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I suspect many people conflate scholarship with clergy because that was the way things worked in the middle ages in Europe: if you wanted to have enough time for scholarly pursuits the clergy was probably the best place to be. Once it became possible to make a career as a scientist this practice changed but the association between clergy and scholarship still lives in the public perception.

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This definitely used to be true, but I don't think it survived colonialism. Nowadays as kids are growing up, there are pretty much two paths: secular (in a manner of speaking) Western style schools, or traditional madrassas (not dissimilar to pre-colonial schools in the region). At least in my middle class socio-economic circles, people who undertook exculsively religious study (as opposed to studying it on the side with western education) were looked at with derision.

The concept definitely lives on in places like Jesuit educational institutions, one of which I attended for 6 years in the Netherlands [1]. These are not religious schools, they are schools started by people from a religious group which had the odd effect of several of my teachers being priests teaching mathematics, classical and modern languages, physics, etc. The only religious aspect of the school was that the school year was opened and closed in church with the French teacher leading the sermon, the Latin teacher playing the organ, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Gymnasium

No, I had in mind the talibans in Afghanistan. I don’t make the error of reading the islamic world through the lens of the European christian past.

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