Home > Event > Suicide Bombers and Islamic Schools, ASC, Washington DC, USA.
19 November, 2011
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Fasihuddin (PSP), the President of Pakistan Society of Criminology chaired a session on Crime and Terror at the 63 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology held at Washington Hilton, DC, USA from 16-19 Nov. 2011. Fasihuddin presented his paper on ‘Are Suicide Bombers Coming from Madrassahs (Islamic Schools)?’. Four other presenters also spoke on the relevant topic. Fasihuddin (PSP) negated the media perception in Pakistan that suicide bombers are coming from Islamic seminaries. The data and various researches have never validated this media perception. Often, after a suicide bombing in Pakistan, the responsibility is put on a tribal, young student coming from an unknown Islamic school which is a lame excuse for avoiding proper investigation and prosecution as an ‘unknown offender’ from an ‘unknown-place’ and having no trace evidence is ultimately an untraced case. This is just a non-professional approach. Evidence of an empirical research that suicide bombers in Pakistan are coming from Islamic schools is not an absolute fact. The data on Islamic schools is also conflicting but the educated guess is that we have about 14000 schools in Pakistan with an estimated enrollment of 1.5 million students. And the total reported/suspected suicide attacks in the last 8-9 years are 300, so if they were coming from Islamic schools, the number would not be 300 incidents for 1.5 million “would-be bombers”. The media construct of terrorism incidents is often faulty and non-research based.