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Inside the Madrasa
A personal history
By Ebrahim Moosa
As I walked one morning last spring through the town of Deoband, home to India’s
famous Sunni Muslim seminary, a clean-shaven man, his face glowing with sarcasm,
called out to me. “Looking for terrorists?” he asked in Urdu. “I have every
right to visit my alma mater,” I protested. With a sheepish grin he turned and
walked away.
I shouldn’t have been so annoyed. The century-old seminary in Deoband had come
under intense scrutiny after the Taliban leadership claimed an ideological
affiliation with it via seminaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Journalists,
politicians, and diplomats have since September 11 descended periodically on
this town near Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, long considered the
intellectual and spiritual heartland of Indian Islam.
Once the Taliban was linked to Bin Laden, every aspect of India’s Muslim
seminaries, or madrasas, became stigmatized. Top-level U.S. officials, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a chorus of journalists, pundits, and scholars
have declared all madrasas to be breeding grounds for terrorists, but they have
done so without any evidence and without an understanding of the complexity of
these networks of schools, which are associated with multiple Muslim sects and
ideologies. They have drowned out reasonable voices—for example, Peter Bergen
and William Dalrymple—who argue that not all madrasas can be indicted in the war
on terror. But even their sympathetic gestures fall short of providing a
realistic picture of what happens inside madrasas or humanizing their
inhabitants.
Had I not been defensive, I would have told the man from Deoband that I had
lived and studied in several Indian madrasas between 1975 and 1981. A quarter
century later, I had returned—not in search of terrorists, but to try to create
a bridge between the world inside the walls and the outside.
* * *
“Wednesday 23 April 1975: The start of our four months in India. We slept after
reading two raka’as (formal Muslim prayers). After fajr (pre-dawn prayers) and
ishraq (optional after-sunrise prayers) we slept again. This was at Khar mosque
in Bandra, Bombay.” So reads the first entry I made in my diary on my six-year
journey in India’s madrasas.
Mumbai, known as Bombay in 1975, was a bewildering city for an 18-year-old kid
from Cape Town, South Africa. Nothing prepared me for the intimidating throng of
beggars and street urchins outside the airport, the countless people sleeping on
sidewalks, and the heavy-laden monsoon air and strong odors. At the time I
wasn’t aware of the full impact of the “state of emergency” that Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi had imposed to silence her critics, but I knew that fear
surrounded me: people whispered about danger and secret arrests. I suddenly
understood my father’s reluctance to let me go.
Deciding to study in India was its own journey that began with a crisis of
faith. I was barely 16 when a classmate, a Jehovah’s Witness, brought some
stinging anti-Islamic literature to our class. I still hear Gabriel reading:
“Muhammad was an impostor who spread his message by the sword and was unworthy
of being a prophet.” And he added, “Actually, Muhammad cribbed his teachings
from Jews and Christians whom he met during his travels.” I had learned at the
daily religious school sessions—also called madrasa in South Africa—that as a
youth the Prophet Muhammad traveled to Syria with his uncle and was even
anointed by a Christian monk. But never did I suspect the Prophet of treachery.
This first exposure to the hostility some Christians harbor toward Muslims
crushed my unchallenged sense of faith. But the encounter also started me
thinking critically about Islam: it would change my life.
A trip to the library did little to reassure me. The refined prose of authors
like Sir William Muir and Montgomery Watt leveled the same charges against
Muhammad and claims to Islam’s authenticity. On reflection, it seems rather odd
that as devout Christians and rational Scotsmen, Muir and (perhaps less so) Watt
found it plausible that God could be incarnate in a man from Nazareth but
incredible that a seventh-century Arab could prophesy as the Jewish prophets
did.
I later found comfort with a group called the Tabligh Jamat. The Arabic word
tabligh means “to convey or transmit.” The Tabligh Jamat consisted of lay
Muslims reminding their co-religionists of their religious duties. I attended
their pious circle at my neighborhood mosque in District Six, Cape Town’s
multiethnic and defiant cultural center, where I lived during the school week.
Several years later, apartheid’s architects would obliterate District Six to
remove any evidence that the coexistence of different races was possible and
assign us to racially segregated ghettos.
But questions about my faith persisted. My doubts—and my existential anxiety as
a person of color in this white-supremacist world—became unbearable. My plans to
become an engineer slowly gave way to another obsession. I wanted to go to India
to study the faith of my ancestors, to reconcile that faith with reason. My
mother was sympathetic to my cause, but my father didn’t want to see his eldest
son as a poor cleric dependent on the benevolence of the community. Born and
raised in South Africa, he hardly performed the daily rituals or attended Friday
prayers, giving priority to his business. He relented, though, when my aunts
reminded him of the promise of paradise for learned scholars of Islam and the
Qur’an as well as their benefactors.
* * *
In my heart I was following my mother’s prayers. She had come to South Africa as
a 19-year-old bride from Gujarat. Far from close relatives and burdened with
domestic chores in an extended family with seven children, one of whom died in
infancy, she took refuge in religion. In particularly tough times she would
share with me, her eldest, the religious lore she learnt in her childhood in the
village of Dehgaam, of how the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, endured
life’s trials.
My grandiose plan was also an escape from the drudgery of life: South Africa’s
third-rate segregated schools, where discipline was violent and dictatorial, and
the weekends and vacations working in the family grocery store in a seaside town
30 miles away. I was aware of the country’s segregationist politics; but I knew
little of the lives of black South Africans, and I did not see the black unrest
that would erupt on June 16, 1976, after I had been in India just more than a
year.
When I arrived in Bombay, Tabligh volunteers received me and the rest of our
group; I had agreed to spend four months in the Tabligh program before entering
a madrasa. The brainchild of an Indian cleric, Muhammad Ilyas, who felt the
teachings of Islam were not reaching the grass-roots faithful in British India,
the Tabligh has no real bureaucratic administration, but its presence is felt in
almost every corner of the globe. Resigning from his teaching position at a
prestigious madrasa in the 1920s, Ilyas devoted himself, against tremendous
odds, to revival work (da’wa) in the Mewat, a region straddling two states,
Rajasthan and Haryana. He used a small mosque, the Banglawali Masjid, as his
base in Delhi, where he cultivated his core of loyal associates. On the same
site today a Spartan mosque serves as the international center (markaz) of the
Tabligh.
Ilyas had a simple but highly effective evangelical message that he had boiled
down to five points to mirror Islam’s five cardinal pillars of practice: grasp
the true meaning and implications of the creedal statement that there is no
deity except Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger; pray conscientiously five
times a day; acquire learning and engage in the frequent remembrance of God;
honor fellow believers; and participate in missionary work (da’wa) by spreading
awareness of Islam. The Tabligh now hosts some of the largest Muslim gatherings,
involving millions of participants on the subcontinent and around the world.
Working with the Tabligh was a grueling ordeal; and overcoming culture shock in
India was daunting. We stayed at mosques, ate very basic meals, navigated
treacherous roads, and traveled in overcrowded trains. By the lights of my naive
faith, eternal damnation awaited these millions of Hindus apparently devoted to
idols. In just weeks, India taught me to ask the first and enduring question
about the workings of divine justice: how was it possible that a just God could
promise me paradise and damn all these people who look like me? Years later, I
would discover that many thinkers in the monotheistic tradition were confronted
by similar questions, including the 12th-century thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali,
about whom I would later write a book.
I cut short my four months with the Tabligh to three and headed for the Madrasa
Sabilur Rashad in Bangalore along with two other South Africans I met in the
Tabligh. At the austere walled campus I found dozens of students apart from the
majority South Indians and the few from my home country—young men from Trinidad
and Tobago, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, and a lone Cuban. I occupied
the fourth thin mattress in a sparse and cramped dorm room with a West Indian,
an African-American, and the Cuban. The latter two would in pursuit of piety
rise at 3 a.m. for optional prayers and liturgy, tormenting the rest of us for
not doing the same. I saw this “calculator mentality” often in the Tabligh—the
preoccupation with rewards for performing certain acts of piety and an attitude
that these roommates celebrated.
Daily madrasa routine would begin at least an hour before sunrise with
preparation for the early-morning prayers. Afterward students remained at the
mosque to read a portion of the Qur’an. Others used the early morning hours to
memorize the Qur’an, known as hifz. Breakfast would follow in the dining hall,
called “the mess,” a reminder that the British had ruled India. Breakfast
consisted of South Indian idli (lentil-rice patties), a crispy roti (baked
bread), and chai (tea boiled in milk). Most foreign students made breakfast in
their rooms with a spread of eggs, toast, and chai.
I had arrived at the madrasa only one month before it closed for the long
Ramadan break, the end of the academic year. But in that short time I chafed at
the highly regimented and pietistic environment and, worst of all, the cafeteria
food. I took a class on memorizing portions of the Qur’an for liturgical
purposes and perfecting my recitation of the holy book. The six-hour day of
memorization was tedious, and students would take frequent bathroom breaks, sip
lots of tea, and play surreptitiously to pass the time. The day’s memorized
passage, as well as back lessons, were recited to an instructor at least twice
daily. It took up to three full years to memorize the entire Qur’an. Not having
budgeted such a length of time, I selected chapters, which would be useful in
the classroom or in delivering sermons, as well as for liturgy. Since all
instruction was in Urdu, I also threw myself into learning both Urdu and Arabic
in private lessons.
But after almost four months in India, I had yet to enroll in an alimiyya
program, required for gaining the knowledge and skills of an alim, the Arabic
word for “a learned person.” (The plural, ulama, is today used to refer to
Muslim clerics.) I spent the Ramadan break with my maternal grandfather,
visiting my parents’ ancestral villages in Gujarat, near Bharuch, a bustling
city on the banks of the Narmada River. On the outskirts of Baruch I discovered
a small madrasa, Darul Uloom Matliwala, supported by an affluent South African
family and enrolling some 200 students at the time.
The centerpiece of the seminary was a three-level Parsee bungalow. Parsees are
followers of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion of Persia. They straddle Indian
and Anglo cultures and often speak both English and Gujarati. The bungalow was
large enough to accommodate several classrooms and administrative space. To the
side of the sprawling compound on Eidgah Road was a beautiful mosque of pastel
greens surrounded by palms and a well-maintained garden. A student dormitory
abutted the tilled fields that ran down to the banks of the Narmada.
The pace was relaxed and congenial. I decided to enroll. By coincidence, three
other fellow South Africans came to study as a private cohort with a brilliant
teacher, Mawlana Ibrahim Patni, who allowed me to join his group. Mawlana
Patni’s talents were such that he could have succeeded as a lawyer or
businessman. For the first few months we four would spend most of the day at the
back of a class with dozens of 12-to-14-year-olds who were taking elementary
classes in the pre-alimiyya program. We were on average 18 years old, writing
with white chalk on child-sized black slate boards. At first we hardly
understood the day classes we were auditing, but as the weeks and months
progressed, things became clearer. By year-end I had a good handle on Urdu, and
my Arabic was coming along.
As I adjusted to my new life, I also learned that my naive views about madrasas
were not immune to contradiction. Puritanism reigned, and sex was taboo. I
recall one evening in Bangalore when the Cuban student raised the alarm in the
dorms, claiming that he had caught two Indian students in a homosexual embrace
in the bathroom. I was scandalized, and the revelation haunted me for weeks. At
home and in the madrasa I was taught that heterosexual conduct outside marriage
was forbidden (and had life-threatening consequences); homosexuality was an
unthinkable abomination.
Within a few months at the Bharuch madrasa I received my second jolt: I learned
that it was an open secret that one of the teachers had sexual relations with
younger men or perhaps even boys. Disturbed, but less shaken this time, I was
getting a reality check. The personal lives of teachers and fellow students
would not be my biggest concern. I realized that Bharuch was a provincial city
and the madrasa lacked the more robust intellectual environment I sought, which
was available in reputable North Indian madrasas.
After a year in Gujarat, I headed for Darul Uloom Deoband—the most prominent and
prestigious madrasa for those affiliated with the Deobandi interpretation of the
Sunni sect. Deoband, legend has it, was named after the goddess Durga, who in
ancient times lived in the dense forest (van) near a lake (kund). It then became
known as the ‘forest of the goddess’ (devi van) or ‘lake of the goddess’ (devi
kund), which became corrupted to Deoband.
Today, the small town of Deoband, 98 miles from the Indian capital, Delhi, is
typical, with open air markets, bookstores, food stalls, grocers, barbers,
Internet cafes, and telephone exchanges. On its congested roads, man, animals,
and vehicles vie for space. Locals joke that Deoband is famous for five things
starting with the letter m: moulvis (Muslim clerics), masjid (mosque), mandir
(temple), matchchar (mosquitoes) and makkhi (flies). But the spacious courtyard
of Darul Uloom Deoband, in its serenity and historical grandeur, is reminiscent
of Castalia in Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game: a place without family, amusements,
poverty, and hunger, but dedicated to learning and hierarchy. Inside the
red-brick walls, a large green cupola rises, dominating the landscape. The
madrasa is built like a medieval fort, with four main gates and a courtyard
marking the administrative and teaching spaces. Enclosing a larger courtyard
replete with manicured lawns and simple flower gardens are extremely modest
student residences. A majestic white marbled mosque now looms outside Madani
Gate of the main campus.
* * *
Deoband was founded in 1867 in the aftermath of the failed Indian rebellion
against British rule. With the defeat of the Moghuls, Muslim India divided into
two intellectual paths. One saw the future secured in the embrace of modernity;
this school established secular universities such as Aligarh Muslim University,
founded by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The other embraced tradition through religious
schools, madrasas.
Deoband’s intellectual architect, Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, a man of ascetic
taste, a committed traditionalist, and a tireless anti-imperialist, belonged to
the latter group. He and Khan were contemporaries and, as evident in their
extensive and at times hostile correspondence, clashed over the meaning and
place of Islam in the modern world. According to Khan, modern rationalism and
science were compatible with a new interpretation of Islam—his. Older and more
established doctrines, he believed, might have to be modified, if not
jettisoned. (Khan did have his limits—he never entirely reconciled himself with
the role of women in modern society.) Nanautvi was also a rationalist, but for
him rationalism did not mean modern Western rationality like Descartes and
Spinoza. It was, instead, a very early form of Greco-Arabic rationality
consisting of Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic in the service of the
old theological formulations of faith. Even today, this rationalist framework at
Deoband and similar schools effectively exclude modern science.
Despite his anti-imperialism, Nanautvi did find European bureaucratic modernity
attractive. He was trained at Delhi College, established by the British East
India Company. He institutionalized exams, salaries for faculty, stipends for
students, and an administrative system at Deoband modeled in part on Delhi
College.
Nanautvi and his descendants controlled the main campus of Deoband until 1981
when rivals ousted Nanautvi’s aging grandson during an extended student strike
that led to the closure of the institution. The reasons for the schism remain
unclear. Students and their supporters at the time leveled charges of nepotism
at the leadership and demanded better living conditions and some modernization
of the syllabus. Ironically, the ousted administration had been planning to
radically transform the Deoband madrasa with the support of a new hastily formed
council that was later deemed to be unconstitutional. Two decades later very
little had changed at the main Deoband campus. In fact, a breakaway madrasa, a
cloned version of the main Deoband madrasa, has sprung up not far from the
original campus. The new facility housed some 1,500 students, whereas the main
campus housed over 3,000 students.
Deoband and other madrasas on the Indian subcontinent differed from their
counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world: they were privately funded. In fact,
their raison d’¯(tm)tre was resisting the state, in particular the influences of
British rule and the spread of modernity through westernized Muslim elites. In
contrast, Cairo’s al-Azhar and other schools in the Middle East had lost their
independence to secular governments, who turned religion and clerics into
extensions of the state and coerced modernization in certain areas.
For idealistic young men like me, who landed on the subcontinent in the
mid-1970s in search of salvation and identity, the madrasas of India and
Pakistan were presented as genuine bastions of tradition. We viewed institutions
and scholars throughout the Middle East with disdain: they were feckless, robbed
of intellectual vigor by governments that were slavish to foreign powers and
uninterested in indigenous talents and history. Despite meager resources
(extremely meager compared to the bourgeois comforts to which I had become
accustomed), the madrasas had great legitimacy in our hearts and minds.
Being a student at Deoband was for me at first a dizzying experience. I devoured
my texts, and they opened up worlds to me. Madrasa education drives home the
sacred nature of knowledge. One is taught to show the utmost respect for the
bearers of knowledge, teachers, and the instruments of learning, books. Novices
quickly learn that some scholars cannot even tolerate the sight of paper lying
in the street; carelessly discarded paper is the desecration of knowledge. Texts
are not only symbols of learning, but markers of progress, too. So, for
instance, if you ask a student what year of the program he is in, he will cite
the text he is studying; only an insider could translate the name of that text
into a specific year of the curriculum.
We studied books that were written in the tenth century and earlier, as well as
those from the 15th to 20th centuries. The beauty of the textual tradition lies
precisely in its discordant variety: texts serve as palimpsests of the ancient
and the modern world. The best professors not only translated and clarified the
text; they made an effort to link the ancient world to contemporary realities.
Law, called fiqh in Arabic, is the mainstay of the madrasa curriculum. Fiqh is
actually moral discourse that proposes ethical guidelines for society. Learning
the classical fiqh texts was exciting and awesome; after all, learning the
practices advanced by tradition confers a certain responsibility and authority.
I initially held out the hope that the proper application of fiqh would create
an ideal Muslim society, only to find out that it would take more than law. I
was disturbed, too, that some of what passes as the execution of Sharia
practices involved gruesome amputations and floggings. I believed that if there
were other ways to deter murder and theft they would be preferable to the
practices of early centuries. There were few teachers to whom one could air such
doubts. Most would respond with dire warnings of the spiritual and theological
hazards of such thinking.
Even as students we would lampoon some of what we were taught, questioning its
utility. For instance, in the fiqh class there were endless discussions about
seven types of water usable to secure ritual purity: rain, sea, river, and well
water, followed by water melted from snow and ice, and, finally spring water.
Most of us had only seen water from the taps and wells, and few students from
rural India would have had seen snow or the sea, except for in pictures—and
pictures were rare, since images of animate objects were taboo. But thoughtful
professors would transform arcane lessons into broader discussions, for example
about the validity of recycled water for ritual purposes, a possibility
unimaginable to the medieval authors of our texts.
* * *
Critics often charge the madrasa system of anachronism, a charge that is partly
true. Defenders of the traditional curriculum, which was devised by the
18th-century scholar Mulla Nizamuddin, insist on the supreme pedagogical value
of the old texts. They believe that, apart from connecting students to the
canonical tradition, the “Nizami curriculum” enhances one’s mastery of every
discipline and enables scholars to solve any contemporary problem. But few have
been able to rebut the charge that the texts used are redundant and at times
impenetrable, save to a few scholars who have spent their lives mastering them.
Indeed most texts are frustratingly terse, forcing teachers and students to
scour commentaries and super-commentaries for help. The multiple levels of
calligraphic marginalia on each textbook page were decorative, but they were
taxing to the eyes and mind. For decades critics have petitioned for more lucid
texts. But inertia has turned the texts and syllabus into inviolable monuments
to the past. The result is that students are poorly prepared and lack the
confidence to engage the tradition critically to meet the needs of a changing
world. At its worst the system recycles intellectual mediocrity as piety.
After three years in India I started asking questions about the relevance of the
texts and how to apply their insights in the modern world and, especially, in
South Africa. By now I had become acutely aware of the political challenges of
my home country: racism, and the intransigence of the Muslim clergy there to
speak out against the evil of apartheid. Reading the uncensored Indian press and
following political developments at home through the literature of Nelson
Mandela’s banned African National Congress, all impressed upon me the challenges
I would face in South Africa. My restlessness drove me to read widely and
independently—especially literature written by more contemporary authors. One
such author was Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, whom most teachers in Deoband reviled
and for whom only the bravest expressed guarded admiration. Mawdudi was the
gadfly among clerics who pushed for what is called “political Islam.”
Mawdudi rose to prominence during the dying years of British colonialism and
after partition moved to the new state of Pakistan. While he had the
credentials, he was not a member of the clerical elite, being for most of his
life an autodidact, a gifted writer and founder of a continent-wide social
movement known as the Jamat-e Islami. Mawdudi’s prolific writings guaranteed him
audiences among modern educated Muslims. As the traditionalist ulama bickered
with him on petty issues, Mawdudi emphasized the social dimensions of Islam as
an ideology. If Muslims conceived of Islam as a social teaching then they could
build new societies. Establishing an Islamic state, fully backed by Islamic laws
and institutions, was one of Mawdudi’s ideals. Mawdudi was an ideologue with a
vision, a political program, and international influence. Sayyid Qutb, the
prominent Egyptian writer and ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood was persuaded
by Mawdudi’s analysis that secular materialism was akin to the days of
ignorance, jahiliyya, at the birth of Islam.
I thus discovered an interpretation of Islam outside the walls of the madrasa
where I could find inspiration and guidance for building society from an Islamic
platform. The ancient texts I was studying suddenly seemed musty and stale.
An overbearing government clerk who told my father that my expired passport
could not be renewed unless I returned home changed everything. During
mysubsequent—and, as it turned out, unecessary—three-month trip to South Africa
in 1978, I realized I had been living in a cloistered world. Just seeing the
people of Cape Town made me begin to question everything: my lifestyle, attire,
ideas about my future. Up to that point, I had hardly spent time in Indian
cities; nor did I watch television, go to movies, or listen to music because of
the strict moral code I had followed for three years. I had given away all my
Western clothes, vowing to wear only what I then believed was “Islamic dress”:
the typical loose-fitting knee-length tunic, called a kurta, and loose-fitting
pants.
I now knew that if I were to follow the rules of Deoband, not only would my life
in South Africa be restricted—I had come to the madrasa to escape such
confinement—but so too would be my emotional and intellectual development.
On my return to India I stepped into the precincts of Deoband wearing a T-shirt
and jeans, a cavalier affront to my immediate friends. Even though the act was
largely symbolic—I would continue to wear the conventional attire—I spurred a
debate among close friends about what I thought were the deficiencies in the
madrasas. Fellow students and a few teachers predictably labeled me a
“modernist,” an insult. Some of my younger teachers who often gently challenged
my views, helped me realize how self-righteous I had been in the past about an
Islamic dress code and the superiority of the interpretations of madrasa
authorities on virtually every matter.
It was time to move on. I was still determined to complete the alimiyya program,
but I needed to find a madrasa with less emphasis on texts. I explored
opportunities to study in Libya, Iraq, and Egypt to little avail. I was less of
an idealist by now, and the burden of becoming independent started to weigh on
me as I approached 21. Taking over the family business was certainly not an
option; I needed to find a vocation.
I decided to transfer to Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama, a madrasa in the capital of
Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow. Nadwa was located on the banks of the Gomti River, which
flows through this historic Mughal city, reputed for its refined culture, food,
and aesthetic taste and a place where people still feel nostalgia for the days
of nobility. In Mughal times this region was known as Oudh, and its rulers were
mostly those who followed the Shia rite. In my student days there were
occasional Sunni–Shia tensions around the beginning of the Islamic month of
Muharram, signaling the Muslim New Year, when public exhibitions of Shia passion
plays rekindled ancient grievances underlying the sectarian split within Islam
more than a millennium ago. Yet Lucknow was a city that took pride in civility.
* * *
Moving from Deoband to Nadwa is in effect like transferring from the Vatican to
a liberal divinity school. Deobandis look askance at Nadwa: in addition to being
too modern and too liberal for the Deoband temper, it is more internationalist
in outlook. Its former president, the late Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, was
internationally reputed in the Muslim world. A one-time colleague of Mawdudi,
with whom he would later had differences, he was clearly enchanted by Qutb and
the Muslim Brotherhood. He wrote extensively on the plight of Muslims in the
20th century and mobilized for their welfare and advancement. Nadwa received a
great deal of support from foundations and individuals in the Arabian Gulf, and
the campus boasts significant upgrades over the last three decades. Ali Nadwi
was a descendent of the Prophet’s family and was therefore known as a sayyid. He
wrote mainly in Arabic and strongly believed that a renaissance among the Arabs
would have a salutary influence on the rest of the Muslim world. I think that
toward the end of his life he was less sanguine about such an outcome.
Nadwatul Ulama was launched in 1898 by a broad spectrum of ulama,
traditionalists to modernists, who all believed that the Deoband-type madrasa
education did not equip students for the challenges of modern life. Placing a
greater emphasis on the liberating message of the Qur’an, Nadwa favored certain
departures from the traditional curriculum and emphasized the study of history.
Nadwa’s motto was “Synthesizing the profitable past with the useful modern.”
Nadwa’s tolerance to intra-Sunni differences made it attractive. Students
adhering to the Barelwi school of thought, a more Platonic interpretation of
Islam that accepts elements of popular religion, and Salafis, those who follow a
scripturalist interpretation, both rivals to Deoband, enroll at Nadwa to pursue
different degrees. Students are allowed to attend class wearing Western dress,
although the majority wear kurtas.
But while Nadwa offered me space to pursue my own interests, the curriculum was
in the end not that different from Deoband. (On a recent visit to both places I
was unable to tell the difference.) By now, too, the Nizami curriculum seemed
largely redundant. Classes at Nadwa were not very demanding. And I was
completely put off by the lifeless study of Islamic law, even though the
philosophy and sociology animating law and ethics intruigues me to this day. On
my own I frequented the British Library in the Hazratganj area of Lucknow and
borrowed widely from Nadwa’s excellent library collection to read new
subjects—political science, economics, and English literature. I found Alex
Haley’s biography of Malcolm X inspirational and became totally enchanted by
Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss), the author of The Road to Mecca, an account of an
Austrian Jew’s discovery of Islam and his life as an explorer, a confidante of
kings and rulers, a scholar and a diplomat. Asad and Malcolm X kindled in me the
desire to write. I published an essay in Arabic in Nadwa’s monthly newspaper and
submitted op-ed pieces to the daily Northern India Patrika on politics and
Islam.
In 1980 several international speakers attended a conference on Arabic
literature held at Nadwa. A tall and imposing Egyptian lawyer and Princeton
postgraduate, Mohammed Fathi Osman impressed me. We had several animated
conversations about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred. Later, when I
was about to graduate, I wrote Osman seeking advice. I received no reply, and
decided to visit Egypt and explore a master’s degree at al-Azhar in Cairo. By
now I was thoroughly disabused of my earlier, negative views of Islamic
education in the Middle East. But just weeks before I was to leave, Osman sent a
message inviting me to join the staff of a promising new magazine, sponsored by
liberal Saudis, that he was launching in London. The choice between studies in
Egypt and journalism in the United Kingdom was a no-brainer. I grabbed the offer
and set off for London. Arabia: The Islamic World Review turned out to be the
beginning of my career as a journalist. Even though I moved on from Arabia after
18 months, its closure a decade later was a great loss to the world of
progressive Islamic ideas.
* * *
Spending six years inside India’s madrasas left deep imprints that over time
have become only more significant as I have grown further from my youthful
indignation. If given a choice once again at age 18 between a madrasa and a
university, I suspect I would opt for a madrasa.
I remain a critic of madrasa education—its inability to provide the big picture
of Islamic ideas, its failure to effect the transformation of Muslim societies.
Yet madrasas offer something of enormous value. Properly harnessed, they are
repositories of classical learning and seed intellectual sophistication that
might challenge the shallow discourses of fundamentalism and revivalism that
often pass as Islam today. Madrasas are environments of Islamic cultivation of
the self, culture, civility, wisdom, and life.
While madrasas are growing in number on the subcontinent, the cherished world of
the madrasas of my youth is rapidly disappearing. Shrill rhetoric substitutes
for critical and sober reflection as the battle lines are drawn between a
triumphant West and the madrasas who believe it is out to destroy them. This
atmosphere breeds a debilitating defensiveness and a victim’s mindset. Madrasas
of the 21st century will continue to change. I fear that the West’s insistence
on casting madrasas as redoubts of terror and proposing invasive surveillance
techniques and unilateral curriculum reforms will only force madrasas to retreat
into more unpredictable modes of resistance. Madrasas may be forced to defend
themselves by more militant means as the political rapids in countries such as
Pakistan and Bangladesh become more turbulent.
My experience in the madrasas is an atypical one: I crafted my own program and
selected from what was on offer, whereas most conform to the prescribed syllabus
and ideology. Yet as I continued in my work as a journalist, social activist,
and then academic in South Africa and now in the United States, I have been able
to recover the palimpsest of my madrasa education. I now appreciate these
resources in ways madrasa authorities would not approve. Now, as I write about
human rights, bioethics, Islamic law, and the ethical interpretation of the
tradition, I can do so with confidence and argue that tradition is open to abuse
and open to change. In my own thinking, writing, and activism I can push back
against the many retrogressive forces and form productive associations with
progressive ones. I doubt I would have had the courage to undertake some of this
work otherwise.
Ebrahim Moosa is a professor of Islamic studies
at Duke University and a 2005 Carnegie Scholar. He is the author of Ghazali and
the Poetics of Imagination, which was awarded the American Academy of Religion’s
2006 Best First Book in the History of Religions prize. He is working on a book
called Inside Madrasas.
Originally published in the January/February 2007 issue of Boston Review.
http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28561
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