A madrassa in Kenya has been closed down.
The school in Machakos, about 65km (40 miles) from the capital, was targeted after local youths were detained on suspicion of joining Somali militants.
It is the first Kenyan madrassa to be closed because of allegedly extremist teachings. A police chief warned that others could follow.
Madrassas aren’t really “schools” in the normal sense, as I understand it. They train children to memorize the Koran in Arabic, whether or not they understand the language, and they don’t teach anything else. That’s not really a school.
Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka told the BBC the decision had been taken to close the Daarul-Irashad centre, which opened in 1997, on the advice of the police’s CID, anti-terror and intelligence units.
The recent arrest in the Machakos area of 21 young men suspected of being recruited for al-Shabab first raised suspicions, he said.
The police then profiled suspects arrested in other terror crackdowns and found that others had passed through that madrassa, the spokesman said.
Memorizing a holy book isn’t an education.
I thought “madrasa” was just basically the same as “school”, though? Presumably with the same religious history and more general modern meaning of “institute of learning” — what learning they offer presumably being mediated by local preferences?
I expect there are different types of ‘madrassas’ depending on the people in charge of them. The word is arabic for “school”.
Way off, Ophelia. The specific school in question may do what you think (it certainly doesn’t sound a place to get a well rounded education :)) but “madrasa” does cover a lot of different ground. It’s a much more general term than you paint it as.
As pointed out in post no. 2 above, madrassa is the Arabic word for school. It can refer to different things including an ordinary primary school or a purely religious school of the type Ophelia has in mind. Given that this Kenya (not an Arabic speaking country), I suspect Ophelia is correct and this was a purely religious madrassa.
Re: &c.
This is one of the way the terrorists & their merry band of bloodthirsty fuckwits win — we start seeing the world as they do. Let’s not.
@5 quite. A Madrassa is simply a school, not even a type of school. But the word is used to refer to a particular type of school in the west.
It is the same problem with Jihad which simply means struggle. Interpreting it as armed struggle is to fall into the terrorist’s mind set. The same is true of Sharia law which is both a body of law and a system of jurisprudence in the same way that English common law is. There isn’t agreement on what the body of law is.
It may be true that “madrasa” simply means “school” in Arabic-speaking countries, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true everywhere. As far as I know it’s not true everywhere.
Oh I see — you’re suggesting that in non-Arabic-speaking countries “madrasa” may have a more specifically religious meaning. That makes sense although I can’t verify it. Ok.
(By “can’t verify” I mean that none of my friends knows and I can’t ger a straight answer from the Internet, not that I disbelieve you! Just to be clear. Sorry.)
Yes. I think that’s the case in Pakistan and India, for instance.
Where religious fundamentalist fuckwits are in charge, schools teach religious fundamentalist fuckwittery. Somehow this looks a lot like business as usual to me.
The comments here, or at least mine, objected to the unqualified use of the word , not the idea that schools, whatever they are called, are at times engaged in indoctrination of some sort.
Tell that to the people who run the madrasas in Pakistan.
If madrassas were ONLY rote-cramming the Koran in Arabic, they would be sectarianly neutral in the Muslim world. Obviously this is not the case. Saudi, and gulf-state, money has been lavished in support of madrassas that push Wahhabi Islam in western countries.
Madrassas fill the gap created by the absence of public education in ‘developing’ states. So it may be that the word COULD describe a legitimate school, that’s a bit like saying that the Christian Brothers were really working in education in Ireland.
It’s not so much that madrassas fill the gap created by the absence of public education in ‘developing’ states as it is that they exploit that gap.
Ophelia Benson wrote:
Attention religious fundamentalist fuckwits: you do not get to decide how I interpret the world by redefining what common words that have been in use for centuries mean. I refuse to literally see the world on your terms.
You’re missing the point.
In post 6, Phillip writes “It is the same problem with Jihad which simply means struggle. Interpreting it as armed struggle is to fall into the terrorist’s mind set. The same is true of Sharia law which is both a body of law and a system of jurisprudence in the same way that English common law is. There isn’t agreement on what the body of law is.”
If we are going to play that game we can’t define anything: democracy, the Enlightenment, religion, etc. While there is no unanimous consensus of what constitutes Sharia law, in Sunni Islam there certainly is a general consensus. The four different schools of Islamic jurisprudence are not identical but they do agree on a lot things. Please stop the obfuscations. Calling a spade a spade is not adopting the “terrorist’s mind set”.
Re: #16
Maybe. BUt let me unambiguously state that any school that teaches rote recitation of some book or other is a perversion of the concept.
Re: #17
Both shariah and jihad have multiple, sometimes contradicory, meanings. Both words are used by religious extermist fuckwits and rightwing xenophobic fuckwits given one, specific, extremist meaning. It seems to me a prudent thing to recognise that. A few useful bits on the internet: Sharia – A Flexible Notion and Shariah in the Netherlands is often very dutch (in dutch — have fun).
My point, broadly, is please stop making islam per se scary, because it isn’t. Religious extermism is scary. And at the moment, islamic religious extermism is very scary. But do you really think the christian extremists from the US who got African counttries to make laws to murder lgbt people and imprison their allies are any different? Because I don’t — I’d be sharing your prison cell if they were in charge.
But where do these opposite meanings of sharia apply? Nations whose governments announce they are “Islamizing” the country are never talking about liberalizing the laws. Of course people can always decide to define words in their own way, but in the real world of prisons and executions and lashes and stoning, sharia doesn’t have a very flexible meaning.
And I don’t accept that Islam isn’t per se scary. I do of course agree that individual Muslims can have an unscary version of Islam, but I don’t agree that that makes Islam itself non-scary.
Ophelia Benson wrote:
I completely agree that in the contexts of and , shariah has one particular, ghastly, meaning. That’s because in those places, extremists are ones in charge of the discourse. But the word shariah is also used in completely different contexts by muslems all over the world, where it has a completely different meaning, such as moral guidelines for living a good life (the first of the pieces I linked above is about that mess of contexts and meanings, and is written in english).
I don’t think I disagree with that assessment (much). And me calling a religion not does not mean I don’t see some obvious problems with it as practised (presently or historically), e.g. gender ineqiality.
Ah wait a second now – you’re expanding the meaning of “extremists” out of all recognition. You’re talking about the entire government and legal infrastructure of many countries there. Are they all generally considered “extremists”? I don’t think so.
When Islamists say they want to establish sharia everywhere in the world, they’re not talking about “moral guidelines for living a good life” and everybody knows it. Yes, individuals can decide it means that, and that “moral guidelines” mean something other than savage punishments and subordination of women, but in the parts of the real world where sharia is backed by religious cops, that has all the effect of waving a feather around.
No — that’s not what I mean. I said extremists are in charge, specifically of the discourse. What you are broaching here is how ordinary people can be made to do evil things, like participate in the extermination of Jews in nazi Germany, but that happens when the power structures are already in place, and under firm control of extremists (this is one of the very few parallels between islamism and nazism I find useful).
Yes. But when muslems who are not islamists talk about shariah, it very often is what they mean. Which is why you see polls saying some overwhelming portion of moslems living in Europe like shariah. This distinction is real. It’s not some naïve liberal notion about theoretical progressive muslems that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Quite. And I’m not denying that. But those parts of the real world are not all there is. One can condemn what goes on there without implicating others who have no part in it, and without assuming those others don’t have their own set of ideas one disagrees with. Shades of grey, not black & white, that sort of thing.
No, I’m not talking about how ordinary people can be made to do evil things, I’m talking about the fact that at least some Islamizing governments have not been generally considered extremist.
And I actually don’t hear Muslims who are not Islamists talking fondly about sharia. I’m in a group of liberal progressive Muslims and they don’t do that. I don’t buy it. It may have once been possible to think of sharia as something benign, but I don’t think it is now. I think you’re fantasizing…or maybe Dutch liberal Muslims are quite different from the Anglophone ones I know.