Tag: Caste & Religion

Pallavi Singh
New Delhi: Hashmatullah Khan says the combination invites scrutiny: students, computers and Islam. In his case, it gets worse. He is general secretary of the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO).

No, not the Students Islamic Movement of India, better known as SIMI, and effectively banned for alleged extremist activities. But Khan can’t avoid the connotation.

Besides both having educated, young Muslims as members, the groups have the same founding father: the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), a semi-political, religious organization, which founded SIO in 1982 after SIMI, that emerged as its offshoot in 1977, broke away from it in 1981.

And so, SIMI and SIO are like estranged family who “shall never meet”, says Bishruddin Sharqi, national president of the latter. “It is like two separate groups who do not agree with each other—one that chose peace and another that chose violence,” he says.

Blood brothers they may be, but the groups have charted conflicting courses, both in principle and actions. While SIMI is largely underground after the government crackdown, SIO is a gradually swelling student revolution in the making, taking Islam beyond the parodied stereotypes of fundamentalism and violence. Its mission: to prepare students, Muslims and non-Muslims, for reconstruction of a peaceful India on the basis of Islamic principles.

All for education: Subair Ahmad, a student of bachelor’s in philosophy and an SIO member, at Jamia Millia Islamia. He travelled to New Delhi from Coimbatore three years ago after qualifying for a scholarship. Ramesh Pathania / Mint

In one of such rooms on the first floor, Khan, 28, single and soft-spoken, serves as office functionary during the day, and studies at night for a PhD in psychology he hopes to pursue after his two-year term at SIO is over. He studied engineering at Karnataka’s Gulbarga University and did postgraduate work in psychology at Madras University before heading to Delhi to serve at the SIO headquarters in 2006. “They elected me to this post and such responsibility is an honour to carry. We all have to live our lives but running a struggle is a noble task,” he says.

Khan is not alone. There are many others, all below 30 and studying to be engineers, doctors and professors. But career advancement for monetary gains is not on SIO’s agenda; the larger goal is to find the roots of culture. “It’s important to know who we are and where we come from. We need an education system that doesn’t just create jobs but makes better human beings out of young people. This is the only solution to corruption and violence,” Khan says.

So, along with weekly meetings to discuss the Quran’s teachings, SIO amply harps on the same teachings to help its members introspect and regain the “lost struggle”. “There is so much materialism around. Everyone is racing to make money. Families are breaking down and women are being objectified. We are aping the West. We have to struggle for indigenous ideas of development,” Nazeer Ahmad Bagdali, office secretary of SIO, explains.

Practically applied, the organization is comfortable with sex education in schools but not for children below puberty. It welcomes reservation for other backward classes (OBCs), but seeks more Central universities for education of minorities.

It launched campaigns for peaceful campuses after the reported incidents of violence at Aligarh Muslim University. Technology as a tool of development and campaign is more than a mere buzzword. Ten years ago, SIO was one of the earliest student groups to have launched its website. Recent addition has been a text messaging service aimed at delivering updates on its activities to its members and associates.

“With India emerging as an IT power, it’s a great opportunity for us to discover cheaper and more effective ways of spreading education. SIO has kept ahead with the changing times and focused on students’ issues more than politics,” says S.Q.R. Ilyas, former SIO member who now edits Afkar-e-Milli, an Urdu journal and is also a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.

Like Ilyas, a large number of SIO members graduate to JIH, which works for communal harmony with other religious groups, such as Christians, Sikhs and Hindus. JIH’s leadership includes both Muslim clerics, known as the ulema, and educated professionals and academicians, many of whom were once SIO members. JIH has also worked to influence India’s foreign policy to favour Muslim nations and condemn the policies of Israel and the US.

But SIMI is a past neither JIH nor SIO wants to visit. “We have nothing to do with SIMI and, therefore, we wouldn’t like to talk about it,” says Khan in response to persistent queries and veers to SIO’s growing spread across the country, and even in Nagaland and Tripura.

In the years since its inception, the organization has grown to a membership strength of 4,110, in addition to 94,504 associates and 34,358 junior associates. Total units of SIO count up to 621, with more than 3,000 campus branches in universities and 65 branches in religious institutions across the country.

From these institutions, the organization has found its national-level leaders—from states such as Kerala, Karnataka, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, with degrees in languages—from Arabic to Bangla, history and commerce, among others.

Twenty-year-old Bagdali is one such aspirant from Bidar in Karnataka. Son of an auto-rickshaw driver and eldest among nine siblings, Bagdali’s early days with SIO at his hometown lead him to grow within the organization’s rank and files. Today, he manages office affairs of SIO and pursues his bachelor’s in Urdu literature from Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad through distance education mode. “If not for SIO, I wouldn’t have dreamt of education,” he says in a rush.

While educational awareness programmes are on SIO’s agenda with special focus on enrolment in schools, educational assistance in the form of scholarships, book banks, libraries, reading rooms, study circles, career guidance, hostels and coaching classes are also arranged for the students.

For women, they have a separate wing—Girls Islamic Organisation, with the same goals and organizational set-up.

One of the scholarship programmes launched by the SIO has helped more than 12,000 students across the country, including Bagdali, attain higher education. Subair Ahmad, a bachelor’s student of philosophy at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, travelled to Delhi from Coimbatore three years ago after qualifying for a scholarship. “My parents couldn’t have funded my education here. SIO pays my fees and accommodation expenses,” Ahmad says.

But the Jamia student is more excited about the fact that he can now speak fluent English. This is part of SIO’s efforts towards education in the English medium, in a break from the traditional madrasa education. The organization is even mulling a universal education programme along the lines of the government-funded Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and opening of centres funded by the government under the National Institute of Open Schooling in madrasas and Muslim schools for basic education in science and English.

“This is where the future lies. We can’t live in the past and let our youth suffer and feel suffocated. SIO will continue to give them a positive direction and means of peaceful struggle for a better nation,” SIO’s national president Sharqi says.

But beneath the robust purpose lurk muted fears. After aggressive campaigns in line with Jamaat’s call for activism on issues such as the contentious Shah Bano judgement of 1985, which called for lifelong alimony for Muslim women after divorce, and the Babri mosque demolition in 1992, SIO’s theme shifted from active struggle to educational goals.

“We as an organization realized that till the time we are educationally backward, no change can be brought about,” Ilyas, who is also member of Jamaat’s Babri Mosque Movement Coordination Committee, says. At a convention to celebrate 25 years of the organization last year, SIO members spoke on the threats Islam faced: extremism and misinterpretations of Quran. They also found compelling themes to address in the future: education and dialogue.

This story was first published in Mint – [ https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/FxUaXsf4b7nUaDTm4lggdP/Islamic-students-body-on-a-mission-for-peace.html ]

New Delhi: The impasse over a government proposal to modernize madrasas, or traditional Islamic schools, illustrates how a “minority mindset” imposed by the ulema, or clergy, and politicians could draw Muslims deeper into the morass of conservatism, poverty and unemployment.

Fostering education: (from left) Shafiqur Rahman, Abdul Khan, Afaque Rahmani and Salim Akhtar Bellali at a New Delhi hotel in September after receiving the national award for best Urdu teachers. Ramesh Pathania / Mint

Since taking over as the human resource development minister in May, Kapil Sibal has been driving reforms in all areas of education. Among his initiatives is a renewed push for the 2004 Madrasa Modernisation Scheme, which aims to include the teaching of modern subjects in the largely theological curriculum and centralize the management of the thousands of Islamic seminaries spread all across India.

“It’s a big step for Muslim education,” says Firoz Bakht Ahmed, the grandnephew of one of independent India’s founders, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and a writer on minority issues and madrasa education. The scheme will enable students from various parts of the country to seek jobs of their choice, he says.

Changes are urgently needed to improve the state of the community. A committee under former Delhi high court chief justice Rajinder Sachar, which conducted independent India’s first exhaustive study on how Muslims fare in education and employment compared with others, established that the community was lagging behind in education and government jobs.

Some 25% of Muslim children in the age group 6-14 have never been to school, though the national average primary enrolment rates are above 95%, the committee found. The Sachar committee also found that only 3% of Muslim children went to madrasas, denting the government’s argument for using the modernization of religious schools as a means to improve the community’s primary education.

Sibal promised a consensus within 100 days on the scheme, which the government views as crucial for the long-term uplift of the community. Modern education will provide Muslim youth from these seminaries a progressive socio-political outlook as well as help them find jobs and assimilate into the Indian success story. But the consensus deadline passed in August, and there is still no agreement on reforming madrasa education.

The reason? Many madrasas find the teaching of modern subjects such as science and mathematics alongside the Quran too much of a dichotomy. Sections of the ulema and politicians belonging to the community also view the move as government intervention that will dilute the essentially theological nature of the madrasas.

Elusive consensus

The Madrasa Modernisation Scheme was proposed in 2004 by the newly set-up national monitoring committee for minorities education, effectively formalizing a 1986 government initiative to improve the quality of education at the schools.

It provides for setting up an All-India Madrasa Board to monitor the implementation of the modernization programme as well as help them upgrade infrastructure and facilities.

The Central Madrasa Board Bill 2009, which is yet to be moved in Parliament due to a lack of consensus, empowers the board to take steps for the standardization of the non-theological aspects of seminary education and its comprehensive, systematic and integrated development.

The board can promote education in non-theological subjects such as science, social science, mathematics, English and Hindi without interfering in any manner with the theological content and evaluation of madrasa education. The scheme will also devise ways to promote education of Muslim girls to eradicate gender-based educational disparities.

About 6,000 madrasas, 1,800 teachers and 700,000 children will be covered under the scheme for qualitative improvement, which would enable the children to attain standards prescribed by the national education system in formal subjects.

During 2008-2009, Rs27 crore was released for 4,597 madrasas in Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The scheme will also provide augmented infrastructure in private aided/unaided minority schools/institutions, estimated at around 400 across India, in order to enhance the quality of education.

But most of the 18 members of Parliament (MPs) from the Muslim community, who met ministry officials to discuss the issue in October, opposed the terms for the constitution of the national madrasa board. The MPs said the proposal, which stipulates certain appointment norms, may lead to interference by the government in the functioning of madrasas and not adequately represent the Muslim community.

Caught in the middle

The impasse has disappointed people such as Afaque Rahmani, who operates from the ill-equipped Madrasa Ahmadia in Bihar’s Madhubani district. Rahmani, a 54-year-old postgraduate in botany, is pro-reform and looks at modernization as crucial to the progress of the community at large. He already teaches science at the madrasa of his own accord, but was banking on the policy change to get state-of-the-art infrastructure and faculty for his students.

For 23 years, Rahmani has managed to cope with the challenge of teaching science along with the religious teaching of the Quran with rudimentary facilities. But in September, when the human resources development ministry proposed Rahmani’s name with three others as the country’s best Urdu teachers for the President’s medal, he joined the emerging chorus from the seminaries to be heard. The discontent is not just due to the dilemma over integrating modern subjects with religious texts; it pertains to the very rudimentary, day-to-day needs of the madrasas.

One computer has been procured to impart vocational training to children. But apart from that, Rahmani has just a few pieces of chalk and a blackboard. Typically, he says, the hurdles are basic—such as how to show his students chemical reactions or the dynamics of a spring balance as listed in textbooks. “Unless your students see the chemicals turning yellow, blue or red in a beaker, how much fun can they have studying science?”

Rahmani’s love for science and the joy of teaching, despite the resource crunch, keep him going. Back in 1976, when Rahmani had just joined the madrasa after his postgraduation at a local college in Madhubani, he had gone on a door-to-door campaign to get children to attend the school. “There was much resistance and disbelief,” he recalls.

Enrolment has risen to 500 over the years, he says. Since 2003, the pass percentage has also gone up steadily. “In the beginning, it was a dismal 20-30%. Now, 80-90% of children pass out with good marks,” he adds.

Pay, faculty problems

With enhanced enrolment, what remains dismal is the salaries paid to madrasa teachers, says Maulana Shafiqur Rahman, superintendent of the Deorail Madrasa in Assam, who was recognized as the best Urdu teacher of the year last month along with Rahmani. “Worse, the salaries never come on time.”

In Bihar, madrasa teachers get Rs2,000-3,800, while a recent hike in dearness allowance raised the salary of principals in seminaries aided by or affiliated to the state madrasa board to about Rs11,000 a month.

In Assam, apart from the meagre pay, there is an acute shortage of teachers, especially for science. The last appointment of teachers happened in 1999. “Thousands of teaching posts have been lying vacant since then. The government is neglecting minority education in the state, even as education standards keep falling,” says Rahman.

Vacant faculty positions have now become a challenge for these seminaries, says Rahmani, who has been aggressively trying to hire teachers for science and mathematics for the last two years. “For years, we have not taught modern subjects at the seminaries. Hence, there are no teachers good enough to be hired,” he says.

Much of this could be taken care of by the setting up of the national board under the Madrasa Modernisation Scheme.

Question marks

But questions about the scheme have been raised even by those who don’t necessarily fear its secular impact.

A section of detractors fears the introduction of a separate board for madrasas would alienate the Muslim community. “Ideally, there should be some provision in the existing education boards,” says Salim Akhtar Bellali, principal of Faazil Madrasa in Darbhanga, Bihar.

The agenda for reforming madrasas is also being linked with the question of countering “terrorism”, says Rahman.

In Assam, where his seminary imparts education to 350 Muslim children from economically backward sections, classes are often interrupted by police carrying out security checks. “We have computers, we have books in English, we have students who can converse in English—but no militants. The allegation that madrasas breed militants is completely baseless,” he says.

The government reserves the power to appoint the panel that would run the board, remove any member, and monitor the way funds are used. This provision has also caused the Muslim community to accuse the government of trying to control madrasas.

“The hurry with which the government is trying to implement things, it appears that it wants to regulate madrasas,” says Khalid Hamidi, professor of Arabic at Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi. “A madrasa means Islamic school. Universities like Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia recognize madrasa certificates. Then, what is the need for such modernization programmes?’’

Hamidi’s question relates partly to the concern that reforms may alter the “Islamic nature” of the madrasas, with some Muslims viewing the schools as an expression of identity rather than as seminaries where a young generation can be trained to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

This was first published in Mint [https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/NZg147aJQ8Oho55W9MrK9L/Government8217s-madrasa-reform-plan-hits-theological-hurd.html].

In just a fortnight, Jamia Nagar, best known as the host of the historic Jamia Millia Islamia, has become a world of fear.

The realization hit A.K. Ramakrishnan, a professor at the university’s Centre for West Asian studies, after 19 September. That’s when bullets fired by the police at Batla House, one of the several closely nestled buildings in the area, killed one student, and also shattered a sense of security for others, creating shrouds of suspicion overall.

Instantly, effortlessly, Jamia Nagar transformed into an alleged haven for terror merchants.

A “laptop became a stronger weapon than an AK-47 and the terrorist emerged as the educated, Internet-savvy Muslim, and most possibly, a Jamia student”, says Ramakrishnan.

Now, a coalition of faculty, students and legal experts are fighting back, saying the scrutiny on the university is unconstitutional, and are offering legal aid to the detained. In the process, they contend with duelling definitions of Jamia Millia Islamia, better known as JMU, from its desire to be a minority institution while also remaining true to its secular founding.

Already, several students living in rented accommodations in Jamia Nagar were asked to move out by their landlords, and two—Ziaur Rehman and Zeeshan Ahmad—were picked up by the police for interrogation.

Even before the shootout, an Urdu scholar at the university was picked up by the police and later released. Countless others are moving to pre-empt such moves. One Muslim student at the university from Araria, Bihar, met Ramakrishnan with profound doubts.

“My parents called me up and asked me to return home. They even went to the extent of asking me to deregister myself from the university. I don’t know when or whether I would be coming back,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Lecturer Manisha Sethi, like Ramakrishnan, was also flooded by an anxious stream of students, mostly Muslims, all waiting to return home.

“They were all scared by the brazen witch-hunting by the police. That was time for us to act. We keep hearing of blasts in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, but this was too close for comfort. This was right at our doorsteps and we couldn’t just ignore it,” says Sethi, lecturer at the varsity’s centre for comparative religions and civilization since December 2005, who visited the area several times after the encounter.

She and 40 other colleagues, mostly non-Muslims, then did what is often unheard of in university circles. They moved quickly to form Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Group, a counter-response to the “ugly stereotypes of Muslim students and the university at large”, hoping to allay fears of their students and also bridge the quickly widening gap between the neighbourhood and the university.

This was in addition to the unprecedented offer of legal aid tendered by the university administration to the detained students.

Over the last 15 days, the group’s members have made frantic visits to the neighbourhood where about 200 students from the university stay, and demanded that the detained students be considered innocent until proven guilty. The university administration has even announced construction of new hostels to house more students. Currently, the hostels at Jamia accommodates 1,000 students.

To all the initiatives, they say, the idea of the neighbourhood is central.

“This is because this is where a large number of our students and teachers come from. We can’t abandon them and if they feel alienated, this does no good to anyone,” Sethi says.

But beneath the immediate and aggressively articulated response to the turn of events is a deeper concern. The overwhelming and perhaps unwarranted attention for the 88-year-old university—founded in response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call in the 1920s to boycott all educational institutions supported or run by the colonial regime—endangers its secular spirit, insists Tabrej Alam, secretary of the Jamia Teachers’ Association that unanimously supported vice-chancellor Mushirul Hasan’s controversial decision to provide legal aid to detained students, rattling off names of monuments on its campus and historic events that shaped the university.

“Secularists like Dr Zakir Husain was our vice-chancellor from 1926 to 1948, and the President of the nation. We are disturbed and distressed by the misperceptions about our institution. Surely, this is not what we deserve considering our liberal and progressive record,” Alam points out.

For the most part, the university does live up to Alam’s feverish secular pitch. From the Bagh-i-Nanak, named after Sikh religious leader Guru Nanak to the majestic Dabistan-i-Gandhi, one of the academic complexes named after Mahatma Gandhi, buildings on the Jamia campus reflect its Weltanschauung, robust reminders of its tryst with the freedom struggle and secular thought.

While the past is cherished, Anuradha Ghosh, professor at the university’s English department, also lists the successes of the present and argues that it does “embody the idea of India”.

“Jamia as a university has expanded like never before. With the expansion, we have various new centres and courses on a variety of subjects. We are no more an introvert university. We are asking questions and debating issues,” she explains.

Ghosh’s enthusiasm is palpable. From modern architecture on the campus to newly opened centres, the university wears an open look. More than 20 centres that have opened at the university in the last four years offer courses in subjects such as Gandhian studies, culture, media and governance, comparative religion and civilization, theoretical physics, interdisciplinary research in basic sciences, physiotherapy and rehabilitation sciences and West Asian studies.

To most academic discourses, the theme of partition has become central, and not an untouchable topic.

“Jamia as a university opposed the pernicious two-nation theory and has not wavered from the principles of pluralism and secularism. The expansion has attracted more students from various parts of the country and made it more secular and inclusive,” Alam says.

And, while Jamia’s tryst with terror may be new, the past few years did bring the reputation of violence to the university with administration sparring with the student union over admissions and fee hikes, and its teachers’ union demanding a “minority status” for the university.

While the Jamia students’ union was later dissolved, a petition on the status is still pending before the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions, seeking to reserve half the seats for Muslim students.

Currently, the university has no religion-based reservations, though it does reserve 25% of its seats for students of Jamia wishing to continue further studies.

Ramakrishnan says the petition is more relevant now than ever before.

“With the stereotypes being propagated about the Muslims, it’s even more important to make space for them in institutions of higher learning. If you don’t allow them to move up the social ladder and have a future, what option do they have?”

Alam, who is also general secretary of the Federation of Central Universities Teachers’ Association, cites the example of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), which has often been in the news for unrest on campus.

“If universities like AMU and ours do not welcome students from the minority community, where will they go? It’s important more than ever that we protect our nationalist legacy while bringing Muslims into mainstream education.”

AMU teachers’ association notably extended support to Jamia in offering help to its students. But amid the earnestness of dispelling the stereotypes, questions about the implications of the university’s move to provide legal aid to the accused students once the investigations prove them guilty have become a forbidden territory. “We are just giving them a fair chance to present their case. This is just to instill confidence in our student community that their alma mater hasn’t abandoned them,” Alam says.

The 12,000-strong student community at Jamia would perhaps agree. But for Jamia’s many-coloured histories—with Gandhi’s begging bowl for its stumbling finances and Tagore’s welcome for its progressive school of thought— the present is an uneasy liability: an ironic picture of violence tugging at the heart of its secularism.

Earlier published in Mint.