After the bombings in London, President Musharraf promised to wage a “holy war against extremism,” as many terrorists are coming from his country. Madrasahs are basically religious schools in the Islamic world, and some of them implant militant Islamic ideology into their students. So the plan is to oversee what they’re doing and keep track of them to make sure that they aren’t doing this anymore. Well, they don’t like that idea.

As part of its effort to crackdown on religious extremism, the Pakistani government has ordered Islamic schools, known as madrasahs, to register by the end of the year or face being closed down. Aside from making closer checks on madrasahs’ activities and funding, authorities also ordered their foreign students to leave the country. A coalition of madrasahs is rejecting the new measures, branding them discriminatory.

Prague, 13 September 2005 (RFE/RL) ???????? Madrasahs have been much in the news in Pakistan lately as the government tries to place new restrictions upon them to rein in extremism.

Pakistani officials say some of the madrasahs teach intolerance to other faiths and even other creeds of Islam.

They worry that some students, including hundreds who come to Pakistan from other parts of the Muslim world, could become easy recruits for extremist groups opposing Western and Western-backed governments worldwide.

As part of the crackdown, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last month ordered that the schools to register by the end of the year or face being closed down.

But the madrasahs are fighting back.

The Alliance of the Organizations of Religious Schools Pakistan, an umbrella organization representing thousands of seminaries, vowed on 12 September to defy the order.

“The amendment for the registration of madrasahs is unacceptable to us because it is discriminatory,” said Maulana Abdul Maalik, a member of the alliance. “These conditions have not been imposed on any school, or college, or any other organization. They have only been imposed on madrasahs.”

Think of the AORSP as a really big union, except one that happens to represent elementary schools for terrorism. But think about the numbers for a second. It represents literally thousands of these madrasahs. That they are going to cooperate in order to defy a military dictatorship like Musharraf’s just testifies to the amount of power and influence they wield in their communities.

As the article goes on to note, while the madrasahs in a lot of cases indoctrinate students, they also provide a basic education for over a million poor Pakistanis, a service that the government itself cannot or will not provide. Therefore dealing with the madrasahs will be much more difficult than simply asking them to register. Rooting out extremism is a must, but a total unequivocal crackdown will lead to a backlash within communities against the government, which means possible drive to further extremism.