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New Delhi:
"My years as a student in the Darul
Uloom madrasa were the best training I could get to be an effective
MP (Member of Parliament). Because the madrasa taught me that
serving people is the biggest act of devotion to God,” said
religious scholar and educationist Maulana Asrarul Haque of his 1866
alma mater in the North Indian town of Deoband.
The sentences were characteristic of
the moral lens the soft-spoken 66-year-old parliamentarian seemed to
view the world through.
Haque, who has founded 160 madrasas
across four states and a girl’s school in an ill-connected village
in his constituency of Kishanganj in Bihar, said, “Education can
empower and help build bridges.”
Haque is the sort
of Muslim leader the government is now looking to, as it attempts to
craft a consensus in a divided Muslim community to help push through
a sticky piece of legislation to set up a Central Madrasa Board.
The board —
stillborn for a decade — is meant to design a modern curriculum for
India’s estimated 100,000 Islamic seminaries. These numbers are
private estimates; the government has no definitive information on
how many such institutions exist. Under 20,000 are registered under
various laws.
There are also no
definitive surveys, but official estimates say that between 4 per
cent and 6 per cent of India’s Muslim children in the school-going
age study in such seminaries. Attending the institutions between
four to seven years, they study a three-centuries old curriculum
(see box).
Institutions like the madarsa at Deoband are renowned and possess
the funds and skills to modernise. But most seminaries cater to
areas with concentrations of low-income Muslim households, where the
government school system is broken and private schools have no
commercial incentives.
Like Haque’s
constituency of Kishanganj, a backward district of small farmers and
landless labourers with 70 per cent Muslim residents and a female
literacy of 14 per cent, the lowest for any district in the country.
While some states
such as West Bengal and Bihar have instituted madrasa boards to run
such institutions, most seminaries are funded by charities and run
by decades-old trusts, which guard their independence from the
government fiercely.
Abdul Noumani,
based in New Delhi, typifies this strand of thought in the
community, which has opposed the formation of a central board as
interference in the Islamic faith.
At his office
overlooking graceful arches in the headquarters of the 1919 Jamiat
Ulama-I-Hind, which runs over 10,000 madrasas across India, Noumani
said, “The Sachar Commission found that every fourth Muslim child
has never attended, or attended and dropped out of school. Why does
the government not focus on these children? When only 4 per cent of
Muslim children study in madrasas, why is Kapil Sibal (Minister for
Human Resource Development) so interested in our affairs?”
“Our experience of
government and bureaucracy has not been good in states which have
set up their own madrasa boards. It opens the door for corruption
and meaningless rules. We can modernise our own curriculum.”
But, National
Commission for Minority Educational Institutions chairman Justice M.
Siddiqui whose office drafted the Bill for the proposed board (see
box), argued that the government should help lead that change
whereby a madrasa student can learn about Islamic law as well as the
Indian Penal Code, Arabic as well as English.
Siddiqui said the
board should go beyond matters of content to improve the quality of
education. “It should be given a seed fund of Rs 500 crore by the
state and then allowed to function independently. Madrasas currently
pay their teachers Rs 500 to Rs 1,500 (per month). How can that
attract good people? The board will ensure pay parity with
government schoolteachers. We have drafted the Bill. The ball is now
in the government’s court,” he said.
For now, the
government is treading carefully. In a bid to build a consensus,
Sibal has been open to suggestions to people the board with as many
educationists as theologians. He has said affiliation to the board
will be voluntary. On October 3, at a meeting on the issue with
Muslim MPs, he will lobby for the board.
The Kishanganj MP,
Haque, said the government’s revived efforts will be successful only
if “the benefits of the policy are explained clearly to the Muslim
community. The key will be to take all the ulema (religious
scholars) along.”
(Courtesy:
Hindustan Times)
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