When Pakistan`s Army stormed an Islamabad mosque housing a radical Islamic school last month, it raised questions in Indonesia: was the Southeast Asian nation`s own network of Islamic schools a breeding ground for militancy?
Or were the pesantrens, as Islamic boarding schools are known in Indonesia, just centres for learning the Koran with maths, computer studies, geography and English?
More than 100 people were killed in a bloody siege of Islamabad`s Red Mosque, where there was also a religious school for women and a male madrassa, after a standoff between security forces and the centre`s leaders and their supporters.
It is hard to imagine, however, Indonesia`s pesantrens being involved in such violence.
`Pesantrens are part of our identity, part of a long-standing Indonesian tradition,` Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Maftuh Basyuni said.
`They have different principles. They chose to withdraw from the mainstream way of life because they denounce anything Western, which they associate with the colonial powers they fought in the past.`
Islamic boarding schools in Indonesia, the world`s biggest Muslim nation, largely escaped the spotlight in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
They came under scrutiny after the 2002 Bali bombings when a hardline cleric from a high-profile pesantren was accused of being the Jemaah Islamiyah network`s spiritual leader.
Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, co-founder in the 70s of a pesantren which the International Crisis Group dubbed the `Ivy League` of militants, was jailed for conspiracy over the Bali bombings, although later cleared.
Critics blame pesantrens for encouraging fundamentalism in Indonesia, a country of 220 million people, 80 per cent of whom are Muslim. But the vast majority of the 14,000 pesantrens are moderate and venerated, having educated much of the nation`s Muslim elite.
`Pesantrens teach true jihad in the right way. Maybe 2 per cent of the pesantrens have a wrong perception of Islam,` said Sofwan Manaf, principal of the Darunnajah Islamic boarding school in Jakarta.
`Modern pesantrens have a curriculum mixed between Islamic and non-religious teaching.`
While pesantren enrolment makes up a small portion of Indonesia`s school population, numbers have grown fast, partly in line with greater attention to Islamic values.
More than three million students are registered in pesantrens, which are the backbone of the 40-million member Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia`s biggest moderate Muslim group. It has 12,000 of the registered pesantrens.
In large parts of Asia, free board and education sometimes lure poverty-stricken families to send their children to Islamic schools.
Source: www.nzherald.co.nz (9 Agustus 2007)