August 19, 2005
Much before Donald Rumsfeld set up his little “psychic lab” at Guantanamo Bay to figure out the composition of the mysterious force that motivates those bearded men who stand in awe of no earthly force but only their Creator and who have taken upon themselves to challenge the self-proclaimed lone superpower of the world, many defense analysts and policy makers in the United States had already reached the conclusion that madaris had something to do with the making of these men. They arrived at this grand breakthrough with the help of academics like Bernard Lewis and numerous journalists who had supposedly unearthed links between certain rundown buildings in Pakistan’s rugged Northwest Frontier Province and that ubiquitous outfit which has haunted them since September 11, 2001—al-Qaida. Once established, this nexus between madaris housed in poorly maintained mud and brick buildings and the emergence of a global resistance against the ever-expanding American empire then led them to another grand discovery: there are certain people and certain texts that are the real driving force behind this phenomenon. Their solution to eradicate the threat was to have the client regimes in the Muslim countries close down or takeover the madaris.
This led to an organized drive against one of the oldest institutions in the Islamic tradition—an institution that was supposed to have already died through the imposition of the Western education system. The madrassah, it turned out, had not only survived the terror of the colonial rulers, who had attempted to strangle its lifeline through the confiscation and appropriation of endowments that financed this enterprise, but also the assault of brown-skinned collaborators, some of whom sincerely and truly believed that madrassah had outlived its utility.
That generation of Muslim reformers was the forerunner to our latter-day enlightened moderates. They keenly felt the agonizing outcome of the encounter between Islam and modernity and genuinely tried to take Muslims out of their predicament. They analyzed the state of the nineteenth-century Muslim societies and concluded that the root cause of the misery of Muslims was the deterioration of their education. They, then, set out to reform the education system. This is precisely what the colonial rulers wished to see: a total “re-formation” of Islamic education, which would ensure its uprooting from the intellectual and spiritual soil of Islam. No one could accomplish this better than the brown-skinned reformers, who had themselves been thoroughly uprooted from their own intellectual and spiritual tradition.
This uprooting produced a deep inferiority complex in these reformers and together with the shocking and painful realization of the stark realities of their times, it impaired their judgments, made them blind to Islam’s profound message and made them willing collaborators of the colonial rulers who happily co-opted them into their game plan. The extent of their inferiority complex can be judged from the following lines written by one of the most prominent men of the nineteenth century after a visit to London: “Without flattering the English, I can truly say that the natives of India, high and low, merchants and petty shopkeepers, educated and illiterate, when contrasted to the English in education, manners, and uprightness, are like a dirty animal is to an able and handsome man.”
The writer of these lines was knighted by the Queen and became the founder of an education movement that had far-reaching impact on the future directions taken by Muslims of the subcontinent. Similar examples can be found in the Arab world where co-opted reformers looked down upon their own past, praised the achievements of the Western civilization in science, technology, and education, and joined the colonial rulers as second-class partners in an enterprise of immense importance to the future of Islam and Muslims.
By the end of the nineteenth century, these reformers had apparently won the battle against madaris and their new educational institutions had become the main vehicles of social change in the Muslim world. The graduates of these institutions were rapidly absorbed into the new economic, military, administrative, and cultural scheme of the colonial rulers and, in time, they became leaders of a polity which had lost its qiblah. In this vacuous situation, wherein the co-opted Muslims were rapidly gaining a new social and political awareness, a new force emerged to overshadow all other social and political currents of the early twentieth century: nationalism. From the shores of Bengal to the backwaters of the Hijaz, the new rage was loyalty and commitment to this European idol that had produced a grand reorganization of the world map and that now emerged in the Muslim lands as an antidote to the miseries produced by colonization. Ironically, it was the second and third generation of Muslims graduating from the new educational institutions, established by the brown-skinned sahibs and sponsored by the colonial rulers, who stood up to the colonizers demanding independence. Madaris had no or very little role in the making of this new social and political force that now dominated the entire Muslim world.
By the time some fifty-seven “independent” Muslim nation-states emerged on the world map, madaris had all but vanished from the political scene and their function had been reduced to the production of bearded men who could be summoned at will to perform the last rites by pronouncing a few words over a corpse which could not be buried without the ritual. Then came the next phase. The poor orphans who were until yesterday looked down upon with haughty arrogance and whose existence had been all but obliterated from the mainstream currents of the Muslim societies, suddenly emerged at the forefront to reclaim a role in the affairs of the world which had considered them dead. This reemergence of the vanquished was neither through modern science and technology nor through the “re-formation” of the madrassah, but through a far more potent force: faith. The madrassah had survived, but its future remained and remains uncertain. The men who fought and won a decisive battle against the march of the Red army in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan and who later decided to challenge the expanding American empire have still to outline a future course of action that will re-establish the supremacy of their institution over the secularized institutions which are producing petty men who don uniforms and cannot withstand a phone call from the White House and who have decided to eliminate them from the scene. The madrassah has survived, but will it be able to reclaim its right to direct the future in the traditional lands of Islam?
(To be concluded)
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