What direct role do madrassahs in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh play in promoting sectarian violence, particularly against “infidels” and the West? According to Ali Riaz, the answer is country-specific. Since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and definitively after events of September 11, 2001, United States policymakers, analysts, journalists, and scholars have depicted madrassahs as “hotbeds for jihadist and radical Islamist movements” (33).

Riaz's thorough accounting of the historical formation of madrassahs as centers of Muslim education and their evolution in South Asia is primarily aimed at educating the United States policy community and the media. The book begins by documenting the George W. Bush administration's foreign policy misrepresentation and oversimplification of madrassahs as training schools for terrorists. Riaz shows how policy analysts (such as Stephen A. Cohen, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jessica Stern, to name a few) singled out madrassahs as centers of “indoctrination” and “roots of terror” (35). Riaz might have chosen a more neutral introduction, as the Bush administration's approach to the War on Terror continues in the Obama administration to be a highly charged and ideologically divisive topic among Americans. As a consequence, Riaz's opening discussion throws the reader off, raising questions as to the nature of the upcoming analysis: Is the book going to deliver a scholarly analysis or simply be another polemic? As it turns out, the narrative becomes a serious intellectual discussion of madrassahs. Riaz engages the reader in an evenhanded, detailed analysis designed to deconstruct misconceptions and misinformed views about madrassahs.

Riaz sets out “to define traits and territories of thought, and ideologies, deliberations and practices, debates and conflicts” (56) on the role might madrassahs play in educating Muslim men and women to engage in sectarian violence. Briefly, madrassahs were formed to meet the demand of the faithful for religious education. Although scholarly disagreement exists over the origins of the madrassah as formal institutions, Riaz accepts the reign of Abbasyaid Caliph al-Ma'mun (786–833) as the origin of the madrassah. The debate over the nature of education offered in a madrassah historically has centered on the topics of (1) rote learning and (2) theological orthodoxy and interpretation.

The eventual establishment of a universal secular public school system in India and Bengal by the British created a market for growth in sectarian schools. The effect was positive in that the British colonial administration abandoned its attempts at regulating religious education by co-opting madrassahs and later funding Christian education. The secular educational system had a negative effect in that it became a clear target of the Muslim orthodox, particularly the Deobandi (a movement founded in 19th-century India). The theological strictness and puritanical practices of the Deobandi created friction within India's Muslim community, leading to the founding of more moderate madrassahs. The proliferation of madrassahs across the religious continuum was a positive development for Indian society in that it increased tolerance and moderation. The Indian government has continued its minimalist stance vis-à-vis the religious marketplace by refusing to be drawn into polarizing debates over madrassahs and their connection to terrorist organizations.

By contrast, Pakistan (precisely because the state did not invest in a universal public education system) fostered what Riaz calls an apartheid policy (97–100). The Pakistani school system is divided into three types: Urdu-taught mainstream public schooling, English-taught private education, and madrassahs. As in India, madrassahs proliferated, but for quite different reasons. Pakistani Madrassahs, in sharp contrast to the public educational system, provide educational materials and room and board, making them the most attractive option for a majority of Pakistani families. A confluence of national and international events, including the Islamization of Pakistan by Zia-ul Huq (1977–1988), the Iranian Revolution, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, led the Zia regime to support Islamic education requiring that Arabic and Islamic studies be taught in all schools.

Pakistan's central role in the Afghan war, as well as the fact that it welcomed Muslim fighters from any country, required it to establish a network of recruiting centers. Here Riaz's analysis becomes somewhat sloppy. In a single paragraph, Riaz reminds us that the number of madrassahs had already been increasing due to the Zia regime's program of Islamization. However, Riaz then states that the recruiting centers were labeled “madrassahs” “to give them respectability, to provide rationales for the influx of foreigners who would come to join the war, and to demonstrate that the Pakistani government was offering not only food and shelter but also education to the Afghan refugees” (105). Suffice it to say that the United States and Pakistani governments agreed to fund educational projects, some of which took place in recruiting centers and others in madrassahs (107). Thus, the line between these two institutions was blurred. The more significant point that Riaz underscores is that the government-funded educational projects promoted jihad — interpreted as a religious war, and not just an Afghan war.

In a book whose main topic is madrassahs, a more detailed analysis and typology of madrassahs in general would be welcome. Which types of madrassahs are most likely to advocate militancy? Affiliated with which schools of thought? In urban areas? Rural ones? In which geographic parts of South Asia? Which madrassahs resist radicalization? Which ones openly dissent against global jihad? What Riaz concludes is not much different from what the policy analysts are telling us: that madrassahs in Pakistan (and to a lesser extent in Bangladesh) are teaching children that they are “under siege from sinister forces that they must fight to death” (115). A heartening lesson to be learned from Riaz's book is that madrassahs in India are moderate in large part due to the state's minimalist relation to religion. The disheartening part of the lesson is that reforming Pakistan's and Bangladesh's educational systems entails reforming the state entirely.