• Curriculum and educational content

Curriculum and educational content

The Pakistani state’s agenda to reform madrasas, and through that the conservative interpretation of Islam within Pakistan, goes back to the 1960s. From the start it has pursued a similar objective: to introduce modern subjects to the madrasa curriculum so that the students integrate into the mainstream economy and society. However, madrasas have successfully resisted state pressure to change their curriculum. This paper examines this phenomenon.

The author highlights two main reasons for the madrasas’ ability to resist state led reform:

• weak political will due to close links between Islam and political legitimacy
• strong madrasa leadership resulting from an alliance between senior Islamic scholars (ulema) and a strong base of domestic patronage.

The paper reveals that the involvement of bigger madrasas is critical to reform because it gives legitimacy to the reform programme, which in turn makes it more acceptable to smaller madrasas. The paper therefore argues that winning the trust of the senior ulema and making them active partners in developing a reformed curriculum is the only way to develop a reform programme, which will have broad-based acceptance among the madrasas. This requires a major shift in the mindset of the government and the donor agencies supporting the madrasa reform programme. Rather than starting their planning from how to secularise the madrasa, they need to accept the madrasa’s primary role to be a producer of Islamic knowledge, and then explore how modern interpretations of the religious text can be included within the madrasa education rather than exclusively focusing on adding modern subjects to the madrasa curriculum.

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