Friday, July 22, 2005
The Madrassa Myth
The Madrassa Myth
By Peter Bergen
Schwartz Fellow
and Swati Pandey
Research Associate
The New York Times
June 14, 2005
It is one of the widespread assumptions of the war on
terrorism that the Muslim religious schools known as
madrassas, catering to families that are often poor,
are graduating students who become terrorists. Last
year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell denounced
madrassas in Pakistan and several other countries as
breeding grounds for "fundamentalists and terrorists."
A year earlier, Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld had queried in a leaked memorandum, "Are we
capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more
terrorists every day than the madrassas and the
radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying
against us?"
While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have
learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such
schools do not teach the technical or linguistic
skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed,
there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce
terrorists capable of attacking the West. And as a
matter of national security, the United States doesn't
need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom
we may disagree, but about terrorists who want to
attack us.
We examined the educational backgrounds of 75
terrorists behind some of the most significant recent
terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a
majority of them are college-educated, often in
technical subjects like engineering. In the four
attacks for which the most complete information about
the perpetrators' educational levels is available -
the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998,
the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53
percent of the terrorists had either attended college
or had received a college degree. As a point of
reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to
college. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on
average, to be as well educated as many Americans.
The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men,
all of whom had a college education. The 9/11 pilots,
as well as the secondary planners identified by the
9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a
prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the
Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed
Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all
things, urban preservation, while the operational
planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied
engineering in North Carolina. We also found that
two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved
in 9/11 had attended college. Of the 75 terrorists we
investigated, only nine had attended madrassas, and
all of those played a role in one attack - the Bali
bombing. Even in this instance, however, five
college-educated "masterminds" - including two
university lecturers - helped to shape the Bali plot.
Like the view that poverty drives terrorism - a notion
that countless studies have debunked - the idea that
madrassas are incubating the next generation of
terrorists offers the soothing illusion that
desperate, ignorant automatons are attacking us rather
than college graduates, as is often the case. In fact,
two of the terrorists in our study had doctorates from
Western universities, and two others were working
toward their Ph.D.
A World Bank-financed study that was published in
April raises further doubts about the influence of
madrassas in Pakistan, the country where the schools
were thought to be the most influential and the most
virulently anti-American. Contrary to the numbers
cited in the report of the 9/11 commission, and to a
blizzard of newspaper reports that 10 percent of
Pakistani students study in madrassas, the study's
authors found that fewer than 1 percent do so. If
correct, this estimate would suggest that there are
far more American children being home-schooled than
Pakistani boys attending madrassas.
While madrassas are an important issue in education
and development in the Muslim world, they are not and
should not be considered a threat to the United
States. The tens of millions of dollars spent every
year by the United States through the State
Department, the Middle East Partnership Initiative,
and the Agency for International Development to
improve education and literacy in the Middle East and
South Asia should be applauded as the development aid
it is and not as the counterterrorism effort it cannot
be.
Copyright: 2005 The New York Times
