On the night of 18 August in Brahmanbaria, a police cultural evening turned into a street brawl. District police had organised the event at the Police Lines to welcome a visiting official’s wife. Nearby, students of Darul Arkam Madrasa had exams scheduled for the next morning and, understandably, asked for the music to be turned down so they could study and sleep. It was, briefly, then turned back up. An argument followed, then more than a hundred students entered the compound, police baton-charged them, students threw back whatever they could find, and by the time it was over, thirty people, students and policemen alike, were injured, according to a report published by the daily Manab Zamin on 19 August.
It is worth sitting with how ordinary this began. These were teenagers with an exam in the morning, asking, not unreasonably, for quiet. What should have been a two-minute conversation between neighbours ended in a riot, because there was no channel through which a simple complaint could travel: no hotline, no local authority both sides trusted, no institution built for exactly this kind of small, human friction. Instead, local elders and Hefazat-e-Islam’s secretary general sat down with madrasa representatives at two in the morning and negotiated a settlement: an apology from the police, treatment for the injured, and a promise that no concert would ever be held there again. A dispute over noise and an exam schedule was resolved not through any institution the state recognises, but through the same informal channel that now handles almost everything involving madrasas in this country.
That channel exists because the institutions themselves are barely on the map. Bangladesh runs two parallel madrasa systems, and conflating them does a disservice to both. The Aliya stream, roughly ten thousand institutions, sits under the Bangladesh Madrasah Education Board and follows a curriculum set by the state; its Dakhil and Alim certificates have carried SSC and HSC equivalency since the 1980s. Whatever one thinks of the arrangement, it is at least visible: registered, inspected, and accountable to a named authority.
The Qawmi stream is not. An estimated fourteen thousand Qawmi institutions educate roughly 1.4 million students, funded privately through donations and zakat, run under their own boards, and answerable to no ministry. Most of their students come from families too poor to afford any alternative, not from any particular ideological pull. Field research on the sector backs this up in more detail than headlines usually allow: roughly 60 percent of Qawmi families live below the poverty line, and around 15 percent of Qawmi students, an estimated 210,000 to 780,000 children nationally, are orphans receiving free food, housing, and education they would not get anywhere else. Many Qawmi institutions charge no tuition at all, covering board and meals through community donations alone. For a poor rural family, this is not a lifestyle choice weighted against a better secular school down the road. It is often the only door open. That deserves real sympathy, not suspicion. Painting these students broadly as extremists slanders a very large group of mostly poor and sometimes orphaned children who are, more than anything, trying to survive and get an education their families cannot otherwise afford. It also lets the actual failure, an absent state, off the hook.
Even where recognition exists, it has not meant oversight, and this argument has outlasted more governments than it has convinced. The idea itself is not new. In August 2006, just three months before losing power, Khaleda Zia’s BNP government first floated recognising Qawmi credentials, a promise that died with the government that made it. The Awami League picked the thread back up in 2012, forming a commission chaired by Shah Ahmad Shafi, who also led Hefazat-e-Islam. An enabling law drafted the following year could not be implemented amid the disruption of Hefazat’s May 2013 Motijheel mobilisation and the government crackdown that followed, an accident of history as much as anyone’s decision. The commission sat dormant for three years. What happened next was a choice, not an accident. When the effort revived in 2016, it abandoned the original external Authority model entirely. The 2018 Act that finally passed created Al-Haiatul Ulya Lil-Jamiatil Qawmia Bangladesh, a body made up of the six existing Qawmi boards. Rather than creating an independent regulator to inspect institutions, the state simply allowed the establishment to certify its own top credentials. No curriculum requirement, no registration mandate, no financial oversight came attached. Then, in August 2024, the government that made that deal was gone, swept out by a student-led uprising that sent Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country. The interim administration that governed for the next eighteen months drafted its own answer through its education ministry, a “Qawmi Madrasa Vision 2025-2035” proposing to merge the six boards into a single, state-controlled body with teacher salaries paid from the treasury, a more structural change than any of the previous attempts had risked. That plan was still unfinished when Bangladesh voted again in February 2026, handing the Bangladesh Nationalist Party a landslide and making Tarique Rahman prime minister on a manifesto that explicitly promised to develop Qawmi madrasas and modernise religious education. Three attempts, three governments, one unfinished file. Brahmanbaria happened under the fourth government to inherit it, six months into its term.
None of this is one-sided, and a fair argument has to say so. Qawmi boards have genuine reasons to be wary of state oversight, and it is worth naming them rather than waving them away. Research into the sector has found real reluctance among Qawmi institutions to come under any government system, rooted in fear that registration becomes a lever for political control rather than a neutral safety check, a fear the 2017 deal did nothing to dispel, since what the state offered then was a credential, not a covenant. That reluctance carries a real cost for the students themselves: because Qawmi madrasas sit outside government registration, their students are excluded by design from child-focused state social protection schemes that reach every other kind of school, even though many of these children, orphans especially, are exactly who those schemes exist to serve. The Qawmi establishment’s caution is understandable given the history. But there is a difference worth insisting on between the oversight boards fear and the oversight this argument is asking for. Curriculum control means the state deciding what a child is taught about God. A headcount and a ledger check mean the state knowing whether that same child is fed, safe, and alive. Those are not the same request, and conflating them is what has let the smaller, safer one go unmade for a decade.
It does not have to be this way. Malaysia offers a workable model without abandoning religious education: its Control of Islamic Religious Schools framework requires private religious schools, including tahfiz institutions (Quran memorisation centers), to register with state Islamic religious departments under the Department of Islamic Development (JAKIM). Enforcement is real: in November 2025, eighty pupils at an unregistered Selangor school were barred from a standardised religious examination until state officials intervened. Indonesia went further, passing a dedicated Pesantren Law in 2019 that put its more than twenty thousand pesantren formally under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, with state funding and standard-setting attached. In both countries, a compliance failure gets routed through a named agency with real authority, not settled by whichever group can gather the most people the fastest.
None of this requires treating madrasa education as a problem to be eliminated. Millions of Bangladeshi families rely on it, often because it is the only schooling within reach, and any policy that ignores that reality will fail the very children it is meant to help. What it requires, concretely, is this: mandatory registration of every madrasa, Qawmi included, with the Directorate of Madrasah Education, so the country finally has a real count instead of a guess. It requires an independent inspection and financial-disclosure regime, separate from the Qawmi boards’ own self-certifying body, the same kind any other school in the country already accepts as routine. And it requires a standing local grievance mechanism, so that the next noise complaint, land dispute, or leadership fight inside a madrasa is resolved by a named official who can be held accountable, rather than by a two a.m. meeting brokered under pressure.
None of this needs to start from zero, and it does not need a fifth government to draft a fifth plan. A blueprint already exists: the interim government’s 2025-2035 vision for merging the six Qawmi boards under state control, sitting, as of this writing, on the desk of a government that campaigned on developing Qawmi madrasas and has, since February, made a point of engaging religious leaders directly. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman visited a major Qawmi madrasa in Chittagong on 9 August, ten days before Brahmanbaria, urging scholars to work with his government to maintain peace and stability. What has been missing across every version of this file, in 2006, 2013, 2018, and now, is not a shortage of plans but a shortage of teeth: none of them separated credentialing from oversight, none of them built an inspector answerable to anyone but the boards themselves. A separate, statutory inspection office, empowered to register institutions, audit their finances, and confirm that every listed child is real, enrolled, and safe, with its findings public and its refusals appealable in court, is not a fifth ambitious vision. It is the one addition that would make the previous four mean something. This government does not need to invent the argument. It needs only to finish it.
This protects the public, but it protects madrasa students even more, from being cast, collectively, as the villains of every incident, and from an education that leaves them without a credential the wider economy fully recognises. The students in Brahmanbaria wanted nothing more than a quiet night before an exam. What they got was a riot, then a settlement brokered by men who owed them nothing but sympathy. A government that has already promised, on the campaign trail and at the pulpit, to bring these students into the country’s progress can prove it meant that promise here, not with another vision document, but with an office that answers when a child is in trouble. Building one is not an act against religious education. It is the most basic form of respect a state owes to any child in its care.
