Islamic Pakistan
185
Musharraf, but most close observers of the system feel that the madaris are so out of touch with the modern world that reform holds out no hope. They would support a combination of disbanding the more radical madaris, reforming others under state direction, and shrinking their overall enrollment by massive investment in the subsidized public schools while encouraging the formation of small store-front schools that would offer parents an alternative nongovernmental system. With competition in the school marketplace, the role of the madaris would be reduced dramatically, and they would be limited to providing a religious education for a small sector of Pakistan’s population. The rapid growth of madaris correlates with the decline in basic public education, the rise of sectarian violence, and massive funding from private and official Gulf sources. In the view of Islamists, a modern, secular education is the enemy, to be countered by ideologically driven solutions to Pakistan’s comprehensive economic and social problems. Only the middle- and upper-class Jama’at places a high premium on education, even for women. Essentially, the expansion of these seminaries and their upper-class counterparts, the English-language private schools, were in part a free-market response to the inability of the Pakistani state to address the issue of education. The madaris have assumed a lower profile since 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, and some have abandoned their militant curriculum, but enrollment was on the rise by 2002, perhaps to take in the backlog of applicants that had built up. The Pakistan government has declared that it has introduced a number of programs to address the more dangerous dimensions of the madaris. It has developed a standardized curriculum that includes modern subjects, claims to have restricted the entry of foreigners into the madaris, and has announced an expansion of public education. So far, the impact of these programs is very limited. When asked to register, only 1 percent of the madaris complied; the government still has no accurate count of the total number, let alone their influence over what is taught or who attends them. With a shortage of funds and strong resistance from the madaris, such reforms are token efforts. Under the completely new system of local selfgovernment, the provincial authorities lack the capability to enforce them even if the funds were available. Problems also surround foreign aid programs designed to provide a modern alternative to the more sectarian madaris because there is no effective system of monitoring where and