The Taliban’s Madrasa System Is Growing |
The madrasa-based education system has a long and respected history across the Islamic world, including the Persianate intellectual sphere. For more than a millennium, these institutions cultivated a rich tradition of scholars and philosophers. Historically, they reflected an intellectual culture that embraced diversity, free inquiry, and cosmopolitanism. Yet the modern politicization of the madrasa, shaped by colonial disruption, nationalism, and the rise of Islamism, has transformed a tradition of learning into a vehicle of ideology.
Today, this politicization has reached its most extreme form in Afghanistan under the Taliban government. Contrary to their own mythology, the Taliban do not represent a cultural continuity with Afghan or Pashtun traditions. Their interpretation of Islam is a pseudo-ideological, totalitarian project designed not to preserve heritage but to overwrite it.
The Taliban emerged from a politicized clerical infrastructure, specifically, the vast madrasa networks that spread across the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier from the 1980s onward. After their return to power in August 2021, they moved swiftly to intensify the politicization of both the madrasa and the broader education system, seeking to transform Afghanistan’s classroom into a pipeline of indoctrinated foot soldiers for a long-term agenda of global jihad.
In December 2022, Hasht-e Subh, a daily online newspaper, leaked the Taliban’s internal assessment of Afghanistan’s school curriculum. Produced during the Doha negotiations, it proposed a complete overhaul designed to “Islamize” the system. The Taliban have been explicit: schools for girls will not reopen normally until the curriculum is replaced with one reflecting their ideology. That ideology is not about education; it is about engineering obedience.
Here lies a critical point often overlooked in global advocacy campaigns. While we rightly demand the reopening of schools for girls, we must also ask: what kind of education will these girls receive? A school reopened only to impose indoctrination is not liberation. It is the consolidation of authoritarian control. If the Taliban succeed in reshaping education in their own image, they will have secured not merely the present but Afghanistan’s future, and weaponized that future against the region and the world.
To understand the depth of this threat, we must revisit the intellectual lineage from which the Taliban claim........