According to reports, the Saudi Arabian Embassy
in New Delhi is pushing - somewhat tentatively - India's
Human Resource Development Ministry and Minorities
Commission to set up new madrassas (seminaries)
in India. The same reports claim the Saudi royal family
has cleared plans to construct 4,500 madrassas in
India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka at a cost of
US$35 million, to promote "modern and liberal education
with Islamic values".
The House of Saud sees the
setting up of madrassas as an exercise to correct
the distorted worldwide image of Islam. Crown Prince
Abdullah pulled up the Jeddah-based International
Islamic Council and Riyadh-located World Muslim Council
recently for not having done enough to improve Islam's
image.
But similar attempts to put Islam in the
right light were rebuffed in Europe after the Madrid
commuter-train bombings. China, too, has rejected all
religious donations coming in from abroad. India would
do well to lead South Asia in doing the same. The Saudi
proposal to set up thousands of madrassas in
South Asia comes with a big bundle of cash, and is
admittedly a public relations exercise.
The
Saudi money would be dispersed through nine
Jamaat-e-Ulema organizations in the four countries, and
the project is targeted to take off in February 2005,
reports indicate. It is difficult to fathom New Delhi
acceding to the Saudi request. Presently, there are an
estimated 35,000 madrassas in India, big as well
as small, with an enrollment of about 1.5 million. Most
of these have remained attractive to the poor as they
provide free education. But the madrassas were
originally meant to be purely religio-cultural
institutions aimed at preserving and propagating Islamic
traditions. They are no longer centers of knowledge and
excellence, now enmeshed in the grip of orthodoxy and
conservatism.
This presents a clear security
problem for India and other South Asian governments. No
one can deny that a large number of Islamic militants
using violence to impose Islamic laws in Afghanistan
came from madrassas set up in Pakistan. The
Pakistani authorities themselves no longer consider the
students of these madrassas to be law-abiding
Islamic students.
Madrassas in
India Indian madrassas are not a part of
mainstream politics, unlike their Pakistani
counterparts. But India has a large pool of deeply
disgruntled Muslims, who feel alienated and victimized
by the majority Hindus. The Hindu-Muslim relationship,
deeply affected by the violent partition of the nation
in 1947, got another serious jolt in December 1992 with
the demolition of the Babri masjid in Ayodhya.
Demolition of this mosque by a large group of
anti-Muslim militants sent shockwaves throughout the
Muslim community in India and beyond. The act of
demolition was orchestrated by a group of Hindu
political-extremists; but it was backed by a
socio-political grouping that chose to use religious
militancy as a front in its quest to emerge as a
political party of substance in the post-Cold War India
- namely the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The
demolition of the Babri masjid weakened India's status
as a secular nation and made it a breeding ground of
religious orthodoxy. The proliferation of
madrassas in India in the years that followed
acted to link India to the increasingly growing militant
political agenda of Muslims. Significantly, a large
number of madrassas have been set up in the
Indian states of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and
Tripura, as well as in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. With the
exception of Uttar Pradesh, and to a certain extent,
West Bengal, these states all have poor law and order
records and are affected by violent insurgency
activities. According to Indian intelligence authorities
in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the Central
Bureau of Investigation, some of these madrassas
were used by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) organization to indoctrinate young, impressionable
minds for future terrorist activities against a "Hindu"
state.
The madrassas in today's Pakistan
and Bangladesh, as in India, represent the legacy of the
spectacular resurgence of Islamic religious education in
India during the late 19th century, beginning with the
establishment of the Deoband madrassa in 1867.
Since then, the madrassa system has played an
important role in preserving the orthodox tradition of
Islam in the wake of the downfall of Muslim political
power by training generations of Islamic religious
scholars and functionaries; by providing vigorous
religio-political leadership; and, more importantly, by
reawakening the consciousness of Islamic solidarity and
the Islamic way of life among the Muslims of South Asia.
Unstable Nepal In Nepal, bordering
India, a full-blown Maoist movement menaces the Hindu
kingdom-nation. Nepal has a small number of Muslims who,
as records show, have not participated in the violent
Maoist uprising in western and central Nepal.
Nonetheless, reports indicate that the Nepalese
government has begun regulating madrassas amid
growing concern that these institutions might be fanning
radicalism in the country. Those running the religious
schools, however, insist that such fears are erroneous.
Some analysts believe the government's decision to
monitor madrassas in Nepal was a decision
influenced by New Delhi.
Following the hijacking
of Indian Airlines Flight 814 in 1999 by Taliban-linked
Islamic militants from Kathmandu, Indian intelligence
has come to the conclusion that Pakistan's ISI has built
up its capabilities inside Nepal. The ISI has
established linkages with the Muslims of Nepal, and
funding for various anti-India activities are channeled
through these Nepali Muslims, who receive foreign
funding to run their madrassas. Although not much
direct evidence has been presented yet to justify this
conclusion, it has been widely accepted in India that in
many countries, particularly in Pakistan and Bangladesh,
Islamic militants were funded by foreign charitable
organizations through madrassas. One such group,
Pantech, based in Pakistan and engaged in establishing
madrassas in Nepal, has been identified as an ISI
front group.
Indian security authorities are
also keeping a wary eye on the growth of Islamic
fundamentalism in Bangladesh. A number of radical
Islamic groups function in Bangladesh under the rubric
of the Jamaat-e-Islami. But Indian authorities are
particularly concerned that these Islamic militants have
joined hands with the insurgents of northeast India. The
purpose of this alliance between the Islamic militants
and non-Islamic insurgents of northeast India, Indian
authorities believe, is a design formulated by
Pakistan's ISI to further weaken New Delhi's writ over
northeast India. RAW points out that Pakistani terrorist
outfits such as Hizbul Jihad-e-Islam have been implanted
in Bangladesh by Pakistani intelligence groups to speed
up a violent anti-India Islamic militant movement. RAW
correlates the spurt in the growth of madrassas
in Bangladesh with such anti-India activities.
Growing fundamentalism in
Bangladesh On the other hand, the growth of the
madrassa system in Bangladesh is not wholly
unexpected. A poor country, Bangladesh currently spends
only 2.2% of its gross domestic product on education.
The level of academic competency achieved in
madrassas, however, is much lower than that of a
formal school, this supports the belief of many that the
madrassas do not equip their students for a
productive life. Instead, in the present-day context,
they churn out orthodox religious students who remain
extremely vulnerable to the appeals of Islamic
militancy.
While there is no doubt that
Bangladesh is becoming increasingly fundamentalist, the
exact role of madrassas is difficult to
ascertain. Nonetheless, it is certain that Saudi
Arabia's goal is to spread the more orthodox variety of
Sunni theology, known as Wahhabism, throughout the Sunni
world. Saudi Arabia has spent oodles of money to achieve
this objective all over the Islamic world, particularly
where Sunnis dominate. There is compelling evidence that
suggests that some, if not most, of the money spent by
various Saudi outfits to spread Wahhabism ends up
financing militancy and terrorism. As a result,
following September 11, funds moving out of Saudi
organizations to various religious institutions,
including madrassas, have been monitored
carefully.
Recent reports by Western
intelligence sources splashed all over the media stated
clearly the role of some Islamic charities, such as the
Global Relief Foundation that operated within the United
States prior to September 11 and was suspected of
helping the terrorists against the US. Much of Global
Relief's funds came from Saudi Arabia.
Another
Saudi government-supported charity, al-Haramain Islamic
Foundation, is now under the US Treasury Department's
scrutiny. Once it operated in 50 countries, providing
health care and welfare assistance, and proselytizing
for Wahhabism. In March 2002, the US Treasury designated
al-Haramain offices in Somalia and Bosnia as financiers
for terrorists. Washington forced the Saudis to shut
them down. As reports began to trickle out, it became
evident that financial support to the Chechen refugees
from al-Haramain, and approved by both Saudi Arabia and
Russia, was in reality diverted to support the
mujahideen as well as Chechen leaders affiliated with
al-Qaeda networks. Subsequently, one by one,
al-Haramain's branches in Africa, Asia and Europe were
identified and closed. But reports indicate that
al-Haramain functions undisturbed in Bangladesh.
Ramtanu Maitra writes for a number of
international journals and is a regular contributor to
the Washington-based EIR and the New Delhi-based Indian
Defence Review. He also writes for Aakrosh, India's
defense-tied quarterly journal.
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2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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