Ebrahim Moosa - What Is a Madrasa? (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)

What Is a Madrasa?

Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

CARL W. ERNST AND BRUCE B. LAWRENCE, EDITORS

Highlighting themes with historical as well as contemporary significance, Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks features works that explore Islamic societies and Muslim peoples from a fresh perspective, drawing on new interpretive frameworks or theoretical strategies in a variety of disciplines. Special emphasis is given to systems of exchange that have promoted the creation and development of Islamic identitiescultural, religious, or geopolitical. The series spans all periods and regions of Islamic civilization.

A complete list of titles published in this series appears at the end of the book.

Ebrahim Moosa

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

2015 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Jacket illustration: At Jamia Naeemia, a madrasa in Lahore, Pakistan. Photograph by Amjad Perez.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moosa, Ebrahim.

What is a madrasa? / Ebrahim Moosa.

pages cm.(Islamic civilization and Muslim networks)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-2013-8 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-4696-2014-5 (ebook)
1. Madrasahs. 2. Islamic education. 3. Islamic religious education. I. Title.

LC904.M66 2015

378'.077dc23

2014034904

Portions of the Prologue and Chapter 1 were first published in the Boston Review as Inside Madrasa: A Personal Story on January 1, 2007; the author thanks the Review for permission to reproduce this material here.

For Muneer Fareed

I have danced before idols and worn the holy thread, so that

The shaykh of the city may become a man of God by calling me a heretic.

Now they run away from me, now they associate with me;

In this desert, they do not know whether I am hunter or prey.

A heart that lacks warmth can ill profit from the company of a man;

Come with red-hot copper, so that my elixir can work on you.

Muhammad Iqbal, Persian Psalms , trans. Mustansir Mir

But for us existence is still enchanted. Its still

Beginning in a hundred places. A playing

of pure powers no one can touch and not kneel to and marvel.

Faced with the unutterable, words still disintegrate...

And ever new, out of the most quivering

stones, music builds her divine house in useless space.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus

Contents

Figures, Illustrations, and Map

FIGURES

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Arabic transliteration in the text and notes is limited to ayn where indicated and hamza only in the middle of a word. Otherwise I have dispensed of hamzas as in Abu and written Abu and used ulama instead of ulama. I have used the term Darul Uloom without standard transliteration features, since most madrasas transliterate in that form. I have also improvised a convenient form of transliteration for the benefit of nonspecialist readers, such as Abdul Ali instead of the Abd al-Ali. In the bibliography, however, I have used a detailed transliteration system in the event that specialists wish to track some of my sources.

Quran translations are from Thomas Cleary, The Quran: A New Translation and Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Quran with occasional amendments.

Inside Madrasas

One spring morning a few years ago, I walked through the town of Deoband, home to Indias most famous Sunni Muslim seminary. A clean-shaven man, his face glowing with sarcasm, called out to me. Looking for terrorists? he asked in Urdu. Swiftly and instinctively I protested and yelled back at him, I have every right to visit my alma mater. With a sheepish, almost theatrical grin, he turned and walked away.

I shouldnt have been so annoyed. The century-old seminary in Deoband came under intense scrutiny after the Taliban leadership claimed an ideological affiliation with similar institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Since September 11, 2001, journalists, politicians, and diplomats have descended periodically on this town near Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. This state is one node, along with the province of Pakistans Punjab, with Lahore as its capital, in what might be called an extended intellectual and spiritual heartland of Islam that spreads across the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent.

However, Muslim seminaries, or madrasas, everywhere became stigmatized once the Taliban was linked to the terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. Everyone conveniently ignored the history of the special, makeshift madrasas that sprang up on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. These borderland madrasas served as refugee camps for youth in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion that ravaged Afghanistan during the Cold War. The United States supported the war of the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviets.

Since then, top-level government officials, former heads of state like U.S. president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair, along with a chorus of journalists, pundits, and scholarssingled out madrasas as breeding grounds for terrorists. They did this without providing a shred of convincing evidence to warrant the indictment of a large, complex network of religious schools associated with multiple Muslim sects and ideologies.

In popular Western media parlance, the mere mention of the word madrasa conjures up an us versus them dynamic. This strategy effectively mobilizes unwitting audiences to a mindset that does not advance mutual understanding among civilizations and cultures. Revered by many Muslims but reviled, if not feared, by many non-Muslims, madrasas are the single most widely used educational resource to cultivate religious learning in parts of the Muslim world.

Low-budget, monastery-like Muslim seminaries dot the landscape of South Asia. The schools flourish mainly in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh as well as in the South Asian diaspora, but similar institutions are equally visible in different shapes and forms in East Asia, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, and parts of Africa and the Middle East, especially Iran. Young adult males study in the South Asian institutions, but there is a growth in segregated madrasas dedicated to the education of females.

Madrasas specialize in the study of classical theological and legal texts as well as commentaries on the Muslim scripture, the Quran. They place special emphasis on studying the life and teachings of Islams prophet, Muhammad, and are engrossed in complex details as to how rules and morals should regulate public and private conduct according to religious norms. All the secondary disciplines that are needed to gain proficiency in these primary fields of study are also taught, such as Arabic and Persian grammar and literature, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, among other subjects.

Noted journalistic voices like Peter Bergen, William Dalrymple and, belatedly, policy experts Rebecca Winthrop and Corinne Graff of the Brookings Institution now acknowledge that not all madrasas can be indicted Yet sympathetic sound bites do not provide an accurate picture of what happens inside madrasas, nor do they humanize the inhabitants of these age-old institutions. The gulf in perception is captured in the disparity of firmly held convictions as portrayed by insider versus outsider perspectives on the madrasa-sphere of South Asia.