Madrasas first emerged in South Asia under the patronage of medeival Muslim rulers, who sought to create a class of clerics to interpret Islamic tradition in ways that suited statecraft. From then till now these institutions have persisted with a curriculum that has seen few changes. The Islam they teach leaves little room for creative interpretation, and it is from this tradition that many political tendencies in the Subcontinent, including the Taliban have emerged.
With the seemingly ineluctable march of modernity and secularisation, Western-style development planners in much of the postcolonial Muslim world had hoped that traditional Islamic centres of education—the madrasas—would be rapidly replaced by Western schools. These schools would train a new generation of educated Muslims who, while rooted in their own cultural traditions, would imbibe the best that the West had to offer. Madrasas were seen as centres of obscurantism and superstition, and as one of the principal causes of Muslim decline at the hands of the West. In different Muslim countries the attack on the madrasa system took different forms. In Turkey, for instance, a government decree in 1925 ordered the closure of all madrasas in the country with a single stroke of the pen, soon after the Republicans under the staunchly secular Kemal Attaturk took power after deposing the last Muslim Caliph.
This policy was followed in several Muslim countries that came under communist rule in the aftermath of the Russian revolution in 1917, such as Albania and the entire Muslim belt of Central Asia. In other countries, such as Morocco and Algeria, while the state continued to base its legitimacy on Islamic foundations, Islamic education was sought to be 'modernised', with departments of Islamic studies in modern universities taking the place of traditional madrasas. In 1961, the socialist and Arab nationalist, Jamal Abdul Nasser, in his impatience with the traditional Muslim ulama (clerics and scholars), transformed the world-renowned Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest, largest and most respected madrasa in the world, into a modern university.
South Asia, where over a third of the world's Muslim population lives, followed a slightly different course. While the madrasas were left largely untouched, the effective delinking of madrasa education from the job market led to the declining popularity of traditional Islamic schools. However, the 1980s witnessed a rapid revival of the madrasas across South Asia, in terms of numbers as well as power and influence. In India, the number of madrasas is now estimated at some thirty to forty thousand, with a similar figure for Pakistan and probably a slightly smaller number in Bangladesh. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, madrasas today play a crucial role in national politics. The former has several ulama-based political parties with millions of supporters.