Thursday, January 30, 2025
Islamabad (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jan, 2025 ) The process of registering religious schools in Pakistan is a complicated one. It began when the government tried to bring them under a single regulation to improve their curriculum, funding and educational standards.
The process of registering schools has gained more importance after the increasing incidents of terrorism around the world, as schools have been accused of promoting extremism.
Doubts have also been raised about their funding and funding sources, as checks and balances on schools, like other educational institutions, were inadequate.
For the first time in 2002, during the reign of military ruler Pervez Musharraf, an attempt was made to register schools by linking them to government institutions, but this process became impossible every time due to some controversy.
According to current data, there are currently 17,738 registered schools in Pakistan, the largest number of which are in the Punjab province.
In Punjab, their number is 10012, while in Balochistan, this number is 575. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the number of madrassas is 4005, but the number of students is the highest in this province. This number is estimated to be 1283024, while in Punjab, this number is around 664065.
During the government of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, all these madrassas were given under the auspices of the Education Department so that their funding etc. could be done through the Education Department and a uniform curriculum was also introduced so that the children of the madrassas could also continue their scientific education.
This entire process was carried out with great speed after the APS attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A separate institution was created for the registration of madrassas with the Education Department, which is called the Directorate of Religious Education and is headed by former Major General Ghulam Qamar.
Under this directorate, madrassas are registered with the Ministry of Education as educational institutions, in addition to which they are audited annually and modern sciences are being included in their curriculum step by step.
Under this department, grants are given to students in madrassas and visas are also issued to foreign students seeking education in madrassas. This directorate has a total of 16 offices across the country where madrassas are provided with registration facilities.
Clearly, by linking them with the education department, madrassas also came under the purview of government funding and checks and balances, i.e. audit, and the difference in curriculum subjects between general educational institutions and madrassa students also started to decrease.
Several religious parties were unhappy with this decision. Perhaps by giving control of madrassas to the government, the hold of the scholars on them was weakening because it is undeniable that these madrassas and their students have been a huge vote bank for religious political parties.
With the approval of the 26th Amendment Bill in 2024, Maulana Fazlur Rehman made it a condition to get two demands of the religious circles approved, otherwise he threatened the government with a long march towards Islamabad, firstly, the abolition of the usury system and secondly, to bring the registration of religious madrassas under the old Societies Act 1860 instead of the Education Department, and Maulana was successful in getting both of his demands fulfilled.
According to the Societies Registration Act 1860, the registration of religious madrassas will be done by the Deputy Commissioner and not by the Education Department. In the current amendment draft, a registered madrassa will be able to open its sub-campuses without any registration. Every madrassa will submit an annual audit report, the audit will be conducted by an auditor and the audit report will be submitted to the Registrar's Office. Most importantly, no madrassa will teach inflammatory or extremist material.
During the rule of Imran Khan, a uniform curriculum was implemented in madrassas and educational institutions, which was aimed at reducing the educational gap between traditional educational institutions and students attending madrassas. However, it was also criticized by the parents of students studying in general educational institutions, saying that this uniform curriculum has brought the students of educational institutions to the standards of madrassa students and they are being forced to study the same curriculum.
Initially, this curriculum was implemented up to the sixth grade.
The general perception regarding religious madrassas in Pakistan is that a child studying there grows up with extremist and violent ideas. Some members of major terrorist groups, Al-Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and other violent groups, have been associated with religious madrassas established in Pakistan, and many reports have also been published about this.
In October 2019, after more than five years of consultation with the Ministry of Interior, security agencies and provinces, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf decided to regulate religious madrassas under the Department of Education, considering them as ‘educational institutions’, and some religious groups also accepted the government’s demand for its implementation.
While some madrassas welcomed this new approach to madrassas and said that it had a positive impact on the education system of madrassas, on the other hand, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) neither recognized it in 2019 nor today, since 2019, many of the Jamiat’s madrassas have not been registered.
Note: The opinions expressed in any blog, comment or column of DW Urdu are the personal opinions of the author, with which DW does not necessarily agree.
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