[Reader-list] on madarsas

[mahmood farooqui]

I am following into the atrocious habit of inflicting
my writings on the hapless readers of this list, fully
aware still that it can hardly be called 'writing' in
the proper sense of the term...here is one of the last
ones, I promise...

_________

FOOTNOTING THE FOOTNOTES-MADARSA EDUCATION IN INDIA


Work, for me, has always meant poring over books that
I do not understand or enjoy. Perhaps it is exactly
the same for thousands of Madarsa students in the
sub-continent as they lean to and fro in orchestrated
movements and memorise verses, passages, even entire
books by heart. Discussions between these students may
turn into heated arguments even, but merely on issues
such as the appropriate length of the tooth brush and
the permissibility of performing Namaz on trains. For
the training at the Madarsas of South Asia today is
almost exclusively devoted to issues of personal
conduct and correct piety, necessitated perhaps by the
appropriation by the Colonial state of the Public
sphere and Criminal law, which relentlessly drove
religion to the personal domain. 

You talk to a Muslim about the obscurantism of present
day Madarsas and he would probably quote you a Hadith
(a Prophetic tradition) that ‘the pen of the scholar’s
ink is mightier than the martyr’s blood,’ or he might
do better and quote to you this one, ‘go unto China
even to acquire knowledge.’ You ask the Mulla, or as
Madarsa graduates prefer, the Ulema the same thing and
they would tell you that what these Hadith meant, in
fact, was Godly knowledge.

So Ilm, the central tenet of early Islam- and it is
useful to remember here that in the entire Quran there
are only about 200 verses directly enjoining prayer
and three times as many that number commanding the
believers to reflect, to ponder and to analyse God’s
magnificence in nature, plants, stars, the solar
system- has been transformed into ‘ilm of the trivial
and the superfluous. The early Muslims unhesitatingly
translated philosophical, literary texts from Greek,
Latin and Sanskrit and considered it all a part of the
useful knowledge. Perhaps that is why the religious
scholars in the pre-modern era led such full blooded
worldly lives. Maulana Fazle-Haq Khairabadi, for
instance, one of the great religious scholars of
pre-mutiny Delhi, delighted as much in his chess
battles with the poet Momin and in expounding Arab
poetry as in the religious texts he taught. 

Madarsas, as we know the term, full time religious
seminaries with hostels, annual exams, hierarchies of
gradations and branches and affiliations are an
entirely modern phenomena. The preferred mode of
religious scholarship before 1857, in South Asia at
least, consisted of learning particular books under
particular scholars and, since the State was the chief
employer for many of these students, they naturally
tended towards study of jurispudential subjects, laws
governing personal, civil and criminal conduct.
However, post-mutiny, with the disappearance of state
patronage and protection, the establishment of a chain
of Madarsas introduced a new dynamic to the religious
relations within the community-the appeal to the
individual and the community at large as the
protectors of the faith, rather than to the State or
to the political authority. 

These issues and themes, and much else besides, are
well encapsulated in Bastions of the
Believers-Madrasas and Islamic Education in India
(Penguin, Delhi, 2005), this wonderful book by
Yoginder Sikand. Yogi, as he is known, is unique among
present day scholars in the range and
comprehensiveness of his engagement with almost all
aspects of contemporary South Asian Islam and in his
wide-ranging personal and experiential access to all
branches of them. He does well to distinguish two
aspects of the Madarsa problematic: the ‘problem with
Madarsas’ and ‘Madarsas as problems.’ 

The latter treats Madarsa and its products as being
inscribed by a gene code which automatically impedes
modernity from reaching them, as if modernity is a
great river which cannot break through the flood walls
that surround these madarsas. Had madarsas been so
outside the pale of modernity it would have immensely
pleased their leaders, and the modern world would have
been happy at the problem being left outside its
physical locale. However, the very existence of
madarsas as schools with degrees, certificates and
classes and the structure of the education they impart
is in complete consensus with the modern world. As to
the content of that education, I don’t know how far
the content of school education can affect our
formation as modern selves, without the socialization
that accompanies it. Teaching us pious homilies about
Gandhi or about social equality does not prevent our
‘normal’ school children from imbibing reactionary
philosophies or caste biases. 

Besides, Madarsa students are not medieval monks that
they do not sigh when they pass film posters or do not
play cricket with tennis balls or, like ghettoed men
or boys anywhere else in the world, do not indulge in
illicit and sometimes forced sexual congress with
other boys. To imagine that madarsas, with computers,
tables, examinations, grading, the urge to excel, to
compete, consisting of students who all attempt to
chart a successful narrative for their selves in this
world, this here and now-attributes of modernity,
all-are somehow pre or anti-modern is to, in fact,
take their claims too seriously.

Similarly, to imagine that since they teach an
outmoded theology, even a reactionary theology and
therefore they must have something to do with the
politics of extremism or terror is to take that
theology too seriously. Madarsas, as the charge
against them goes, impart a medieval theology. Yet,
that same theology did not impede an Akbar from
instituting the most liberal regime this country has
known, a Quli Qutub Shah from singing praises of
Krishna or a Nizamshahi dynasty from only employing
Brahman Chief Ministers. If that same theology and
curricula did not prevent the development of broadly
tolerant, accommodative and inclusive polities of
medieval South Asia, why must it ipso facto produce
narrow sectarianism as a political attitude? Political
attitudes emerge out of ideological and social
formations and madarsas, far from engendering those
formations, are themelves a product of it. 

While Madarsas in South Asia have been hugely
instrumental in providing access to education and
respectability, that is Ashrafisation, to students
from lower income and status backgrounds, they yet
remain mired in the central problematic of modern
Indian history: that of caste. Most madarsas in India
are still insistent on accepting only the Ashraf, the
genteel castes, into their domain thus perpetuating
the medieval tyranny of ascriptive statuses,
reflecting perhaps the collusion of the Islamic
orthodoxy with Brahmanical prejudices in turning this
land into the terra firms of Homo Hierarchicus. Is it
incidental that the Islamic thinkers and reformers who
did centralize the issue of caste and class are not a
part of our canon today and originated mostly as
peasant-millenarian movements outside the Sharif fold?
For every ten books on Deoband, in Urdu and English,
there is not even one on the Faraizis and Titu Mir,
who, before the Santhal rebellion and before 1857,
wanted to institute a society where only those who
tilled the land would be given its produce regardless
of caste, class or gender. Perhaps this neglect and
these biases are but a reflection of how deeply
affected contemporary Muslim thought in South Asia
remains with the Ashraf-Ajlaf dichotomy. 

In the absence of viable State alternatives the
Madarsas are certainly doing sterling service in
providing literacy to poor Muslims, and it is mostly
poorer students who attend them, yet, as Yogi
sympathetically elaborates, the content of their
curricula is highly disappointing. I say that while
accepting the fact that all forms of knowledge are
sociological constructs and have validity only in
their own contexts. Yet, poring over the footnote upon
commentaries upon expositions of legal treatises, the
chief preoccupation of Madarsa pedagogy, written
mostly before 13th century, can hardly be an edifying
experience. The Madarsas of South Asia, and it is
instructive that the word Madarsa in the Arabic world
refers simply to a school for they mostly do not have
specialist religious schools like ours, mostly
restrict their syllabi to books of fiqh, that is legal
commentaries building upon the four prominent schools
of Sunni thought that came into being in the eight
century, and of Hadith, compendia of traditions and
sayings of the Prophet. This mode of education,
footnoting the footnoted footnotes, like the Tikas
upon Vyakhyans upon Vivechnas of medieval Hindu
thought, does not induce a reflective spirit in the
modern, intellectual sense of the term. 

Although, as Yogi points out, there are now several
modernizing Madarsas in this country in places such as
Azamgarh and Kerala where not only are modern subjects
taught but there are even hostels for girls, most
still remain mired in medieval dogmas. They still have
a subject called Ikhlafiyat, or disputations, which
teaches the students to defend their particular sect
and attack the followers of other sects. Indeed,
Madarsas are loath to reform because for many of them
their primary focus is on refuting other co-believers
who they see as the greater evil. For the same reason,
in Deoband today- one of whose founders wanted to
institute Sanskrit as a subject and was planning to
travel to Europe to learn English before he died-
while Hindi is taught, English is still frowned upon.
They dread the ire of their co-religionist rivals too
much. 

I do wish though that Yogi’s book had more to say on
the kind of students who enroll at Madarsas, their
backgrounds and aspirations. What is it they seek?
What do they think about the Quran as a philosophical
text, about the stigma surrounding their seminaries,
about their future in a world which seems to have no
place for alternative forms of knowledge and even less
respect for their variety of Godly knowledge. Do they
agree that an Aalim, a scholar, even a Godly scholar
is one who studies God’s mysteries as much as one who
studies the books of the followers of commentators of
expounders of his creatures? Is not a genetic
scientist, studying stem cell research expounding upon
God’s work and words better than the religious
preacher who memorises the books of some obscure
thirteenth century cleric? Is it satisfactory enough
to them that they are to form the vanguard of the
Ulema in mosques, Sharia Panchayats and other smaller
seminaries and by transmitting the rote-learning they
received, would be preserving the identity of the
Ummat, even if that identity consists exclusively of
commentaries upon selected tertiary texts? 

Notwithstanding that, Yoginder Sikand’s book is a
highly valuable treatise which evaluates the
historical development of Madarsa education and the
contemporary debates between Islamists,
traditionalists and Modernists as to the direction the
Madarsa education should teach. Rightly, he puts all
concerns about ‘Madarsas as problems’ whether for the
civil society or for the extremist political movements
in their, historical, place, and highlights the
problems with Madarsas as far as their own preferred
mission- of keeping alive the religious traditions of
the South Asian Muslim communities- goes. Madarsas
should certainly modernize and change but we should
remember that they claim only to be religious
seminaries, not schools that equip you to stand alone
in the modern world. It is not the Madarsas that keep
the Muslim community backward but the community that
keeps them so, if ‘backward’ means anything in a world
led by George Bush.  






	
		
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