Why take media’s opinion on madrassas when you can visit one a few blocks away from your neighborhood?
The love for the Holy Prophet (pbuh) that was displayed by our people on Friday was unprecedented and one has to laud the government’s decision to officially announce a National Day of Hooliganism. Normally, state, like a mother, should nurture goodness, promote peace and acceptance between people, be they religious, secular, socialists, leftists, rightist, upper, middle, lower class or confused. But over the years, successive governments have fuelled differences and have taken actions that have only increased the number of people that belong to the ‘confused’ section in the society. However this article is not meant to highlight our society’s utter failure at coexistence. What happened on Friday was just the tip of the iceberg.
Islamiyat is a core subject in our public and private education systems and nearly everyone, by the time they are in grade 5, knows that there are five prayers in a day, that we have to perform Haj once in lifetime, that we have two Eids and we give Zakat every year. Surprisingly, the subject matter remains the same, beginning from class one to BA/BSc, especially in the public sector institutes. The same five prayers, the same Haj once in lifetime, the same two Eids and the same Zakat.
Meanwhile, the same children begin studying science from the basic living and non-living things to cells, atoms and electrons to string theory and by the time they reach university, some even know how to make a nuclear bomb.
The same children, if they are pursuing subjects in humanities and social sciences, start with A-B-C and go onto Jack and Jill and onto the Radiant Way and then Good Bye Mr Chips and read essays from Milton and excerpts from Virginia Woolf and poetry from Sylvia Plath and the Bronte sisters and plays from grandmaster Shakespeare. Their expertise in core subjects such as English and Urdu is much more advanced in comparison to their expertise in Islamic studies. Islamiyat though isn’t something that stays in the books. It becomes the rationale behind everything a Muslim does. As Alama Iqbal says in his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, ‘Islam emphasises deeds more than the idea,’ action cannot be separated from knowledge in the Islamic framework. The BA/BSc level Islamiyat, too, has nothing new to offer.
Come Friday, the National Day of Hooliganism.
It was obvious that religion and love for the Prophet meant a lot to the protesters. They had a sense that Islam entails of them to love the Holy Prophet but they did not know that loving in this context necessarily implies becoming like him or maybe they did not know how to do it.
Of course they will go out and kill and burn. They were never told what religion asks of them in this situation. Their characters were not moulded, they were never taught courses on how to be kind like the Holy Prophet, how to forgive and forget like his companions, what scholars and sufi teachers do in the years they spend in helping people cleanse their heart of negativity and hatred. They were taught that it is a sin to be angry, but nobody’s ever shown them how not to be angry. All theory, no practical demonstrations. All they know of Islam is through ill-informed televangelists who come from the same background as theirs or from TV actors who perform live exorcism and ask people to stop watching ‘fahash movies’ in which they act themselves.
Don’t blame them, blame our system.
When our knowledge of Islam remains well below a sane lower limit, when people keep ignoring the role madrassah education can play in filling the blanks in character building that the formal public education is leaving behind, of course our youth will spew hate. They are hurt and nobody has taught them how to channel their pain productively. Some of our pseudo liberal secular extremist brothers and sisters go on to say that if we become secular all these problems will go away. Their throw-away-baby-with-bathwater argument is so irrelevant that it amuses me how lost their cause is. Maybe the elite 0.2 percent wants to and can be irreligious but it would take others a few hundred more years to be on the same plane as them.
There are many students, even from private institutes, who find that what is taught in universities does not give them a complete picture of how Islam functions in a society and they have chosen to pursue classical Islamic learning being taught in madrassas. There is no reason why students should not be open to studying books by Imam Ghazali, Imam Taimiya and Ibn Jawzi, by our own Shah Wali Ullah, Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Mufti Taqi Usmani in either madrassas or in formal education system so that they can reconcile the world and religion within them and can become vessels of peace. Discontent in hearts leads to what happened on Friday.
A combination of madrassah and formal education enables students to engage formal and Islamic scholarly tradition in their lives and their understanding of both is drastically better than someone who takes the either/or approach. They are able to get a whole picture of reality and in practice, this is what eradicates extremes from the society. Even if they are studying it only to reject and disagree afterwards, they will at least know what they are talking about. If anything, this will definitely improve the quality of editorials that are written in our mainstream pseudo liberal secular newspapers and they will, for once, go beyond ‘talibanization’ and ‘extremism’ and ‘mullah’ and ‘dars aunty’ while talking about madrassas which are an integral part of our society, history and culture, whether we like it or not.
Isn’t that the kind of young men and women we are looking for?
If we go beyond making fun of our countrymen and saying ‘yeh kahan ka Islam hay’ ‘jahil’, ‘mullah hotay hi aisay hein’, ‘niqabi ninjas danday hi utha sakti hein bas’ etc, we will see potential. It hurts to see all that misappropriated love being channelled into hate – just because we are too caught up in appearances to admit the good madrassas can do to our society. No doubt there are problems in the madrassah system as well, but if the majority gets to know what is being taught in madrassas, it would become easier to weed out the rotten eggs there. It is a win-win for all. When religion is such an integral part of our society, I wonder why no effort is being made to improve people’s knowledge of it.
Why take media’s opinion on madrassas when you can visit one a few blocks away from your neighborhood?
The writer is a staff member, a LUMS graduate and is currently pursuing a Dars-e-Nizami Aalimah degree in a women’s institute. She can be reached at tajwar.awan@gmail.com