When my wife and I arrived in Pakistan for the first time in January 1980 we lived in a grotty little shack in Rawalpindi at the end of Jail Road, where Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had recently been hanged. They were happy days, in spite of the jackals howling at night and having few comforts (no hot water); and while I was serving in UN Field Stations in Rawalakot and Astore and suchlike one of the things my wife liked was shopping in Saddar Bazaar.

At that time modestly-dressed foreign women could walk and shop alone in Saddar (and Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani, too) without fear save that of chai-poisoning from over-hospitable shopkeepers. Things were basic – the meat market, beside the mosque, was not for the weak-stomached who might not relish instant beheading of the chicken they had chosen for supper or look with composure on the rows of goats’ heads that looked sadly and curiously intelligently at passers-by while their blood flowed down the gutters. That was death in these days.

There were no suicide bombers. These barbaric freaks didn’t get busy until after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. (There was only one such atrocity in Pakistan before then, caused by a crazy Egyptian who drove a bomb-truck into his embassy in Islamabad in 1995.)

And there were no plastic bags; so if you didn’t have a shopping basket the fruit and vegetable sellers put your oranges and onions in bags made of lined and written-on foolscap paper pages neatly pasted together in various sizes and densities. They lasted nicely until you got home, when you were struck by the neatness of the writing and examined the bags more closely. Then you saw that not only was the writing in English, and good English, at that, but the topics were amazingly diverse.

There were essays on Shakespeare, on the Quaid-e-Azam, on the islands of the Pacific and so on; and what was fascinating was that the shopkeepers had made these shopping bags from discarded school exam papers. In a scrapbook we’ve got some of them dated September 8, 1979. How environmentally friendly. And how evocative of the quality of education in these distant days. Very few madressahs, then.

I’m not saying it is vital for people to be able to write an essay about Shakespeare titled ‘Discuss the role of Fool in King Lear’ (the bag beside me as I write) in order to be educated. But it helps. And I wonder how many of the two million children now in madressahs know about Shakespeare – or, for that matter, have heard of his contemporary, the poet Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah.

Mind you, the reason that Quli Qutb wouldn’t be popular in our madressahs is the tenor of his writing, which includes the delicate line that “I can't drink even a sip from the wine-cup in the absence of my beloved” and so on. And his reflection that “an insane person cannot be counselled” would not go down well with, well . . .King Lear. Or fanatics.

Then there’s Wali Mohammed Wali, who also wrote sensuous verses, and Altaf Hussain Hali, whose couplet that “Where are those Muslims, even ten can't be found/Who would happily see others prospering around” could not be countenanced by the madressah lot, any more than would his wise observation that “Islam has taught us, ‘Show friendship to all’”. There are scores more Muslim poets, writers and sages whose works would not be tolerated.

Of course, I do not claim that knowledge of Shakespeare or Quli Qutb necessarily indicates tolerance or intellectual loftiness. (My favourite Shakespearean quotation is “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” which is, however attractive, rather uncivilised ; and even The News wouldn’t print my favourite couplet by Quli Qutb, from one of his more risqué ghazals.)

I do think that madressah instruction leaves a great deal to be desired in terms of being educational. And the main reason for their massive expansion is that for fifty years successive governments have done almost nothing to improve the standard of publicly-funded education in Pakistan.

It is disgraceful that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (Cathedral School, Bombay), Ziaul Haq (St Stephen’s College, Delhi), Benazir Bhutto (Convents of Jesus and Mary, Karachi and Murree), Shaukat Aziz (St Patrick's High School, Karachi), Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pervez Musharraf and Mian Soomro (Forman Christian College, Lahore), Zafarullah Khan Jamali (St Francis Grammar School, Quetta), and Nawaz Sharif (St Anthony’s High School, Lahore) did so little to improve public education in their country when they were in power.

But they were of the privileged class and didn’t want the peasants to be educated. They considered that if the lower classes went to good schools they would present a threat to the prosperity and superiority of the elite.

But uneducated and brainwashed fanatics are now much more of a threat to Pakistan – and the present government had better do something about it, and fast. Otherwise they’ll end up like discarded paper bags: just scraps in the litter of history.

The writer is a South Asian affairs analyst.
Website: www.beecluff.com

http://e.thenews.com.pk/10-23-2013/page6.asp