1. Introduction

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Muslim schools in Mumbai Desecularization, privatization and segregation of education in urban India van der Kaaij, S. Publication date 2020 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): van der Kaaij, S. (2020). Muslim schools in Mumbai: Desecularization, privatization and segregation of education in urban India. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:28 Sep 2021 1. INTRODUCTION Every day Firdoos and Zubia go to school. Firdoos is picked up by a yellow school bus. Forty-five minutes later the bus drops her at the gate of her school located in a small lane adjacent to the JJ Flyover in one of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods. Around the same time Zubia takes the train to cover the twenty kilometers to her school located a stone’s throw away from the CST Railway station. After the morning assembly, both girls, in their respective schools and classrooms, spend their day learning about Newton, Archimedes’ Laws, and how to parse sentences. Just like all other school children in all other schools in Mumbai. Just like all other school children in all other schools in Mumbai. Yet, when, over the years, I summarized my research at Firdoos and Zubia’s schools by saying I studied “Muslim schools in Mumbai,” I would, without exception, encounter the same response: “Aha! You study madrasas!” These responses confirmed again and again that among the general public and among academics very little is known about the great diversity of Muslim schools in India. This is surprising, if not disturbing, since Muslim schools, in recent years, ostensibly did receive ample attention, particularly in popular media. Noor, Sikand and Van Bruinessen in the introduction of their 2008 edited volume on madrasas in Asia contextualize this new attention. “The Islamic Revolution in Iran, the role of Western- and Saudi-funded madrasas in Pakistan in training the mujahidin to fight the Soviets, the coming of power of the Taliban in Afghanistan and so on, all helped propel the madrasas (particularly of Asia) into the limelight of the media. This resulted in a sudden burst of writings on the madrasas, especially by journalists. These reports were often sensational, focusing on those madrasas or ulema that were depicted as ‘radical’ or militant and fundamentalist. (…) In the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the [October 2002] bombings in Bali Indonesia, madrasas came under even greater suspicion as alleged breeding grounds for terrorists” (Noor, Sikand, & Van Bruinessen, 2008, p. 10; cf. Alam, 2008, p. 2003; Winkelmann 2006, p. 252). That this attention has not led to an increased general knowledge of Muslim schools is due to the fact that much that has been written was based on untested assumptions and myths, rather than in-depth ethnographic and statistical data (Jeffery, Jeffery & Jeffrey 2006, p. 227-228). Three Assumptions Three assumptions about Muslim schools seem particularly persistent in popular and scientific reports on education in India, and resonate among the wider public as well. These assumptions are sometimes believed and sometimes questioned, but in either scenario the scope of most research does not venture far beyond them. The first assumption is that all Muslim schools are madrasas, and that all Muslim schools are thus, more or less, the same. The second one is that Muslim schools promote fundamentalist 1 Chapter 1. Introduction ideologies at best, and train children for terrorist activity at worst. The third assumption is that parents who send their children to these schools do so only because no other options are available to them. If provided with the possibility, they would surely select a “mainstream” school for their offspring’s education. In this study, I test these assumptions against reality, and bust them, as they will turn out to be myths, but, most of all, I will move the discussion on Muslim schools in India away from these limited inquiries. In what follows I will start with a simple working definition of what a Muslim school is: a Muslim school is a school where a majority of students (i.e., more than 50%) are Muslim. That begs the question what definition of Muslim will be used. Muslims in India are not a homogeneous community, which also is true of the Muslims in Mumbai (Menon, 2012, p. 4).1 Vora and Palshikar (2003, pp. 163-164), writing about contemporary Muslim in Mumbai, make a threefold division: “First, there are business communities like Bohras and Momins, who migrated to the city during the colonial period. Second there are the Konkani Muslims who came in search of source of livelihood and third there are North Indian Muslims who have acquired greater significance in recent years.” In addition to origins, diversity further comes from the adherence to religious different sects (i.e., Shia or Sunni), and religious (reform) movements and schools of thought (such as Darul Uloom Deoband and Ahl-i-Hadith, Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, the Barelwis, and the Nadwatul Ulema2), as well as wide variation in customs, beliefs, and practices. In this study, I define Muslim as a person who self-identifies as Muslim, while acknowledging that behind this term great heterogeneity lies hidden.3 1 Jim Masselos (2007, pp. 15-16) noted for the early twentieth century “Although distinguished from Hindus, Parsis and Christians, the Muslims of Bombay city were by no means a single entity. As a prominent Muslim pointed out in 1908, ‘the ‘most essential fact to be learnt about the Mohammedan community of Bombay is that there is no such community. There are various communities in the city which profess this religion.’ He continued: ‘The 1901 Census listed some fourteen different categories of Muslims in the city with a further category of unspecified and the list might even be further refined.’” More recently Yogendra Singh (2006, p. 38) observed, based on data compiled through a survey called Peoples of India (POI), that “there are 4635 communities in India of which 584 are Muslims.” With the exception of two states in the North-East of India, “all states have Muslim communities ranging from one each in the states and union territories of Goa, Nagar Haveli, and Sikkim to a maximum of 87 communities in Gujarat. (…) This demonstrates the internal social structural differentiation within the Muslim communities in India, and their significant geographical dispersal.” Singh further observed that Urdu [on which more below] is identified as one of 325 languages recorded in the POI survey, and spoken by 162 communities.” 2 “All five represent large Muslim organizations that emerged between the late 19th and the mid-20th centuries” (Winkelmann, 2005, p. 162). 3 Thomas Blom Hansen (2001, p. 266) insightfully noted that “[t]he notion of the existence of a single Muslim community in Mumbai has in many ways been forced upon multiple linguistic groups and sects in the city by the assertion of an aggressive Hindu politics since the late 1980s. In the heated atmosphere after the demolition of Babri Masjid in North India in December 1992, militant Hindu organizations organized an anti-Muslim pogrom in the city in January 1993. More than 1000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed and many more wounded and the conflagration was a shock and a traumatic experience for every Muslim in the city. Thousands were displaced and lived in camps in the Muslim areas in the city, and many chose never to return to their earlier homes in mixed or predominantly Hindu neighbourhoods. In that sense, the Muslims in Bombay became more than ever before a de facto community in spatial terms and in terms of being approached and administered by police and state bureaucracy as a unified security problem and an active threat towards the civic order and the Hindu middle classes.” 2 Security & Relegion Security & Religion Testing these assumptions will be done within the context of analyzing the growth of Muslim schools in Mumbai. Although the number of thorough studies on Muslim schooling has increased since the mid-2000s, the scope is still limited. Muslim schools are primarily approached from a securitization angle: research on Muslim schools is often undertaken to test hypotheses on the relation between Muslim schooling and social cohesion, fundamentalism, and terrorism (Noor et al., 2008; cf. Mercer, 2006, Alam, 2008, Hefner & Muhammad, 2007, Malik, 2008). Further, much of what has been written on Muslim schools in media and academia has focused almost exclusively on the faith-based or religious character of these schools. Aspects related to this are emphasized in answers to any queries about the schools, including the rationale for founding of the school and the selection of the same by parents. Some authors stress the role of religious educators who want to proselytize. Others maybe point to the schools as an example and expression of a global resurgence of religion – a prime locus for desecularization trends.

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