Fun and games at the madrassa
If Wikipedia has it right there are currently around forty thousand madrassas in Pakistan. If they’re all full-time pseudo-schools as opposed to an hour or two in the afternoon, that’s an appalling figure, because they don’t teach anything, they just inject the Koran in Arabic, which is useless for anything except doing the same thing to the next generation of doomed children. And that’s before we even get to the political and, shall we say, combustion-related aspect.
A 14-year-old who was trained to kill by radicals in the tribal regions of Pakistan now sits in a crowded classroom at a detention facility in Kabul. His only wish is to see his parents again…”I didn’t want to do it but he forced me to go,” he says of his recruiter. Rubbing his face with his hand, he says he now spends his time dreaming of his life back home in rural Pakistan. His eyes begin to water and his voice becomes softer when he talks about missing his mother. Asked what he misses most about her, he says simply, “A mother is a mother.” His was a life of farming and tranquility in Pakistan, he says. It was also a life that took a drastic turn when his father decided to send Shakirullah for studies at a madrassa. He says his [father] wanted him to learn more about Islam and the Quran, something he could not do himself. He says his father didn’t know radicals ran the school. In the madrassa, Shakirullah learned to recite the Quran in Arabic, not his native language. He relied solely on the fanatical interpretations the mullahs were giving him. “When I finished reciting the Quran, a mullah then came to me and told me, ‘Now that you have finished the Quran, you need to go and commit a suicide attack.’ That I should go to Afghanistan to commit a suicide attack,” he says.
So – lucky parents of rural Pakistan – they send a child to what they think is a place where he’ll learn more about Islam and the Quran but is in fact a place where adult men send children out to kill themselves and others. How nice.
“I miss my parents”
Not to take away from Shakirullah’s desolation, anguish and loss. But, in all probability, if he we were a girl of the same age in his part of the world, he would be in the throes of being packed off by his parents to be married off to some miserable man, or other, (thricefold and more his age) In all likelihood, he would not have the luxury of having any more contact thereafter, with his parents.
True. I hadn’t thought of that.
We can always hope that many girls are married to men who aren’t too awful, and that they are able to stay in contact with their families if they want to, and so on. But for X number of others, you’re right – they’re sent into exile with a man who is too awful.
sigh
“At the juvenile detention facility, Shakirullah and the others are now being taught a different interpretation of Islam.”
In comparison to the peaceful rural farming surroundings that S comes from – it must be awful at the JTF.
Nevertheless, in saying this, there is one bit of consolation in that he is taught ‘a different interpretation of Islam’. He will, as a result (hopefully) because of all this new found education stand a better chance of surving. If he was older it would, I think, be very difficult to change his views, as ‘it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks’.
I wish him all the best. He has such beautiful features – one would not expect someone as gentle as him to be capable of such evil atrocities. There is full-blown indoctrination in evidence.
OB: Is the Q’uran in Arabic, the only acceptable version, considered by Muslims?
M-T: Yes. The idea is that the Koran was dictated directly by Allah so the Koran is the words of Allah while any translation of course is not.