Madressas: then and now?
The madressa (lit. school) or Islamic school/seminary has been in recent years under focus and criticism. Madressas today are criticized for being associated with the dissemination of radical ideologies and indoctrination of students in anti-Western propaganda. Not least, the Taleban (lit. students) as a movement are said to have originated in Pakistani madressas.
I don't intend on discussing the alleged problems with madressas (indeed I wouldn't be qualified to do so). I do think however, the above criticisms aside, that the system of religious education in the world's Islamic countries is in desperate need of a significant overhaul. That much is a no-brainer.
For now, I found this passage from a book I'm currently reading of interest. It talks about what an officer in the British East India Company had to say of education of Muslims in India in the mid-19th century.
Even Colonel William Sleeman... a leading critic of the administration of the Indian courts, had to admit that the madrasa education given in Delhi was something quite remarkable: 'Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among the Muhammadans in India,' he wrote on a visit to the Mughal capital.
'He who holds an office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the medium of Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin - that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford - he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and, what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through life.'
I'm not one to romanticize the past, but if what Sleeman wrote a century and a half ago (really not that long a period of time) is true, then a reversal of fortunes, so to speak, of the madressa in the greater South Asian region (including Pakistan and Afghanistan) from the present state to one more congruent with the description in the passage ought not to be as Herculean an endeavour as it sounds. Wishful thinking on my part? Perhaps.
5 comments:
Excellent post, Eli, but I have a question. Isn't it supposed to be 'medresa'? Or has your method of transliteration been revised recently?
Having read that excerpt, it's even more upsetting to know (according to a recent BBC article) that Muslims belong to the lowest strata of Indian society today. The emphasis on education that was once so prevalent among Indian Muslims has almost entirely disappeared.
I have a bit more to say about madrassahs then and now, and the "overhaul" of religious education in the Islamic world, but right now I'm a bit tired.
Er, my name is Ali, not Eli. And I don't have a particular 'method of transliteration' that I follow. Thanks for the compliment though.
it's madrassa.
are religious madares, as opposed to regular madares, still in daily operations anywhere? i'm mostly familair with kuwait and egypt, and i know they aren't there.
There are tonnes of madaress in Pakistan (and I believe India as well), and a handful in Canada, the United States and Britain. As for the Middle East and Africa region, I can't think of countries besides Mauritania and maybe Somalia that have religious schools at the primary and secondary level.
In the post though I think the writer is talking about post-secondary Muslim religious education, which would mean that almost all Muslim countries, including Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and others have Islamic colleges and universities.
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