NEED HELP UNKNOTTING YOUR KNICKERS:

Less than 1 percent go to Pakistan madrassas (Anwar Iqbal, 3/15/05, UPI)

A new research study released Tuesday refutes commonly accepted assertions about the popularity of madrassas in Pakistan.

The report, titled "Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A look at the Data," is the first study to use publicly available and nationally representative data sources to examine the enrollment trends of Pakistani students at religious schools.

Madrassas provide basic training to would-be Muslim clerics, teaching them how to read the Koran and lead daily and weekly prayers. Some of the leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban movement studied at these madrassas, and later when they came into power, they also became associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, which is believed to have carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.

Professor Asim Ijaz Khwaja of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-authors Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc found that madrassas account for less than 1 percent of the total student enrollment in the country, with 200,000 children enrolled fulltime before 2001. They also concluded that there is no evidence of a dramatic increase in madrassa enrollment in recent years.

As reformation picks up in the Middle East we'll find a lot of things we feared needlessly.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2005 10:31 PM