Community development and other extra-religious functions of Islamic schools: a contemporary perspective from the voices of stakeholders in two madrassas in Pakistan

Contributors to a special issue of Community Development on social capital (Flora & Allen, 2006) agree that community development depends on embedded or emergent characteristics of social interactions. Following Bridger and Alter’s (2006) argument that community development occurs more frequently through opportunistic combinations of local and extra-local structures and interactional fields that form and reform according to particular issues or external pressures, we examine the emergence of madrassa communities as a field of social interaction embedded in enduring networks that generate community development functions and outcomes beyond its obvious religious and instructional roles.