August 5, 2005
Now the haunt of the poor and the dispossessed, the madrassah was born in the sanctified space of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah shortly after his migration to the city. The first teacher was the Prophet himself, may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him; the first students, his Companions who sought knowledge of a kind not found anywhere in the world but through the coming of a Prophet. This knowledge was transformative; it changed the core of the person in the very act of its acquisition. These students sat on the rough mats woven from date-palm and memorized, internalized, and acted upon what was being taught to them.
This prototype of the madrassah was then taken to cities as far as Samarqand and Bukhara in Central Asia and Timbaktu in Africa. The madrassah tradition in Islam was to give birth to some of the most penetrating minds history has ever known—men who occupied themselves with understanding the human condition and who wrote some of the most profound texts in human custody today. These were the scholars of Islam who were concerned with understanding primary concepts and foundational ideas. They wrote about the use of intellect, emotions, senses and numerous other resources available to us in a manner that cultivates the higher and noble traits of our being. They were concerned with important definitions and ideas which define the relationships between individual members of a society, between individuals and the state, as well as among states. They produced a formidable tradition of learning, leaving behind thousands of books, manuscripts, maps, tables, instruments, and tools.
They sat on rough mats in mosques and taught the seekers of knowledge who flocked to them in cities such as Baghdad, Basra, Kufa, Samarqand, Ghazni, Lahore, Multan, and Damascus. They sought no worldly recompense for their teaching and scholarship and often lived frugally; their concern was for gains in the Hereafter. They were respected and honored and they produced students who carried the light of learning to further lands and to greater depths.
These madaris were not only the seats of learning in the Islamic tradition, they were also the institutions which defined, shaped and directed the intellectual currents in a vast region. Ideas and ideals borne in these austere surroundings permeated the public space and changed lives by inspiring them to strive for the highest possible state of being.
These madaris were often funded through waqf properties (pious endowments) attached to the mosques. These were donations by the rich and were exempt from state taxes and control. This allowed the madaris to remain fiercely independent of state intervention and scholars could freely criticize the excesses of the rulers. The verdict passed by these scholars carried no official authority, but it had a moral strength that no ruler could ignore.
This system of education deteriorated over time and by the middle of the seventeenth century, the production of knowledge had almost come to a halt. It was also a time when the European institutions were producing new instruments, theories, and techniques, especially in the domain of natural sciences and soon this new knowledge was to become instrumental in giving a military edge to Europe over the Muslim lands which would result in the colonization of the entire Muslim world.
The colonial rulers knew that their conquest was not going to be complete unless they colonized the minds of the conquered lands. They also knew that the shortest route to the colonization of minds is through the education system. Thus they assaulted the citadel of the Islamic education system—the madrassah. They confiscated waqf properties, imposed taxes on lands that had been endowed for the upkeep of the mosques and madaris, and tried to strangle the now decaying institution of madrassah by numerous other means. But even before this assault during the era of colonization, the madrassah had already lost its past glory, as well as the vitality and power of penetrating minds, and the moral force of upright men who feared none but their Creator; during the colonial period, they even lost the social prestige and became the true haunts of the poor and the dispossessed.
Pushed out of the mainstream social and intellectual currents by the new educational institutions implanted by colonial rulers and their collaborators, madrassah could not be eliminated altogether because the men and women educated in these new schools through a system that was a caricature of the English or French educational system could not even perform the most necessary rites of birth, marriage and death; they needed the poor and the dispossessed student of the madrassah to come and bury their dead properly and have them wedded in an Islamic manner and recite the Book of Allah over their sick and dying so that they could leave this world in peace.
Soon after the era of colonization, a new relationship between the state and the madarssah was negotiated: in all Muslim lands, the state needed the madrassah-trained maulvi for its farcical display of adherence to Islam and for its stately rituals and thus, it cultivated relationship with a hand-picked minority of maulvis, elevated them to the title of maulana and gave them the charge of glorious Mosques of major cities while divorcing itself from the care of thousands of rundown mosques of remote areas of the country. But since no locality could live without a mosque and a madrassah where children could learn to read the Book of Allah, the upkeep of these remote madaris and mosques often became the responsibility of the local populace and this reliance on charity further lowered the self-esteem of those who spent their lives in these mosques and madaris. This, and numerous other factors, created two opposing currents in the Muslim lands: one produced by a secularized education system; the other by that of madrassah. These two currents now face each other in perhaps the mot decisive battle for the hearts and minds ever fought by the Islamic tradition. This time around, the assault on the madrassah is not from the colonial rulers, but from the colonized minds of the brown sahibs. Will the madrassah survive this assault?
(To be concluded)
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