By SABRINA TAVERNISE - MOHRI PURI, Pakistan


THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL in this poor village is easy to mistake for a barn. It has a dirt floor and no lights, and crows swoop through its glassless windows. Class size recently reached 140, spilling students into the courtyard.

But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.

The concentration of madrasas in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas.

“We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the country,”said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization.“It’s red alert for Pakistan.”

President Obama said in a recent news conference that he was “gravely concerned”about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the government did not“seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.”He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan for nonmilitary purposes, including education. Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan $680 million in nonmilitary aid, according to the State Department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for the military.

But education has never been a priority here. Pakistan’s current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.

“This is a state that never took education seriously,”said Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution, an independent research institute.“I’m very pessimistic about whether the educational system can or will be reformed.”

Pakistani families have long turned to madrasas, and the religious schools make up a relatively small minority. But even for the majority who attend public school, learning has an Islamic bent. The national curriculum was Islamized during the 1980s under General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, a military ruler who promoted Pakistan’s Islamic identity as a way to bind its patchwork of tribes, ethnicities and languages.

Literacy in Pakistan has grown from barely 20 percent at independence 61 years ago, and the government recently improved the curriculum and reduced its emphasis on Islam.

But even today, only about half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.

“Education in Pakistan was left to the dogs,”said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad who is an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to stand up to spreading Islamic militancy.

This impoverished expanse of rural southern Punjab, where the Taliban have begun making inroads with the help of local militant groups, has one of the highest concentrations of madrasas in the country.

Of the more than 12,000 madrasas registered in Pakistan, about half are in Punjab. Experts estimate the numbers are higher: when the state tried to count them in 2005, a fifth of the areas in this province refused to register.

Though madrasas make up only about 7 percent of primary schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of people live.

The phenomenon began in the 1980s, when General Zia gave madrasas money and land in an Americansupported policy to help Islamic fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The Islamic schools are also seen as employment opportunities. “When someone doesn’t see a way ahead for himself, he builds a mosque and sits in it,”said Jan Sher, whose village in Punjab, Shadan Lund, has become a militant stronghold, with madrasas now outnumbering public schools.

Even if the madrasas do not make militants, they create a worldview that makes militancy possible.“The mindset wants to stop music, girls’schools and festivals,”said Salman Abid, a social researcher in southern Punjab.“Their message is that this is not real life. Real life comes later”- after death.

Abed Omar, 24, had little religious education before he was inspired by a sermon at a seminary in Kabirwala run by adherents (called Deobandi) of an ultra-Orthodox Sunni school of thought that opposes music and festivals.

Restless and unfulfilled, Mr. Omar joined a conservative Islamic group, paying about $625 to travel with them around the country for four months on a preaching tour. The group, Tablighi Jamaat, taught him that Islam forbids music and speaking with women. American officials suspect that the group is a steppingstone to the Taliban. Pakistani officials say it is peaceful.

Now, when Mr. Omar visits his friends,“they turn off their tape players and give me their seat,”he said.

“I want to make everyone a preacher of Islam,”Mr. Omar said brightly, eating honey-soaked fritters in his family’s sweets shop.

He knows about 100 people in his town who have done a four-month tour like his. As for those who sign up for less, he said“they are countless.”


Waqar Gillani contributed reporting from Mohri Pur and Lahore, Pakistan.