.

Those events were part of a much larger phenomenon: the triumph of the New Class, the professionalization of just about every aspect of everyday life, and the transformation of the average person into a passive client.

That last is pretty close, IMO, to the neoconservative vision of "democracy" and the "rule of law." Periodic legitimizing rituals in which you choose which candidates from the elite get to manage your life for you--and between elections, you sit down, shut up, and trust the "proper authorities" to do their jobs.

|1.7.04 @ 2:39AM|#

Let them eat hash cakes.

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