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WHAT IS A Madrasa? Ebrahim Moosa Copyright © 2015 by the University of North Carolina Press This edition has been published in Great Britain by arrangement with the University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514, USA Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0173 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0174 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0175 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0176 0 (epub) The right of Ebrahim Moosa to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Portions of the Prologue and Chapter 1 were first published in the Boston Review as “Inside Madrasas: A Personal Story” on January 1, 2007; the author thanks the Review for permission to reproduce this material here. For Muneer Fareed I have danced before idols and worn the holy thread, so that The shaykh of the city may become a man of God by calling me a heretic. Now they run away from me, now they associate with me; In this desert, they do not know whether I am hunter or prey. A heart that lacks warmth can ill profi t from the company of a man; Come with red- hot copper, so that my elixir can work on you. —Muhammad Iqbal, Persian Psalms, trans. Mustansir Mir But for us existence is still enchanted. It’s still Beginning in a hundred places. A playing of pure powers no one can touch and not kneel to and marvel. Faced with the unutterable, words still disintegrate . And ever new, out of the most quivering stones, music builds her divine house in useless space. — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus Contents Note on Transliteration and Translation, xi PROLOGUE Inside Madrasas, 1 PART I. LIVED EXPERIENCE 1. A Novice, 15 2. Wake, Wash, Pray, 31 3. Becoming Scholars, 47 PART II. HISTORY AND CONTEXTS 4. Birth of the Contemporary Madrasa, 77 5. Texts and Authors, 108 6. From a Republic of Letters to a Republic of Piety, 122 PART III. POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE 7. Preserving the Prophet’s Legacy, 145 8. Believe, Learn, Know, 176 PART IV. MADRASAS IN GLOBAL CONTEXT 9. Talking about Madrasas, 207 10. The Future of Madrasas, 219 11. Letter to Policy Makers, 233 12. Letters to My Teachers, 241 Epilogue, 250 Glossary, 255 Notes, 259 Bibliography, 269 Ac know ledg ments, 277 Index, 279 Figures, Illustrations, and Map FIGURES Select genealogy of Deobandi scholars from the eighteenth century to the present, 70 Key scholars in the Farangi Mahall school, 80 Scholarly genealogy of the Khairabadi school, 99 Genealogy of the Barelvi school, 101 Periodization of education in India over time, 128 Signifi cant Persian infl uence impacting the Nizami curriculum, 131 A visual schematization of Islamic moral values, 159 ILLUSTRATIONS Faculty and students interacting at Jamiʿa Naeemia, Lahore, Pakistan, 4 Young male students memorizing the Qur’an at a mosque in Srirangapatna, in Karnataka State in India, 18 Author making ablutions (wudu) prior to ritual prayers at one of the mosques of Darul Uloom Deoband in India, 36 Students working on computers at Darul Uloom Deoband, India, 50 Shah Waliyullah’s grave in Delhi, India, 95 Statue of Tamerlane outside Ak-Saray Palace in Shakhrisabz, Uzbekistan, 115 Remnants of a historic madrasa built by Mahmud Gawan in Karnataka State in India today, 116 Students interacting with faculty at Jamiʿa Naeemia, Lahore, Pakistan, 154 Mawlana Anzar Shah Kashmiri, 165 Entrance to the Jamiʿa Naeemia madrasa in Lahore with antiterrorism security precautions, 167 Tomb inside the madrasa of Jamiʿa Naeemia, 168 Children in the town of Deoband in India going to elementary school in traditional clothing, 186 Students in class at Jamiʿa Naeemia, Lahore, Pakistan, 189 New York Times magazine story giving the impression that all madrasas are run by the Taliban and are linked to terrorism, 208 New marble mosque on Darul Uloom Deoband campus, 243 Doors to mosque of Jamiʿa Naeemia, Lahore, Pakistan, 248 MAP Geographical distribution of the main centers of traditional learning in South Asia, 169 Note on Transliteration and Translation Arabic transliteration in the text and notes is limited to ʿayn where indi- cated and ʾhamza only in the middle of a word. Otherwise I have dis- pensed of hamzas as in ʾAbu and written Abu and used ʿulama instead of ʿulamaʾ. I have used the term “Darul Uloom” without standard trans- literation features, since most madrasas transliterate in that form. I have also improvised a con ve nient form of transliteration for the benefi t of nonspecialist readers, such as ʿAbdul ʿAli instead of the ʿAbd al-ʿAli. In the bibliography, however, I have used a detailed transliteration system in the event that specialists wish to track some of my sources. Qurʾan translations are from Thomas Cleary, The Qurʾan: A New Trans- lation and Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qurʾan with occasional amendments. PROLOGUE Inside Madrasas One spring morning a few years ago, I walked through the town of Deo- band, home to India’s most famous Sunni Muslim seminary. A clean- shaven man, his face glowing with sarcasm, called out to me. “Looking for terrorists?” he asked in Urdu. Swiftly and instinctively I protested and yelled back at him, “I have every right to visit my alma mater.” With a sheepish, almost theatrical grin, he turned and walked away. I shouldn’t have been so annoyed. The century- old seminary in Deo- band came under intense scrutiny after the Taliban leadership claimed an ideological affi liation with similar institutions in Pakistan and Af ghan- i stan. Since September 11, 2001, journalists, politicians, and diplomats have descended periodically on this town near Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. This state is one node, along with the province of Pak- istan’s Punjab, with Lahore as its capital, in what might be called an ex- tended intellectual and spiritual heartland of Islam that spreads across the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. However, Muslim seminaries, or madrasas, everywhere became stig- matized once the Taliban was linked to the terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. Everyone conve niently ignored the history of the special, 1 makeshift madrasas that sprang up on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. These borderland madrasas served as refugee camps for youth in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion that ravaged Afghan i stan dur- ing the Cold War. The United States supported the war of the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviets. Since then, top- level government offi cials, former heads of state like U.S. president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair, along with a chorus of journalists, pundits, and scholars—singled out madra- sas as breeding grounds for terrorists. They did this without providing a shred of convincing evidence to warrant the indictment of a large, com- plex network of religious schools associated with multiple Muslim sects and ideologies. In pop u lar Western media parlance, the mere mention of the word “madrasa” conjures up an “us versus them” dynamic. This strategy ef- fectively mobilizes unwitting audiences to a mindset that does not ad- vance mutual understanding among civilizations and cultures. Revered by many Muslims but reviled, if not feared, by many non-Muslims, mad- rasas are the single most widely used educational resource to cultivate religious learning in parts of the Muslim world. Low- budget, monastery- like Muslim seminaries dot the landscape of South Asia. The schools fl ourish mainly in India, Pakistan, Af ghani stan, and Bangladesh as well as in the South Asian diaspora, but similar in- stitutions are equally visible in different shapes and forms in East Asia, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, and parts of Africa and the Middle East, especially Iran. Young adult males study in the South Asian institutions, but there is a growth in segregated mad rasas dedi- cated to the education of females. Madrasas specialize in the study of classical theological and legal texts as well as commentaries on the Muslim scripture, the Qurʾan. They place special emphasis on studying the life and teachings of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, and are engrossed in complex details as to how rules and morals should regulate public and private conduct according to religious norms. All the secondary disciplines that are needed to gain profi ciency in these primary fi elds of study are also taught, such as Arabic and Per- sian grammar and literature, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, among other subjects. Noted journalistic voices like Peter Bergen, William Dalrymple and, belatedly, policy experts Rebecca Winthrop and Corinne Graff of the Brookings Institution now acknowledge that not all madrasas can be in- 2 Prologue Meanings of Madrasa Pronounced “mud- ra- sa” and derived from the Arabic root word d- r- s, meaning “to study,” madrasa means the “place of study.” The most common word is dars, meaning a lecture or sermon. D- r- s also can be used in the senses of “to train,” “to discipline,” and “to repeatedly read something until one memorizes it.” Given the various shades of d- r- s in Arabic, madrasa can refer to a place where a sermon or lecture is delivered, and hence is applied to old- style schools with an emphasis on memory and discipline like the seminaries of South Asia. In modern Arabic, “madrasa” generically denotes any educational institution from preschool to high school, so every secular elementary, middle, or high school in a place like Cairo would be called a madrasa.