A Parallel Education System: The Taliban’s madrasa expansion and its implications for gender, society and regional security

Afghanistan Analysts Network

5 Oct 2026 print sharing button

In June 2026, HAMRAH Network published Taliban Madrasas: Ideological Consolidation, Gender Persecution and Afghanistan’s Future Stability, which documented the scale of the Taliban’s madrasa expansion. Drawing on ground-level fieldwork conducted in Kandahar and Bamyan provinces between March and May 2026 and interviews with more than 34 individuals with direct knowledge of the education sector, the report reveals an educational transformation of a speed and scale without precedent in Afghanistan’s modern history. In this Expert Voice, the report’s author, Timor Sharan,* presents its key findings and analyses their significance for Afghan society, regional stability and international engagement.

The full report, including sourcing, methodology and the HAMRAH Network’s recommendations, is available here.

An unprecedented transformation

Before August 2021, there were approximately 5,000 madrasas that formally registered across Afghanistan, while many more functioned informally without state regulation. In September 2025, the Taliban’s de facto Ministry of Education reported over 23,000 registered religious education institutions, with more than 3.65 million students – talib al-ilm(seekers of knowledge) – enrolled. This near-fivefold increase in four years represents not merely an expansion, but a wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s religious education system, with a knock-on effect on state-run schools.

Registered religious education institutions now outnumber Afghanistan’s more than 18,000 public and private schools (see Table 1 below). Against this backdrop, the Taliban established only 276 new public schools since they have retaken power, despite not all children having access to a school – a disparity that underscores the extent to which religious education has been deliberately prioritised while the public school system is reduced to a residual function.

Much of this growth has been achieved not by building new institutions from scratch, but through what might be described as a “franchise model”:^[1] bringing pre-existing private, informal and community-based madrasas under Taliban administrative control in exchange for government salaries, formal certification and access to state resources. At the same time, the Taliban have systematically converted public education infrastructure. Documented cases include Abdul Haji Habibi High School in Khost province – one of the most modern secondary schools in southeastern Afghanistan – converted into a madrasa in 2022, displacing approximately 6,000 students and 130 teachers. Across all 34 provinces, teacher training institutes were shuttered and converted into jihadi madrasas, while the Ministry of Education simultaneously abolished its Teacher Training Department entirely.

Metric	2023-2024	Sept 2025
Standard madrasas	19,669 registered institutions	22,972 registered institutions (in which 27,379 students were provided with accommodation and food).
Dar ul-Huffaz	1,277 (with accommodation capacity for 1,650 talib al-Ilmapproved in 2023)	Data on the total number of Dar ul-Huffaz centres is unavailable; however, 1,800 talib al-ilm were reported enrolled, of whom 300 are girls.
Dar-ul-Ulooms	115	Data unavailable
Orphanages (with religious teaching)	39	9,000 orphans receiving religious education in madrasas
Madrasas in prison	Data unavailable	92
Total madrasa enrolment	3,687,200	Exact data unavailable. The IEA is reported to have enrolled 29,013 new students (grade 1-14) in 2025-26.
Jihadi madrasa enrolment	21,000	26,000

Table 1: National Scale of Madrasa Expansion (2023-2025). Source: Ministry of Education, Summary Report on the Implementation Progress of the Ministry of Education’s Operational Plan Achievements, September 2025. NB: Figures should be treated as minimum estimates; this report’s provincial findings indicate significant undercounting. Official data do not distinguish between newly constructed madrasas, formerly private institutions brought under Taliban registration and repurposed public facilities.

A layered architecture of ideological control

The Taliban have developed a layered religious education infrastructure comprising several distinct institution types which together form an interlocking system of religious instruction, politicised ideological socialisation, leadership reproduction and societal control – see Table 1.

Standard madrasas – the largest category by number – provide mass religious conditioning through a curriculum rooted in the Dars-e Nizami tradition, with its heavy emphasis on Quranic memorisation, Hadith studies and Hanafi jurisprudence. Dar ul-Huffaz centres specialise in Quranic memorisation and typically enrol children at a very young age – they are the earliest point of entry into the broader madrasa system. Dar ul-Ulooms are seminaries, providing advanced theological training for the future clerics, judges, muftis and religious administrators who will staff Taliban governance structures for the next generation. Female madrasas have become, since the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary and further education, the only remaining legal education option for girls above grade six.

The most politically significant category is the jihadi madrasa. Established by decree of Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and administered through a special Kandahar-based directorate that reports directly to him – in other words, outside the normal Ministry of Education chain of command – these institutions function in practice as screening and recruitment mechanisms for the Taliban’s administrative, religious and security structures. The acting Minister of Higher Education, Neda Muhammad Nadim and former Minister of Refugees Khalil al-Rahman Haqqani have both publicly called for madrasas to instil jihadi and military concepts. Officially, the Taliban acknowledge one jihadi madrasa per province. HAMRAH’s fieldwork in Kandahar alone documented 23.

Ultimate doctrinal authority flows from the Supreme Leader’s office through a newly established General Directorate of Religious Affairs in Kandahar. The Supreme Leader directly appoints senior administrators of jihadi madrasas, sets doctrinal parameters and exercises final approval over the curriculum. This governance architecture – the Supreme Leader holding doctrinal authority, ministries of education and higher education managing operations, ulama councils enforcing local conformity and the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice monitoring compliance – is designed for durability. The Generate Directorate of the Religious Affairs in Kandahar manages the operation of Jihadi schools.

What the fieldwork found: Kandahar and Bamyan

HAMRAH’s provincial fieldwork illuminates both the scale of Taliban madrasa expansion and its unevenness with findings in two provinces telling markedly different stories about the same national project.

In Kandahar – the Taliban’s ideological and administrative heartland – the Provincial Directorate of Education recorded 1,522 madrasas operating across the province in 2026, with an estimated enrolment of approximately 608,800 students. Kandahar City alone accounts for 340 madrasas and approximately 136,000 enrolled students – nearly one quarter of total provincial enrolment. Researchers verified much of this data through field visits to Kandahar City and four surrounding districts and identified at least 23 Dar ul-Ulooms and jihadi madrasas in the city and its immediate surroundings alone, against the Taliban’s official acknowledgement of one jihadi madrasa per province.

In Bamyan – a predominantly Hazara and Shia Muslim province with historically high rates of girls’ enrolment in schools and a history of anti-Taliban resistance – the transformation has been starker in relative terms. Total enrolment in the province’s madrasas (all Sunni) stood at approximately 6,972 students in 2023. By 2025, that figure had roughly doubled to approximately 12,800. More than 2,500 students now graduate annually from these religious institutions, compared with fewer than 1,800 from public schools – down from more than 4,000 before 2021 (see Table 2).

Indicator	2023	2024-25
Public madrasas	84	136 (incl 16 not yet registered)
Female madrasas	1 public	1 public, 1 private
Dar ul-Ulooms	1 public, 1 private	1 public, 1 private
Dar ul-Huffaz	10	Data unavailable
Jihadi madrasas	0	1 (capacity 1,000 students)
Total madrasa students	6,972 (3,401 male; 3,571 female)	~12,800 (est.)
Annual madrasa graduates	Not recorded	>2,500
Annual public school graduates	>4,000 (pre-2021)	~1,800

Table 2: Madrasa Expansion in Bamyan Province; Sources: Bamyan Provincial Directorate of Education (2023 and 2025 data); HAMRAH Network fieldwork.

Bamyan also illustrates a hardening posture toward non-Sunni communities. In early 2026, students at Bamyan University were told that dormitory accommodation would only be available to Sunni Muslim students following the Hanafi school. A December 2025 report by Rawadari documented the Taliban’s use of coercion and financial incentives to convert Ismaili Shia communities in four districts of Badakhshan Province. These are not isolated incidents but early indicators of a hardening posture toward non-Sunni communities as the Taliban’s power consolidates.

The evidence from Kandahar and Bamyan points to a coordinated effort to rapidly expand the madrasa network, which has become a central instrument of the Taliban’s project to reshape and penetrate Afghan society. They have subordinated madrasas in these provinces to their administrative framework, repurposing them and establishing new ones as instruments of movement-building, state consolidation, enforcement of their decrees and the cultivation of popular legitimacy and support. In Kandahar, their heartland, madrasa expansion is vast and has deepened the Taliban’s reach into society. In Bamyan, it is being used to reach into non-Sunni communities and extend Taliban dominance, with plans to bring Shia madrasas under state control too.

Financing Madrasas

The full cost of the Taliban’s madrasa expansion programme is difficult to establish; no public disclosure of expenditure has been made. The World Bank reported in 2025 that education spending accounted for 18.8 per cent of the total Taliban budget – approximately USD 675 million – the second-largest sector after security. A 2023 AAN report found that 95 per cent of the education budget went on salaries alone. Read alongside the Taliban’s own data – 87,592 religious education posts advertised nationwide, with recruitment of 50,000 personnel underway in 2025 – the implication is clear: a substantial and growing share of the Ministry of Education’s budget is directed to salaries for religious teachers, madrasa instructors and administrative personnel.

Beyond the state budget, the Taliban draw on several additional funding streams. The Supreme Leader maintains a significant discretionary budget, which funds madrasa construction and management outside normal appropriations processes. Coercive fundraising targeting private individuals and businesses has become increasingly common. As one businessman in Kandahar told HAMRAH researchers: “Paying for a madrasa’s salaries, food and building costs is the price of getting things done under the Emirate.” Sustaining and funding a madrasa has become an informal way to secure contracts, licences, or favourable treatment from authorities – conferring religious legitimacy alongside political advantage. Some of the largest madrasas in Kandahar documented in this study were linked to key Taliban figures, including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who established al-Jamiah al-Islamiyyah Dar-ul Uloom Kandahar following the Taliban’s return to power, from which approximately 1,000 students graduate annually.

Religious taxation provides another funding stream. The Emirate takes what in most Muslim countries are private charitable donations as state taxes. They are ushr – a tithe of approximately ten per cent levied on the harvest – and zakat – a tax on increases in livestock. In 2023, the Taliban reported collecting approximately one billion dollars through these taxes – funds flowing directly to the Supreme Leader’s office for distribution at his discretion. The scale of investment required to sustain a network of 23,000 madrasas cannot be explained by the Taliban’s domestic revenue base alone and the sources, mechanisms and governance of madrasa financing remain inadequately documented.

The institutionalisation of gender persecution

The madrasa network has become the primary infrastructure through which the Taliban’s gender persecution is being institutionalised and internalised. The system of gender discrimination – characterised by leading human rights organisations and a growing number of governments as gender apartheid – is being encoded in doctrine, enforced through surveillance and deliberately designed to outlast the current political moment.

A survey involving 8,245 women across all 34 provinces found that 56 per cent identified the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary education as the primary reason families enrolled daughters in madrasas.^[2] Today, between 1.4 and 2.2 million girls are barred from attending school beyond primary level.

Field interviews documented that female madrasa students are consistently taught that men are permitted four wives, that women should accept and not question their husbands’ remarriage and that early marriage – particularly to fighters and those involved in jihad – is to be sought and celebrated. One girl, interviewed in Kandahar, noted that three of her friends had already married at age sixteen.^[3] Physical compliance with Taliban gender norms is enforced within madrasa settings with notable rigour: girls are monitored not only for hijab observance, but for the colour of their nail varnish, the shape of their eyebrows and the colour of their clothing. This pervasive surveillance of female bodies normalises a culture of control that extends well beyond madrasa walls.

The social consequences are immediate and visible beyond the classroom. Field interviews documented stories of brothers pressuring sisters to marry early and abandon education, armed with religious authority derived from their madrasa instruction (see the report below). Children are being taught that their loyalty to the Emirate takes precedence over family bonds and that monitoring and reporting the behaviour of parents and relatives is not a betrayal but an obligation. The report also documents parents withdrawing sons from madrasas specifically out of fear that their children had become informants within their own households. As one community elder in Kandahar recounted, after speaking with the head of provincial intelligence: “Be aware that we now have informants in each one of your households.” The madrasa system, the elder observed, was the ideal training ground for this kind of conformity.

The long-term implications are profound. A generation educated exclusively within this framework will inherit and enforce a social order in which gender persecution is not policy but doctrine – normalised, naturalised and sanctified by religious authority. This is, by design, self-perpetuating.

The ideological threat

In July 2022, following criticism from ulama regarding the ban on girls’ education, Supreme Leader Akhundzada warned that criticism of Taliban authorities was “not permissible” in Islam, framing dissent as fitna – a state of social disorder incompatible with Muslim duty, to be eradicated by all means necessary. The acting Minister of Higher Education stated that those who undermine Taliban order “by speech, pen, or in practice” are considered wajeb ul-qatl – permitted to be killed. Meanwhile, our research found that non-Hanafi religious minorities are increasingly characterised in madrasa teaching as guilty of bid’aa – illegitimate innovation from the correct path of Islam – and legitimate candidates for conversion. Dissenters, women and religious minorities inside Afghanistan are the first targets of a doctrine that treats disagreement as a religious offence.

The primary concern is not that jihadi madrasas are systematically producing battlefield combatants – available evidence does not support that conclusion at this stage. The more consequential threat is ideological: the annual production of tens of thousands of graduates formed within a framework that treats religious authority, political loyalty and militant identity as inseparable.