Religious Seminaries Research Articles

The educated militants of Pakistan: implications for Pakistan's domestic security

This paper presents preliminary findings from a survey of 141 militant households in Pakistan, focusing on the background of slain militants in those households. The militants in the sample are well educated and are not predominantly emerging from Pakistan's religious seminaries as is often suggested. This essay considers Pakistan's policy options and constraints as Islamist militancy looms as Pakistan's single most important security concern. Given that militant groups in Pakistan have been state-sponsored actors, militancy will not go away until Pakistan makes a strategic decision to abandon the use of proxies as tools of foreign policy. However, in recent years, many of these once proxies have turned against the state. Effective policy measures to contain these groups are likely to elude the Pakistani Government, posing great risk to Pakistan, the region and the international community.

Muslim village intellectuals: The life of the mind in northern Pakistan

The findings reported in this article would not have been possible without the help and support of many people in Chitral. Fieldwork in Chitral was conducted with the generous support of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, an ESRC research studentship, and a grant from the British Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has also benefited from sustained and insightful criticism from Dr Susan Bayly, and from four anonymous AT reviewers. Pseudonyms are used for places and people throughout the text. 1 I first lived Chitral as a school-leaver in 1995 and made three subsequent visits before conducting a 20-month period of ‘formal’ anthropological fieldwork in the region between April 2000 and October 2001. This period of fieldwork was followed up by three further shorter stays. 2 The most detailed studies of Pukhtun society are Barth 1959, Ahmed 1983, Lindholm 1982 and Banerjee 2000. 3 There are a number of colonial accounts by British soldier-scholars of Chitral: see, especially, Robertson 1899 and O'Brien 1895. On the region's history, see Parkes 2001. 4 Many Chitral people do, however, understand and speak Urdu; those educated beyond the age of 16 are often also competent in English, and Chitral people who have lived in other regions of the Frontier are often fluent Pashto-speakers. 5 On sectarian conflict in Pakistan, see Nasr 2000. 6 The number of religious seminaries in Pakistan's Frontier Province has increased greatly over the last 20 years; most of these are affiliated to the reformist Deobandi school, and Chitral is a major centre for the recruitment of students for these seminaries (see Malik 1996). On the history and development of Pakistan's madrassah network, see Zaman 2002. 7 In both academic and popular literature, reform-minded Muslims of many different doctrinal traditions are widely referred to as fundamentalists and Islamists. While it is important not to oversimplify, I will employ the term reformist to describe the wide range of ‘bearded ones’ (rigisweni) whom Chitrali villagers and townsfolk see as adherents of strict, reform-minded Qur'anic forms of Islam. Such folk are also referred to as ‘hardened’ (saht), ‘preachers’ (tablighi) and ‘extremists’ (imtihai pasand). 8 Women never attended this mahfil type of musical programme. Whilst women and girls did enjoy listening to local Khowar-language music in the privacy of their own homes, they also often told me that they preferred the more ‘modern’ and lively Hindi film cassettes their male relatives bought in the bazaar for them. 9 On the Jama'at-e Islami, see Nasr 1994. 10 See Kepel 2002.

Media and Information: The Case of Iran

THE election of Mohammad Khatami as president of Iran in May 1997 launched what many of his supporters hoped would be the most ambitious attempt in the Islamic world to bridge the divide between the public and private spheres. In the years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the conservative clerical establishment had systematically eliminated almost all traces of the democratic pluralist currents that had helped feed the original rebellion against the U.S.-backed shah. What is more, they fortified Iran’s traditional political despotism with an equally despotic reading of the Shiite Muslim faith, forcing dissent, debate, and differences of opinion to take refuge behind closed doors. Now the progressive movement that first began to take shape in the early 1990s and which later chose Khatami as its leader aimed to break the conservative clerical establishment’s monopoly on public discourse. The slogans and themes that emerged from the Khatami election campaign—and came to dominate his presidency—reflected many years of discreet discussion in reading circles, on the boards of small specialty journals, and in the halls of the religious seminaries . Their debut on the public stage, in the run-up to the election , was the opening shot in a struggle to reshape society and the state. At first, they decided to run only as a way of introducing their ideas to the public at large. Among their most prominent slogans were promises to introduce the “rule of law,” to foster “tolerance ” for competing ideas and to create a true “civil society” within the Islamic system. SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Fall 2003) Media and Information: The Case of Iran GENEIVE ABDO These goals were extremely ambitious considering Iran’s history of some 2,500 years of autocratic rule. Whether it was clerics in charge of the state, or the elites under the Pahlavi dynasty and its predecessors, public opinion had no role to play in influencing state affairs. Different elements of society did indeed create an otherwise unlikely alliance around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to bring about the 1979 revolution. But this coalition of nationalists , liberal Islamists, secularists, and leftists was soon sidelined as the clerics began to rule the state. The Khatami experiment was designed to address the imbalance between two competing visions of Islamic Iran that emerged in aftermath of the revolution. Was it an Islamic state ruled by the clerics, or a religious republic ruled by the people? In other words, the 1997 election was a resounding vote for enlarging the public sphere at the expense of what had become the private preserve of the ruling conservative clergy. Even in mundane ways, society expressed its desire to come out of hiding. Young men and women began socializing together in restaurants, cafes and parks—which was illegal. Rather than the chador, women began to opt for a more modern form of veiling—a long overcoat and headscarf—and the headscarves began slipping farther and farther from the forehead, revealing more and more hair. But despite society’s readiness to embrace a reform movement, the Khatami effort to establish republican rule was short-lived. Among the many myths about Iran in the United States is the notion that the level of public discourse that occurs—generally criticism of the Islamic state—could never be achieved in an Arab country. The lively debate in Iran, often on display in the press, gives the misleading impression that the potential for a free society is far greater than in most Arab societies. For example, there have always been opposition voices to varying degrees in the Iranian press since the revolution. And there were never official state newspapers such as Soviet Russia’s Pravda. But the roots of ultimate clerical control over the press date back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, when the senior clergy secured 878 SOCIAL RESEARCH for itself final say over freedom of expression in the name of religion . In fact, public discourse in Iran today has vast limitations and in no way compares to the kind of discussion we now see on al-Jazeera television and on other independent Arab networks and web sites. One reason is that it is easy to circumvent state...

The concept of international terrorism: An interim study of South Asia

International terrorism, coined to describe the attempts by the Soviet state to promote instability in the West, is now being applied to the activities of organizations and individuals, often in the developing world, who advocate indiscriminate violence in support of their goals. The combination of politics and religion in countries such as Pakistan under leaders such as General Zia al Haq and the rapid increase in the number of religious seminaries (Madrissas) laid the grounds for the emergence of urban terrorism that began in the 1980s and continues to plague the country. The author suggests that terrorism seeks legitimacy from religion, and points out that many people entering Pakistan's seminaries are from underprivileged backgrounds. He suggests the elimination of international terrorism is through education and the elimination of poverty, and recommends the establishment of parallel Madrissas providing a more enlightened religious education.

Religious seminaries in America: a selected bibliography

Religious seminaries in America: a selected bibliography

The First Party Congress and Its Place in History

Soviet Union will be known in history as the 22nd because the count began with a secret meeting of a few Marxists in Minsk in March 1898. At that time Lenin was a young man of twenty seven, Stalin was only seventeen and still enrolled in a religious seminary, and Khrushchev was but three years old. But is the Soviet Communist Party really sixty five years old? Was it actually born in 1898? And, if not, how old is the Party and when did it come into existence?

Foreign Language Teaching and International Conciliation

Not so long ago ours was a country of many languages and dialects. Today it is, no doubt, on the verge of becoming, at least in its ceaselessly expanding urban areas, the most linguistically monolithic part of the civilized world. A dwindling microscopic minority still study the classical tongues. Were it not for the religious seminaries, Greek studies would long since have vanished to the point of extinction. The fate of Latin is only somewhat less dire. And what shall we say about the modern languages other than English? Fortunately, scholarly concern with and proficiency in them are widespread and notable. But so far as one is able to make out, the amount which in practical life sticks to the ribs of high school and college students is about as slight as is the aroma of a cup of Ersatzkaffee. Certainly when our people get scattered about the wide world, with which they are now perforce concerned in multifarious ways, they are like nothing so much as Missouri farmers after an ice storm that has snapped all the telephone wires and coated all the roads.