Secular education in Catholic School v/s Madarsa education for Muslims

http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/india-unity/message/4494

--- Ghulam Muhammed <ghulam_muhammed2@...>
wrote:

>
> Sunday, February 27, 2005
>
>
>
> Dear Mr. Wasnik,
>
>
>
> I agree that Christian schools spread out among all
> other countries of the world, had quite a good
> presence in India too and had been in the forefront
> of non-religious education. However, you may be
> surprised that in a city like Mumbai, where Jesuits
> have a century old presence in educational field,
> with schools and colleges spread out in the length
> and breadth of the city, they found that in city
> centers the percentage of Muslim students in their
> schools had grown to be more than 50% and in some up
> to 70%. So much so, that after Bombay riots, when I
> was with a Muslim advocacy group IDRAAK that worked
> for communal harmony and interfaith dialog, the
> Jesuits had requested IDRAAK to arrange to teach
> Islam in their secular schools. They arranged a
> meeting of 50 principals and vice-principals from
> their schools with IDRAAK in which the fact came out
> that without any religious education, the Muslim
> students are fast becoming rowdies and unmanageable.
> (Imagine the same religious education
> is being attacked by the US as source of all terror
> in the world.) Jesuits wanted IDRAAK to arrange for
> religious education in their moral science classes
> for Muslim students, so that Muslim students should
> learn the basic morality of Islam and become better
> citizens. This will give you an idea, how Muslim
> education has suffered, after the advent of British
> Raj in India and modern education was identified
> with colonial and Christian rule. Muslim retreated
> in their mental ghettos and lost more than a
> century, focusing to ward off any incursion into
> their religious life. Only recently, the trend is
> reversed as highly educated class is warming up to
> the basic fundamentals of Islam and is confident
> that modern education need not be a threat to Islam
> and could even help Muslims as well as others to
> understand the deeper and more profound significance
> of Islamic teachings. So there is a definite
> two-pronged movement world over to merge religious
> and secular education to face modern
> challenges.
>
>
>
> It is here that motivated exercise, to denigrate
> Madrasa education, as something archaic and not
> compatible with some arbitrary liberal standards
> with blind spot for all things religious that
> characterizes some unhealthy superficial scholarship
> and militates against sincere efforts to reform
> Muslim education.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai