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Greg Mortenson Interview (page: 3 / 6)Best-Selling Author, Three Cups of Tea
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The female literacy rates in some of these countries are so much lower. Is this resistance to women's education rooted in Islam?
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Having studied the Holy Koran, the first word of the revelation to Muhammad the Prophet is the Arabic word iqra. And iqra means "read." The first two chapters of the revelation implore that all people have a quest for knowledge. And this is really what the Koran is about, about tolerance, about respect for all people, and also about education and literacy. There is nowhere in the Koran that says girls can't go to school. In fact, it advocates that all people have a quest for knowledge. Also in the Holy Koran, which is maybe of relevance after 9/11, when a young man or anyone goes on jihad, he or she first needs to get permission from his mother or her mother. Usually it's men obviously. If a man doesn't get permission from his mother, it's very shameful or disgraceful. So if a man goes on jihad and he hasn't gotten his mother's blessings, then his jihad is not a noble jihad, and if he becomes a shahid, which means a martyr, he won't get the benefit of what the Koran accords a shahid.
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That became after 9/11. The Taliban actually had a high desertion rate. The central core of the Taliban is only about 25,000 people, and then maybe about 60,000 kind of loose adherents, getting paid to be jihadists or fighters for the Taliban. After 9/11, but before the U.S. and coalition forces came into Afghanistan, they had a very hard time getting recruits. So they were going into villages to try and get recruits at gunpoint to fight against the imminent invasion or intervention. But they were mainly targeting illiterate, impoverished societies, because educated women were refusing to allow their sons to join the Taliban.
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I met hundreds of women who refused to allow their sons to join terrorists or jihadi groups. Because they say that in the Koran, suicide and the killing of civilians are two of the worst sins that a person can commit. And when a woman has an education, she is much less likely to condone her son to get into violence or into terrorism. That also is true in urban areas in the U.S. You have a single mother, you know, impoverished. Her son wants to get into gangs or drugs or violence. The higher an education a woman has, the more likely her son is to get his GED or to continue on with his education. And I've been also criticized for that. Because a lot of people say, "Well, great. That's all great. But the 9/11 hijackers were all educated." And that's all true, but nearly all their mothers were illiterate. And I doubt that they asked for permission to do what they did on that tragic day on 9/11. I think the other interesting point is, if you look at this somewhat analytically, since 2007, or in the last year and a half, the Taliban and other jihadi groups have bombed or destroyed or shut down about 450 schools. Nearly all those schools are girls schools, very few boys schools. So why is it that a group of men want to destroy girls schools and not boys schools? Because I think the greatest fear is not the bullet, but it's the pen. But even more than that, they fear that if that young girl grows up, she becomes a mother, that the value of education will go on in the community, and they have lost their ideological way to really control the society.
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I think one thing that the U.S. is trying too hard to do is to "plug in" democracy. You can't "plug in" democracy. You have to build democracy, and democracy starts first with education. And then the second key ingredient is land ownership. That's very imperative to the right of women's suffrage, or the women's right to vote. We had the same course in our history in America. People came out West. And there was the Homestead Act in 1867. People got 160 acres. If the man died, often the inheritance went back to the family back East. So the woman was left in a very precarious situation. Then came the Land Grant Act, higher institutions, more higher education for women, legal advocacy, which led to the right of land ownership. And if you talk to women's studies professors, they'll say that the single most important thing that led to the Women's Suffrage Act in 1920 was the women's right to own land. The first women to vote in America were ranching widows in Wyoming. The first Congresswoman in the U.S. Congress was Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. She was a Montana ranching woman. And right of land ownership was kind of a key ingredient.
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In 2004, the U.S. gave Pakistan a billion dollars to do two things. One, send 70,000 Pakistan troops into the tribal areas to capture and kill Al Qaeda and the Taliban. And number two, to have elections. So Pakistan did have an election. But the MMA, which is the extremist coalition, got 28 percent of the vote. Five years earlier, they had two percent of the vote. So basically, we galvanized the extremist coalition. Now what's happened recently, in March 2008, they had another election, and the MMA hardly got any votes, about five percent of the votes, and they only got six seats in the Parliament. But the reason people are turning against the extremist coalition is because they're not providing basic health care, education, the things that people want out of a political party. So this could be the finest hour for Pakistan and for the U.S. and for other organizations. The people are very eager for education. They gave a very strong mandate through their election. They do not want the extremist coalition in power. So I'm hoping that their voice will resonate, and the people will really get behind education.
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In the world today, there's 145 million children who are deprived of education due to slavery, poverty, religious extremism, gender discrimination, corrupt governments. If we wanted to, we could give the gift of education -- literacy -- to every single child on the planet. And the investment in that would be six billion dollars per year for 15 years. It's about $30 to $40 per child per year. It's like two or three dollars per month per child. And we could eradicate global illiteracy. And what would happen as a result of that? We'd have reduced population explosion. Women could be empowered in such a tremendous way. Unfortunately, where we put our money is in a lot of other things. So what we spent last year, just in Iraq on the war on terror, we could eradicate global illiteracy. We could do a lot of other things. But I think that education and literacy should be one of the top global priorities.
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It is part of the U.N. Millennium Goals which were established in 2000. Some countries are doing pretty well, but we've still got a long way to go.
You've spoken about a link between girls' education and hygiene, and how that education has an effect on the rest of their lives.
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Greg Mortenson: When I'm talking about education, I'm talking about very basic education. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Our students learn five languages by the time they're in fifth grade. We also, in addition to regular education, we have hygiene, sanitation, nutrition in our classes, the storytelling tradition. But what happens, even if you do not have hygiene, sanitation, nutrition in class in the school, I've been able to see, over now 15 years, how if you go into one village where there's no girls in school. and you go to another village where girls have been going to schools for five years. And you walk into the kitchen, or even into the bathroom, and these are outdoor pit kind of toilets, but you see this -- I don't know what it is -- but this transformation. The sanitation, the way the dishes are washed, the way there's pride in making food and how their awareness of public health, and also about recycling of diseases. You know, having clean drinking water not run through their community toilet systems. They use the manure to mulch into their fields to get nitrogen, but you can put that at the bottom of the field, so that your drinking water is coming from a clean source. And a lot of these things don't even have to be taught. But there's this kind of awareness that comes about as a result of literacy.
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Two other things that happen are when girls first learn to read and write, they often go home and teach their mothers how to read and write. Their mothers then can start writing letters to their extended family. When a woman is married, often their maternal ties are severed. And so through letter writing -- there's no cell phone or e-mail or any other way -- they can communicate with their families. And really it helps them to be empowered. And the way men in oppressive societies control women is to cut off the support network. The same with a battered woman in the U.S. They cut off the support network. The other thing that happens is you'll see kids coming, or people coming back from the bazaar, from the marketplace, and they have vegetables or meat wrapped in newspaper. And then they very carefully unfold the newspaper, and the girl will start reading the news to her mother. There is some radio, but that power of bringing the outside world, through word and text, into the community, all of a sudden that woman becomes part of a regional or global community. It's a very powerful force.
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They seem like very simple things, but they're very changing events that happen in a community. Investing in education is the most if you want to call it bang for the bucks.
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Some economists calculate that one dollar -- just one dollar -- invested in the education of a girl in the Third World, the return rate after one generation -- about 20 years -- is about $18. You cannot get any other such an effective investment for value than educating a girl in society. You know, you can build a dam or you could invest in weapons of war. Or you could invest in public sector infrastructure, roads. But the most tangible economic return is girls education.
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Greg Mortenson Interview, Page:
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This page last revised on Oct 28, 2009 16:24 EST
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