Asians take a closer look at Islamic schools
International Herald Tribune
February 12, 2002
Michael Richardson 

Without warning, a phalanx of riot police and plainclothes officers descended on a school for about 200 young children in a lush oil palm estate in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, adjacent to Singapore. The raid, on Jan. 3, led to the closure of the Islamic school, or madrasa, which Malaysian authorities say was linked to a group of Muslim extremists.

The school is alleged by officials to have been teaching students to hate the Malaysian government and preparing them to fight a jihad to establish an Islamic state, or theocracy, in Malaysia, where about a third of the 23 million-strong population is non-Muslim.

"They took away the principal," said a staff member at the former school. "After that, parents pulled their children out and the teachers also left."

Across Asia in countries that have significant Muslim communities, governments, intelligence services, law enforcement agencies and the military are taking a long, hard look at Islamic religious education following the terror attacks on the United States on Sept. 11 and the resulting international campaign against terrorism.

Starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the campaign has produced an ever-growing trail of evidence linking the indoctrination programs of some madrasas to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, which is blamed by the Bush administration for the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September, as well as earlier bombings of U.S. targets in Africa and the Middle East.

Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia said recently that he was concerned about Malaysians studying Islam in Pakistan and possibly other countries because some forge links with Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime and Al Qaeda to learn about weapons, bomb-making and the tactics of war.

Mr. Mahathir said a number of extremists arrested in recent months in Malaysia had been schooled in Pakistan's madrasas and received terrorist training in Afghanistan.

Thousands of students from Southeast Asia, as well as Central Asia and the Balkans, have attended Pakistani madrasas, officials say.

Many ethnic Malay Muslim families send their sons to religious schools out of piety, with some paying for a religious education abroad in the well-known madrasas of Pakistan and Egypt.

But as part of a crackdown on Islamic militants, Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, announced new measures last month to rein in the estimated 6,000 to 8,000 madrasas, particularly what he called the minority of such religious schools that "propagate hatred and violence" and produce only "semiliterate religious scholars." The Pakistani government is requiring all Islamic schools to register with the authorities, teach courses in modern subjects along with the Koran, and restrict foreign students and teachers sharply.

Long unregulated, Pakistan's madrasas offered free board, accommodation and education for hundreds of thousands of local children, mainly boys, from poor families who could not otherwise afford to send their sons to school in a country with a weak public education system.

This pattern has been replicated in many other parts of Asia, officials said, although they emphasized that most of the religious schools are a vital part of local education and have modernized their teaching to cover not just the study of Islamic values and rules, but secular subjects such as mathematics, computer studies and European languages.

Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, has many thousands of religious schools, including boarding schools known as pesantrens.

These schools have come to play an even more important role in national education in the past few years as an economic slump and shortage of government funds have undermined the public school system.

Indonesian officials insist that the vast majority of pesantrens are breeding grounds of tolerance and peace, not hatred and violence.

"We won't let a wayward few destroy tens of thousands of pesantrens that have brought peace to this country for ages," said Mohammed Irfan, director of Islamic religious schools at Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs. "We do not see any worrying sign. We will not intervene because intervention will only breed distrust."

Schools for Thailand's Muslim minority have never taught anyone to be violent, said Naiem Wongkasorn, a spokesman of Anurak Moradok Islam, a Thai Muslim education group.

But many other Asian countries are no longer taking an unconcerned, hands-off approach. "Basically, the children are taught to fight for Islam," said one official in the Catholic-dominated Philippines, which has around 1,500 madrasas for its Muslim minority. - China is strengthening controls over Islamic education in the troubled far west province of Xinjiang by standardizing classes for local imams, or priests, Chinese state media reported last month. Singapore's Islamic Religious Council, which administers madrasas in the island-state, said it has been updating its register of religious teachers, or ustadz, following the disclosure by Singapore and Malaysian police that Qaeda cells in both countries were led by a number of people claiming to be Muslim teachers. ''We don't want any Tom, Dick or Harry calling themselves ustadz,'' the council president Maarof Salleh said recently. Singapore and Malaysia both have well developed and widely used public education systems. The Malaysian government said recently that it is considering closing religious nursery schools run by the opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia because they are allegedly being used to indoctrinate hatred of the government and its leaders — a charge denied by Parti Islam. It is the country's biggest opposition party and also governs two of Malaysia's 14 states, In Johor, the state government, an ally of Mahathir's governing multi-ethnic coalition, is reviewing the religious education system to ensure that religion is not used for political purposes and that students can find paid employment after they finish school. ''There must be a balance between religious education and academic knowledge so that students from religious schools will not lag behind in the modern world, especially in their careers and jobs,'' said Johor's chief minister, Abdul Ghani Othman. Michael Richardson is senior Asia-Pacific correspondent of the International Herald Tribune.

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