Education for Muslims needs a little self-help

August 30, 2020, 7:05 AM IST SA Aiyar in Swaminomics | India, politics | TOI

   

Dear Asaduddin Owaisi,

Recently you bemoaned the growing literacy and school attendance gaps between Muslims and
other communities. You cited the NSSO’s 75th round report showing that 22% of Muslim girls
aged 3 to 35 have never enrolled in a formal educational course. The attendance gap for
Muslims, especially girls, is low at the primary level but rises sharply for higher levels.

You define the problem as “successive governments have refused to invest in education for
Muslims.” Your solution is government scholarships for all. I am glad you highlight the
importance of education in improving the economic and social backwardness of Muslims
highlighted in the Sachar Committee Report. But a lack of scholarships affects all communities.
Christians, another Indian minority, fare very well educationally compared with all communities,
including Hindus, and not because of more government scholarships.

Instead of depending on the state, Christians have long created their own educational
institutions of excellence (eg St Stephen’s College and St Columba’s School in Delhi). So good
are top Christian schools and colleges that Hindus and Muslims pull all possible strings to get
into them. This is not because Christians have more money. Muslim Wakf Boards have
thousands of crores of assets. The Muslim practice of zakat provides vast sums annually from
well-off Muslims for charitable purposes, including education. The Muslim community has the
means to create world class schools and colleges.

It has created a few universities of reasonable quality like Aligarh Muslim University, Osmania
and Jamia Milia Islamia. Southern Muslim institutions like Kerala’s Muslim Education Society
have done good work. Yet these are exceptions, so Muslims remain educationally backward.

Overall, Muslim institutions do not remotely match the reputation or cachet of Christian
institutions. That is why thousands of new private schools give themselves “convent” names like
Holy Mother or Saint Peter’s, because convent schools are associated with high quality
education. Muslim schools are not, nor even Hindu ones.

Christian missionaries came not just to educate Indians, they had a religious agenda too: good
schools helped make Christianity attractive to potential converts. Yet the missionary schools
never focused on religious studies. They aimed at excellence in every aspect of education.

During early centuries of Muslim rule, India was known as a great centre of learning and visitors
like Ibn Batuta reaffirmed it. Some Muslim rulers aimed to improve and extend education. But
the sad overall story is that India slipped educationally far below the West, in both Muslim and
Hindu kingdoms. Nothing like Oxford, Cambridge or the Royal Society came up. Literacy was
just 3.2% in the 1870s. It rose under British rule but was still a pathetic 14.1% in 1941.
Madrassas ceased to be great centres of learning and wakfs used them mainly to teach kids the
Quran.

Many critics say Muslims are backward because they rely on low-quality madrassa education,
so the solution lies in reforming and modernising madrassa curriculums. Sorry, but the Sachar
Committee showed that only 4% of Muslims attend madrassas. This is not the root of their
educational backwardness. One reason could be Muslim elite traditions for centuries
emphasising military training over education. Prominent Muslims like M J Akbar have grieved
that Muslim reluctance to educate girls will tend to keep half the community backward.

But this cannot be the whole story. Muslims were once world leaders in science and medicine. I
learned while visiting Uzbekistan that the medieval madrassas of Samarkand, Bukhara and
Khiva were great universities with some of the best scientists and mathematicians in the world.
Ulugh Beg, grandson of Tamerlane, was the greatest astronomer of his time. Khiva was the
birthplace of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, who pioneered algebra, algorithms and the decimal
point. Ibn Sina (called Avicenna in the West), foremost medical expert of his time, taught at
Bukhara and Khiva. No scientists of remotely comparable greatness arose in Indian madrassas.

Mr Owaisi, the quality of government schools in India is so poor that giving more government
scholarships will do little for Muslims or any other community. The Wakf Boards and well-off
Indian Muslims have ample financial capacity to create a string of world-class educational
institutions. Why not start by creating 200 top-class schools good enough to attract foreign
students, and gradually expand that to 2,000? Next, aim for at least three world-class
universities. Recalling ancient Bukhara and Samarkand, why not call them madrassas? You
could even name them after Ulugh Beg, al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina. Today thousands of Hindus
boast that they studied in St Stephen’s College. Please aim for an India where thousands of
Hindus one day boast of studying at Ulugh Beg Madrassa.