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You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of
its women. — Jawaharlal Nehru
The proportion of Muslim women who
are illiterate is substantially higher for rural north India than
for the entire country — more than 85 per cent reported themselves
to be illiterate. Fewer than 17 per cent of Muslim women ever
enrolled completed eight years of schooling and fewer than 10 per
cent completed higher secondary education, which is below the
national average.
According to the 1991 Census, there were over 48 million Muslim
women in India; in 2001 the number rose to 62.5 million. In
popular perception, these women are typically seen as a monolithic
entity undistinguished and indistinguishable in their homogeneity.
The spotlight, when it falls on them, tends to do no more than
view the role of religion in their lives and reinforce the usual
stereotypes: pardah, multiple marriages, triple talaq, the male
privilege of unilateral divorce and the bogey of personal law. The
truth, however, is that like women from other communities, Muslim
women too are differentiated across class, caste, community, and
geographical location (including the great rural-urban divide).
Despite these differences within their lot, when compared to women
from other faiths in India, the majority of Muslim women are among
the most disadvantaged, least literate, most economically
impoverished and politically marginalized sections of Indian
society. While debates on personal law and divorce are pertinent
and timely, and one is not for a minute running down these issues,
Muslim women need to be seen as social beings too, entitled to the
same rights that the Constitution of India grants to all its
citizens. The right to education, especially at the primary level
is mandated by the Constitution, yet over six decades after
Independence less than 50% of Muslim women in India are literate.
Compare this with other women from other minorities: 76% literacy
among Christians, 64% among Sikhs, 62% among Buddhists and a
whopping 90% among Jain women!
According to an ORG-Marg Muslim Women’s Survey — commissioned by
the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi — conducted in
2000-2001 in 40 districts spanning 12 states, the enrolment
percentage of Muslim girl children is a mere 40.66 per cent. As a
consequence, the proportion of Muslim women in higher education is
a mere 3.56 per cent, lower even than that of scheduled castes
(4.25 per cent). On all-India basis, 66 per cent Muslim women are
stated to be illiterate. The illiteracy is most widespread in
Haryana while Kerala has least illiteracy among Muslim women
closely followed by Tamil Nadu. Muslim women are found to be more
literate than their Hindu counterparts in the states of Madhya
Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Most of the northern states are in urgent need of vigorous and
sustained literacy campaigns.
The very low level of schooling is one of the most depressing
findings of the survey. In fact, nearly 60 per cent of the total
Muslim respondents never attended school. There is a negative
correlation between education and employment among Muslims and the
minuscule proportion of Muslims in formal employment or
wealth-creating occupations. The proportion of Muslim women who
are illiterate is substantially higher for rural north India than
for the entire country — more than 85 per cent reported themselves
to be illiterate. Fewer than 17 per cent of Muslim women ever
enrolled completed eight years of schooling and fewer than 10 per
cent completed higher secondary education, which is below the
national average.
One of the most striking insights into the situation of Muslim
women comes from their dismal work participation rate — estimated
at 11.4 per cent for urban Muslim women and 20 per cent for rural
Muslim women. This low figure is especially striking in the light
of the obvious deprivation of most of these women. Significantly,
only a minuscule 0.14 per cent of Muslim women respondents cited
pardah as the reason for not working.
So what is it that makes Muslim women so badly placed at the
bottom of the socio-economic pyramid (lower even than OBCs) and so
disenfranchised in every sense of the word? A sprinkling of
high-profile Muslim women judges, academics, ministers,
sportspersons does not offer a complete picture. In the hamlets of
rural India and the slums of urban India, young girls are still
encouraged to stay within the home (first their own, then that of
their husbands’). A complex web of circumstances makes the
schooling of Muslim girls a daunting task. There is, of course, a
fair degree of conservatism, a general mistrust of Western-style
education, even a tendency to regard education for girls as being
not entirely necessary, sometimes even viewed as an impediment in
getting a girl married. But this is not the complete picture.
Historically, while there has always been a gap between the
education of boys and girls in India in the case of Muslims, the
gap has been a yawning chasm. The education of girls has always
demanded higher investment in terms of more facilities, more women
teachers, separate schools, transport and scholarships to provide
the much-needed incentives. Muslim educationists and thinkers
themselves, and as a consequence the state and central
governments, have been tardy in redressing this imbalance. While
there are numerous instances of minority-run institutions among
Christians, Sikhs and Parsis that have made special efforts to
provide free education to their girls, among Muslim faith-based
organisations this consciousness has been late in coming.
Those involved in the education of the Muslim girl child have not
been able to reach any consensus on the sort of education to be
given to the Muslim girl child and ambivalences persist about the
merits of Deeni Taalim vs Duniyawi Taleem. Meanwhile, there is a
growing hunger for education among Muslim girls and women that can
no longer be ignored. Several initiatives have been taken by women
themselves when they feel the State or patriarchal society is not
giving them their due. The Minorities Vikas Manch in Jaipur is
doing great work to raise Muslim women’s literacy levels in
Rajasthan. Elsewhere, private educational institutions have
stepped in providing both secular and religious education. Often
women have come forward to set up coaching schools to redress the
high dropout rate among school-going girls. The states of Kerala
and Tamil Nadu, to some extent Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, have
more successful stories to tell largely due to overall higher
literacy rates and greater persistence on the part of NGOs.
Established in 1966, the Anwar ul-Ulum Women’s Arabic College in
the village of Mongam near Calicut, is one such institution that
provides a blend of modern and Islamic education. Lok Jumbish
(People’s Movement), an NGO specializing in education, has done
excellent work among the Meos in Haryana who have almost 90%
illiteracy among their women. Lok Jumbish found a simple but
workable solution to the steadfast refusal among Meo fathers to
send their girls to school. It offered Urdu as a medium of
education.
Another myth about Muslims is that they refuse to opt for secular
education and prefer only madrasa education and madrasa education
makes them religious fanatics. This flies in the face of not just
common sense but also statistics — according to the Sachar
Committee Report only 4% of all enrolled Muslim children go to
madrasas; 66% go to government schools and 30% to private. No
middle class person sends his children to madrasas; it is only
poor Muslims who cannot afford secular education or happen to live
in areas where the State, whose duty it is to provide primary
education, fails to do so that children are sent to madrasas. In
fact, the cause of lack of secular education is poverty, not
religion. But so popular is this myth that madrasa education is
ascribed to religious fanaticism and orthodoxy rather than to
poverty.
The link between poverty and illiteracy among Muslim women can not
be over-emphasised. Regardless of whether illiteracy is a
consequence of poverty or vice versa, regardless of the debates
between the ‘modernists’ and the ‘traditionalist’, regardless of
the merits of an English-medium western-style education and an
Urdu-medium traditional education, what Muslim women want today is
some form of knowledge that empowers them to better their lot.
Individual initiatives — few and far between and laudable for
their courage, no doubt — will not take the Muslim woman very far.
While much is being achieved in pockets, in an isolated, random,
almost ad hoc manner, a lot still remains to be done. What is
needed, and needed urgently, is a more proactive role on the part
of the state. More cash incentives, attendance incentives, special
stipends to meritorious girl students, special bus services, more
morning shift schools, more emphasis on basic literacy and
numeracy, adult-education classes, public reading rooms,
gender-sensitive learning materials – these need to be factored
into any schemes involving education among Muslims. Given the
increasing incidents of communal violence where women are the
easiest victims, parents are often wary of sending girls to
“unsafe” neighbourhoods. The Sachar Committee Report talks of the
co-relation between place of residence and education. If more
schools were located in or closer to Muslim-dominated areas, more
parents would be willing to enrol their children. While this
co-relation is especially strong in rural areas or
communally-sensitive neighbourhoods, the positive co-relation has
been seen in big cities as well. The Delhi Public School at
Mathura Road runs a free school for poor children from the Basti
Nizamuddin area. Called “Ibtida” (meaning Beginning), its
catchment area is almost 98% Muslim. It caters to the poorest and
most disadvantaged by offering free western-style education from
nursery till Class VII, using its own classrooms and teachers and
providing free books and uniforms.
At the Ibtida school, one can
actually find a student whose mother begs on the streets of
Nizamuddin! Likewise, the feeder schools of the Jamia Millia
Islamia cater to the disadvantaged sections, to those living in
the urban ghettos of Jamia Nagar, Shaheen Bagh, Batla House, etc.
and manage to attract – and retain – enough girl students right
uptill middle and senior school because of its location. The
morning shift school is Urdu-medium till the VIII standard and
English-medium thereafter and has been showing consistently good
results for both the Xth and XIIth Board examinations. Those
students who make the ‘switch’ from Urdu-medium to English manage
to do well due to better teaching aids, better textbooks and most
of all enough Urdu-medium teachers – a combination that is found
to be lacking in most government-run Urdu schools. The
government’s much-hyped madrasa-modernisation scheme or catchy
slogans such as ‘Education for All’ will amount to little if the
so-called incentives fail to meet ground realities.
The state of the Muslim girl child is such that no single
institution – be it government or private – can bring about
lasting change. What is needed is an ideal mix between
non-governmental organizations, local community, government and
international donors. A survey of availability of textbooks in
regional languages needs to be undertaken. More Urdu medium
schools with better facilities, more women staff, more books in
Urdu too would go a long way in encouraging girls to go to schools
and stay there. There is also a need for debate and mobilization
by the Muslim community itself to make a clear-eyed assessment of
the situation.
Finally, let’s remember that literacy alone is not the key. It
will not magically open the doors of opportunity. The quality of
education is just as important. It has been seen that after the
first few years of the primary education afforded to the Muslim
girl child, one of two things usually happens. Either the girl is
plucked out of formal education by the time she reaches puberty
and for all practical purposes lapses into virtual illiteracy, or,
if she continues in school and does climb up the education ladder,
with every rung, the quality of education available to her is so
inferior that it equips her for very little. The quality of
education in some Urdu-medium schools as also the calibre of
teachers in such schools is so inadequate that the girls who do
come out from such institutions – many privately run, others with
dubious affiliations from quasi-religious bodies – cannot cope in
a competitive environment.
However, to conclude on a less grim note, I want to quote once
again from the Sachar Committee Report: “While the education
system appears to have given up on Muslim girls, the girls
themselves have not given up on education. There is a strong
desire and enthusiasm for education.” It is this enthusiasm that
we clearly need to tap.
The writer is Director
of Culture and Media at Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi
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