THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2003
Clerics reject Pak offer to fund Islamic schools
AP
MULTAN : A council of clerics running thousands of Islamic seminaries in Pakistan has rejected a government offer to fund their schools, a setback to President Pervez Musharraf's hopes to reform religious education.
"We do not need any government or foreign financial assistance to run our madrassas (Islamic schools). We have enough funds for this purpose," Hanif Jalandhri, the head of Wafaq-ul-Madaris-il-Arabia told a news conference.
It was the first authoritative response by Jalandhri's organization, which controls more then 8,000 madrassas, to a government offer to help fund the schools.
Critics claim the madrassas are breeding grounds for extremism in this Islamic nation.
Musharraf's government has been pressing the oranizers of these schools to standardize their curricula and introduce secular subjects, including English, sciences ad mathematics, to prepare students for the modern world. It offered funding to schools that agree.
"We have told the government that we do not need their funds," Jalandhri said.
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