ISLAMABAD, 25 August 2005 — Pakistani authorities began registering thousands of madrasas yesterday, a move hard-line clerics have vowed to resist.
President Pervez Musharraf launched a drive in 2003 to reform religious schools, or madrasas, some of which are suspected of being breeding grounds for militants, but the effort fell through because of opposition from hard-line Islamist groups.
Last month, he announced a renewed plan to regulate the country’s estimated 12,000 madrasas after revelations that three of the four bombers in the July 7 attacks in London were British Muslims of Pakistani origin, at least one of whom had visited madrasas in Pakistan.
Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led war on terrorism, last week promulgated a law requiring madrasas to register by the end of this year.
He has also said an estimated 1,400 foreign students enrolled in madrasas would be ordered to leave Pakistan and no more would be admitted, but has so far set no deadline for this.
Vakil Ahmed Khan, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Religious Affairs, said the government had distributed forms to madrasas seeking information on their number of teachers and students and details of their income and expenditure and all other related informations.
The forms also urge madrasas to refrain from teaching or publication of literature promoting militancy or sectarian hatred.
“This is a kind of information which no madrasa will want to hide,” Ahmed told Reuters.
The registration began two days after representatives of more than 300 madrasas met in Islamabad and vowed to resist the government order on the grounds that it was discriminatory.
Ahmed said the government had no plans to take action against madrasas which failed to register by Dec. 31.
“There is no punitive provision in the existing law. The government will consider such things after Dec. 31 and not before that,” he added.
Ahmed said the exact number of madrasas operating in Pakistan was not known, but around 6,000 madrasas had already registered with authorities in the past two years.
Madrasas have fulfilled a need in Pakistan by providing free religious education, shelter and food to hundreds of thousands of boys from poor families.
The country saw a spectacular rise in the number of madrasas in the 1980s when the schools, backed by funding from the West and many Arab countries, became recruiting grounds for volunteers fighting Soviet forces in neighboring war-ravaged Afghanistan.
Some madrasas allegedly supplied recruits for the Taleban regime toppled by US-led forces in late 2001 for sheltering Al-Qaeda militants, including Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on US cities.
