2th Anniversary
August-September 
2005 
Year 11    No.109-110

Education


Teach your children well

Islamic schools or madrassas need the modern teacher more than a modern curriculum

BY MUHAMMAD ALI SIDDIQI

 

THERE is a misperception in Pakistan that the threat from the madrassas can be eliminated if the students there get a dose of modern education. In other words, the madrassas would turn out better, non-militant students if in addition to the traditional curriculum the students were taught modern subjects like science, mathematics, economics, IT, etc. Not only is this a superficial view, it could be counterproductive, even dangerous.

 

The ability to operate a computer does not change one’s attitude to life. If one is a militant, then the computer only makes one more well equipped; it does not make one a pacifist. This point needs to be understood.

Madrassas in the subcontinent have traditionally performed a useful and vital function. They have taught students traditional courses in Islamic subjects and helped produce Imams and muezzins for mosques. At a higher level, some of South Asia’s great Islamic scholars were madrassa products. They had nothing to do with politics of violence.

 

The US-led resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan turned out to be seminal, for the madrassas started serving both as recruiting centres for the army of mujahideen (Muslim warriors) and as ideological motivational and training centres.

 

Today not all madrassas are controlled by parties and groups having a militant, anti-western "ideology". Most madrassas still perform a traditional and useful function. It is the madrassas preaching militancy that are the subject of this discussion.

 

In his remarkable book, Islam: Chund Fikri Masael, Dr. Manzoor Ahmad, a former vice chancellor of the Hamdard University, bemoans the fact that Islam has been turned into an ideology. Since by its very nature every ideology is totalitarian, it rejects whatever is outside it. So because Islam is now an ideology, says Dr. Ahmad, it must reject everything modern, even if it is for the good of the people and does not violate Islamic values.

 

Can the madrassa students be "de-ideologised", and if so how? Under the present system – given the nature of the curriculum and the restricted mental horizons of those who teach – the madrassas have turned into ideological schools where students are brainwashed into becoming indoctrinated robots lacking a will and an intellect of their own.

 

They may be taught the traditional courses but what they are not taught are values that go into the making of a refined human being – an individual who is a citizen of planet earth, who abhors hate and revenge, and who has an abundance of love that looks at all human phenomena, including individual and social conflicts, with understanding. He respects every human being and considers human life sacred. He loves both the wronged and the wrongdoer. He may hate sin but he does not hate the sinner. He believes in salvaging the sinner rather than in punishing him and making a spectacle of punishment. These are values higher than those that modern education promotes.

 

Teach a brainwashed madrassa student a subject like aerodynamics or marine biology, and he would still remain beholden to Mullah Omar, because he would continue to view the world through the prism of the "ideology" as taught by teachers who themselves have had no exposure to humanities.

 

One reason for this tragedy is the absence of literature from the syllabi of most madrassas. Indeed, he has a poor understanding of the purpose of education and its effect on society if he does not understand the impact of literature on the development of the human mind, outlook and personality.

 

Our elders were aware of this truth and made literature, especially poetry, an essential element of home education for all. That was the reason why Islamic learning and poetry went hand in hand in South Asia. Most Islamic scholars were themselves poets. As for those parts of the subcontinent which now constitute Pakistan, Sufi poets thrived, especially in Sindh, and they still have millions of adherents and admirers. That was the reason why, in our parents’ time, a person not well versed in Urdu and Persian poetry was considered uncouth.

 

In middle class families, a child’s traditional education began with a dose of Persian poetry. Hafiz, Saadi, Jami, Nizami, Baydil and Amir Khusrau, if not Rumi, were compulsory reading. As for Saadi’s Gulistan and Bostan, one remembered most of these verses by heart. (Incidentally, Gulistan was part of the curriculum at the Deoband school, and Arab students seeking admission to Deoband were supposed to have learnt Persian up to the Gulistan.)

 

Seen against the humanistic traditions of Islamic education in South Asia, today’s madrassa curriculum is a tragedy, for the madrassa products are unable to interact with the educated middle class on a footing of equality. Not just because they do not know English, but also because they have missed out on a vital part of middle class upbringing in the subcontinent.

 

Those who teach at madrassas must themselves be well read in poetry, drama and fiction, besides history – not just Islamic history. History is a continuous process, and no nation or people has, or ever had, a monopoly of knowledge. Babylon and Egypt, Greece and Rome, Cardoba and Baghdad, and modern Europe and America are names that indicate the continuation of a process that began with the dawn of civilisation and shall continue.

 

Nations received a legacy from the past, improved on it and passed it on to the next before departing from the scene. But their contributions last. Paper and block printing invented by the Chinese, "Arabic" numerals by the Hindus, algebra by the Arabs, and the combustion engine and nuclear energy by modern western civilisations will forever remain part of human heritage.

 

Ask a madrassa teacher what Islam’s role in history has been, and in all probability he will find it difficult to say anything beyond references to Muslim conquests. According to this view of history, Muslims have done nothing besides being locked in perpetual conflict with non-Muslims. This is in stark contrast to historical facts.

As author Fred Halliday points out in his 100 Myths about the Middle East, "...the overall history of the Muslim world has been one of interaction through trade and cultural exchange with the non-Muslim world: east to India, south to Africa and west and northwards to Europe".

 

Knowledge that makes one view peoples of other cultures and civilisations as perpetually hostile to Muslims and destructive human beings is anti-knowledge. A man with such "knowledge" is to be pitied because he lives in a world of his own in which others are perpetually engaged in a plot to destroy him and the values he believes in. He suspects others for no other reason than that he does not know and understand them.

As Iqbal said while presenting his idea of Pakistan to the 1930 Allahabad session of the All India Muslim League, "A community which is inspired by feelings of ill will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities."

Today’s world has not come into being through science; it is the liberation of the human mind from the shackles of church and political despotism that has unleashed forces which developed the sciences and the arts.

 

Reformation and renaissance were not scientific revolutions; they were revolutions in human relationships. The developments that followed have shaped our world.

 

Those developments in some cases were destructive, such as the two world wars, but other movements – the consolidation of democracy, the age of enlightenment, the socialist movements, the colonial powers’ rivalries, the rise of communist power, the Afro-Asian peoples’ fight for freedom and the collapse of communism – have given the individual the freedom he was long denied. To view modern societies which have come into being through this historical process as infidel societies against which one must be at war is as ridiculous as it is suicidal. The madrassa needs the modern teacher more than a modern curriculum.

 

http://www.dawn.com/2005/07/23/op.htm#1


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