Education in Pakistan must help create battlefield of ideas

Graduates should be empowered with ethics and empathy to build a better world

Three years ago it was during the same month – September – that I was writing Shakil Auj’s obituary for BBC. Auj, Dean of Islamic Studies at the University of Karachi, had been killed in Pakistan’s port city earlier in the day. Whoever I spoke to for background interviews mentioned him as a person who neither had any political, ethnic or sectarian enthusiasms nor any business entanglements that might have invited hostility. I, however, was told that in his lectures, Auj would lament that modern people, too, often refuse to debate and discuss matters. “Today people want to impose their will at gunpoint.”

Auj might have had an inkling of whatever was happening at his university then. Police say a bunch of people associated with a proscribed militant organisation, Ansar-ul-Sharia Pakistan, arrested for carrying out an assassination attempt recently on Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) leader Khawaja Izhar-ul-Hasan come from the same university. But this phenomenon is not limited to one educational institution. Until recently fingers would have been pointed at students of madrasas (religious seminaries) where lack of access to quality education limiting economic opportunity made young people targets for extremist groups.

Now Pakistan is seeing a rise in the number of educated young people being lured into extremism and terrorism. A recent newspaper report showed that out of 500 militants held in Sindh province’s jails, 64 hold a master’s degree and 70 have a bachelor’s. Saad Aziz, considered the mastermind of the Safoora Goth carnage in 2015 which left 46 people dead, and the murder of social activist Sabeen Mahmud, was also an MBA student at an elite business school in Karachi. Another suspect in the murder named Ishrat had a degree from the Sir Syed University of Engineering. Noreen Laghari, a final year medical student at the Liaquat Medical College in Jamshoro, Sindh, who went missing to join the Daesh, was arrested before executing a terror attack in Lahore.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) has recognised education as a tool to help prevent violent extremism and the radicalisation that leads to it. But the tool is not working for Pakistan as education seems to have failed to be an antidote to intolerance and conflict. Pakistan’s National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA), which monitors and proposes counter-extremism strategies, has devised a policy, called National Counter Extremism Policy (NCEP), to curb extremism and militancy by introducing social and education reforms and facilitating good governance. The proposed policy defines the word ‘extremism’ as “having absolute belief in one’s truth with an ingrained sense of self-righteousness”.

“NCEP is a set of programmes in the six fields with an objective to build strong bond between state and citizenry, reforming educational streams including religious education and instilling an environment of openness and co-existence,” NACTA chief officer, Ihsan Ghani said in a statement.

According to Anthony Jackson, vice-president for education at Asia Society, the willingness of one group to harm another often stems from a lack of accurate information about the other’s history, culture, motivations, and behavior. Teaching students to investigate the world equips them to find information, weigh the credibility of the information they glean from sources worldwide, and frame issues in the context of global trends. Teaching students to recognise, analyse, and articulate diverse perspectives —including those with which they personally disagree — gives them the skills they need to understand controversial issues. As much crucial is the ability to communicate ideas, with the understanding that diverse audience groups and individuals might interpret the same messages quite differently. The expectation is that our graduates will be the leaders empowered with ethics and empathy to take action in ways that enhance our collective humanity and build a better world.

Pakistan has had many impressive initiatives — including the National Action Plan — in recent years that aim to rub out extremism. The success of the new counter-extremism policy hinges on an effective implementation. Empowering students to think critically teaches them to challenge ideas, construct rational thoughts, and engage in meaningful debate. Cultural learning enhances their self-awareness and identity, opening their minds to different customs, practices, and traditions, and promotes comparative analysis. With such a well-rounded educational experience, educational institutions, particularly universities, would represent a battleground of ideas and opinions, and not of guns and bullets.

Teaching students to recognise, analyse, and articulate perspectives — including those with they disagree — gives them the skills to understand controversial issues