[Reader-list] Where the state pays for teachers of hate-Parveen Swami(in Hindu)

[rashneek kher]

  *The Jammu and Kashmir government has decided to hire hundreds of
schoolteachers linked to the Jammat-e-Islami. *

  Back in 1945, Islamist ideologue Abul Ali Mawdudi called on his followers
to “change the old tyrannical system and establish a just new order by the
power of the sword.” He demanded that members of the party founded in his
name “seize the authority of state for, an evil system takes root and
flourishes under the patronage of an evil government, and a pious cultural
order can never be established until the authority of government is wrested
from the wicke d.”

Last week, the National Conference-Congress government quietly moved to help
realise Mawdudi’s ugly dream. Hundreds of jobs, a Cabinet decision taken on
July 14 mandates, will be handed out to schoolteachers linked to the Jammu
Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami, the party set up in Mawdudi’s name. More than 440
Falah-i-Aam Trust teachers will now be inducted into the State school
system. Seventy-four unskilled workers who lost their jobs when Falah-i-Aam
schools were closed down in 1990 will also get State government jobs.

For years, successive governments in Jammu and Kashmir have ruled out fresh
recruitment, saying the State can barely meet the salaries of its existing
employees. Only recently were Rehbar-i-Zirat agricultural scientists, who
are provided a stipend if they cannot get a job, told that there was no
early prospect of employment. By hiring the Falah-i-Aam teachers, the
National Conference evidently hopes to build bridges with its decades-old
Islamist adversaries. But the costs of the decision could prove horrific.

Early in the 20th century, Kashmir saw the emergence of the religious
neo-fundamentalist movement that was to lay the foundation for the rise of
the Jamaat-e-Islami. From the outset, education was a core part of the
neo-fundamentalist programme. In the minds of the religious right, education
was an instrument

In 1899, Mirwaiz Rasul Shah — whose grandnephew and clerical heir is today
the All Parties Hurriyat Conference chief — started the Anjuman Nusrat
ul-Islam (Society for the Victory of Islam). It aimed not only to give
Kashmir’s nascent middle class modern scientific education but also
eradicate folk Islam and create a religion-centred political consciousness.
The Anjuman funded the creation of the Islamiya High School in 1905. Rasul
Shah’s successor, Mirwaiz Ahmadullah, went on to set up the Oriental College
in Srinagar. In turn, Ahmadullah’s successor, Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah, set up
Kashmir’s first printing press, and used the two magazines it published to
rail against what he saw as heretical practices embedded in Kashmiri folk
Islam.

Perhaps the most important voice of the neo-fundamentalist movement was the
Jamaat-e-Islami. Drawing on Mirwaiz Rasul Shah’s early efforts, it went on
to create an educational empire.

Born into a family long-linked to Kashmiri Sufism, Tarabali had come to
despise the faith of his parents, seeing it as the cause of the political
weakness of the people of Kashmir. Early in his life, he encountered the
work of the seminal Islamist ideologue, Maulana Abul Ala Mawdudi, through
the Islamist journal *Tarjuman al-Quran*. Tarabali also despised the
socialism of Jammu and Kashmir’s most important political figure, Sheikh
Mohammad Abdullah.

Having started his career as a teacher at the Islamiya High School, Tarabali
went on to work at government-run educational institutions at
Chrar-e-Sharif, Baramulla and Shopian. Before he left government service to
devote himself full time to Jamaat-e-Islami work, Tarabali had succeeded in
recruiting dozens of young men from elite Pir caste families. Most were from
Baramulla, Shopian, Srinagar, and Pulwama — the very areas which have seen
clashes between police and stone-throwing mobs since last summer. “Islam,
for them,” scholar Yoginder Sikand has noted in his seminal study of the
Jamaat-e-Islami, “was a call for political assertion in a context of
perceived Muslim powerlessness.”

Among the young who joined the Jamaat was Syed Ali Shah Geelani — now the
patriarch of Kashmir’s Islamist movement. Geelani, like Tarabali and many
other Jamaat leaders, started his adult life as a schoolteacher. He first
worked at the government-run primary school in Srinagar’s Pather Masjid
area, and then at the Rainawari high school. Many teachers at the Rainawari
school, interestingly, went on to become influential figures in the
Jamaat-e-Islami.

>From the outset, the Jamaat understood the centrality of education to its
political project. According to the account of Pakistani scholar Tahir Amin,
Jamaat schools were intended to prepare the ground for a “silent
revolution.” The Jamaat believed, Mr. Sikand has written, “that a carefully
planned Indian conspiracy was at work to destroy the Islamic identity of the
Kashmiris, through Hinduizing the school syllabus and spreading immorality
and vice among the youth. It was alleged that the government of India had
despatched a team to Andalusia headed by the Kashmir Pandit [politician and
state Home Minister] D.P. Dhar, to investigate how Islam was driven out of
Spain and to suggest measures as to how the Spanish experiment could be
repeated in Kashmir, too.”

In Jammu, where the Jamaat feared that Muslims battered in Partition
violence would give up Islam, Maulana Ghulam Ahmad Ahrar called for the
setting up of schools to spread education and Islamic consciousness.

Not long after independence, the Jamaat set up the first of what would
become a network of schools in Srinagar’s Nawab Bazaar, with five students
and one teacher. The organisation developed its own textbooks, built around
a curriculum that included English, Arabic, Urdu, mathematics and Islamic
studies. The Jamaat cadre were appointed instructors. In time, many
Jamaat-run schools evolved into higher secondary institutions. Students, Mr.
Sikand records an observer as saying, were “inspired to work for the victory
of Islam, jihad in the path of Allah, freedom and self-determination of the
Kashmiri people.” Many of the students, Pakistani scholar Alifuddin Turabi
has recorded in an essay on the contribution of educational institutions to
the Kashmiri secessionist movement, went on to play a key role in the jihad
that began in 1989.

During the Emergency, Sheikh Abdullah cracked down on the Jamaat. Some 125
schools run by it, with over 550 teachers and 25,000 students, were banned.
So were another 1,000 evening schools run by the organisation, which reached
out to an estimated 50,000 boys and girls. In one speech, Abdullah described
the Jamaat schools as “the real source for spreading communal poison.”

But Jammu and Kashmir’s crackdown on the Jamaat proved short-lived. In 1977,
the party founded the Falah-i-Aam trust and charged the Doda-based Islamist
activist Saadullah Tantray with reviving its school network.

The Jamaat also formed a student wing, the Islami Jamaat-e-Tulaba. Helped by
Saudi Arabia-based Islamist organisations, the IJT soon grew into a powerful
force in schools and universities. In 1979, the IJT was granted membership
of the World Organisation of Muslim Youth, a controversial Saudi-funded body
which financed many Islamist groups that later turned to terrorism. The next
year, the IJT organised a conference in Srinagar which was attended by
dignitaries from across West Asia, including the Imam of the mosques of
Mecca and Medina, Abdullah bin-Sabil.

By the end of the decade, the IJT had formally committed itself to an armed
struggle against the Indian state. Its president, Sheikh Tajamul Husain —
now a mid-ranking leader of the secessionist movement — told journalists in
Srinagar that Kashmiris did not consider themselves Indian, and that the
forces stationed there were an “army of occupation.” Mr. Husain also called
for the establishment of an Islamic state. A year later, in 1981, he
reiterated his call to his followers to “throw out” the Indian “occupation.”

In 1990, as the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir gathered momentum, the state
cracked down on the Jamaat-e-Islami once more. The party was banned, and the
Falah-i-Aam schools were shut down. Promises were made that the teachers
would be brought into the State school system. However, fearful that the
Falah-i-Aam teachers would misuse their position to spread the Jamaat
message, successive governments went slow.

No great imagination is needed to see what the Jamaat hopes to get from the
party affiliates whose salaries will now be paid by the Jammu and Kashmir
government — and the tragedy that could lie ahead.

In the Jamaat’s view, scholar Mohammad Ishaq Khan has noted, “Kashmiri
Muslims need to be converted afresh.” In 1945, Tarabali called for the
institution of an authentic Islam “because of whose truth and universalism
the cultures and even languages of the most civilised countries of the world
were abandoned by their people.” For his part, Mawdudi warned believers that
under a secular state, “the civilisation and way of life which he regards as
wicked, the education system which he views as fatal: all these will be so
relentlessly imposed on him, his home and his family, that it will be
impossible to avoid them.”

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah — whose secular credentials are impeccable —
must act to prevent the poisoning of the State’s school education system

-- 
Rashneek Kher
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com