In the capital alone, some 160 madrassas and 72 day scholar Quranic institutes are not registered with any of the government authorities, the survey revealed.
The survey, jointly carried out by the police and Islamabad Capital Territory Administration, was recently shared with the Interior Ministry. It states that there are 401 seminaries within the capital city’s territorial limits with the majority of them running under the aegis of the Deobandi school of thought.
The number of government-run schools and colleges in the capital is 422, according to the record of the Federal Directorate of Education.
Of the total 401 madrassas, some 72 are ‘day scholar maktabs’ where children recite Quran for a few hours a day. The remaining 329 are full-time seminaries with lodging facilities for students.
Some 31,796 students are enrolled at these seminaries. Of them, 17,419 belong to Islamabad and Rawalpindi, while 14,377 hail from other parts of the country, mainly from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Fata.
The seminaries are being run by representatives of four major schools of Islamic thought — Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahle Hadith and Shia.