WITNESS-In black Africa, a co-ed Koranic school thrives
Thu Dec 7, 2006 2:15 PM ET



By Mark Trevelyan

GAO, Mali (Reuters) - There must be at least 80 children in the classroom,
the desks packed so tightly together that I wonder how those at the back
have squeezed their way to their places.

Adjusting from the glare of the sun outside to the dark of the mud-brick
room, I can barely make out the boys in the furthest row.

But shafts of light through the windows -- holes in the wall, without
glass -- catch the dazzling colors of the girls' dresses and headscarves.

The faces are black African, but the writing on the blackboard is in
Arabic -- a difficult, foreign tongue to the 600 children at the Soullamou
Islamic school in eastern Mali.

They are learning it to study the Koran, the holy book of Islam, in this
desperately poor west African nation where 90 percent of people are
Muslims.

"Why have you come?" a girl of about 13 asks me.

The truth is that I have never seen an Islamic school and am curious to
compare the stereotype with the reality. In countries like Pakistan,
Koranic schools or madrasas have often been viewed with suspicion in the
West, and even portrayed as academies for al Qaeda.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once famously asked if the United
States was eliminating more terrorists every day than the madrasas and
radical clerics were recruiting.

But in Mali, where most adults cannot read or write, the growth of private
Islamic schools or medersas shows "a hunger for numeracy and literacy" in
a state that lacks the means to educate all its people, U.S. ambassador
Terence McCulley said.

He told me the United States is even supporting some of them through
development aid -- a "soft power" counterpoint to its military training
program, in which U.S. special forces are teaching Malian soldiers to
fight militants in the desert.

The medersas are thriving -- in Gao alone there are 41, an increase of
nearly threefold in the past three years.

As it receives no money from the state, the Soullamou school charges at
least 5,000 CFA francs (about $10) per student per year, but waives that
for orphans and the poorest families.

"The child has the right to be educated," assistant director Boubacar
Maiga says. "We can't refuse that to the child, even if the parents can't
pay."

The Malian government supports the development of medersas and regulates
their program, insisting that they offer the full state curriculum, from
maths to humanities.

The children learn the Koran "like any other subject" for up to 40 minutes
a day, Maiga says. Apart from French, which they start at age eight, they
take all their lessons in Arabic.

"It's very difficult, but there's no rule against giving the children a
hand by using their native language," says Maiga. By year four or five,
their Arabic is fluent.

He leads me to see the youngest class, where six-year-old children are
sitting cross-legged under a shelter of branches and reed matting. They
burst into an excited song of greeting, a small boy leading with a solo
and the others joining in chorus.

It is a moving, uplifting experience. But while education in Koranic
schools is widely respected across West Africa, there is a darker side.

Some schools have come under scrutiny from children's rights groups who
say unscrupulous Koranic masters or teachers are sending pupils out to beg
on the streets.

"Hundreds of thousands of children in West Africa are being forced to
become street beggars for the personal enrichment of the masters
themselves and are punished or beaten if they refuse to beg or don't
collect enough food or money at the end of each day's work," the
International Organization for Migration said.

Some children were vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and even human
trafficking, it added.

At Soullamou school, some pupils are barefoot but not one of them asks for
money or presents -- even when we leave and a throng of kids follows us
through the streets, jostling to shake hands and show off the Arabic
writing in their exercise books.

Why do parents choose this school? Maiga's answer makes me smile because
it would resonate with many in the West.

"The parents have seen there is quality teaching here," he says. "We
always beat the state schools in exams."

(Additional reporting by Pascal Fletcher in Dakar)



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