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Asim Ijaz Khwaja on Fundamentalist Religious Schooling in Pakistan

Following the 9/11 attacks on the United States, many blamed the proliferation of Muslim fundamentalist religious schools for spreading fervent anti-Americanism in Pakistan and elsewhere. But Assistant Professor Asim Ijaz Khwaja's latest research examines statistical data to determine more precisely the enrollment in madrassas in Pakistan. The results are quite revealing and may cause political scientists to rethink their previous theories.

Q: What did your analysis find, in terms of enrollment in Pakistani madrassas?

Khwaja: Our analysis finds that enrollment in Pakistani madrassas is relatively low, with less than 1 percent of all students enrolled in a school attending madrassas. There are as much as 100 times as many children in public schools as there are in madrassas and almost 40 times as many children in private schools as there are in madrassas. For the average Pakistani household, the choice of going to a madrassa is simply not a statistically significant option. Even in areas which surround Afghanistan, which are considered to be hotbeds of madrassa activity, madrassa enrollment is actually less than 7.5 percent.

Outside this region madrassa enrollment is thinly, but evenly, spread across the rest of the country. Furthermore, we find no evidence of a dramatic increase in madrassa enrollment in recent years. Examining time trends we find that madrassa enrollment actually declined in Pakistan from its creation until the 1980s. It increased somewhat during the religion-based resistance to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979 and the subsequent rise of the Taliban. However, looking at the last few years, our data does not suggest that there is any dramatic increase in madrassa enrollment.

Q: What data did you utilize for this study?

Khwaja: We used three different sources of data, which are collected through established and verifiable statistical methodologies. These are all household based surveys that document patterns of enrollment and available educational options for Pakistani families. The first two of these sources, the 1998 official census of population and three separate rounds (1991, 1998, and 2001) of the Pakistan Integrated Household Survey (PIHS), are nationally representative (rural and urban areas) and publicly available. However, they were collected prior to the events of 9/11. The third survey, which is a smaller sample, is a census of schooling choices in over 100 rural and peri-urban communities collected by our own research team in 2003.

All three of these sources were collected at different times, have slightly different definitions of madrassa enrollment, and were collected by organizations and individuals with very different institutional affiliations, ranging from the Pakistani government to international organizations and U.S. based academics. This provides independent verification of enrollment estimates and allows us to determine the sensitivity of our results. What is reassuring is that estimates obtained from all three sources are very similar and therefore give us greater confidence in these numbers.

Q: How do these findings contradict popular beliefs?

Khwaja: Popular beliefs, whether we consider articles in leadings U.S. or international newspapers, scholarly work by U.S., international or Pakistani scholars, or even government reports like the 9/11 Commission, are that madrassa enrollment in Pakistan is high both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of total enrollment, and that it has been increasing in recent years. For example, between March and July of 2002, figures for madrassa enrollment cited in The Washington Post tripled from 500,000 to 1.5 million. A report in 2002 by the International Crisis Group reported madrassa enrollment in Pakistan was between one and 1.7 million. The 9/11 Commission Report states that millions of families in Pakistan send their children to religious schools. In comparison, even our highest estimates are lower than these numbers.

What is more striking and in even sharper contrast to our estimates is the relative importance of madrassas. The L.A. Times reported that 10 percent of all enrolled children in Pakistan go to madrassas. The widely cited International Crisis Group report states that about one in every three enrolled children is going to a religious school. Although it is likely that the latter estimate is inflated ten fold due to a numerical miscalulation (transcription error). Recall our estimates were that less than one percent of enrolled children are in a madrassa.

Given the importance placed on these numbers by policy makers, what is of greater concern is that none of these articles base their analysis on established statistical methodologies and verifiable data sources or attempt to 'fact check' some of the higher estimates. For the most part, the primary sources for these articles are newspaper accounts of Pakistani police estimates or simply interviews with policy makers. We have yet to find a single article that validates these numbers with established statistical methodologies or verifiable data sources.

Q: What do these findings say about the educational landscape in Pakistan and its potential radical influences on young people there?

Khwaja: The educational landscape in Pakistan is characterized by the prevalence of public and private schools and madrassas play a minor role. While there has been a striking change in the last few years in the educational landscape, this is not a large increase in the number going to madrassas, but the phenomenal growth of mainstream private schools in Pakistan since the mid-90s.

In related work we show that in an almost 20 year period from 1983 to 2000, the number of private primary and secondary schools increased tenfold. Currently, almost 30 percent of children enrolled at the primary level are going to private schools. What is interesting is that the greatest growth in private schools has been in rural areas. These schools are typically for-profit schools and are affordable. The typical monthly tuition fees in these schools are less than what an unskilled worker would earn in a single day, with a family with four enrolled children spending around 7 percent of its household expenditure on schooling. These private schools are very much in the mainstream. They teach a curriculum that is similar to the government curriculum, with perhaps greater stress on teaching English. The vast majority of these private schools are coeducational at the primary level, compared to government schools which are officially single-sex.

While our findings show that madrassas are relatively unimportant as an educational option, these findings may speak differently to people with different concerns. For those interested in schooling choices facing the average Pakistani parent, madrassas play a very insignificant role. However, for those concerned about global security issues, absolute numbers may matter.

While we do not have data to examine whether certain types of madrassas promote extremist views, or what factors cause a child to go to a madrassa as opposed to a public or private school, our results suggest that no simple explanation will work. Most existing theories seek to explain why children go to madrassas based on the differences between families. For example, poor families may be more likely to send their children to madrassas because madrassas typically offer free room and board. Similarly, families with more radical religious beliefs or no alternate schooling options may send their children to madrassas. However, none of these theories are able to adequately explain the facts, in particular, the large observed differences in educational choice in children within the same family. Even in the less than 1 percent of families that send at least one child to a madrassa, more than three-fourths of these families send their other children to a public and/or private school. Any existing theory we have will have to be modified to account for the fact that there are large differences in educational choices across children in the same family. In fact, if the choice of a madrassa or private school does provide information about the ideology of the household, the data suggests that the choice of a private school is more ideologically driven than the choice of a madrassa.

The real revolution in the Pakistani educational landscape has been the rise of mainstream and affordable private schools. In order to understand what the future youth, or even the current youth of Pakistan is, or will be, we need to understand what the role of this private sector is and how it interacts with the public sector. For the average Pakistani child, the alternative to a public school is in fact not a madrassa, but is a private school, a fact which has been largely ignored in the current debate about education policy in Pakistan.

Reporters:

Please contact 617-495-1115 to arrange an interview with Asim Ijaz Khwaja.