| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Terror Networks & Islam | |
| Jihad and Jihadism | |
| 2005-08-25 | |
| By Husain Haqqani The Pakistani government’s decision to bar 1,400 foreigners from studying at the country’s madrasas is not the solution to terrorism. None of the terrorists involved in international attacks linked to Pakistan, even tenuously, over the last several years have been regular foreign madrasa students. Pakistan’s real problem is the training camps established by Jihadist groups in the country, which were tolerated by the Pakistani state for strategic reasons. Some of these camps operated under the cover of madrasas. By focusing on madrasas, and then only on foreigners within the madrasas, Pakistani officials are again missing the opportunity to move forward with a complete roll back of Jihadism. Blaming foreigners has become a convenient excuse in Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, to avoid condemning the extremist Jihadists’ ideology of hatred. It is not necessary for everyone in Europe or the Muslim world to agree with all aspects of US or British policy to acknowledge that many Muslims have been so consumed by hatred of the West that they have lost their moral compass. Terrorism is reprehensible. Extremist ideologies that feed, justify or condone terrorism deserve unequivocal condemnation. Instead, non-steps such as expulsion of foreign madrasa students continue to distract Gen Musharraf’s regime. Pakistan’s madrasas breed hostility towards modernity, produce students without contemporary knowledge, and feed obscurantism. But madrasas have existed for centuries without generating terrorists. Producing theology is not the same as producing radicalism. The reason so many Islamist radicals from all over the world congregated or passed through Pakistan was the strategic decision by Pakistan’s rulers to use Jihad as an instrument of influence in Afghanistan and Kashmir. If Pakistan is to move beyond the phase of officially tolerated Jihadism, it is not the madrasas but the training camps and the militias spawned by them that need to be shut down.
| |
| Posted by:john |
| #1 ""...decision to bar 1,400 foreigners from studying at the country’s madrasas is not the solution to terrorism." That's true: The solution to terrorism is to close madrasas altogether - whether they be in Pakland, Turkey, London, or Detroit. |
| Posted by: Glereper Craviter7929 2005-08-25 02:09 |