Re: Havoc created by Madarsa education in Pakistan

 

 

Havoc created by Madarsa education in Pakistan

Does RSS want to replicate such a situation in Hindustan?

 

After a lecture in end 1998, on India's relations through millennia with Central Asia at the University of Bukhara, a major stop on silk Route between East and West, a student asked me that Hindus worship gods made out of clay and other such material. I explained to him that the Hindu religion as such is not like Judaism, Christianity or Islam, where everything is written in the Books. Hindu religion is a collection of total beliefs and systems from very simple ways of worship to highest level of spiritual and philosopher thinking.

 

I explained to them how Hindus describe the Almighty as neither this nor that because it is impossible to comprehend the Reality by rational thinking or mind. While intelligent and philosopher  minds might comprehend Hindu philosophy and its various aspects, illiterate, uneducated and very ignorant minds find it difficult to comprehend God. Muslims have found a simple solution by saying that it is beyond comprehension and no one tries to define Allah. Therefore, such people who worshipped their tribal or folk gods through pictures or idols continue to do so.

 

I then countered with a question. After all, God can understand Quran in any language and Turkey's leader Ataturk tried to convince his people to recite Quran in Turkish, but it was reverted back to Arabic after his death. After all, God can understand if prayers to him are in Arabic or Turkish. And if unlettered Indians worship statues and figures then the same can be said about the caligraphied words Allah, Mohammad, Ali etc written in Arabic. Any desecration of these words, not only in Arabic, but in any language would bring upon the whole indignant might of the Muslims.

The word Hindu comes from river Sindhu known as Indus in the West. Scylax, a Greek origin Persian subject from Asia minor was commanded by Emperor Darius to navigate river Indus , then under Persian rule , from Kabul to its delta on the Arabian Sea, from whose records Herodotus and West learnt about India.  Many names of the countries in the past were based on their rivers like Senegal, Niger or Congo; India came to be so known. The Arabs named the country Al Hind in Arabic and in Turkish it is Hindustan.

Mr Bhagwat of the walrus moustache sitting in Nagpur is trying to put the complex collection of beliefs, philosophy and systems and its followers called Hindus into a rigid narrative. This is dangerous, counter-productive and will not be tolerated by the people of India. Mr Bhagvat  and Mr Modi have still not seen the truth that people of India and most of the Hindus do not like the kind of philosophy and religion BJP and RSS are trying to impose on them .They have been given a body blow from which it will take quite some time for them to recover in Delhi. Still, they keep on misguiding people and creating tensions.

 

I first give some extracts from what Mr Bhagvat has said and at the end an article by Khaled Ahmad on how retrograde obscurantist teachings in madarsas have destroyed Pakistan. There are daily killings and fights between majority Sunnis and Shias .Ahmediyas have been declared as nonbelievers/ kefirs and regularly killed .Does BJP and its leaders specially RSS want to create havoc in this country, something like in Pakistan.

 

K.Gajendra Singh 16 Feb., 2015, Delhi

 

 

According to media reports

 

"Noting that the time has come when the entire society wants RSS and has expectations from it, Sangh Chief Mohan Bhagwat today said the organisation's job was to "unite the Hindu society" and this cannot be only through 'bhashans (lectures)'.

 

"The time has come when the entire society wants RSS and has expectations from it. To fulfil these expectations, the organisation must be expanded," the RSS chief said at 'Rashtra Raksha Sangam' here. "The job of RSS is to unite the Hindu society and make it fearless, self-reliant and selfless, and the one which is ready to live and die for the country," he said, adding that this cannot be done only through 'bhashans'.

 

"It has to be brought into practice... What is the meaning of RSS shakhaa? We come together and forget everything else. Only 'bhagwa (saffron) flag' is in front of us and that is the symbol of pride," he said. Bhagwat said, "Often the word 'show of strength' crops up. When we organise such programmes, it is said that these are show of strength by RSS. Those who do not have strength need to show it. We don't need to do that. We have our own strength. RSS moves ahead on the basis of its own strength. It is our 'atma darshan'."

 

When madrasa challenges state

 

Written by Khaled Ahmed | Posted: February 14, 2015 4:00 am | Updated: February 14, 2015 7:54 am

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/when-madrasa-challenges-state/99/

 

After the adoption of a National Action Plan and a constitutional amendment to tackle terrorism through military courts, the clerics in Pakistan are worried. Records show many terrorists with a madrasa background, some used also by a state that has lost several essential attributes of normality.

The Nawaz Sharif government says madrasas are sacrosanct and will not be investigated, but a growing body of facts in the media says madrasas are involved in terrorism through the training of killers and "excommunication" (takfir) of the Shia community. The state itself apostatises Ahmadi Muslims but balks at takfir of the Shia counted as

Muslims in the census. Most madrasas have gone on record — they may deny it — in calling the Shia kafir. Their fatwas have been used as handbills prior to Shia massacres.

 

The document that arraigns the madrasas of Pakistan comes from India in the shape of a collection of fatwas for apostatising the Shia. The compiler was the head of the Lucknow madrasa Nadwatul Ulema, the late Manzur Numani. The compilation is titled Khumeini aur Shia kay barah mein Ulama-e-Karam ka Mutafiqqa Faisala (Consensual Resolution of the Clerical Leaders about Khomeini and Shi'ism), al-Furqan, Lucknow, 1988. Numani was funded by Saudi Arabia to write a book against Imam Khomeini and collect fatwas of takfir of the Shia.

A number of clerical leaders of Pakistan cosigned or confirmed the fatwa against the Shia in 1986. Among them were two well-known names: Muhammad Yusuf Ludhianvi and Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai. Both were to die in the sectarian upheaval that overtook Pakistan during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s and the jihadist reaction to the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Fatwas of apostatising are on record as having been issued from time to time from all the prominent madrasas of Pakistan. Darul Ulum Haqqaniya Akora Khattak of Maulana Samiul Haq issued its own fatwa apostatising the Shia in 1986, saying that eating foodcooked by them, attending their funerals and burying them in Sunni graveyards stood banned. Another fatwa from Jamia Ashrafia, Lahore, whose leader Maulana Muhammad Malik Kandhalwi, known to be a relative of General Zia-ul-Haq, declared the Shia kafir because "they held that the Quran had been tampered with and gave Hazrat Ali a status equal to Prophet Muhammad, claiming that angel Jibreel had made a mistake while taking wahi (sacred verse) to the Prophet".

 

The above fatwas were circulated in Quetta, Balochistan, in 2003 before the massacre of the Hazara Shia there on two occasions. Since no madrasa is required by the state to register all the fatwas it gives out to the people, the information given by the Hazara leaders on TV fell on deaf ears. However, the compilation of all the Shia-related Pakistani fatwas in Lucknow in 1987 is available for scrutiny by the military courts.

 

There are more than 25,000 officially accepted madrasas in Pakistan — they may be double that number — not all of them registered with the government. According to one source, Balochistan alone has 10,000 madrasas! The big killers that Pakistan wants to catch and hang belonged to these madrasas at one time or another.

 

The biggest challenge for the government and the military courts is the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) madrasa, whose head Maulana Abdul Aziz was under summons in January from a court that he defied. In 2007, al-Qaeda owned up links to it and created the Ghazi Force, which savaged the military personnel of Islamabad-Rawalpindi with suicide attacks.

 

The killer behind the Ghazi Force, named after the founder of the Lal Masjid, was Qari Husain Ahmad Mehsud, who had graduated from madrasa Jamia Faruqia of Karachi, which was founded by Mufti Shamzai, who went on to found Jamia Banuria too, the biggest factory of sectarian killers, till Shamzai himself was killed. And Mehsud was killed by a drone because he trained the son of an air force officer to attempt blowing up Times Square in New York.

 

Many terrorist organisations now banned by Pakistan were born in madrasas. Jaish-e-Muhammad was founded by a graduate of madrasa Jamia Banuria of Karachi, Maulana Masood Azhar, the same man who was caught in India but was "exchanged" for a hijacked Indian airliner. He was the disciple of Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, the terrorist mullah who was murdered in the sectarian war between 1980 and 1990. Now, terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is headed by another disciple of his, Malik Ishaq, who was bailed out by a scared judiciary and is now being kept in jail by the government.

 

Pakistan tells the world it doesn't know where Azhar is today. (His madrasa in Bahawalpur is flourishing as one of the watering holes of Taliban killers roaming in Pakistan.) Another Banuria graduate, Maulana Azam Tariq, was gunned down by rivals after he was "mistakenly" elected to the National Assembly. The headquarters of the biggest killer outfit, Sipah-e-Sahaba, is in Jhang. It is banned, but is alive and kicking in southern Punjab, where you can win elections only after a pact with the Sipah. Jhang has been the epicentre of sectarianism in Pakistan and Jhang was where Syeda Abida Hussain, a Shia farmer, won elections against the founder of the Sipah-e-Sahaba, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi. In 1990, Jhangvi was murdered, and Hussain thought she could meet and condole with his widow. The widow replied: "No need for you to come. You can recite Sura Fateha on the phone; I do not need your assistance. My brother Osama bin Laden looks after all my needs. You must have heard of him. He is a very famous rich Saudi, much richer than all of you kafirs put together." (From Hussain's memoir, Power Failure).

 

No one knew bin Laden in 1990. He left Peshawar after 1991, when the Afghan warlords tilted into their internecine war, and returned from Sudan only after Pakistan had installed the Taliban in Kabul in 1996. It was in Afghanistan that the various Pakistani madrasas touched base with him and swore allegiance to the "Shaikh", including the Lal Masjid clerics of Islamabad and sundry Islamist nuclear scientists and doctors of Pakistan, which then led to the killing of Shia doctors all over the country.

 

Nobody ever thought that madrasas in Pakistan would become powerful enough to challenge the state itself. In 2015, they have become the most powerful civil society element capable of challenging the state to self-correction. The ideology of Pakistan has finally wrenched the "monopoly of violence" from the state and established the clergy as the arbiter of state behaviour. Lawyers, military personnel, doctors, teachers serving in the state sector, journalists and the unemployed, supplement the power of the seminarian boys, who form the frontline against the state without knowing it.

 

The state today is too weak to enforce the Action Plan against terrorism. Like the Middle East, it is no longer able to undo the textbook biases drilled into the common man's mind. Education is heavily tilted in favour of irrational conduct. Spending on education — the Islamic world neglects education, from Pakistan to Algeria — is of no use unless the state ideology is changed.

 

The writer is consulting editor, 'Newsweek Pakistan'