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We agonize a lot here about Islamic fundamentalism. But what can be done about it?

There are many reasons why Islamism of the most belligerent sort now stalks the earth, but one of them is that in many parts of the world, if you want an education, your only choice now is often either an education presided over by Islamic fundamentalists, or no education at all.

It is this problem which a group of businessmen in Pakistan have set out to remedy. With financial help from people of Pakistani descent who are living it Britain, they have established The Citizens' Foundation, and there was an article about the work of TCF in the Times Magazine yesterday by Joanna Pitman.

Quote:

The six of them – all highly successful top-level managers – met in August 1995 and began to think seriously about the problems. They addressed poverty, health, intolerance, population, education, water and sanitation, and concluded that the solution to all these issues was education. In Pakistan, education remains desperately, stupidly low on the list of government priorities. The state schooling system, riddled with corruption, has been either non-existent or on the point of collapse for many years. The result is a massive intellectual deficit: out of a total population of 145 million, the country has 28 million children entirely unschooled and 41 per cent of adult men and 70 per cent of adult women illiterate. Ironically, in some areas, the first parents queueing to send their children to TCP schools rum out to be government schoolteachers.

The six businessmen decided to set up a corporate-style charitable organisation to build and run schools offering high-quality education to both girls and boys in the poorest areas of the country. Within four months, the ground had been broken to construct the first five schools, paid for out of the pockets of the founders, and by May 1996 all five were operational. Only once the schools had been running successfully for a year did TCF begin to expand – not through advertising or asking for funds, but simply by taking people to see the reality and letting them spread the word.

Its target is to build 1,000 primary a secondary schools by 2010, which will cater for 350-400,000 children at a time, offering them a high-quality, secular education that is the envy of most government schools and comparable to the country's elite private schools. "We want these children to compete with our own children," says Saleem, whose four teenage children are being educated at the best Pakistani private school and at the American School.

I have been unable to locate this article either here or anywhere else (although if someone can correct that, please do), and so have taken the liberty of scanning it all into my Education Blog, where you can now read the whole thing. If you do that, you will not, I believe, regard your time as having been wasted.

This project strikes me as an example of all kinds of good things, but in particular of the benefits that can come to a poor country when people from it are able to go and live in richer countries, and are then able to do something about the depressing circumstances from which they thought at first only of escaping.

In general, I believe that if Islam ever does get past confrontation and accommodates itself amicably into humanity as a whole, the Islamic diaspora will be an important part of this process.