Karachi (Kubha News) – Concurrent with the expulsion of Afghan migrants from Sindh province in Pakistan, officials of religious schools in this province have informed the media that the Pakistani government has asked them not to include Afghan students in their seminaries.
Religious schools (seminaries) in Sindh have been prohibited from admitting new students following this directive.
A provincial government committee summoned members of religious schools to a meeting last week and informed them that during an attack on a police center in the city in late 2023, a seminaries teacher was involved and claimed that the teacher was an Afghan citizen.
However, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry responded to the seminary’s owners, stating that the mentioned individual was Pakistani and was killed during the attack.
Maulana Talha Rahmani, the head of the federation of seminaries in Pakistan, told Arab News that Pakistani religious schools had halted the enrollment of Afghan students a year ago.
Rahmani stated, “Various intelligence agencies occasionally come and gather information from seminaries. Religious schools have a specific registration system, and we cooperate with these agencies.”
Over the past forty years, especially since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, thousands of young people have flocked to Pakistani seminaries for religious education.
International organizations and human rights bodies have highlighted the role of these seminaries in promoting extremism among youth and consider the promotion of extremist ideologies by these schools as one of the factors contributing to the spread of extremism in the region.
Although the Taliban government in Afghanistan has not announced a plan for Afghan students’ return to seminaries inside Afghanistan, but Taliban ministries of education and higher education have mandated thousands of graduates from these Pakistan religious schools to work in various government positions contrary to their field of study by distributing Afghan educational documents.