When I ask Mufti Hayatullah Masroor to choose a text for the morning lesson in the Al-Jami’a Al-Islamiya Al-Islamiya Al-Mohammadia-Kabul madrasa which he supervises in Qala Haidar Khan, a village in Kabul province, he takes time, approaches the shelf where he keeps his books in order, leafs through them, carefully chooses the lines and reads this hadit aloud: «I have heard the Messenger of Allah say: ‘Every woman who dies will enter Heaven if God was happy with her conduct’».
In front of him about twenty students. The youngest is her son, he is six years old, he sits at the back of the classroom, the others are all teenagers. They listen to him with their heads bent over their turbans, their hands folded on their knees, in a silence that is already devotion.
Servant of Islam
The text that Mufti Hayatullah Masroor reads is one of the 600 pamphlets written by the founder of the Koranic school, Shaik Mohammad Zahed Azizkhel, a scholar from the province of Logar, specialized in religious studies and a jurist known worldwide for his publications, “a great servant of Islam ”all define it here.
Trained in Pakistan, he taught Islamic subjects in the madrassas of 16 Afghan provinces. When there is news of his arrival, the Mufti says, the villages stop and the families pray that their children will be admitted to the lessons. His first time in the village was ten years ago, he gave short seminars to five hundred students from the area. There were no books, nor enough space, but no one gave up, they listened to him sitting in the cold, and slept on the ground to listen to him again, the next day “his lessons were our challenge to the previous regime” says Mufti Masroor, stacking in front of me, one on top of the other the texts of the founder and giving me one, in French, which indicates the rules of good behavior for the sisters of the Islamic faith.
In 2018, a school was born from the short seminars, built on an area of one hectare and so far cost 12 million Afghans (about one hundred thousand euros), private funds, says the Mufti, collected by Shaik Mohammad Zahed Azizkhel among businessmen who they support it, especially in Pakistan.
In class 24 hours a day
The building is still under construction, glass is missing in many windows, only a handful of classrooms have stoves, despite this 150 children live in the school to learn the Koran by heart and follow specialization courses in Islamic studies and law, which they last two years.
One hundred and fifty which should become 1,500 in two years.
A life closed within the walls of the school, a 24-hour program. From dawn to noon in class, then the time of prayer, then again the individual study of the texts until the evening. A fear of two hours and more memory exercises on the Koran, and finally writing until 11 pm. It is the pure instruction of pure Islam, the Mufti repeats several times, only by instructing young people in this way, he explains, “the regulations of the Afghan people will be conducted in accordance with Islam and under the supervision of the Ulema (religious scholars) ».
For a long time, madrasahs have been the only way for the most vulnerable sections of the population to give an education to their children, who were welcomed, protected, fed and clothed there: there are no taxes, no one pays either to study or for the board and lodging. The madrasahs arrived in Afghanistan where the state did not arrive: the government of Kabul has historically allocated few resources to the education of rural areas, thus allowing the Koranic schools to grow in number and influence. It is in those classrooms that the majority of young people grew up who last summer entered Kabul, rifle on their shoulders, to wave the flag of victory. Even stronger than this, since they took office the Taliban have reiterated that the country no longer needs young graduates in the last twenty years, instructed by usurping armies to change the traditions of the country.
Useless graduates
The education minister, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, said clearly during the first meeting with university teachers: “The graduates we inherit from the years of occupation are useless.” The decisions of the first months of government were consistent: having declared learning, languages and sciences irrelevant, the Taliban banned girls from going to school and defined Koranic schools as “the only scholarship the country has need », a clear reference to the money spent by the West to finance school projects from 2001 to today. Education was considered one of the success stories of international aid, last year in Afghanistan 67% of boys and 48% of girls were enrolled in school according to data from the World Bank, which means that under the protection of the international community nine times more young people had access to education than in the period of the first Islamic emirate, between 1996 and 2001.
The return of the mullahs
Today, for the Taliban, contesting the previous educational paradigm does not only mean seeking continuity with the past – girls banned from classes – but it also means bringing the mullahs back to where Westerners would have liked to build the new leaders of Afghanistan. “You see that the mullahs and the Taliban in power do not have a doctorate, a master’s degree or even a high school diploma, but they are the greatest of all,” said the deputy education minister, referring to the religious formation of government members. they too, like the founder of the madrasa that welcomed me, trained in the Pakistani Koranic schools, almost all of them by one of the oldest seminaries in the country, Darul Uloom Haqqania, to whom the Haqqani network, the military wing of the Taliban, owes its name, responsible for some of the most heinous attacks in recent years.
The university of jihad
Analysts call it the “university of jihad”, believing it to be the terrain that has fueled violence in the region for decades, has come from Sirajuddin Haqqani, on which hangs a $ 5 million bounty from the United States government, current minister of the Interior of Kabul, and again Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Foreign Minister and – needless to say – Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the Minister of Higher Education. Therefore, this too is the message of the new decisions on school, for twenty years you have promoted education for all, the walls of the madrasa seem to whisper, but we, the Koranic students, have won.
And therefore our model will become the model for everyone.
Mufti Hayatullah Masroor, in the madrasa of the village near Kabul, claims it: no specializations, here: no English, no mathematics «maybe one day we will include these subjects in our curriculum, but it is definitely premature to think about it now. We think about welcoming those in need, there will be time for other disciplines ».
It is true that without specializations, however, the state machinery cannot be made to function.
If education is one of the main objectives of the new Taliban policies, it is legitimate to ask who and with what skills will solve the banking paralysis, who will make the administrative and diplomatic machinery work, who will stop the humanitarian crisis?
The winner’s parade
After the euphoria of victory, the young Taliban at the checkpoints are left with weapons on their shoulders and empty pockets, young people who proclaim the values of “pure” Islam in a constant parade of the winner. A fragile parade, however, because it is exhibited in the face of an economic collapse that needs urgent solutions, and specialists capable of managing it. Like those raised in schools and universities of the past twenty years, skills necessary to rebuild the country and to which, perhaps, sooner or later, the Taliban will be forced to ask for help and cooperation, to free the billions of dollars in blocked funds and reactivate the administrative machine, emptied of employees and officials and occupied by students who know the Koran by heart but do not know mathematics.
Women’s rights
On the morning when I was admitted to the madrasa lessons, Mufti Hayatullah Masroor taught grammar and read a text dedicated to women. When I asked why she had chosen that one, among many, she said she did it to show that “it is possible for women to receive an education but only in accordance with the Islamic Sharia, that is, according to their needs”.
Requirements written on an interpretation of the world that he explained to his students more or less like this: women are precious human beings and must be protected, so at birth they are protected by the father, then by the husband and finally by the children, who take care of them. This, he said, is proof that women are more valuable than men, are supported by being alive, do not need to work, nor do they have to worry about financial problems. Indeed, they are men, their servants. This is why school is not a necessity.
The students nodded.
For a while I thought that the lesson, more than to them, was addressed to me, the part for the whole of the western occupier.
Then the Mufti said these words: “The rights of women promoted by Western countries are in contradiction with our religion and our tradition and the invaders will never be able to impose these rights, if not at the price of a war, as the one they just lost. “
And then I realized that the lesson was not for me, but that I was the object of it. Presented to the Taliban of the future as evidence of a defeat, in front of them, winning students.
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