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Muslim schools in Desecularization, privatization and segregation of education in urban India van der Kaaij, S.

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Citation for published version (APA): van der Kaaij, S. (2020). Muslim schools in Mumbai: Desecularization, privatization and segregation of education in urban India.

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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 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 , Nagar Haveli, and Sikkim to a maximum of 87 communities in . (…) 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. Even those who disagree with an explanatory framework emphasizing the schools’ faith- based or religious character often fail to go far beyond a negation of religion as a causal factor in their analyses. For India, such scholars have pointed out the phenomenon of excess demand. Muslim schools grow in number, because the demand for education exceeds the supply provided by the government. In the words of Estelle James (1994, p. 778):

“Excess demand for education often exists when the capacity of the public-school system is less than full enrollment; that is, the option of attending a free or low-price public school is not available to everyone. If the private benefits from education are high (e.g., because of labor market rewards), many people who are left out of the public schools will seek places in private schools, as a ‘second best’ solution.”4

Yet authors offering this explanation for the existence and growth of Muslim schools still largely remain within the same debate frame: “Does religion play a role in the increase of faith-based and religious schooling?” They fail to venture much beyond this to find other, possibly more comprehensive, explanations for the phenomenon in the present or the past. That is regrettable as a great variety of schools exists fitting the category of “Muslim schools in Mumbai.” This suggests that analyzing the existence and growth of urban Indian Muslim schools exclusively through the lens of religion, whether from a desecularization angle or a modernization theory angle, cannot

4 This as opposed to “differentiated demand.” In the words of Estelle James: “[D]ifferentiated demand views private schooling as a response to differentiated tastes about the kind of education to be consumed. This model hypothesizes that important taste differences about education stem from religious and linguistic differences that concern group identification” (James, 1994, p. 779).

3 Chapter 1. Introduction

fully explain the phenomenon.5 Existing studies on Muslim schools may conclude that faith-based and religious schools do not pose a threat to the social cohesion of a society, and that religion is (or is not) the reason they are growing, but such conclusions do not help us further. They do not tell us what these schools are really like, who is selecting them for their children, or why they are growing in number. It is precisely this research gap that I aim to fill. I approach the phenomenon of Muslim schools without securitization and modernization biases inbuilt in my research aims, although I will not discard security and modernity as explanatory factors per se. I am concerned with the effort to describe and explain the phenomenon of Muslim schools in contemporary India. I endeavor to provide an answer to the question what factors explain the growth of Muslim schools in contemporary Mumbai in particular, and thereby hope to provide pointers as to what may explain the growth of faith-based and religious schooling in urban India in general.6

Private & Segregated There are two traits in particular that become obvious after even a quick round in the field. Yet curiously, they are often overlooked. These traits are that (most) Muslim schools are (1) private schools and (2) provide a segregated context with an exclusively Muslim student body. In the literature on Muslim schools, the private character of schools is hardly ever discussed in detail. Nor are Muslim schools generally taken into account in studies on privatization of education. Although segregation is indeed mentioned in studies on Muslim schools, this is generally only as an unfortunate outcome, or side effect, of faith-based education. Neither privatization nor segregation has been explored in relation to the foundation and growth of—or indeed as part of the rationale for—Muslim schools. These observations provide the first impetus to look beyond the faith-based character of Muslim schools in Mumbai and to study them not just as faith-based schools, but as private and as segregated schools as well. In other words, in addition to looking at these schools through the angle of desecularization, it is instructive to take into account two other contemporary societal (and educational) phenomena: privatization and segregation. Muslim schools could very well be reflecting and reinforcing privatization and segregation trends, if any.Figure 1.1 below illustrates this hypothesized twofold relationship.

5 The tendency to put the role of religion at the center of the inquiries and analyses is a tendency that is not limited to study of Muslim schools, but applies to the study of Muslims in India in general. As Hasan and Menon (2006/2004, p. 2) lament: “With a few notable exceptions, the spotlight [of the study of Muslims in India] has always been on the role of religion in Muslim life and culture, largely producing sociologies of religion (often distorted and in the abstract) rather than a sociology of Muslims. In this perspective, Muslims were typically seen as a monolithic entity in terms of an that is all-pervasive and primarily prescriptive, ignoring data on the heterogeneity of Muslim communities, their culture and their social organization”. 6 In 2001, the total population of India was approximately 1,029 million people. Of these, 828 million people (or 80.5%) were Hindus, and around 138 million (13.4%) were Muslims. Muslims make up the largest minority group in India (Census 2001). In Mumbai, Muslims made up 19.2% of the total population, Hindus made up 67.7% (according to the Census 2011). ). Globally, India is home to the largest number of Muslims, after Indonesia and Pakistan. Almost 11% of the world Muslim population lives in India (Pew 2017).

4 Set Up of the Study

Figure 1.1 Visualization of Hypothesis regarding the Relationship between Desecularization, Privatization & Segregation and Faith-Based Schools

a

Desecularization, Existence and Growth Privatization & of Faith-Based Schools Segregation b

In addition to more accurately explaining the existence and growth of faith-based schools in India, I expect that an additional focus on privatization and segregation, when studying Muslim schools, will bring new insights to the understanding of these schools. For example, by taking into account privatization trends, class differences within the Muslim community may become clearer. This may help to (further) dispel the myth of the Muslim community being a monolith. It may also show with more clarity how (parts of) the Muslim community try to overcome their disadvantaged position in education, and, by extension, their marginalized (social and socioeconomic) position in society as a whole.7 Similarly, by taking into account that Muslim schools in urban India are segregated schools, it could become apparent that segregation is not just a side effect of privatization and desecularization, but possibly a conscious strategy to create a safer, less hostile environment. Could a demand for segregated education, in addition to a demand for religious education and a demand for quality education, be at the heart of the growth of Muslim schools in urban India? In this study, the aim is to explore half of the hypothesized relationships between the three trends and Muslim schools in urban India. Desecularization, privatization, and segregation will be studied as causal factors behind the existence and growth of these schools. The other half, the reinforcing function that Muslim schools can have in relation to desecularization, privatization and segregation, are mostly beyond the scope of this study.8 These will be touched upon in the Conclusions, where the possible effects of a growth of faith-based schooling will briefly be discussed.

Set Up of the Study In Chapter 2 the three societal trends will be discussed in more detail. Subsequently, in Chapter 3 the methodological and technical choices made in this study are described and explained, as well as their potential consequences.

7 The educational marginalization of Indian Muslims will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6. 8 Analogous to terminology used by De Baets (2015) in an interesting but topically unrelated article on history writing and democracy, this could also be called the “amplifier-function.”

5 Chapter 1. Introduction

The next chapters are empirical. Based on extensive fieldwork in Muslim schools in Mumbai, the variety that can be found among these schools is described. This is done in Chapter 4. In three subsequent chapters, Muslim schools in Mumbai are analyzed through the lenses of desecularization, privatization, and segregation. The relevant structural and temporal contexts are introduced, and empirical data collected in the field are presented and discussed in Chapter 5, Chapter 6, and Chapter 7. From the very start of this research I felt that the phenomenon of Muslim schools and their growth should neither be merely studied from the perspective of structural developments, such as policies and institutional frameworks, nor just from the perspective of the educators, that is to say the founders and school staff. As a result, I devoted a lot of time to interviewing parents of various Muslim schools in Mumbai. I wanted to find out whether the reasons they would give for their school choice converged with what the literature told me. The findings in this regard are presented in Chapter 8. In the final chapter, I will summarize and drawing together the main findings, and briefly touch upon the major debate of the effect of faith-based schooling on society, and its relation to social cohesion.

6