Madrasas and the Modern State: Religious Education and Religious Extremism in Pakistan

摘要

Shortly after the 7 July bombings in London last year, it was revealed that at least two of the four bombers had travelled to Pakistan to study in local madrasas. At about the same time, Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey reported, in an article prepared for The Washington Quarterly, that, among those with an interest in accounting for the sources of religious 'extremism', not only in Pakistan but throughout the Muslim world, the role of local madrasas had been exaggerated. In particular, they noted that 89 per cent of the world's seventy-nine leading Muslim terrorists had not received their education exclusively in a madrasa. Instead, most were educated in modern secular schools.