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. 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'être 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.
Rahul Gandhi or his key aides did not respond to questions from ET.