AP
Islamabad, Dec 16: It began with sweets and pocket money when he was 10 years old — special attention from the religious cleric who ran the Pakistani madrassa, or Islamic school, the boy attended.
And it escalated to rape and months of sexual abuse, the now 28-year-old young man says.
“I feel rage now when I think after he raped me, he took a bath and right away he left to lead the prayers,” the man, an economist who lives in Islamabad, said. “After that I came to know from three or four of my classmates that the mufti used to do the same with them.”
Speaking English, at times searching for the right words and at others apologising for the explicitness of his conversation, he described the cleric’s advances: how he took him to another mosque that was not associated with the madrassa the boy attended and then raped him.
He said he suppressed memories of the abuse for years, but after reading an AP report last month revealing widespread abuse by clerics in Pakistan’s thousands of madrassas, they all came tumbling back.
“I read the story two times. The first time I was shocked. The things that were written there were everything I had lived. The second time I read it, the whole of my body was trembling because of the memories it brought back,” said the man, speaking on condition of anonymity, not only because of the shame he felt nearly two decades later but because he feared Pakistan’s religious leaders could retaliate against him either with violence or charges of blasphemy or being an apostate, both of which, he said, were tantamount to a death sentence. He decided to approach his former classmates, to rally survivors of abuse to band together to speak out. But, he said, he was rebuffed, and firmly.
“They said ‘Stop talking’. This is not something to discuss.’ It is so common in the madrassas here, but people don’t want to talk about it. We are ashamed,” the young man said.
There are more than 22,000 registered madrassas in Pakistan, and many thousands of unregistered ones, often grimy one- or two-room facilities in remote villages. The millions of students they teach are often among the country’s poorest, who receive food and an education for free.
But at the madrassa this young man attended — one of the largest in the Pakistani capital, which attracted students from other parts of the country — many of his fellow students were, like himself, from middle- and upper-middle class families, “sent to the madrassa to win favour for the family from God,” he said.
Naeema Kishwar, a federal lawmaker who last year helped change Pakistan’s laws to close a legal loophole that had allowed those who commit so-called “honour killings” to escape punishment, said that laws exist to tackle sexual abuse of minors, which she called a scourge in Pakistan, not only in madrassas but in public schools, at home and among the army of child workers who are employed in homes as domestic workers and in factories.
