Religious schools get Rs70b donations a year

Pakistan's more than 10,000 religious schools receive roughly around Rs 70 billion ($1.2 billion) a year through foreign and local charitable donations which is almost the equivalent of the country's income tax revenue, a recent study by an international research group said.

"Over 1.5 million students at more than 10,000 seminaries are being trained, in theory, for service in the religious sector," the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank, said in its recent report on religious schools, or Madaris in Pakistan.

"But their constrained worldview, lack of modern civic education and poverty make them a destabilising factor in Pakistani society," the report said.

Pakistan's military-led government is struggling hard to monitor and regulate the Islamic schools, which includes modernisation of their syllabus and barring them from receiving foreign donations without government approval.

But so far it has met with bitter resistance from the associations of these schools as well as the hardline organisations, including the two factions of the pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam and the Jamaat-e-Islami.

The hardliners, already incensed because of their government's support to the U.S.-led war against terrorism in Afghanistan, have vowed to resist the government's attempts to what they call "interference in their institutions."

Senior government officials say that many of the religious schools are fanning religious intolerance and extremism.

In recent months, the government has been shaken by a series of terrorist strikes targeting Westerners and Christian minority by suspected extremists.

About a third of all children in Pakistan in education attend Madaris, which provide free religious education, boarding and lodging and are essentially schools for the poor."

"Some sections of the students have been radicalised by state-sponsored exposure to jihad, first in Afghanistan," then in the disputed region of Kashmir, the ICG report added.

The influence and the number of Madaris started increasing in Pakistan since the early eighties when the country was serving as the base of Afghan and militants from across the world fighting Afghanistan's communist regime and the forces of the former Soviet Union.

The former military government of Gen Zia-ul-Haq patronised Madaris and militant groups, including hardliners like Osama bin Laden, who received weapons and funds from abroad.

Pakistan's successive governments failed to change the policy and their support to hardline groups until the September 11 strikes in the United States.

Even now most money for Madaris comes from abroad.

The ICG report said that 94 per cent of charitable donations made by Pakistani individuals and business corporations went to the religious institutions.

The United States and its Western allies are putting pressure on President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to regulate the religious schools.

But the ICG report said that the government's attempts to regulate these schools lack "substance, legal muscle or an intent to institutionalise long-term change" because, it says, the Musharraf government is reluctant to antagonise religious groups.