Education in the Pashtun lands: madrasas, schools and universities

At a glance

• Schooling in the Pashtun lands began in the mosque and the hujra. Bacha Khan, born in 1890, learned the Quran by heart from a village mullah at the age of five and remembered the man as barely literate. [1]

• The first Pashtun-run modern schools were opened from about 1910 by Bacha Khan, Maulvi Abdul Aziz and the Haji of Turangzai. The Azad High School at Utmanzai followed in 1921. The British closed the earlier schools during the First World War and arrested their teachers. [1]

• Islamia College in Peshawar opened on 1 October 1913 under Sir Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum. The University of Peshawar followed in 1950. [10, 11]

• In Afghanistan, Habibia College opened under Amir Habibullah in the first decade of the century, and the School of Medicine of 1932 was the first faculty of Kabul University. [4]

• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's literacy rate was 51.1 per cent in the 2023 census, behind Punjab and Sindh. In 1948 about 8 per cent of Afghans could read. [4, 6]

• Pashto as a language of teaching has been given and taken away several times, most recently in 2014 and 2021. [12–14]

The mosque, the hujra and the village mullah

Before there were schools there were mosques and hujras. The hujra taught manners and custom, by listening to elders. The mosque taught reading, and in practice that meant the Quran.

Bacha Khan describes his own start in his autobiography. He was five when he was sent to the mullah of Utmanzai. He says the man "was devoid of learning and practically illiterate", could recite the Quran but, Bacha Khan doubted, understood none of it. [1] His parents handed out sweets on the day he began the Quran and again on the day he finished it. [1] Bacha Khan says most Pashtuns sent their children to the mosque because no other school existed. [1]

Gregorian, writing about Afghanistan before 1919, gives the shape of that older system. It had four stages, primary, secondary, professional and higher, and students read the Quran, jurisprudence, hadith, calligraphy and the classics of Arabic and Persian. [4] Outside Kabul children went to mosque schools where memorising the Quran mattered most; there were 214 hafiz, people who knew it by heart, in 1915 and 1916. [4]

Bacha Khan's judgement of the village mullahs is harsh, and it is his. He says the British had opened a few primary schools in the larger villages of the province, with hardly any Pashtun teacher, in a language that was not the children's own. [1] He says the mullahs preached against them, and he quotes the rhyme going round the bazaars:

Those who learn in schools,

They are none but money's tools,

In Heaven they will never dwell,

They will surely go to hell. [1]

He gives it in English only, as his translator rendered it. He adds that his father, an influential khan, ignored the mullahs, and that his brother, Dr Khan Sahib, was the first boy in Hashtnagar to be educated at a school. [1] He also reports telling the mullahs that Islam makes knowledge a duty, and that if people would not use British schools they should build their own. [1] Not every religious leader fitted his picture. The man who helped him build those schools was the Haji of Turangzai, a religious leader himself. [1]

The first national schools, 1910 to 1921

Bacha Khan says he found a great helper in the Haji of Turangzai. Under the Haji's guardianship they founded a dar-ul-ilm, a college, at Gadar, with Maulvi Taj Muhammad in charge. In 1910 Bacha Khan and Maulvi Abdul Aziz opened a national Islamic school at Utmanzai, and he says many more opened across the province and people took more interest in education. [1]

The war ended that first wave. Bacha Khan writes that the British "did not want the Pathans to be educated". After the Haji left Buner for Mohmand territory, the schools across the province were closed, and the teachers were arrested and taken to the jail at Dera Ismail Khan. [1] The Haji's own article gives the official counts, which differ.

Bacha Khan then tried Bajaur and Dir. He opened a school at Khalu in Dir and says the people welcomed it. He adds that the British political agent of Malakand told the Nawab of Dir that "All this education is creating endless trouble for us", and that the Nawab had the school pulled down. [1] Bacha Khan does not say how he learned of the conversation, and the political agent's side is not on record in the sources used here.

In 1921 came the Azad school. Bacha Khan's words: "With the help of some friends I had been trying to provide facilities for higher education. In 1921 our efforts were crowned with success and the Azad High School was founded in Utmanzai." [1] He lists eight colleagues, among them Qazi Ataullah and Mian Ahmad Shah, and says they founded a society, the Anjuman-ul-Afaghina, at the same time. [1] Money was short: teachers could not be paid well, so he took classes himself. [1] Two brothers who had been studying for the BA at Islamia College, but had left it during the Khilafat movement, joined as headmasters in turn, and Bacha Khan says the British frightened and tried to buy away new teachers, and police harassed the first headmaster whenever he came to Utmanzai. [1] "Azad" means free or independent, and the school's story is told in the article on Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar, which also records its teaching in Pashto and the sentence he received in December 1921.

Islamia College, 1913

Islamia College belongs to a different tradition. Dawn says Sir Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum (1863 to 1937) and Sir George Roos-Keppel, the British chief commissioner of the province, founded it together, and that Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum collected the donations and persuaded the colonial government. [9] Dawn's Sher Alam Shinwari says building began in 1911 on 916 kanals of land, and that admissions opened on 1 October 1913 with the first and third year only. [10] The first student admitted was Sahibzada Khurshid, later a governor of the province. [10] Dawn's two writers differ on the early numbers: Shinwari says the roll reached 33 by the end of 1913, and Muqaddam Khan in 2013 says the college began with ten staff and as many students. [9, 10]

Donors paid for much of it. Shinwari lists a woman, Bibigul, who gave her ornaments to the fund on 6 June 1911; Sethi Karim Bakhsh, Abdul Karim Khan and Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum himself, who gave Rs50,000, Rs10,000 and Rs1,000; and the ruler of Dir, who gave Rs125,000 and 400 trees. [10]

The motives were argued then and are argued now. Abdul Qaiyum, a member of the central assembly when he published Gold and Guns on the Pathan Frontier in 1945, a book dedicated to Dr Khan Sahib, calls Sahibzada "a clear-headed moderate statesman" who "was the first to realize that without education the Pathans would be nowhere", assisted by Roos-Keppel. [2] The same book says the college was affiliated to the Punjab University, taught Arts, Science, Agriculture and teacher training, and took boys from the tribal belt, though "sufficient encouragement is not given" to them, since the Foreign and Political Department ran the tribal areas and awarded too few scholarships. [2] Dawn's 2013 piece quotes the columnist Mohammad Jamil, who cites historians saying the British wanted, in their own word, to calm Pashtun "fanaticism" by educating them. [9]

Abdul Qaiyum records what Pashtuns wanted in 1945: "to transform this college into a great Pathan University", one that would help "the development and growth of the Pushtu language and Pathan culture". [2] He says a resolution to that effect had passed the Central Legislative Assembly unanimously but "so far there has been no practical response from the powers that be". [2]

The University of Peshawar, 1950

The university arrived after Pakistan did. Shinwari, writing in The News in 2025, quotes Muhammad Ali Jinnah on a visit to Islamia College in 1948: "Nothing is dearer to my heart than to have a university in the North-West Frontier Province". [11] Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan laid the foundation stone on 30 October 1950. [5, 11] Shinwari calls it the first university founded in Pakistan after independence, and says it began with the Khyber medical and dental colleges and the engineering college under it. [11]

Shinwari says Islamia College became the cornerstone of the university. A profile published by the Higher Education System Strengthening Activity, an American-funded programme, mentions Jinnah's 1948 visit and does not mention Islamia College. [5, 11] Islamia College was itself made a university: Dawn reported in 2008 that it was granted that status in December 2007. [10]

Kabul: Habibia and the university

West of the Khyber the first modern school was a royal one. Gregorian says Habibia College was Amir Habibullah's creation and that its date is disputed: four of his sources say 1904, E. and A. Thornton, writing at the time, say autumn 1906, and two other writers, Wilber and Stolz, give other dates that he could not confirm. [4] It taught mathematics, geography, English and Urdu beside the traditional subjects, then added science and history, and had the country's first public library. [4] It had some 55 teachers in 1918, most of them Indian Muslims trained at Lahore or Aligarh, and 296 students, against about 700 in five semi-traditional primary schools in Kabul and an unknown number in mosque schools. [4] Gregorian adds that the study of Pashto and Turkish, as well as English and Urdu, was officially encouraged. [4]

Bacha Khan visited Habibia during Amanullah's reign, with the minister of education, and asked a student what his national language was. The boy said "Afghani", then admitted he could not speak it. [1] At a party Mahmud Tarzi told him "Our people speak Persian as well as Pashtu", and Bacha Khan answered that Pashto was the national language and the language of the majority. [1] The scene is Bacha Khan's own, told some decades later.

Kabul University's foundations, Gregorian writes, were laid in 1932 with its first faculty, the School of Medicine: a seven-year course, no fees, and stipends of 50 afghanis for nearly a fifth of the students. [4] Law and political science (1938), natural sciences (1941) and letters (1944) followed, and the university was officially inaugurated in 1946. [4] For the capital's language politics see Kabul and its Pashtuns.

Pashto in the classroom

The first government decision on Pashto as the language of lessons came with the ministry of Dr Khan Sahib in 1937. Bacha Khan says Qazi Ataullah, as education minister, "first of all made Pashtu the compulsory medium of instruction in the schools". [1] Abdul Qaiyum, writing in 1945, says the same minister introduced it as the medium "in all rural schools up to the Primary standard". [2]

Bacha Khan treated the language as part of the same cause. When he started the journal Pakhtun in 1928, he recalls, educated Pashtuns asked, "Has anything worthwhile ever been written in Pashtu?" [1] He blamed English-educated scholars who thought a language grew by magic, and the mullahs who said Pashto was spoken in hell. [1]

The later history has been uneven. On 21 March 2011 the provincial cabinet under Chief Minister Amir Haidar Hoti approved Pashto as a compulsory subject up to the sixth grade, with Hindko, Seraiki, Khowar and Kohistani compulsory where people spoke them. [12] In April 2014 the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government changed the medium of instruction in public schools from Urdu to English. [13] Bushra Rahim, writing in Dawn, cited a household survey of 13,702 homes in 23 districts in which 45 per cent preferred Pashto as the medium and 39 per cent Urdu, and the 1998 census, which counted 74 per cent of the province as Pashto speakers. [13] In July 2021 Dawn reported a notification keeping Pashto only in grade 5 and removing it from grades 1 to 4, and groups linked to the Awami National Party protested. [14] On 4 October 2026 poets and writers at Timergara, in Lower Dir, opposed a reported move to drop Pashto from the primary syllabus and asked that it be compulsory to matriculation. [15]

Literacy by census

Gregorian reports that in 1948 only an estimated 8 per cent of Afghans could read, by Soviet and Western estimates, that fewer than 10 per cent of school-age girls were in school in 1949, and that in 1959 Kabul, with under 2 per cent of the population, had 73.8 per cent of the country's secondary students. [4]

In Pakistan, Gallup Pakistan's reading of the census tables gives male literacy in the old North-West Frontier Province as 51 per cent in 1998 and 69 per cent in 2017, and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as about 30 and 56 per cent. [7] The 2023 census put Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at 51.1 per cent, against 66.3 per cent in Punjab, 57.5 in Sindh and 42 in Balochistan. [6] A compilation of the census results gives the provincial figures as 64.57 per cent for men and 37.15 per cent for women. [8] On Gallup's gender parity index, which compares women's literacy with men's, the five lowest districts in the country are Torghar (26.8 per cent), Orakzai (29.5), Khyber (29.6), Bajaur (30.8) and Lower Kohistan (31), all in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [6]

War and the school

Militancy and war took classrooms. The State of Pakistan's Children report for 2011, as Dawn reported it in 2012, counted 710 schools destroyed or damaged by militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 640 of them in Malakand, and in Swat 121 destroyed and 280 partly damaged over about two years. [16] Pakistani government estimates cited by Voice of America in 2017 put the number of girls' schools damaged or destroyed in the tribal areas at more than 1,100, with about 900 said to have been rehabilitated. [17] The Swat figures and the attack on Malala Yousafzai in 2012 are in the article on Swat.

In Afghanistan the Taliban government of the 1990s barred girls from school. Human Rights Watch reported in 2001 that girls over eight were not allowed to attend, that women had been 70 per cent of teachers before the Taliban took power, and that UNESCO estimated as few as 3 per cent of girls received any primary education. [3] After 2021 the authorities closed secondary schools to girls and, in December 2022, universities to women, which the United Nations called on them to revoke. [21] The numbers and the history are in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.

Madrasas today

The madrasa tradition continued beside the schools. Darul Uloom Haqqania at Akora Khattak in Nowshera was founded in 1947 by Maulana Abdul Haq, a Deobandi scholar. His son Maulana Sami ul Haq took it over after his death in 1988. [18] The Express Tribune, quoting Ahmed Rashid, says most of the Afghan Taliban's leadership council studied there and at least eight of its cabinet ministers in 1999 were graduates. [18]

On 19 December 2024 the government told the Senate that Pakistan had 17,738 registered madrasas with 2,249,520 students, and that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had 4,005 of them with 1,283,024 students, against 10,012 madrasas with 664,065 students in Punjab. [19] Arshad Yousafzai, writing in The Friday Times in January 2026, reads those figures against the idea of a Pashtun "madrasa belt": the average Khyber Pakhtunkhwa madrasa holds about 320 students and a Punjab one about 66, because the province's are larger residential seminaries, and a 2018 study cited there put Pashtun-majority regions at under 18 per cent of all madrasas. [20] Those figures count registered institutions only, and the Friday Times piece gives the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics' 2023 to 2024 economic census as finding about 36,000 madrasas in all. [20]