A Global Nightmare

Edited by Luigi Zoja and Donald Williams
Copyright 2002 by authors.

Stories About Stories by Donald Williams, p. 203-218.

Imagine a young adolescent at one of Pakistan's 7,000 "madrasahs," the religious schools that produced the Taliban and still prepare young men for military Jihad.(1) He wakes up with other children at 3 a.m. for study and prayer, breaks for play at 4:30 a.m., has breakfast at 7:30, studies the Qur'an till 11, sleeps for 2 hours, then prays, studies, eats, prays, studies, prays, eats dinner, then goes to the mosque to sleep. In the course of several years he will memorize the Qur'an in Arabic, a language he most likely does not understand.