This is in no way to undermine the need and significance of the ongoing military operation in Waziristan. The valiant soldiers and officers of the Pakistan Armed Forces are laying down their lives to crush the Frankenstein monster, Pakistani Taliban and the foreign fighters from the Farghana valley and some other countries from the Muslim World. The growing number of blasts and suicide bombs are ripping through the mind and soul of this nation under attack. A reign of terror has been unleashed upon the innocent civilians across this country. No place seems safe, be it a mosque, a school, a bank, a market or a funeral congregation. But, amid all this mayhem and unstoppable tragic loss of valuable lives, have we for a moment stopped and asked ourselves: “can we fight ideas with guns only?”

It is pertinent to note that you can not kill them all unless you neutralise those ideas that move and inspire these killers and suicide bombers. And ideas can not be fought with guns. These can be fought with ideas only. While on the one hand we are fighting full blast guns with guns, there is a certainty that we would soon outgun them, but we must launch a programme that stops the hordes of teenagers from joining them.

This is no secret that these suicide bombers are inspired and motivated by the atmosphere of militancy in the country. This militancy has roots in sectarian strife that has beset us since our inception as a new country. This sectarian hatred received a fillip from the Islamization drive under Zia’s regime when a public and ostentatious display of your religiosity and religious leanings became an important component of an individual’s social identity. Consequently, all the sects tried to grab a monopoly of righteousness and moral correctness. Failing to develop a good character this Islamization drive only led to untiring hypocrisy and Pakistan became a boxing ring for the contending sects.

With foreign funding and not very intelligent governmental policies, the mullahs (religious leaders) got money, guns and political power. To provide cheap and willing gun fodder for Afghanistan and Kashmir, the growth of Madrassas was encouraged. And the number of madrassas has risen from 189 at the time of independence to around 25,000 today with a student population ranging between 1.9 to 2.5 million. Though the madrassas are neither the centres of terrorism nor a training ground for militancy, as some sections among the US think tank believe, yet they do help create the raw material that can be lured into becoming militants and terrorists. The love of religion and the love of an oppressed Ummah is manipulated and re-channeled by the militants and the terrorists to their own political purposes. This is a complex process and requires a detailed study which this brief article does not warrant.

Madrassas (Religious Schools) have a great history of service to the community in the Indian sub-continent. After the fall of the Muslim power to the British Empire in India, these religious schools sought to preserve the moral values and educational system of the Muslim India. They have produced great men of learning and religious insight over the last 150 years of our history. Because of their increasing drift exclusively into the religious and non-secular studies, the people who are being churned out from these madrassas are least sensitized to the realities of present day life and are living either in history or in future. These are mostly men and women from the middle and lower middle class families, already living on the margins of our society. Most of them end up in madrassas instead of public schools owing to their families’ inability to buy them a good education. This creates further polarisation between them and the rest of the society whom they start viewing as “the others.”

This parallel system of education at this moment is only deepening the divide in our society. Our society is already divided by a divisive, class-ridded education system that separates the Cambridge system from the Matric system. The students coming from these two different systems already consider themselves as children of two different educational deities simply because they have read different books and imbibed different syllabi on the same subjects. On top of this is the religious education imparted by the madrassas which is a third kind of education and further divides the society.

 It is emphasized that there is essentially nothing wrong with imparting religious education to our children. Our faith is the most important component of our life. But, the problem lies in divorcing the madrassa students from the mainstream education, further reducing their prospects of rising to institutions of higher education in the country. Those madrassa students who leave madrassa education at an early age and join a public school later usually enter the mainstream life and lose the distinctive stamp of a madrassa-educated maulvi. A childhood friend of mine was a hafiz (one who knows the Holy Quran by heart) at a madrassa before he joined a public school at the age of 10. Later, he became the most brilliant student of his school. After B.A, he sat the CSS exam and is now a senior bureaucrat in the Police Service of Pakistan. But, those who continue to follow their religious studies to become Mufti or Imam are generally outsiders of our system of government. They either become religious teachers, imams or muftis. Some of them start their own madrassas as that is a profession closer to their hearts.

Now this creates and perpetuates the polarisation referred to earlier, dividing a society against itself. It is an open secret that some of those who leave the religious seminaries view the society around them with contempt, and look at those unlike them as a multitude of sinners and worldly beasts. Similarly, they with their distinctive looks and manners are also viewed as different, and are held in respect, fear and contempt by different sections of the society. While a majority of the society is engaged in enjoying the pleasures of art and culture coming from music and movies, some of these seminary-trained young men consider it a noble cause to destroy these CDs and movies because these lead to sinful behaviour and moral turpitude of their society. Many such incidents led to the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) episode in Islamabad. Motivated to reform and change the society for the better in the light of their view of the world, some of them get frustrated as the government is also patronising everything that helps immoral and sinful behaviour. The logical next step is to be inspired by those who are fighting in the name of God and for establishing the kingdom of god on earth or at least killing the kafirs (non-believers) and their local associates. It is a known fact that before the Taliban turned on our own people, the heroes of jihad would be invited to some madrassas in the mainland Pakistan to inspire the students and win recruits.

Refusing to enter the mainstream ethos of the society with which they disagree, a lot of those educated at madrassas are in direct and sharp conflict with the mainstream society. This is where we have to step in to reform and rehabilitate this large educational set up in a way that it unites rather than divides different sections of society. We have institutionalised conflict. We need to institutionalise tolerance. Only tolerance of other ideas can lead to tolerance of other people. And this tolerance is not possible unless it is part of our formal learning. We need to introduce in the madrassas a syllabus that broadens human sympathies and promotes respect for other human beings who speak a different language, wear a different dress and read different books. We need to equip our madrassas to be able to produce not only religious leaders and teachers but also poets, writers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, scientists and human rights activists. We have no choice but to bring them in the main stream of education. We must put an end to this educational caste-system. The battle for minds can not be fought and won at the frontiers but in the battlefield of mind only.

This article is published on Chowk.com: http://chowk.com/articles/16601