WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- A new research study released Tuesday refutes commonly accepted assertions about the popularity of madrassas in Pakistan.
The report, titled "Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A look at the Data," is the first study to use publicly available and nationally representative data sources to examine the enrollment trends of Pakistani students at religious schools.
Madrassas provide basic training to would-be Muslim clerics, teaching them how to read the Koran and lead daily and weekly prayers. Some of the leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban movement studied at these madrassas, and later when they came into power, they also became associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, which is believed to have carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.
Professor Asim Ijaz Khwaja of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-authors Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc found that madrassas account for less than 1 percent of the total student enrollment in the country, with 200,000 children enrolled fulltime before 2001. They also concluded that there is no evidence of a dramatic increase in madrassa enrollment in recent years.
These findings contradict many recent press accounts. For example, between March 2002 and July 2002, figures for madrassa enrollment cited in The Washington Post tripled from 500,000 to 1.5 million.
A report about madrassas by the International Crisis Group in 2002 puts madrassa enrollment between 1 million and 1.7 million. The report claimed that this number represents 33 percent of all Pakistani children enrolled in schools, "when in fact it is less than 1 percent," the authors say.
Similar numbers were reported in other major newspapers and influential publications like the 9-11 commission report.
"We felt compelled to examine the data carefully to determine precisely the popularity of madrassas in Pakistan," Khwaja said. "And our conclusions run counter to the numbers reported in many newspapers and by influential publications like the 9-11 commission report."
According to the authors, enrollment in madrassas accounts for just 0.3 percent of all Pakistani children between ages 5 and 19. Since the overall school enrollment rate in this age group is 42 percent, this represents less than 0.7 percent of all Pakistani children attending school. Even in regions that border Afghanistan, where madrassa enrollment is relatively high, it is less than 7.5 percent of all enrolled children.
The authors point out that the real revolution in the Pakistani educational landscape in recent years has been the rise of affordable and mainstream private schools.
The study shows that since 2001, total enrollment in madrassas has remained constant in some districts and increased in others. Even among the less than 1 percent of families who have children enrolled in madrassas, more than 75 percent send their other children to private and public schools.
The report points out that there is an important distinction between a madrassa, which enrolls fulltime students, and a maktab where parents send their children to learn their religion.
The data collected by the research team show that around 200,000 children were enrolled fulltime in madrassas before 2001. Since 2001, the authors' school census suggests that these numbers may have increased somewhat, although the experience varies across districts.
According to this study, total primary enrollment -- grades 1-5 -- in public and private schools stood at 17.4 million in 2003. Enrollment in madrassas accounted for approximately 0.3 percent of all children between the ages of 5 and 19.
Given that the overall enrollment rate for this age group is roughly 42 percent, this represents less than 0.7 percent of all enrolled children, an order of magnitude less than the 33 percent cited by the International Crisis Group report.
In terms of proportions of the enrolled population, the top 10 districts out of a total of 101 lie in the Pashtun belt on the western border of Afghanistan. Outside the Pashtun belt, madrassa enrollment is thinly, but evenly, spread across the rest of the country.
Madrassa popularity declined from 1940 to 1980, but increased during the religion-based resistance to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979. The largest jump in madrassa enrollment was for 10-year-olds in the period 1989-93 -- coinciding with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Taliban.
Outside the "Pashtun" belt, the distribution of madrassa enrollment at the level of the village is spread evenly with most variation within rather than between villages. Among the households covered by this team's 2003 census, the researchers found the same pattern.
"The prevailing hypothesis that households do not have other schooling options and thus send their children to religious schools, or that households are religiously minded and thus choose madrassas over private and public schools is not supported by the data," the researchers note.
They looked at households with at least two enrolled children where one child attends a madrassa. Such households are small in number, accounting for less than 1 percent of the sample.
Among these households, less than 25 percent send all their children to madrassas; in contrast, 50 percent send their children to both madrassas and public schools and another 27 percent use the private school option.
"There is weak evidence to support the hypothesis that poorer and less-educated families are more likely to send a child to a madrassa, and somewhat stronger findings that poor children in settlements without a school use madrassas more often."
