Taliban-run madrassa still open in Kabul

The Lycee Jamhooriyat overlooks the heart of the old city of Kabul, but its run down interiors which were being spruced up last week to welcome several hundred girl students has its own story to tell.

It's the only girl's school in the Afghan capital which has a Taliban-run madrassa that still functions. The six male teachers have come to work every day, right through the dark days of the Taliban regime.

The end of the Taliban have made no difference to their routine, and the Ministry of Education has little choice but to pay their salaries.

"We come to work just like we have always done, even though all the boys have stopped coming to school after the Taliban left. After all, it is really a girl's school. We are hoping they won't shut it down," said Mohammed Amir, who because of the Taliban strictures admitted he taught very little biology.

The issue of madrassas is now in the hands of Afghanistan's education minister, said Mohammed Zareef, the schools supervisor, who had just returned to Kabul, after refusing to work with the Taliban.

Scoffing at the 'Islamic education' the Taliban taught, he pointed proudly to the new poster that had been hung over the Taliban's edicts painted in black that frowned on girls education.

In fact, it's an issue that has left Rasoul Amin, Afghanistan's new Education Minister, with very few options.

"We don't want to shut them down, we are not going to abolish the madrassa. We are an Islamic country, we need Islamic institutions, but they must impart the right kind of Islamic education," Amin told Gulf News.

The interim administration's education minister has won support for his enormously successful 'Back to School' from major donors, NGOs and the UN, that has drawn schoolgoing children back into the fold, and reemployed women teachers in their hundreds.

But madrassas are a different matter. "It's an extremely sensitive subject, in the light of constant criticism from extreme elements on the fundamentalist fringe that continue to operate here who would dearly like to brand us as being unIslamic, which we are not," Amin said, repeating a common refrain among top government officials here.

"I have put up the proposal to the cabinet that we bring in Islamic scholars from abroad in an advisory capacity to work with our scholars. We once had a Department of Theology that was respected from Cairo to Jakarta. Mustafa Shakil was one of our greatest scholars," he said.

The minister said he would like countries like Egypt, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates to seriously consider helping his country in the field of Islamic education. He would like Arab countries with a long history of religious education to step in and help devise a curricula for the madrassas, set up during the Taliban regime.

"We would like to impart a moderate Islamic education, that is vastly different from the limited kind of education that was given to students in schools in Pakistan who went on to become the Taliban," Amin said.

Kabul had six well-known madrassas before the Taliban, including the Imam Abu Hanifa school and the Arabi Madrassa, both of which were known for their high standards of Islamic learning.

Once the extremist Taliban swept to power, promising peace and security, they gave us the "peace of the grave", said Amin referring to the Taliban's blanket ban on education of girls, who like their mothers were restricted to their homes.

They also swiftly shut down all girls schools including the Lycee Jamhooriyat, and converted 12 of Kabul's best schools into madrassas including the famed Lycee Istiqlal and Lycee Malayalai, which like the other centres turned education into a tool for indoctrination.

The Lycee Jamhooriyat with some 2000 female students was a technical training school that taught girls from ages of seven to 16, skills ranging from home science to sewing and accounting.

The Taliban installed a mulla in the school, taking over the school library and rubbishing all the school books. The school teachers secreted away the furniture and equipment in a run-down house, and were preparing last week to bring them all back right down to the last chalk.

Amin would like moderate Islamic countries to also examine the possibilities of setting up teacher's training colleges in his country, as Afghanistan has a huge pool of talented teachers who needed to be trained to run the hundreds of schools and colleges that were set to open in the provincial capitals and the interior.

Several hundred of them had besieged his office on Friday, a sea of blue clad women, pushing and shoving their way into the minister's stuffy offices.

"We need schools that teach the English language, we need IT training schools, we need printing presses to print our schoolbooks, it's an enormous task ahead," the minister said.

Like the issue of madrassas, Amin will also have to tackle the half a dozen Taliban run orphanages, that are a mirror of the schools in Pakistan that gave birth to the Taliban in the first place.

"I want to turn them into centres of learning, but there are other priorities, it will have to wait," Amin said.