Situating the Islamic Schooling Trend in Pakistan

Abstract

In the summers of 2004 and 2005, I visited Pakistan to conduct a pilot study on religious education in Pakistan. Despite being a native anthropologist, I was not better informed than the international media and only examined religious education and practice inside madrasas. As I collected comparative information from private secular schools to understand differences in their pedagogical methods from those of the madrasas, I noticed the growth of a private Islamic kind of schooling. I was curious to know whether this educational phenomenon, that I later returned to Pakistan to study in detail, was present elsewhere in the world. I found that, although no systematic research has yet been done on Islamic schools in Pakistan, they are a fast-growing trend among majority and minority Muslim communities in various Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Although a few studies exist, there is a dearth of systematic examination of these modern Islamic schools. Parochial schools have also become widespread among diasporic Muslim communities in the United States and Europe. My second task was to find a theoretical grounding for terms such as Islamic way of life, traditional Islamic education, modern secular schooling and moderate Islam that administrators, teachers, and parents used frequently during my conversations with them in Karachi.