Sex and the Madrasa
By Irfan Khawaja
http://www.secularislam.org/articles/khawaja24.htm

They say that "sex sells," but I guess there's an exception to every
rule, and evidently child rape in Pakistani madrasas is one of the
exceptions.[i]

On December 10, the BBC reported a bombshell story about
pedophilia in Pakistani madrasas that (to my knowledge) has
gotten almost no coverage in the mainstream US media--not even
a promissory note to the effect that "we'll look into it." I passed
the story along to a small handful of American journalists, but
only one (Charles Freund of Reason magazine) expressed any
interest in it.

I didn't see anything in any of the major American papers,
either”or on the major networks or CNN. (I first heard the story
on a BBC segment of National Public Radio.) An extensive Lexis-
Nexis search netted two references to Pakistani madrasa stories
between December 10 and 16, both unrelated to this one (and both
equally lame). Google turned up nothing in the US but recycled
versions of the BBC story posted on special-interest websites. The
Pakistani reaction was more diligent, but oddly muted; the best
coverage I read was a Dec. 11 piece in The Daily Times of Lahore,
but otherwise, coverage in the English-language press has been
relatively perfunctory.

A bit more persistence on Lexis-Nexis turned up a solitary but
astonishing dispatch from the United Press International, dated
Dec. 10:

Despite at least 500 complaints of child sex abuse at
Pakistani Muslim schools this year there has yet to be one
successful prosecution.

Aamer Liaquat Hussain, a minister in the nation's religious
affairs department, is facing death threats and
denunciations from Islamic clerics for his insistence that
Pakistan confront the sex abuse at its "madrassas," the
BBC reported Friday.

There are about 10,000 madrassas in Pakistan.

This year's 500 complaints compares with last year's 2,000,
Hussain said, but still no one has been convicted in any of
those 500 cases.

He praised the Federation of Madrassas for its willingness
to investigate the problem, which he said was besmirching
Islam's good name.

Hussain also rejected demands from some Islamic
politicians that he apologize for discussing the situation,
saying he himself experienced attempted abuse at a school
when he was 8.

Since none of this was considered newsworthy in the US, no one
here has bothered to pursue any of the obvious questions about
this item:

* Why hasn't there been a successful prosecution of the 500
cases brought forward this year?

* Who exactly is making the death threats and denunciations
against Aamer Liaquat Hussain? What are they saying, and
what has the response been?

* What became of the 2,000 complaints made last year?

* Do the complaints cluster among the 10,000 madrasas in
any interesting ways?

* What is the Federation of Madrasas doing to "investigate
the problem," and what sort of progress is it making?

* Where do the major Pakistani parties stand on the issue?
Have Benazir Bhuttoor or Nawaz Sharif been asked to
comment?

* What exactly happened to Mr. Hussain in his childhood
madrasa? Was it an isolated incident or a commonplace?

It may be a pipe dream to expect American journalists to pursue
questions like these, but that fact by itself leads naturally to an
eighth question: Why should the supposedly richest, freest, wisest
and most objective press in the world - usually eager for a scoop
on any scandal, however inane - have missed a story of this
caliber, and be so indifferent to it?

A caveat: I admit that it is politically convenient for the Musharraf
government to be breaking this news at this time, so there is a
possibility that Mr. Hussain is exaggerating parts of it. And, of
course, since there have been no successful prosecutions so far,
we can't immediately infer from "accused" to "guilty." Fair
enough.

But that caveat only goes so far. There are obvious reasons why
Muslim clerics, even if guilty, might not successfully be
prosecuted for sex crimes, so the usual mantra about "innocent
until proven guilty" needs a bit of qualification in this case. For
one thing, the same fundamentalist parties that are denouncing
Mr. Hussain control some of the regions with the densest
concentrations of madrasas. For another, as recent gang rape
cases in Pakistan show, when it comes to the prosecution of sex
crimes, Pakistan's law-enforcement and judicial systems are, to
put it mildly, acquittal-prone. At any rate, I find it difficult to
believe that Mr. Hussain would publicly have brought up his own
victimization if there wasn't some truth to the charges.

So let's put it this way: there is at least "probable cause" to
believe that something sexually untoward is going on in those
madrasas. If probable cause can justify a warrant for search or
arrest, it can surely justify a bit of journalistic curiosity. So take
the remainder of what I say not as a categorical accusation of
guilt, but as an exploration of the implications if the charges turn
out to be true.

If they are true, the madrasa story is to Pakistan (and by extension
to the Muslim world) what the analogous story was to the
Catholic Church a few years ago”or for that matter what Abu
Ghraib has been for the US occupation of Iraq. Both of the latter
scandals have permanently scarred the institutions responsible for
producing them. The consequences of inflicting the same sorts of
damage on the Pakistani madrasacracy are incalculable - incalculably good, that is.

The charges also give some perspective to Islamic fundamentalists' tedious habit of sermonizing at us about the supposed sexual dysfunctionality of "the West" and the superior moral virtue of "the Islamic East." The Asia Times columnist Spengler has recently produced an amusing quasi-parody of such a sermon in which he rails at the sexual depravity of "the West," and which he jokingly claims to have gotten directly from Osama bin Laden.

Joke or not, such sermons ought to provoke the rejoinder that dar
al Islam is not exactly the abode of virginal chastity that the
fundamentalists would have us believe that it is. With gang rape in
Punjab (cf. the Mukhtaran Bibi case), mass rape in Darfur, female
genital mutilation across parts of Muslim Africa, and honor
killings of girls in various Arab countries, it would appear to be
time for our holier-than-thou sermonizers to introspect a bit and
focus on some of their own sexual hang-ups. Add polygamy to the
rap sheet, plus the weird Muslim obsession with burqa, chador
and hijab; add the yet-weirder cult of the 72 post-mortem virgins,
throw in stoning as a punishment for adultery, and then consider
burial-alive as a punishment for homosexuality. XXX- rated
Qur'anic literacy lessons seem pretty much par for the course in
this context. In short, put it all together, and the sexual depravities
of "the West" begin to look tame by comparison with what the
Muslim world has to offer in the way of polymorphous perverse
sexuality.

Pause with me a bit for a digression, albeit a pertinent one. I
wonder if you're as tired as I am of Muslim apologists
rhapsodizing about the joys of life under Islamic theocracy, of
which life in the madrasa is supposed to be a microcosm. Hearken
for instance to the words of Brother Amir Butler, a self-avowed
Australian-Muslim theocrat, and Executive Director of the
Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee. In a recent piece in
the Sydney Morning Herald, Butler tells us (from the safety of
Sydney, naturally) that theocracy rather than secularism is the
right prescription for Muslim countries:

While the Islamic world may be undergoing its dark ages
now, history shows that its experience under religious rule
has been the antithesis of European experience: the
periods of theocratic Muslim rule, such as in Cordoba or
Baghdad, were also periods of social, technological and
scientific advancement and achievement.

Many foundations of modern society owe themselves to
Islamic contributions, such as the invention of algebra, the
establishment of the hospital, lighted cities, and the
preservation of Greek and Roman texts. It is ironic that the
Muslim world contributed significantly to the development
of the culture that would in a few short centuries come to
colonise it, in part because of the Muslim world's
abandonment of its faith. ("Muslim reformists threaten the
faith," Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 17, 2004).

Oh, the sad, familiar tale: Islam makes; the world takes. But
doesn't Butler's argument cut both ways? The operative
explanatory principle here is that Islam gets all the credit for
whatever happens under Islamic rule. In that case, why wouldn't
Islam constitute the perfect explanation of pedophilia in
Pakistan's madrasas? Surely Pakistan's madrasas are more
distinctively Islamic a milieu than the supposedly "theocratic"
regimes of Cordoba or Baghdad. If Islam reigns in the madrasas,
and produces pedophilia, why can't we infer that Islam is what
produces pedophilia?

I doubt Brother Butler would be happy with that inference. But if
he wants to acquit Islam of the depredations of Islamic madrasas,
he's hardly entitled to assert blankly that Islam must necessarily
get the credit for such secular achievements as the invention of
algebra, hospitals, lighted cities and the preservation of pagan
texts. If Islam doesn't explain the crimes of assiduously Islamic
institutions, why assume that it explains the secular achievements
of nominally Islamic regimes? Either Islam explains everything
under Islamic rule, in which case it explains the atrocities that
take place there; or it explains selected things, in which case we
need a non-arbitrary principle to determine what it explains and
what it doesn't. But "non-arbitrary principles" are not the sort of
thing I've come to expect from our armchair theocrats, who have
an agenda essentially dependent on the arbitrary, and essentially
hostile to principles.

While we're on the subject of theocracy, I can't resist taking a
peep at what Islamic theocrats have specifically had to say about
sex. One of my favorite passages on the topic comes from Sayyid
Qutb's famous 1964 book, Milestones. In Chapter 7 of the
book - modestly entitled "Islam is the Real Civilization" - Qutb
rails on and on against Western sexual depravity, and then offers
his own view of the straight path:

The line of human progress goes upward from animal
desires toward higher values. To control the animal
desires, a progressive society lays down the foundation of
a family system in which human desires and satisfaction,
as well as providing for the future generation to be brought
up in such a manner that it will continue the human
civilization, in which human characteristics flower to their
full bloom. Obviously, a society which intends to control
the animal characteristics, while providing full
opportunities for the development and perfect of human
characteristics, requires strong safeguards for the peace
and stability of the family, so that it may perform its basic
task free from the influences of impulsive passions. On the
other hand, if in a society immoral teachings and
poisonous suggestions are rampant and sexual activity is
considered outside of the sphere of morality, then in that
society the humanity of man can hardly find a place to
develop. (Milestones, p. 99 of the Kazi edition, Lahore).

The passage is a sort of zoological equivalent of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Our biological capacities, it tells us, are mere animal
drives that ought to be "controlled" by force, i.e., throttled,
suffocated, and repressed. Applied to nutrition, I suppose this has
the salutary effect of making a virtue out of Egypt's perennial
inability to feed its population. Applied to sexuality, it turns out to
be a crude revival of the moral psychology of the Platonic
dialogues (e.g., the Republic and Phaedrus, so beloved of Islamic
fundamentalists), according to which our bodily and sexual nature
is a wanton animal running wild in our otherwise pure and
immaterial psyche. Taken literally, the doctrine seems to imply
that procreation aside, it doesn't much matter whether you have
sex with a person or with an animal; sex is but a dreary
anatomical operation no matter who's doing it to whom.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that exponents of this view of
sexuality should end up imposing their "anatomical operations"
on children. If you believe that your sexuality is the doing of a
wild, alien animal that resides inside of you, your sexuality isn't
really yours; it's an alien phenomenon that runs by its own
inexplicable urges and impulses, operating wholly beyond your
ken. But sometimes, alas, the beast within must be placated, and
why should there be any shame in doing so? Its needs aren't
yours; it wallows in the muck, while your immortal soul soars to
the heavens. Since "its" needs are a purely animal function
unrelated to romantic love, naturally the sexual choices you're left
with will be the decidedly unromantic ones.

Take romantic love entirely out of the sexual equation, and you
take reciprocity out of the sexual act. Take reciprocity entirely
out, and you subtract both equality and consent. Take consent out,
and you're left with rape or bestiality. Combine rape with
bestiality”and dress them both in the garb of pedagogy - and you
have pedophilia. Combine pedophilia with misology, misogyny,
neurosis, and political power, and you have the
Deobandi/Wahhabi madrasa system of Pakistan. The ulema of
Pakistan may not have advanced the cause of human knowledge
by a single centimeter, but let's give them credit: they have
doctorates in the algebra of human exploitation.

Descending (or rather, ascending) from the ulema to plain
persons - and specifically to ordinary Pakistanis - one is left at
last with a few questions. Since the fall of 2001, we've seen and
heard Pakistanis repeatedly taking to the streets to protest what
they like to call "American interference in Pakistan's affairs" and
President Musharraf's "poodle-like subservience to George
Bush." Two days after the revelations about the madrasas, the
Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (i.e., the fundamentalist party coalition)
and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz faction (i.e., the center-
right party) took to the streets of Lahore to protest...what? Why,
the catastrophic moral horror of General Musharraf's wearing his
military uniform in public.

I admit that there is something problematic about American policy
vis-à-vis Pakistan; that the Pakistani military has gotten out of
control under Musharraf; that terrorism has become an excuse for
the PML-Q's authoritarianism; and that Musharraf's military
dictatorship cannot last forever.

But admitting all of that, isn't a sense of priorities in order?
Suppose that these madrasa charges turn out to be entirely true.
What then is the greater threat to the well-being of Pakistan - the
military's admittedly underhanded political machinations, or the
thousands of sub-literate sexual predators educating the children?

Who has literally "infiltrated" and "invaded" Pakistan: the
American Central Intelligence Agency - or the Pakistani
Federation of Madrasas? And which phenomenon deserves louder
condemnation in the streets of Islamabad, Lahore and
Karachi - the excesses of the government's war against Islamic
fundamentalism, or those of the fundamentalists' war against the
people of Pakistan?

I'm optimistic enough to think that Pakistanis will eventually
come to the right answers to these questions (even if they take
their sweet time doing it). There is a healthy reservoir of contempt
for the madrasacracy in Pakistan, as there has always been, and it
is long since time to unleash that contempt at its proper object.
But there is no point in complaining about "foreign interference in
Pakistan's affairs" when those "affairs" are being run, in effect, by
a bunch of child rapists and their sympathizers, claiming the
sanction to violate children in the name of God and the authority
to anathematize those who merely inquire into the matter. Sweep
them away and you have at last a country capable of staking its
claims as an equal among other nations. But not until then.

There is a hero in this dismal story, and it is Aamer Liaquat
Hussain, now on the receiving end of blind abuse, death threats,
and defamation. A recent Pew Research Center survey asserts,
depressingly, that 65% of Pakistanis have a favorable view of
Osama bin Laden. That explains a lot, and also tells us that Mr.
Hussain has his work cut out for him. But it stands to reason that
the remaining 35% ought to stand by him--and stand by the
unsung activists described in the Dec. 11 Daily Times piece
hyperlinked above. Part of standing by someone is supporting
him; part is emulating him. If as many people would turn up at
Lahore's Minaret of Pakistan (Minaar-e-Pakistan) in support of
Hussain as showed up in defiance of Musharraf, they would
discharge both tasks at once. Repeated a few times, that would
send a message that would reverberate through all 10,000 of the
madrasas of Pakistan: "Beware of what you do. Take from us
what belongs to us”violate what is most intimately ours - and we
will resist you to the death."

That last phrase is ambiguous, I suppose, about whose death is
intended. Well, the ulema interpret texts for a living, don't they?
Let them puzzle that one out for themselves.

[i] My apologies to linguistic pedants who insist on the plural
"madaris," but just as we refer in English to "Muslims" and not
"muslimun," we legitimately refer to "madrasas" and not
"madaris."

Irfan Khawaja is adjunct professor of philosophy at The College
of New Jersey and Rutgers-Camden, and Executive Director of
ISIS.