This article is PART TWO of a longer essay which appeared first in the New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 19, December 1, 2005. (www.nybooks.com/articles/18514). PART ONE was published in the July 2006 edition of this journal. (www.interreligiousinsight.org)

The debate about the alleged links between madrasas and terrorism has tended to obscure both the madrasas’ long histories and the differences among them. Throughout much of Islamic his­tory, madrasas were the major source of religious and scientific learning, just as church schools and the universities were in Europe. Between the seventh and twelfth centuries, madrasas pro­duced free-thinking luminaries such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina, and al-Khwarizmi. They also produced America’s bestsell­ing poet throughout the 1990s, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet of love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was trained as a Muslim jurist, and through­out his life taught Sharia law in a madra­sa in Konya. It is true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought and spirituality characteristic of the ulema of his day, but he did so as an insider, from within the system.

None of this should be a sur­prise. In the entire Qur’an there are only about two hundred verses direct­ly commanding believers to pray and three times that number command­ing the believers to reflect, to ponder, and to analyze God’s magnificence in nature, plants, stars, and the solar system. The oldest and greatest of all the madrasas, the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good claim to being the most sophisticated school in the entire Mediterranean world during the early Middle Ages. Indeed the very idea of a university in the modern sense – a place where students congregate to study a variety of subjects under a number of teachers – is generally regarded as an innovation first developed at al-Azhar.

In The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, George Makdisi has demonstrated how terms such as having “fellows” holding a “chair,” or students “reading” a subject and obtaining “degrees,” as well as prac­tices such as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even mortar boards, tassels, and academic robes, can all be traced back to the practices of madrasas. It was in cities not far from Islamic Spain and Sicily – Salerno, Naples, Bologna, and Montpellier – that the first universi­ties in Christendom were developed, while the very first college in Europe, that of Paris, was founded by Jocius de Londoniis, a pilgrim newly returned from the Middle East.7  Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars such as Adelard of Bath would travel to the Islamic world to study the advanced learning available in the madrasas. Alvaro of Córdoba, a Mozarab, or Christian living under Muslim rule, wrote in the fourteenth century:

My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the work of Muslim theologians and phi-losophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads Latin commentaries on Holy scripture? At the men-tion of Christian books they dis-dainfully protest that such works are unworthy of their notice.

When the Mongol invasions destroyed the institutions of learning in the Islamic heartlands, many learned refugees fled to Delhi, turning northern India for the first time into a major center of scholarship. By the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the six­teenth century, the curriculum in Indian madrasas blended the learning of the Islamic Middle East with that of the teachings of Hindu India, so that Hindu and Muslim students would together study the Qur’an (in Arabic), the Sufi poetry of Sa’adi (in Persian), and the philosophy of Vedanta (in Sanskrit), as well as ethics, astronomy, medicine, logic, history, and the natural scienc­es. Many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasas.

However, following the collapse of Islamic self-confidence that accompa­nied the deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1858, ­­8  disillusioned scholars founded an influential but narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, a hundred miles north of the former Mughal capital in Delhi. Feeling that their backs were against the wall, the madrasa’s founders reacted against what they saw as the degenerate ways of the old elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Qur’anic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.

It was, unfortunately, these puri­tanical Deobandi madrasas that spread throughout North India and Pakistan in the twentieth century, and that par­ticularly benefited from the patronage of General Zia ul-Haq and his Saudi allies in the 1980s. Ironically, the US also played an important part in this harnessing of madrasas for holy war as part of the Afghan jihad, with the CIA financing the production by the US Agency for International Development of some notably blood­thirsty madrasa textbooks “filled”, according to a Washington Post report, “with violent images and militant Islamic teachings.”

One page showed a picture of a jihadi carrying a gun, but with his head blown off, accompanied by a Qur’anic verse and a tribute to the Mujahideen who were “obedient to Allah.... Such men will sacrifice their wealth and their life to impose Islamic law.” When the Taliban came to power, these textbooks were distributed for use in schools.9  At the height of the Afghan jihad Ronald Reagan is said to have praised Mujahideen madrasa students as “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers [of America].”

It is certainly true that many madrasas in Pakistan have an outdated curriculum: some still teach geometry from Euclid and medicine from Galen. Emphasis is put on the rote learning rather than the critical study of the Qur’an, and consider­able prestige is still attached to becoming a hafiz – knowing the Qur’an by heart. Deobandi madrasas teach that the sun revolves around the earth and some even have special seating for the invisible Islamic spirits, the djinns.10  This is, however, by no means the case with all madrasas, some of which are surprisingly sophisticated.

In Karachi the largest madrasa is the Dar ul-Uloom. Its green lawns resemble a cross between a five-star hotel and a rather upmarket university campus. It is clean and prosperous-looking: well-watered gardens and palm trees give onto smart, well-kept classrooms and computer rooms; all around, embalmed in scaffolding, new libraries and dormi-tories were rising from the ground.

Inside, the atmosphere was earnest and scholarly. In room after room, stu­dents sat cross-legged on carpets, reading from Qur’ans that lay open before them, resting on low wooden bookstands. In others students were listening intently as elderly maulanas expounded to them commentaries on the meaning of verses in the Qur’an and the Hadiths, the traditions of the prophets. A computer room was filled with bearded men strug­gling with the mysteries of using Urdu and Arabic versions of Microsoft Word and Windows XP; in the senior years, I learned, all essays are expected to be typewritten on computers and handed in as printouts. Of course some other madrasas lack such equipment.

After the beheading of Daniel Pearl, I had taken the precaution of informing the British consulate about my movements; but there was nothing threatening about the Dar ul-Uloom. The students were almost all eager, friendly, and intelligent, if somewhat intense. When I asked one bearded student what music he listened to on his new cassette player, he looked at me with horror: the machine was only for listening to sermons. All music was banned.

Puritanical it may be, but it is clear that the Dar ul-Uloom, like many Pakistani madrasas, performs an important service – especially in a country 58 percent of whose population, and 72 percent of whose women, are illiterate – indeed half of the population never sees the inside of a school. Madrasas are often backward in their educational philosophy, but they provide the poor with a real hope of advancing themselves. In certain traditional subjects – such as rhetoric, logic, and juris-prudence – the teaching can be excellent. And although they tend to be ultra-conservative, only a small proportion of them are militant. To close them down,without first attempting to build up the state sector, would relegate much of the population to a state of ignorance. It would also be tantamount to instructing Muslims to stop educating themselves about their religion, hardly the best strategy for winning the war for Muslim minds.

You don’t have to look far from Pakistan to find a madrasa system that has effectively engaged with the prob­lems of both militancy and educational backwardness. For although India was originally the home of the Deobandi madrasas, such colleges in India have no record of producing violent Islamists, and are strictly apolitical and quietist. Indeed several of modern India’s greatest scholars – such as the Mughal histo­rian Muzaffar Alam of the University of Chicago – are madrasa graduates.

An important study of the madrasas of India by the Hindu scholar Yoginder Sikand, Bastions of the Believers, demon­strates how forward-looking and dynam­ic some madrasas can be. In the south­west Indian state of Kerala, for example, Sikand found a chain of educational institutions run by the Mujahid group of professionals and businessmen which aim to bridge the differences between modern forms of knowledge and the Islamic worldview. The Mujahid group has been at the forefront of Muslim women’s education in Kerala, and in many of their madrasas girls outnumber boys by a considerable margin. Mujahid intellectuals have written extensively about women’s rights from an Islamic perspective, and Sikand quotes the Zohra Bi, the principal of one of the group’s colleges: “Islam is wrongly thought of as a religion of women’s oppression,” she told him. “Through our work in the col­lege we want to show that Islam actually empowers Muslim women.”

This would seem to confirm that it is not madrasas per se that are the prob­lem so much as the militant atmosphere and indoctrination taking place in a handful of notorious centers of ultra-radicalism, such as the Binori Town madrasa in Karachi, whose students are taught that jihadism is legitimate and noble. Some graduates have allegedly been involved in the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan. The question remains, however, whether General Musharraf’s government has the will to carry out the necessary reforms that would reproduce the success of madrasas in India.

So far attempts at reforming Pakistan’s more militant madrasas have proved at best halfhearted. Immediately after the London bombings (7 July 2005)there were around 250 arrests in Pakistani madrasas, and there have been some attempts at curbing the attendance of foreign students: an estimated 1,400 non-Pakistanis have been expelled since July. Some statements have also been made about standardizing the syllabus and encouraging madrasas to teach some modern subjects.

However, the more extreme madrasas have been able to resist the enforcement of even these mild measures; recently, fewer than half of Pakistan’s madrasas complied when asked to register as educational institutions with the authorities. To date, the Pakistani government, far from hav-ing found ways of curbing the excesses of the more radical madrasas, does not even possess exact statistics about the number of madrasas in the country. Moreover, the military government’s close alliance with the Islamist parties, which now control two of Pakistan’s provinces, prevents Musharraf from acting more strongly against the extremist madrasas. As a result not even one militant madrasa has yet been closed.

Such militant madrasas are, how­ever, likely to create more problems for Pakistan’s internal security than for the safety of Western capitals. For that, as the July 7 London bombings showed, rather than blaming seminaries in Pakistan we would do better to examine the Islamic extremism blossoming on our own cam­puses, and the way that the excesses of American and British foreign policies can fatally alienate so many previously moderate Muslims and lead to violence at home as well as in Muslim lands.

William Dalrymple is an acclaimed writer who lives in New Delhi. His most recent book, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, won the Wolfson Prize for History. He is now at work on a biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor.