Published: 12:45 PM, 18 September 2026
Where Minority Persecution Begins: Inside Pakistan's Unregulated Madrassas
Every subsequent reform of the response to mob violence, of political parties, or of enforcement gaps further up the chain will treat downstream symptoms of an upstream problem that nobody has yet measured
Pakistan's religious minorities live within a system with several moving, reinforcing parts: a constitution that formally excludes some citizens from its highest offices, a mob-violence pipeline that turns unverified blasphemy rumours into hours-long sieges, and political parties that have built electorates out of organised religious pressure. Each of these has its own story. But one institution sits underneath all of them, supplying the ideas the rest of the system runs on and it is the one the state has spent twenty-five years failing even to count, let alone reform.
The Ministry of Religious Affairs, working with the seminary umbrella body ITMP, has recorded just over 26,000, but ITMP's own count puts registered seminaries far higher, teaching an estimated 3.5 million children. When the Senate asked for a formal figure in December 2024, the Law Minister could offer only 17,738 registered madrassas, while admitting that no data exists on unregistered ones. According to the Directorate General of Religious Education (DGRE), Ministry of Federal Education & Professional Training, a total of 20,417 Deeni Madaris (religious seminaries) were registered in Pakistan as of 5 May 2026.
Depending on which source and which year you pick, credible estimates for Pakistan's madrassa sector range from roughly 17,700 to 40,000 institutions, enrolling between 2.2 million and 3.5 million students, a spread too wide to plan any policy around. This isn't a paperwork problem. As the government's own National Action Plan monitors have found, the main reason madrassas avoid registration is ideological, disagreement with the state over curriculum and doctrine.
Every government since Musharraf has announced essentially the same reform: mandatory registration, financial audits, and a legal bar on sectarian hate speech in teaching material. Each has met the same resistance and produced the same result. The 2001 ordinance was rejected outright by the country's five seminary boards. The 2014 National Action Plan, adopted after the Peshawar school massacre, made madrassa registration a headline priority, thirteen months later, NACTA's own national coordinator admitted that the government had not even agreed on how to collect the data. Most recently, the 2024 Societies Registration Amendment quietly handed registration authority back to provincial officials, undoing the federal oversight system built up since 2019.
It found that madrassa textbooks generally describe non-Muslims not as citizens but as one of three legal categories — infidels, protected-but-subordinate minorities, or apostates.
The structural flaw is the same every time: enforcement is self-regulation. Seminary boards police their own member institutions; audits are commissioned by the madrassas being audited; and no independent body has the mandate to check curriculum content at scale. The result is an oversight framework that is structurally weak for both registered and unregistered madrassas: registered institutions are largely monitored by bodies within the madrassa system itself, while unregistered institutions may remain outside effective state oversight altogether.
The strongest public evidence on classroom content comes from USCIRF's Connecting the Dots (2011), which visited 37 schools and interviewed 226 madrassa students and teachers. It found that madrassa textbooks generally describe non-Muslims not as citizens but as one of three legal categories; infidels, protected-but-subordinate minorities, or apostates. More recent fieldwork across Lahore madrassas, spanning all major sects, points to the same pattern: a widely used classical jurisprudence text still commercially published in Pakistan instructs that non-Muslims living under Islamic rule must not resemble Muslims in dress or conduct, an enforced differentiation that the text itself says exists to make their humiliation visible.
Perhaps more troubling is where this vocabulary starts. The same fieldwork found an Urdu primer used to teach small children their alphabet, in which the sample words include gun, dagger, and jihad, associations between violence and religious identity introduced before a child can read a full sentence, let alone question what they are being taught. Teachers trained in this system showed markedly lower tolerance for minorities than government-school teachers, frequently blamed minorities for blasphemy cases, and were largely opposed to non-Muslims holding senior public office; a belief that mirrors and reinforces an actual constitutional exclusion.
To be fair to the sector, this is not a story about one type of institution radicalising Pakistan alone. Researchers note that government schools, which reach far more children than madrassas do, carry some comparably damaging content; it is an educational ideology that runs through more than one system. None of this is abstract. This kind of instruction has a traceable line to what happens later, in mob attacks like the 2023 Jaranwala violence, in the campaigns run by religious pressure groups, and in state institutions that quietly comply when organised religious pressure is applied. That is a separate story, worth telling on its own terms. But it starts here, with an institution the state has spent a quarter-century promising to count and has never managed to.
Until it can, every subsequent reform of the mob-violence response, of the political parties, of the enforcement gaps further up the chain will be treating downstream symptoms of an upstream problem nobody has yet measured.(By. Nazir Ahmad)
>> Source: The Friday Times
Pakistan's religious minorities live within a system with several moving, reinforcing parts: a constitution that formally excludes some citizens from its highest offices, a mob-violence pipeline that turns unverified blasphemy rumours into hours-long sieges, and political parties that have built electorates out of organised religious pressure. Each of these has its own story. But one institution sits underneath all of them, supplying the ideas the rest of the system runs on and it is the one the state has spent twenty-five years failing even to count, let alone reform.
The Ministry of Religious Affairs, working with the seminary umbrella body ITMP, has recorded just over 26,000, but ITMP's own count puts registered seminaries far higher, teaching an estimated 3.5 million children. When the Senate asked for a formal figure in December 2024, the Law Minister could offer only 17,738 registered madrassas, while admitting that no data exists on unregistered ones. According to the Directorate General of Religious Education (DGRE), Ministry of Federal Education & Professional Training, a total of 20,417 Deeni Madaris (religious seminaries) were registered in Pakistan as of 5 May 2026.
Depending on which source and which year you pick, credible estimates for Pakistan's madrassa sector range from roughly 17,700 to 40,000 institutions, enrolling between 2.2 million and 3.5 million students, a spread too wide to plan any policy around. This isn't a paperwork problem. As the government's own National Action Plan monitors have found, the main reason madrassas avoid registration is ideological, disagreement with the state over curriculum and doctrine.
Every government since Musharraf has announced essentially the same reform: mandatory registration, financial audits, and a legal bar on sectarian hate speech in teaching material. Each has met the same resistance and produced the same result. The 2001 ordinance was rejected outright by the country's five seminary boards. The 2014 National Action Plan, adopted after the Peshawar school massacre, made madrassa registration a headline priority, thirteen months later, NACTA's own national coordinator admitted that the government had not even agreed on how to collect the data. Most recently, the 2024 Societies Registration Amendment quietly handed registration authority back to provincial officials, undoing the federal oversight system built up since 2019.
It found that madrassa textbooks generally describe non-Muslims not as citizens but as one of three legal categories — infidels, protected-but-subordinate minorities, or apostates.
The structural flaw is the same every time: enforcement is self-regulation. Seminary boards police their own member institutions; audits are commissioned by the madrassas being audited; and no independent body has the mandate to check curriculum content at scale. The result is an oversight framework that is structurally weak for both registered and unregistered madrassas: registered institutions are largely monitored by bodies within the madrassa system itself, while unregistered institutions may remain outside effective state oversight altogether.
The strongest public evidence on classroom content comes from USCIRF's Connecting the Dots (2011), which visited 37 schools and interviewed 226 madrassa students and teachers. It found that madrassa textbooks generally describe non-Muslims not as citizens but as one of three legal categories; infidels, protected-but-subordinate minorities, or apostates. More recent fieldwork across Lahore madrassas, spanning all major sects, points to the same pattern: a widely used classical jurisprudence text still commercially published in Pakistan instructs that non-Muslims living under Islamic rule must not resemble Muslims in dress or conduct, an enforced differentiation that the text itself says exists to make their humiliation visible.
Perhaps more troubling is where this vocabulary starts. The same fieldwork found an Urdu primer used to teach small children their alphabet, in which the sample words include gun, dagger, and jihad, associations between violence and religious identity introduced before a child can read a full sentence, let alone question what they are being taught. Teachers trained in this system showed markedly lower tolerance for minorities than government-school teachers, frequently blamed minorities for blasphemy cases, and were largely opposed to non-Muslims holding senior public office; a belief that mirrors and reinforces an actual constitutional exclusion.
To be fair to the sector, this is not a story about one type of institution radicalising Pakistan alone. Researchers note that government schools, which reach far more children than madrassas do, carry some comparably damaging content; it is an educational ideology that runs through more than one system. None of this is abstract. This kind of instruction has a traceable line to what happens later, in mob attacks like the 2023 Jaranwala violence, in the campaigns run by religious pressure groups, and in state institutions that quietly comply when organised religious pressure is applied. That is a separate story, worth telling on its own terms. But it starts here, with an institution the state has spent a quarter-century promising to count and has never managed to.
Until it can, every subsequent reform of the mob-violence response, of the political parties, of the enforcement gaps further up the chain will be treating downstream symptoms of an upstream problem nobody has yet measured.(By. Nazir Ahmad)
>> Source: The Friday Times
