Speakers at a seminar yesterday identified fear as the biggest challenge for students studying in Bangladeshi madrasas.
They said the fear of questioning and the fear of being questioned were two major fears working among madrasa students.
The observations came at a seminar at the Brac Centre yesterday, organised jointly of World Faiths Development Dialogue, Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, and Brac University’s department of Economics and Social Sciences.
People are mostly ignorant about different madrasa education systems – government run-Aliya and the independent Qawmi. This lack of knowledge prompts people to look down on madrasa students and at times becoming suspicious about them, the speakers said.
They noted a rapid growth of madrasas since independence, from less than 2,000 in 1971 to over 20,000 in 2014. At present, there are an estimated 9,341 Alia madrasas and 13,902 Qawmi madrasas, they said.
