ABSTRACT
When debating Islam and its political role in South Asia and especially in Pakistan, the role of the religious schools (in Arabic: madrasa, plural madaris = place of learning) is often central to the public imagination. There are three categories of religious schools: the madrasa teaches from first to tenth grade, the dar al-ulum (dar al-’uulum) the eleventh and twelfth, while the jamia (jami’a) has university status. For a variety of reasons, madrasas have acquired significance, attracting increasing interest from secular political actors and organizations, not only since 11 September 2001.1
The popular literature concerning madrasas in South Asia has expanded enormously in recent years, especially in policy-oriented journals and the press. But, even when this literature has appeared in peer-reviewed journals (as very few books have emerged yet), most of that literature has been written from a point of view of securitization. Usually, a connection between religious education and religious extremism is made, then madrasas are connected to the notion of religious education, and the task becomes one of counting up the number of madrasas (or madrasa students) in order to “measure” the (Islamist) extremist “threat”. More sophisticated studies then go on to note that, owing to the problem of sectarianism, the threat of extremism is a problem not only for “the West”, but also for the individual countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and so on.
