In seeking explanations for Islamic radicalism, the U.S. media has focused disproportionately on the madrassas of Pakistan and Afghanistan as training grounds for budding terrorists, with the resulting effect that educational practices throughout the Muslim world are imagined as uniformly retrograde or medieval. After colonialism, governments in many Muslim countries sought greater control over educational practices, resulting in an often uneasy relationship between 'ulama (the learned group of Islamic scholars whose function in Muslim societies has been to determine correct religious practice) and state, as chapters on Pakistan and Egypt assert.
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