BOOK REVIEWS

Faithful Education: Madrassahs in South Asia by Ali Riaz. New Brunswick, NJ, and
London: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 289 pp. $59.90 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-
8135-4345-1.

Within the post–September 11, 2001, debate on global terrorism, Islamic educa-
tional institutions have increasingly become the target of political analysts and
policy makers. Against the monolithic and often oversimplified depiction of Islamic
schools and their connection to the “global jihad,” Ali Riaz offers a nuanced his-
torical and comparative examination of madrassahs in the three Southeast Asian
countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. Instead of offering a simplistic equa-
tion that connects madrassah education with international terrorism, Faithful Ed-
ucation goes beyond a narrow security perspective to examine these schools within
larger contexts, paying attention to international developments and specific socio-
economic and political dynamics in each country post-1947. Although Riaz dis-
misses an unqualified equation between madrassahs and transnational terrorist
ideology, he traces changes in the three countries’ political economies along with
international developments that have led to a transformation of the madrassahs,
especially in Pakistan and Bangladesh, linking the schools to political activism and
militancy.
Although Southeast Asian madrassahs, particularly those in Pakistan, have
drawn much public attention over the past years, in part due to presumed links
between them and Afghanistan’s Taliban, Riaz’s study is the first of its kind to
evaluate these educational institutions from a comparative perspective in the con-
text of South Asia. Chapter 3 argues that the growth of madrassahs in Pakistan,
“their close connection with political activism,” and “their transformation into
institutions of indoctrination” (79) have to be understood as a result of the sec-
tarianism promoted by successive political regimes since the late 1970s. Similarly,
Riaz points to the role of outside events, such as the Iranian revolution and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in the increased organization of madrassahs along
sectarian lines. The situations of the madrassahs in Bangladesh and India are
analyzed with similar attention to sociopolitical contexts. Chapter 4, on Bangladesh,
asserts the shaping influence of domestic and international factors such as a shift
in state ideology and the rising Islamization of Bangladeshi society over the past
2 decades on the growing connection between militant groups and privately man-
aged Qwami madrassahs. Different from their Pakistani and Bangladeshi counter-
parts, Indian madrassahs, the focus of chapter 5, have not yet been politicized in
the same way. Riaz, however, posits the future possibility of such politicization in
light of the state’s continued failure to address the political and social exclusion
of India’s Muslim minority and to provide access to basic education.
Given the shared historical and cultural traditions of these institutions, the
comparative framework of Riaz’s work is instructive. The study’s ambitious scope,
however, leaves the reader dissatisfied with the lack of attention to significant issues
in the contemporary discourse on Islamic education in South Asia. Gender ques-
tions and the education of girls are only marginally addressed in the country studies.
For Pakistan, in particular, a discussion of the consequences that recent initiatives
of provincial governments to expand girls’ education have had on developments
in the madrassah scene would have been desirable. In the same way, the effects of

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 BOOK REVIEWS

the burgeoning sector of nonsectarian private schools in both urban and rural
areas and its influence on school choice for parents are not addressed beyond the
assertion that the madrassah remains the most popular alternative for the rural
poor when state schooling is unavailable. Such conclusions, although not entirely
without warrant, are complicated by studies indicating that in the absence of gov-
ernment schooling a general exit from the school system or enrollment in the
private school sector (even among the rural poor) are more popular alternatives
than madrassahs (see Tahir Andrabi et al., “Modern School Enrollment in Pakistan:
A Look at the Data,” Comparative Education Review 50, no. 3 [August 2006]: 446–77).
Furthermore, the study’s broad reach rarely affords the author sufficient space
to address nuances regarding variations across districts within each of the three states.
The discussion of the Pakistani madrassah, for example, primarily focuses on the
madrassahs in the Pashto-speaking areas along the border with Afghanistan. The
author’s analysis of available survey data supports the widely shared notion that
geopolitical factors, such as the Afghan-Soviet war and the rise of the Taliban, were
decisive factors in the dramatic increase of madrassahs in the 1980s. Measured in
terms of the percentage of students enrolled, however, the Pashtun belt is more of
an anomaly than the norm in Pakistan. The enrollment percentage for madrassahs
in the border region with Afghanistan remains significantly higher than in all other
districts in the country. To what extent do these geographical patterns of madrassah
enrollment reflect variations in type, organization, and ideological orientation of
these institutions throughout the country? This question remains largely unanswered
in the present study and still provides rich opportunities for future research.
Some of the above limitations are the result of the dearth of publicly available,
accurate data on madrassah education in South Asia. As he analyzes existing surveys
and research, Riaz readily acknowledges these difficulties, among others, as a con-
sequence of unreliable government surveys and a lack of previous academic interest
in madrassah education. In the absence of dependable, large-scale surveys or a
larger number of in-depth ethnographic studies, some of the author’s conclusions
will have to be viewed with caution. In his final assessment of the madrassah as a
source of sectarian violence in Pakistan, Riaz insists “that sectarianism is funda-
mentally related to Islamic jurisprudence or fiqh” and that “therefore the mad-
rassahs that focus on fiqh are bound to teach a narrow and parochial version of
religion and thus contribute to intolerance” (225). This conclusion posits a level
of inevitability concerning Islamic education that is neither warranted by the data
presented in the study nor congruent with the author’s insistence throughout the
book that the role of the madrassah in Southeast Asia is shaped by sociopolitical
factors in its environment.
Despite caveats that result from the study’s broad scope and from the limitations
imposed by the available data, Faithful Education offers a finely nuanced and in-depth
historical analysis of madrassahs in South Asia. Against the prevalence of essentializing
and monolithic depictions of Islamic education, Riaz’s work serves as a reminder
that the madrassahs constitute a complex phenomenon that warrants rigorous at-
tention to the socioeconomic and political contexts in which they operate.

FLORIAN POHL
Oxford College of Emory University

Comparative Education Review 597

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