Aitchison College is said to be in Lahore, Pakistan - but it might as well be located on another planet altogether.

Walking through its lush green lawns, the orderly composition of which is broken only by the odd colonial-era Moorish-Moghul monument, one cannot help but be stunned by the beauty and scale of the buildings themselves.

The college exudes its own sense of pride and history, a quality which is desperately wanting in the other modern metroplexes of Pakistan today. But then again, Aitchison college was never meant to be an ordinary institution of learning.

Its primary aim was to create a generation of political elite who were meant to help govern the outer reaches of the British Empire in India and this it did admirably well.

The problem however, is that old habits die hard, and the neo-feudal culture of Pakistani politics remains alive and well in Aitchison as it does in many other elite educational institutions of the post-colonial world.

Like its (smaller and humbler) counterpart in Malaya - the Royal Malay College of Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) - Aitchison has produced a steady stream of political leaders and popular celebrities for Pakistan.

The Pakistani cricket hero Imran Khan happens to be one of the old boys of Aitchison, as well as a couple of Malay Tengkus from God knows where. But the boys who have been sent there by their parents may not know all that much about the country they are destined to govern.

Cloistered as they are behind its redbrick walls and guarded compounds, they have better things to do like learning how to ride horses and playing cricket instead.

Cannon fodder

On the other side of Lahore one finds areas like Ichara, where dozens of Deeni Madrasahs have sprung up. These are religious schools funded and run by a range of Islamist parties like the Jamaat-e Islami , the Jamaat-i Ulama-e Islam and the Jamaat-i Ulama-e Pakistan .

In some of these madrasahs the curriculum and daily schedule is somewhat different from that of the regime at Aitchison, to say the least.

Lunch and dinner consists of plain chapatis with dhal and water, and the daily routine is made up of rote learning of the Quran, religious sermons and lectures, punctuated only by short breaks for prayers.

The boys in these madrasahs don't know all that much about life beyond their walls either. Their Uztad s (teachers) are close at hand to lecture them on the evils of the world (which of course includes that species known as women), and their duty to become Ulama and Mujahideen to take up the struggle or jihad for Islam one fine day.

During the 1990s, these madrasahs became the recruitment ground for the Islamist and Jihadi movements, which stripped them bare of students who were sent to Afghanistan and Kashmir to become cannon fodder instead.

When the Taliban began to suffer losses at the hands of their opponents in Afghanistan, the Uztad s of the JUI controlled

madrasah s simply closed down their schools and sent all their boys straight to the front line.

Many of them never got back alive, while others returned maimed and traumatised for good. But the supply of poor uneducated children is something that Pakistan is not short of, and as Hitler once said: 'What are the young men for otherwise?'

Between the elite institutions of learning for the well-heeled and the well-off and the squalid madrasah s for the poor, there seems to be little in between in Pakistan.

Guns and bombs

The state education system has failed and gangsterism has taken over the campuses. Students send their bodyguards and drivers or sometimes their own relatives to threaten their teachers with guns if they fail their exams.

The militant student wings of the extremist parties organise boycotts of classes, disrupt lectures and sometimes even resort to all out violence and terrorism.

In the 1980s, with the backing of the state and the military regime, some members of the Islamist student movements even went as far as burning the hair of female students who were not wearing the head scarf ( hijab ) which they deemed was compulsory for all Muslim women.

Dialogue and discussion has given way to the language of the gun and petrol bomb instead.

But in a sense, it is not just the women who have been forced into purdah (seclusion) in Pakistan. For the truth is that all of Pakistani society happens to be in a state of purdah , and most of the social and class groupings in the country are actually isolated from each other.

Lest it be forgotten, we should remind ourselves that the word purdah refers to the practice of seclusion that was originally the exclusive purview of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad.

Purdah was practiced by the wives of the Prophet in order to seclude them from society and to keep the immediate family of the Prophet outside the realm of clan and tribal politics.

Ordinary Muslim women then did not practice purdah . They moved about freely in society and interacted with other members of the Muslim and non-Muslim community.

Elite phenomenon

In time, however, the practice of purdah was taken up by sections of the Muslim society as a mark of status.

In the South Asian context, elite Muslim families in the Indian subcontinent adopted purdah as a mark of status and this was particularly true for those who claimed to have blood links to the family and clan of the Prophet himself.

Purdah was therefore an elite phenomenon, and it remains so till today.

It is not uncommon to see wealthier Pakistanis eating in their cars around the numerous drive-ins around Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.

Unlike the ordinary Pakistanis who step out and dine at the tables and chairs that have been set up along the pavements, those who are well off prefer to eat in their air conditioned Pajeros instead.

The chicken tikkas and Afghani kebabs taste the same (presumably), but the ambience is altogether different. This is a society with many levels and degrees, and none of them meet or coincide.

The elite live in their closeted and guarded cocoons, barricaded behind concrete and steel-reinforced walls while the guards sleep on their chairs and charpoys outside.

They bemoan the state of the nation, the collapse of the health service, the declining standards of public education and the rise of the Islamist opposition parties with their fiery rhetoric of divine justice and retribution.

Yet the very same elite are the ones who send their kids to the most exclusive and expensive schools abroad, who stash their earnings in foreign bank accounts, and who refuse to pay their taxes.

Sad reality

Everyone dreams of the restoration of law and order, but none are prepared to pay the price in terms of loss of earnings (in the form of higher taxes) for themselves.

It must be noted that Pakistan is not unique in its manifold contradictions and ironies. The sad fact is that the realities of Pakistan are now the realities of the Muslim world and the developing world as well - though perhaps the contrasts are not as great or as painfully evident elsewhere.

Malaysians who think that they are better off than their counterparts in Pakistan and other parts of the world had better think again, for the fact is that similar divisions exist in our own backyard and we seem to be following the same sad trajectory as these other countries.

But for now one fact remains though - rich and poor, high and low, Pakistanis live in a perpetual state of purdah from themselves.

And while the liberals complain about the rise of the Islamist movements and their culture of jihad and hijab , they have singularly failed to note that they themselves have been forced into a culture of self-imposed purdah .

DR FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian academic and human rights activist. He has been in Pakistan for a study tour over the past 6 weeks. His column, 'The Other Malaysia', will resume next week.