By Sabrina Tavernise
Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish
flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where
he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere
assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But
that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of
Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back
to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts
of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school
system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
Mr.
Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators
who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of
Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the
West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.
Their
efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and
whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of
American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.
At
present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis
cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free
but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their
children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid
organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some
have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is
rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and
choosing from a new array of private schools.
The Turkish schools,
which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one
opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they
offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of
Islamic extremists.
They prescribe a strong Western curriculum,
with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English
literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one
class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike
British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their
dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.
“Whatever
the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a
Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion
as well.”
That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want
their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing
their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in
Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an
elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not
sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called
PakTurk.
“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr.
Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house.
“Religious schools
can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”
The model
is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A
preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes
from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam.
He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in
trouble with secular Turkish officials.
Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr.
Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and
without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”
The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic
thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith
they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic
intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish
ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.
In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.
The
Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where
residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose
poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr.
Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as
soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with
their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle
America.
“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they
pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice
principal of the school, who is Pakistani.
Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.
“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr.
Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The
two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there
was no difference between a tie and glasses.
“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”
That
misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the
poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from
a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or
running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide
mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a
Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.
“Our nation
has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings,
after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one
of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish
school.
The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr.
Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the
family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr.
Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he
has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same
distinction. Their father was an imam.
His is a lonely mission in
a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most
disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard
against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the
wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised
around the clock in a dormitory.
“They are totally against
extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They
will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with
justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”
Illiteracy is one of the
roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a
religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in
Saudi Arabia.
In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated
province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a
government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about
half of the district’s children attended madrasas.
Mr. Aail said:
“Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to
mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have
knowledge, but they are influential.”
That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.
“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.
Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”
In
an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen
put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious
leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their
fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in
struggles that serve their own purposes.”
Moderate as that sounds,
some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political
agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience
with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has
been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim
Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.
Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen Movement, offered a darker assessment.
“The
purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power
is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim
world.”
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