Madrasa Education in South Asia

Madrasa Education in South Asia

By Yoginder Sikand

Madrasas first emerged in South Asia under the patronage of medeival Muslim rulers, who sought to create a class of clerics to interpret Islamic tradition in ways that suited statecraft. From then till now these institutions have persisted with a curriculum that has seen few changes. The Islam they teach leaves little room for creative interpretation, and it is from this tradition that many political tendencies in the Subcontinent, including the Taliban have emerged.

With the seemingly ineluctable march of modernity and secularisation, Western-style development planners in much of the post-colonial Muslim world had hoped that traditional Islamic centres of education—the madrasas—would be rapidly replaced by Western schools. These schools would train a new generation of educated Muslims who, while rooted in their own cultural traditions, would imbibe the best that the West had to offer. Madrasas were seen as centres of obscurantism and superstition, and as one of the principal causes of Muslim decline at the hands of the West. In different Muslim countries the attack on the madrasa system took different forms. In Turkey, for instance, a government decree in 1925 ordered the closure of all madrasas in the country with a single stroke of the pen, soon after the Republicans under the staunchly secular Kemal Attaturk took power after deposing the last Muslim Caliph.

This policy was followed in several Muslim countries that came under communist rule in the aftermath of the Russian revolution in 1917, such as Albania and the entire Muslim belt of Central Asia. In other countries, such as Morocco and Algeria, while the state continued to base its legitimacy on Islamic foundations, Islamic education was sought to be ‘modernised’, with departments of Islamic studies in modern universities taking the place of traditional madrasas. In 1961, the socialist and Arab nationalist, Jamal Abdul Nasser, in his impatience with the traditional Muslim ulama (clerics and scholars), transformed the world-renowned Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest, largest and most respected madrasa in the world, into a modern university.

South Asia, where over a third of the world’s Muslim population lives, followed a slightly different course. While the madrasas were left largely untouched, the effective delinking of madrasa education from the job market led to the declining popularity of traditional Islamic schools. However, the 1980s witnessed a rapid revival of the madrasas across South Asia, in terms of numbers as well as power and influence. In India, the number of madrasas is now estimated at some thirty to forty thousand, with a similar figure for Pakistan and probably a slightly smaller number in Bangladesh.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, madrasas today play a crucial role in national politics. The former has several ulama-based political parties with millions of supporters. The Taliban regime in neighbouring Afghanistan is entirely ulama-based, products of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. In India, the ulama and their madrasas wield less direct political influence.

While there are few ulama active in Indian politics, they, however, exercise an enormous influence on Muslim public opinion. The massive agitations that India witnessed against what was seen to be an attack on Muslim Personal Law in the 1980s were led principally by the ulama. The Muslim Personal Law Board, which sees itself as the key representative of Indian Muslims, is also largely in the hands of madrasa leaders.


Although the power of the ulama among the Muslims of South Asia is today substantial, it is interesting that early Muslim history knew no such separate class of professional clerics and religious scholars as the ulama or of an institution of specialised religious training as the madrasa. After all, Islam is unique among the world’s major religions in its radical disavowal of any intermediary between God and lay believers. The Quranic assertion that Muslims could approach God directly obviated the need for a professional class of priests. Every Muslims was seen as, in a sense, his own priest. Prayers could be led by any believer, for God was believed to be equally accessible to all Muslims. The institution of priesthood was further undermined because acquiring knowledge of the scriptural tradition was seen to be a duty binding on all Muslims, men as well as women, and not as the prerogative of a special class. While some people were recognised as more learned or pious than others, early Islamic history saw no paid class of ulama as religious specialists. Islamic knowledge could be had by all, generally provided freely in mosques and, later, in Sufi lodges.

Methods old and new:



The word madrasa shares a common root with the term dars, which means ‘lesson’ or ‘instruction’. Although it does not specifically refer to a religious seminary, the word has come to be used as such in common parlance. It is a specialised institution for the training of ulama (literally ‘scholars’). The word ulama (singular, alim), too, does not denote a class of specialists in the Islamic disciplines, for early Islamic tradition did not countenance any distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ education. However, today the term ulama is used to refer to a class of scholars who are well-versed in the intricacies of the Islamic legal tradition.

The emergence of the institution of the madrasa—as distinct from the mosque—as a centre for religious learning, and of the ulama as a class of religious specialists, coincided with the spread of Islam outside the Arabian peninsula in the years after the death of the Prophet. By the eighth century, large parts of West and Central Asia, in addition to almost the whole of North Africa, had been brought under Muslim rule. A de facto division between political and religious power, foreign to pristine Islam, now came into being.

Under the Caliphates of the Umayyad in Damascus, and, then later, the Abbasid in Baghdad, while political power rested with the Caliphs, religious authority gradually began being exercised by a special class of men—the ulama—set apart from the general body of Muslims as experts in Islamic theology and law. The two classes worked in tandem, the Caliphs providing the ulama with protection and official patronage, and the ulama seeking to interpret the Islamic tradition in order to legitimise the rule of the Caliphs, which, as the historical records tell us, rarely, if ever, accorded with the foundational principles of Islam.

It was in this period that madrasas as specialised institutions for the training of ulama emerged, first in West Asia, and then, as Muslim rule spread, in Africa, southern Europe and South Asia. Madrasas were subsidised with permanent sources of income, such as land grants by the state (inam) or by endowments (awqaf) by rich Muslims. Although madrasas, as distinct from elementary mosque-schools (makatib), were known before the tenth century, the first major madrasa dates to as late as 1065, when Nizam-ul Mulk, the Seljuq wazir, ordered the construction of the grand Nizamiah madrasa in Baghdad. It appears that the multiple challenges posed to the Sunni religious and political establishment at the time, in the form of the Ithna Ashari Shi’as (fierce opponents of Sunni claims to orthodoxy), the Batini Isma’ilis (with their belief in the abrogation of the shariat) and the Mutazilite rationalists (who insisted that religion must be understood through the intellect), prompted Nizam-ul Mulk to set up the Baghdad madrasa to train a class of loyal ulama who could effectively deal with what were seen as challenges to the state in the form of dissenting religious sects and movements.

The Nizamiah school, like the madrasas which, following it, were set up in other parts of the Muslim world, was intended to train bureaucrats for the royal courts and the administration, as well as judges (qazis), jurisprudents (fuqaha) and muftis qualified to issue fatawa or legal opinions, all of whom were appointed by the state to staff various levels of the bureaucracy. Typically, teachers as well as students were drawn from the elite, and there seems to have been little provision for the education of children from the poorer classes. The thirteenth century commentator, Ziauddin Barani, a Turkish noble attached to the court of the Delhi Sultans, insisted in his Fatawa-i-Jahandari that higher religious education and top religious and administrative posts were to be kept as a closely-guarded preserve of the foreign-born Turkish, Central Asian, Iranian and Arab Muslim elite. The poorer classes of the Muslims, in India consisting largely of ‘low’ caste indigenous converts and their descendants, were to be content merely with knowledge of the basic principles of the faith.

Barani’s views, of course, had no legitimacy in the shariah, for the Quran lays down the fundamental equality of all believers, as such, but they reflected the way in which large sections of the medieval Muslim elite perceived themselves and the world around them.Since one of the primary aims of the madrasas was to produce a class of bureaucrats and, particularly, judges, as employees of the state, the teaching of Islamic law (fiqh) came to occupy a major position in the madrasa curriculum. This stress on the law became so pronounced that in the minds of many ulama, Islamic education was practically reduced to the teaching of the shariah, which the later Sufis were to vehemently protest.

Among the Sunnis, who today account for some ninety per cent of the world’s Muslim population, four schools of jurisprudence developed—the Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafi—and each of these schools had its own chain of madrasas, wherein its own system of jurisprudence was taught. The four Sunni schools recognised each other’s legitimacy, but differed on minor points of detail in their understanding of the derivation of the rules of Islamic law from the primary sources, the Quran and the Hadith (reports of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad), and the two secondary sources, qiyas (analogical reasoning) and ijma (the consensus of the community).

In addition to law, Arabic grammar and prose, logic and philosophy, subjects that a prospective bureaucrat would find indispensable, were also taught at the madrasas. Theology (kalam) and mysticism (tasawwuf), subjects that one would have expected religious seminaries to specialise in, received relatively little attention. Orthopraxy, proper ritual practice and social behaviour, rather than orthodoxy or correct religious belief, was the major concern of the establishment ulama, and so it remains till this day, and this was clearly reflected in the subjects taught at the madrasas.



In South Asia, Muslim rulers made elaborate arrange-ments for the setting up of madrasas to train a class of ulama attached to their courts and to provide them with the legitimacy that they needed to bolster their rule. Not all ulama accepted royal patronage, however. In the eyes of many Sufis, particularly those belonging to the Chishti order, by far the most popular in India, those ulama who accepted employment under the Sultans were seen as little more than puppets in their hands, willing to barter their faith for worldly trifles and ever ready to provide favo-urable fatawa to support even those policies of the Sultans that were in flagrant violation of the Islamic law. They were branded as ‘worldly ulama’ (ulama-e-su), in contrast to the ulama of the truth’ (ulama-e-haq), who refused any favours from the state or from the ruling nobility and thereby preserved their faith intact.

In addition to madrasas producing higher-level ulama, most mosques had schools (makatib) attached to them where children were taught to recite and memorise the Quran and a smattering of Persian and Arabic, a pattern that continues till this day. No standardised syllabus was employed in the madrasas, however, and each school was free to teach its own set of books, many of which, however, they shared in common. These consisted, largely, of commentaries on classical works on Islamic law. With the general consensus of the ulama that the ‘gates of ijtihad’, or creative understanding of the law in the light of changing conditions, had been ’closed’ following the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in the late thirteenth century, after the devastation of Baghdad by the plundering Mongol hordes, the madrasa curriculum lost its earlier dynamism, degenerating into a timeless warp. Many, though not all, ulama now began to insist that new understandings and inter-pretations of the divine law were forbidden, and all that Muslims needed to do to preserve their faith intact was to “blindly follow” (taqlid) the interpretations laid down by the medieval scholars. New books, attuned to the very different context in which Muslims found themselves in India, ceased to be written and read, and a strict conformity to the classical works was sought to be rigidly enforced.


Signs of change emerged in the late seventeenth century however, when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir commissioned a team of ulama to prepare a compendium of Islamic law, named after him as the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri. The emperor granted one of the ulama associated with this project, Mulla Nizamuddin, an old mansion owned by a French trader, the Firanghi Mahal, in Lucknow, where he set up a madrasa that soon emerged as the leading centre of Islamic studies in North India, with students flocking there from different parts of the Mughal empire. Mulla Nizamuddin prepared a fresh curriculum for study here, which came to be known after him as the Dars-i-Nizami or the “Syllabus of Nizami”. The focus of the Dars-i-Nizami was on what were called the “rational sciences” (maqulat), subjects such as law, philosophy and grammar that would befit prospective bureaucrats.

Three centuries later, the Dars-i-Nizami continues to be the syllabus of most madrasas in South Asia today, although an increasing number of books on the “revealed sciences” (manqulat), such as theology (kalam), the traditions of the Prophet (hadith), jurisprudence (fiqh) and the principles of Islamic law (usul-i-fiqh) have been added over time.

While in Mughal times the madrasas served the purpose of training an intellectual and bureau-cratic elite, leaving the poorer classes largely out of their purview, things began to change with the onset of British rule. By the early nineteenth century, the British had replaced Persian with English as the language of officialdom and Muslim qazis and muftis with lawyers and judges trained in English law. The eclipse of Muslim political power in the region, and the administrative changes wrought by the British, meant that the ulama and their madrasas were now bereft of sources of political support and patronage. In many cases, the vast grants (awqaf) that Muslim rulers had provided the madrasas were taken over by the East India Company.

In this rapidly changing context, the ulama now began to turn to ordinary Muslims for support. It is striking that it was only in the aftermath of the failed revolt of 1857 against the British that a vast network of madrasas was established all over north India. In the absence of Muslim political power, it was the ordinary Muslim who was seen as the “defender of Islam”, and, for this, every Muslim, it now came to be believed, must be armed with a knowledge of the principles of the faith. Islamic knowledge now became far more easily accessible to ordinary Muslims than ever before. The introduction of the printing press was eagerly taken advantage of by the ulama, who published scores of tracts to impart Islamic knowledge to an increasingly literate constituency. The rapidly increasing number of madrasas that now began being set up further galvanised this process of bringing ordinary Muslims to share in the shariah-centred Islamic tradition, which they had hitherto been effectively kept apart from.

The most important event in this regard was the setting up in 1867 of the Da-rul Ulum madrasa at the town of Deoband in the Saharanpur district of present-day Uttar Pradesh, not far from Delhi. The Dar-ul Ulum is today the largest Islamic seminary in the world after the Al-Azhar in Cairo, and has several thousand smaller mad-rasas attached to it all over India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as in countries in the West where South Asian Muslims are to be found. Some of the founders of Dar-ul Ulum had taken part in the aborted revolt against the British in 1857, inspired by a commitment to re-establishing Muslim rule in the Subcontinent. After the defeat of the revolt, they turned their attention to the field of education with the aim of promoting a religious conscious-ness among the Muslims in order to carry on the struggle against the British through other means. They envisaged the madrasa as a centre for the preservation of the tradition of Islamic learning and Muslim culture, which they saw as being under grave threat from the British, and from the ‘irreligious’ influences of modernity that British rule had brought in its wake.

Thus, many of those who founded Dar-ul Ulum were opposed to the modernist attempts at reconciling Islam with critical reason, Western culture and Victorian morality, as best represented by reformist, liberal Muslim leaders like Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan and Amir ‘Ali. They were equally opposed to the Chris-tian missionaries, and, later, to the fiercely anti-Muslim Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj. British rule, atheism, rationalism, modernism, scepticism, Christian missionaries and the Arya Samaj attacks on Islam were all seen as major challenges which could only be met if Muslims firmly abided by the dictates of their faith, and, in the minds of the founders of the Dar-ul Ulum, the most effective means for this was by setting up a chain of religious schools which would train young Muslims in the shariah-centred Islamic tradition.


In a marked departure from the pattern of the traditional Muslim religious schools, the founders of the Deoband madrasa consciously decided not to depend on the state or on the traditional Muslim elites for patronage and monetary support. Instead, they insisted that ordinary Muslims must contribute to the running of the institution, in whatever small way they could, in order for it to be a real community-wide enterprise. Special delegates were appointed by the madrasa to travel to towns in villages throughout north India to collect contributions from ordinary Muslims to support the costs of running the seminary.

In its early years most of the Deoband Madrasa’s students were drawn from families from western Uttar Pradesh qasbas or small towns with a significant population of Muslim gentry with a long and established tradition of Islamic education. But in a few decades its student composition gradually changed. As more well-off Muslim families began sending their children to modern schools, and, in particular, to the Aligarh College set up by Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan (who, interestingly, was branded a kafir by leading Deobandis for his rationalistic views on religion, notably his conviction that the “Word of God”, the Quran, could not contradict the “Work of God”, the laws of nature), Deoband began attracting increa-sing numbers of students from lower-middle class and even pea-sant and artisan families, who, in the centuries of Muslim rule, seem to have had little or no access to Islamic education at all. The free education, including board and lodging, that was provided at the madrasa, and the hope for a job as a mosque imam or madrasa teacher upon graduation, a position of considerable respect and authority, acted as powerful incentives bringing large numbers of young boys from poorer families to enroll at the Dar-ul Ulum. The new access that the madrasa provided these students to the shariah-centred Islamic tradition and the culture of the Muslim elite added further impetus to their quest for upward social mobility.

The madrasa at Deoband represented a new form of Islamic “orthodoxy”, seeking to come to terms with the challenges of modernity. Thus, on the one hand, it willingly embraced the bureaucratic methods of functioning associated with the British government and Christian missionary schools, including a fixed syllabus, regular examinations and an administrative hierarchy. It also made good use of the new media of print to spread its doctrines far beyond the narrow circles of the madrasas of earlier times. On the other hand, its theology remained firmly grounded in the Hanafi tradition, enjoining, as it did, stern conformity to past precedent as formulated by the medieval fuqaha, or jurists. It refused to recognise the need to reinterpret Islamic law and jurisprudence in the vastly changed context of British rule. In the face of the challenges of modernity, it insisted that Muslims must firmly abide by the traditional corpus of fiqh or jurisprudence as laid down in the books penned by Hanafi scholars centuries ago. To depart from this tradition was seen as tantamount to bidaat or “innovation” from the path (sunnat) of the Prophet Muhammad, which was nothing less than grave heresy.

Pre-Deoband madrasas had no fixed curriculum or a system of regular classes. A student would travel from place to place, reading a particular book from a particular alim (religious scholar) who was considered an authority on it. After he had mastered that particular book, often having had to memorise it completely, he would be given a certificate (sanad or ijaza) which would allow him, in turn, to teach that book to others. The Deoband madrasa can be credited with having instituted, for the first time in South Asia, a radical change in the methods of transmission of religious knowledge. The peripatetic seeker of knowledge (talib) was replaced with a regular student who enrolled for a maulvi alim or maulvi fazil course, which required him to stay at the madrasa for a period of between seven and twelve years, depending on the degree of specialisation that he wished to pursue. Each year he would be required to take a series of examinations, the papers for which were set by the leading sheikhs or masters at the madrasa. Yet, these pedagogical innovations did not go far enough. Students were still required to memorise the texts and critical debate was strongly discouraged.



The content of the syllabus of the Deoband madrasa represented a firm commitment of the founders of the school to the classical Hanafi tradition. The Dars-i-Nizami of the early eighteenth century Mulla Nizamuddin continued almost intact, except for the excision of certain “rational sciences” (maqulat) such as Greek philosophy, which were deemed to undermine faith in the divine nature of the Quranic revelation. In addition, more books of Hadith (narrations about the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) and fiqh were introduced. The overwhelming focus of the curriculum was on Islamic jurisprudence, so much so that, in the minds of the Deobandis, Islam was seen almost as synonymous with the shariah, while the rich tradition of classical Islamic theology (kalam) was almost completely ignored. Unlike the Muslim modernists of their time, as represented by Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh school, the Deobandis saw no room for ijtihad or interpreting the demands of the shariah in the context of modern conditions. The “gates of ijtihad” (bab-ul ijtihad), were, they insisted, “firmly closed”.

Of particular concern to the founders of the Deoband madrasa was the need for Muslims to strictly follow the practices (sunnah) of the Prophet Muhammad in every aspect of their lives. This required that all influences, practices and beliefs that had no sanction in the sunnah of the Prophet be strongly attacked, these being branded as un-Islamic. Among these were what were seen as ‘Hinduistic’ influences, such as the worship of local deities, participation in Hindu festivals such as Diwali and Holi, child marriage, consulting soothsayers and astrologers, the ban on widow remarriage and a host of domestic rituals associated with birth, marriage and death and other life-cycle events. It was held that if these practices continued unabated, the Muslims would gradually be absorbed into the Hindu fold, a fear that gained particular impetus in the wake of the shuddhi (purification) campaign launched by the aggressively anti-Muslim Arya Samaj under Swami Shraddhanand in the 1920s, which saw the mass conversion of several thousand neo-Muslims to Hinduism in large parts of north India.

Firm lines of division were, thus, sought to be drawn between Muslims and Hindus, to stave off the looming threat of mass apostasy. The Deobandis were also equally opposed to what they viewed as the ‘un-Islamic’ beliefs and practices among the Sunni Muslim populace associated with popular Sufism and Shiaism. Although not opposed to Sufism as such, and many of the Deobandi sheikhs were themselves Sufi masters, they vehemently attacked many popular practices that had, over the centuries, developed around the cults of the Sufis. These included prostration at Sufi shrines (arguing, instead, that prostration, being tantamount to worship, was due to Allah alone), musical and dance performances and wasteful and costly rituals. They also bitterly critiqued those be-shariah Sufis who did not abide by the dictates of Islamic law. The mystical quest (tariqa), they insisted, must be trod within the bounds of the shariah. Sufis who believed that they were not bound by the shariah, as well as the Shias, were condemned as infidels and enemies of the faith.

Today, the Deobandis have emerged as a powerful school of thought, with several thousand madrasas all over South Asia associated with the mother madrasa, the Dar-ul Ulum at Deoband. Many students from these madrasas go to Deoband to spend some time in specialised training in Islamic law. Till recently, several hundred students from Deobandi madrasas abroad would enroll at the Dar-ul Ulum to pursue their higher studies, but the number of such students is now negligible.

Co-ordination between the Dar-ul Ulum and smaller Deobandi madrasas is diffuse and loose, however, more in the nature of a shared vision rather than in terms of any identifiable linkages or organisational bonds. The overall commitment to the Deobandi vision of Islam is what unites them, besides visits and lecture tours by leading Deobandi ulama and the exchange of books and periodicals. The Deobandi vision also inspires several Muslim political movements active today in various parts of South Asia. Thus, the ruling Taliban (“students”) in Afghanistan are products of the numerous Deobandi madrasas located in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan. Common to them is the understanding that western influence is to be shunned and so must efforts to interpret Islam afresh. ‘Blind following’ of the medieval scholars of the Hanafi fiqh is strictly enjoined.


Similar is the case of the Jami’at-ul Ulama-i-Islam, one of the several radical Islamic political parties based in Pakistan which are today actively involved in what they call the ‘jihad’ against the Americans in Afgha-nistan and against the Indians in Kashmir. Radical Deobandi madrasas got a major boost in the Zia-ul Haq years, when the Pakistani dictator, in an effort to bolster his own fragile legitimacy, liberally funded numerous madrasas all over the country. They dispensed a radical Islamist discourse, churning out thousands of young students who later went on to join the ranks of the mujahidin fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Deobandis in Pakistan, along with the Jama’at-e-Islami (to which, interestingly, many of the Deobandis have been fiercely opposed) were the major beneficiaries of this newly-found state largesse of the Zia years. In Bangladesh, too, governments with little popular legitimacy, beginning with Gen. Zia-ur Rahman in 1975, have been actively patronising the madrasas, employing the ulama as a weapon with which to beat the secular opposition with.

However, not all Deobandis are active on the political front, and there are sharp differences even among them. This diversity in political positions of the Deobandis can be traced to the early evolution of the Deoband vision in post-Mughal India. Among the founding fathers of the Deoband were some who were actively committed to armed jihad against the British, while there were others quite willing to work within the framework of British rule for preserving and promoting Muslim interests and the Islamic tradition. Even among the former there were acute differences on the nature of the jihad that was envisaged. Some called for armed struggle against the British to convert India into dar-ul-islam or “land of Islam”, but they were always in a minority. The dominant voices at the madrasa from the first decade of the twentieth century till 1947 were of those who, while committed to the struggle against the British, insisted on the need to co-operate with the Hindus in a joint effort for winning freedom for India. Prominent among these was the Shaikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud-ul Hasan, who, along with several other Deobandi stalwarts, played a major role in the Khilafat movement in the second decade of the twentieth century, roping in the Indian National Congress party, led by Gandhi, to jointly oppose Britain’s policy towards Ottoman Turkey and to rally support for the rule of the Caliph in Istanbul.

The Khilafat movement failed in preventing the abolition of the Caliphate—the Young Turks under Mustafa Kemal Attaturk themselves did what the Deobandis had accused the British of conspiring to achi-eve—but the links established in the course of the movement between the Deobandis and the Congress were further strength-ened in the years to come.
Thus it came to be that the majority of the Deobandis, rep-resented by the largely-Deobandi Jamiat-ul ulama-i-Hind (the “Union of the ulama of India”), established in 1917 in the course of the Khilafat movement, vehemently opposed the Muslim League and its ‘two-nation theory’.

The head of the Deoband madrasa, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, a strong supporter of the Congress, penned a tract against the claims of the advocates of the Pakistan movement, insisting that the Hindus and the Muslims of India were one “united nation” (mutahhida qaum). He insisted that the territorial nationalism of the Congress was fully in keeping with the Prophetic tradition, for, he argued, the Prophet himself had established a united nation of Muslims, Jews and pagan Arabs in the city-state of Medina. Although Madani remained the dominant voice within the Deoband tradition, some notable Deobandis, including such renowned scholars as Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, opposed the Congress and lent their full-fledged support to the Muslim League.

This tradition of political pluralism, rather than any one fixed political stance, continues to characterise the Deobandi tradition today. Thus, if the Taliban represent one extreme, the Tablighi Jamaat, the single largest Islamic movement in the world today, and active in countries around the globe with several million activists, characterises the other. The Tablighi Jamaat has its global headquarters in New Delhi, and has a major presence in all countries in South Asia. Unlike the Taliban, it has no overt political pretensions. It insists that political power is not to be actively struggled for but is a gift that God might, in his wisdom, choose to bestow on the Muslims if they faithfully follow his religion, and that Muslims must turn their attention from these worldly concerns to the world after death. “We talk only of the grave below and the heavens above”, is a constant Tablighi refrain.

Like the Taliban, the Tablighis also owe inspiration to the Deobandi vision—its founder, Maulana Ilyas (d.1944) was a student of the Deoband madrasa, but in terms of politics it stands poles apart. In fact, radical Islamists have not refrained from accusing it of being used by the ‘enemies of Islam’ to depoliticise the Muslims and to divert their attention from worldly concerns to imaginary pies in the sky. In between these two extremes is the Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind. It adopts a middle-of-the-way path, striving to promote Muslim community interests, such as the cause of the Urdu language, the preservation of Muslim Personal Law, provision of religious education and protesting against atrocities against Muslims in India. It is, however, largely a spent force in terms of political appeal, being considered by many to be a feeble, ineffective and pliable appendage of the Congress party.

“We talk only of the grave below and the heavens above” — the refrain of the Tablighi Jamaat.
Deobandi scriptural reformism coupled with Aligarh-style modernism provided the inspiration for the establishment in 1894 of the Nadwat-ul ulama madrasa at Lucknow. Its founder was the renowned Islamic scholar Maulana Shibli Numani. Shibli was equally dissatisfied with the unrelenting traditionalism of the Deobandis and what he saw as the uncritical embrace of Western modernity by Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan and his British-supported Aligarh College. Shibli left his job at the Aligarh College following differences with Sayyed Ahmad Khan over the college’s overtly pro-British leanings. An ardent supporter of a united Hindu-Muslim struggle against the British, Shibli believed that the future of the Muslim community in India critically depended on the emergence of a new class of ulama who, while firmly grounded in the tradition of Islamic learning, were also fully conversant with the challenges of modern life. Shibli sought to reform the traditional madrasa system, making subjects such as science, history and English compulsory for the students of the Nadwa. Today, the Nadwa has some 2000 students from various parts of India, as well as some from abroad. Shibli’s vision for a new generation of ulama able to creatively respond to the demands of modernity, however, was to fail. The Nadwa, in its syllabus and methods, now differs but little from Deoband, except that rudimentary English and science are taught, a cosmetic concession to Shibli’s original vision.

Vehemently opposed to the Deobandis are what are loosely called the Barelwis, who insist that they alone represent the true Sunni Muslim tradition, and so arrogate to themselves the term Ahl-i-Sunnat wal Jamaat (“The People of the Sunnah and the Community”). Unlike the Deobandis, the so-called Barelwis do not represent a homogenous and clearly defined school of thought. They represent, rather, the traditional Sufi-centred and internally plural and loosely organised Islam of the South Asian countryside, heavily influenced by local cults and belief-systems. The term Barelwis is not used by the Ahl-i-Sunnat wal Jamaat themselves, but, rather, by their detractors to characterise them as followers of the nineteenth century Qadri Sufi, Imam Ahmad Raza Khan (b.1856) of Bareilly in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Imam Ahmad Raza was one of the foremost traditional South Asian clerics who played a leading role in defending traditional popular Sufism from the attacks of a diverse range of opponents, including the Deobandis and the Aligarh modernists, all of whom he branded as infidels and ‘enemies of Islam’. In 1906, he issued a fatawa accusing leading figures at Deoband—including Rashid Ahmad Gan-gohi, Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Ashraf Ali Thanvi—of being kafirs and hence outside the pale of Islam. (In turn, the Deobandis countered with a fatawa of their own, insisting that the Deobandis alone were the true Hanafi Sunnis).


In contrast to his opponents, Imam Ahmad Raza insisted that traditional Sufism, centred in the belief in the intercessionary powers of the Sufi saints and the various ritual practices associated with their shrines (dargahs) represented the true Sunni tradition. Another major point of dispute with the Deobandis was the Imam’s belief in Muhammad’s superhuman nature, as being “present and hearing” (hazir-o-nazir) even after his departure from the world, with which the Deo-bandis disagreed. In order to defend the tradition of popular Sufi Islam from both the Deobandis and the Muslim modernists, Khan set up the Madrasa Manzar al Islam in Bareilly. Like the Dar-ul Ulum at Deoband, against which it sought to define itself, the Manzar al-Islam madrasa taught the Dars-i-Nizami, to which were added numerous Sufi texts penned by Khan himself as well as polemical treatises seeking to prove all other Muslim groups as deviant. Over the years, several madrasas owing inspiration to the Barelwi vision were set up in various parts of South Asia, affiliated in a loose, largely ideological rather than organisational sense, to the madrasa at Bareilly.

Despite this spirited defence of popular Sufism, the Barelwis remained politically conservative. This political stance should be seen, at least in part, as owing to their differences with the Deobandis. Thus, in contrast to the Deobandis, the Barelwis strongly opposed the Congress, prohibited agitation against the British and enthusiastically supported the Muslim League. When the Non-Cooperation Movement was launched in 1920 by an alliance of the Deobandi Khilafatists and Gandhi, Maulana Ahmed Riza remained predictably aloof. He objected to Muslim collaboration with Hindus in preference to “People of the Book”, namely the Christian British. In the post-1947 period, the Barelwis and their madrasas have remained by and large politically quiescent, in India as well as in Pakistan. Within India, their ire has been directed more at fellow Muslims—in particular the Deobandis, Jama’at-e-Islami and the so-called Wahhabis—than at non-Muslims.

The all-embracing ideologyThe Jamaat-e-Islami and the so-called Wahhabis are the two other major Sunni groups in South Asia, and both of them are linked to or have their own madrasa networks. In India, the Jamaat has its headquarters in Delhi and units in almost all the states of India. In contrast to other Sunni groups, the Jamaat in India does not have any official madrasa of its own. Instead, it is loosely affiliated with several madrasas scattered all over the country, the most prominent being the Jami’at-ul Falah at Baleriaganj (Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh), the Markazi Darsgah (‘The Central School’) in Rampur (Uttar Pradesh) and the Idara-e-Tahqeeq-o-Tasneef-e-Islami at Aligarh. Common to all these madrasas is the understanding that underlies their own vision of the Islamist project—of Islam not simply as a bundle of rituals, of prescriptive and proscriptive rules, or simply as a private relationship between the individual believer and God. Rather, Islam is seen as a complete worldview and an all-embracing ideology and way of life, covering all aspects of personal as well as collective life.

A madrasa in Patan, Kathmandu which gives shelter, food and lessons to orphaned children.
In line with this understanding of Islam, and in contrast to the traditional Sunni madrasas, in religious schools associated with the Jamaat Islamic disciplines such as jurisprudence and Arabic grammar are taught along with modern subjects such as English, history and science. The voluminous works of the founder of the Jamaat, Maulana Sayyed Abul Maududi, are also com-pulsory reading. Unlike both the Deobandi and Barelwi madrasas, Jamaat-related mad-rasas stress the need for Muslim scholars to exercise ijtihad or the application of reason in matters of Islamic law within the broad framework of the shariah. In contrast to the Deobandis and the Barelwis, the Jamaat does not turn its back on the challenges thrown up by the onward march of modernity. Rather, it critically accepts modernity, seeking to Islamise it. Thus, Jamaat scholars have been in the forefront of what is known as the “Islamisation of knowledge” project, seeking to ground not just the social sciences, but even linguistics and the physical sciences in a normative framework based on the Quran and the Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. The Jamaat has published scores of tracts and books on Islamic perspectives on issues of contemporary concern as diverse as family planning and women’s rights, on the one hand, and international relations and bio-technology, on the other.

The Ahl-e-Hadith, or the so-called Wahhabis, are the fourth major Sunni group in South Asia, and they have their own network of madrasas spread all over the region. The Ahl-e-Hadith, in contrast to the other Sunnis, are vehemently opposed to all forms of Sufism. They insist that rather than rely on Sufi saints or imams of the four recognised schools of Sunni jurisprudence, Muslims must go back to the Quran and the Hadith of the Prophet for instruction and inspiration—hence their name of “People of the Hadith”. They insist on a literal reading of the Quranic text and the corpus of Hadith. They derive their inspiration from the puritan eighteenth century Muhammad bin ‘Abdul Wahhab (hence the pejorative title of ‘Wahhabi’ by which they are known by their detractors), who crusaded against popular practices and Sufism in the Arabia of his time, insisting that Muslims strictly abide by the dictates of the shariah.

The Ahl-e-Hadith also traces its origins to the jihad movement launched by the charismatic Sayyed Ahmad and Ismail Shahid against the Sikhs in the Punjab and the Pathan borderlands, seeking to mobilise the Pathans against what they considered Sikh misrule and oppression. The jihad was crushed by the army of the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh in 1831 at the Battle of Balakot, where its main leaders were killed, but spontaneous ‘Wahhabi’-inspired revolts continued till the end of the nineteenth century in the North-West Frontier Province. Thereafter the ‘Wahhabis’ remained low and largely quiet, their opposition being directed more at other Muslims than at the British. They set up major madrasas in Amritsar, Sialkot, Delhi, Bhopal and Benaras, and the last three are still the nerve centres of Ahl-e-Hadith scholarship in India. As compared to the Barelwis and Deobandis, the Ahl-e-Hadith failed to emerge as a mass movement, owing largely to its vehement opposition to Sufism and to the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. It remains till today an elitist movement, with its core support base among the urban, educated middle-classes, a consti-tuency that it shares with the Jamaat-e-Islami. While in India the Ahl-e-Hadith is still largely apolitical, in Pakistan it has emerged in recent years as a major political player. The madrasas it runs through its Markaz Dawat-ul Irshad (“The Centre for Invitation and Instruction”) are today major training grounds for militants involved in the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (“The Army of the Pure”), the armed wing of the Pakistani Ahl-e-Hadith. The Lashkar is active in armed movements in places as far afield as Kashmir, Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Philippines.

Most madrasas share a common system of adminis-tration. At the apex is the sadr mudarris (the head teacher), who is assisted by a team of fellow ulama. The teachers are themselves products of madrasas, few having had any access to modern education. Funds for the running of the madrasas generally come from public donations, from earnings from properties controlled by the madrasas, from endowments (awqaf), from sale of skins of animals sacrificed on the day of Bakr Id, and, in some cases, from organisations based in Arab countries. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, several madrasas also get funds from the government. The students generally come from poor families, being provided free education, food and accommodation at the madrasas. Some come for a year or two, to memorise the Quran. Others stay on for up to twelve years, training for the maulvi fazil or maulvi alim degree, after which they are recognised as accomplished ulama.

Contrary to popular perception, Muslims in South Asia, like Muslims elsewhere, are not a homogenous whole. Sharp differences of schools of thought, jurisprudential affiliation and sect serve to set them apart, and these divisions are particularly marked in the madrasas that each group runs. A Prophetic tradition (hadith) illustrates this predicament perfectly. The Prophet, it is said, predicted that after his death the Muslims would be divided into 72 quarreling groups, of which 72 would be destined for hell. The only one chosen group (firqa-e-najiya) would be that which faithfully abided by the Quran and the Prophet’s sunnah or practices. Each of the several Muslim groups claims that it alone is the one saved sect, the others being doomed to eternal perdition. Intra-Muslim conflicts thus continue to rage in many madrasas. Indeed, the role of some madrasas in fanning the flames of sectarian conflict is one of the major causes of intra-Muslim strife in countries such as Pakistan, and to an extent, India.

While ordinary Muslims might be oblivious of the minor details that divide them on sectarian grounds, several ulama owing affiliation to madrasas of rival sectarian groups have been involved in promoting inter-sectarian rivalry that has, on many occasions, taken violent forms. Scores of polemical treatises have been penned by rival groups of ulama seeking to brand all other Muslim groups as heretical. On a visit to the Dar-ul Ulum, Deoband, some years ago, this writer was struck by the students’ wall-magazine that greets the visitor at the main gate of the madrasa, the Bab-ul Qasim. Almost all the articles, penned in the most exquisite calligraphy, dealt with the refutation of other Muslim groups—Barelwi, Ahl-e-Hadith, Shi’a, Ahmadi and Jama’at-e-Islami, as deviant sects, for all practical purposes outside the bounds of orthodox Sunni Islam.


Today, all over South Asia, barring probably Afghanistan, Muslims are increasingly advocating reforms in the madrasa system to make it more relevant to modern times. Some see reform as the only way to prevent the madrasas from emerging as breeding grounds of Taliban-style militants. Secular, westernised Muslim elites, or, in India, anti-Muslim Hindu groups, are not alone in demanding such reforms, though. Numerous ulama are themselves now among the most vocal in pressing for change. Although most South Asian mad-rasas continue to faithfully follow the eighteenth century Dars-i-Nizami and traditional pedagogical methods, voices advocating reform and change are now impossible to dismiss. Several madrasas are now experimenting with new methods of teaching, including using computers in instruction and encouraging access to the Internet. A small, yet increasing, number of madrasas has now begun teaching ‘modern’ disci-plines, including English, mathematics, science and history. Several have introduced texts and tracts by modern Muslim thinkers. Efforts are on to develop a standarised syllabus and evaluation procedures for the madrasas, but given the sharp sectarian divisions, this seems to be an uphill task.

Rumblings of change are now being heard even within the seemingly impregnable walls of the Deoband madrasa. The madrasa now has a computer section and a web-site of its own, modern technology being pressed into the service of a time-tested theology. Exposure to the world outside might well lead to the rethinking of traditional theology, however grudgingly and painfully slow this may be. A good example is the Markaz-ul Ma’arif (‘The Centre of Wisdom’), based in Bombay with branches all over the country. Set up in 1994 by a group of Deobandi scholars and Muslim traders, it runs scores of modern schools, hospitals, orphanages and social work centres. At the Markaz’s Delhi centre, graduates from Deobandand the Nadwat-ul Ulama spend two years learning English, computers and comparative religions. Says Muhammad Umar Gautam, director of the centre, ‘Ulama who train here go on to work not just as madrasa teachers but also as journalists, computer specialists and translators.

Despite these efforts at innovation, the over-whelming majority of the madrasas in South Asia carry on with merely teaching the compendium of medieval commentaries. Few, if any, madrasas, have dared to depart from the traditional focus on jurisprudence or have even attempted to come up with new ways of understanding Islam in the light of modern conditions. Nor is there any indication of a widespread desire to break the shackles of “blind conformity” (taqlid) to medieval Islamic jurisprudence, itself a product of the medieval Arab world, and to revive the tradition of ijtihad. If other religions are taught, it is merely for polemical purposes and to prove them ‘false’, there being no serious engagement with the pluralistic predicament and with the need for inter-faith dialogue.

Leading South Asian Muslim scholars who do not identify themselves with any particular school of thought or system of jurisprudence, such as Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, Nejatullah Siddiqui and Asghar ‘Ali Engineer, have argued for a thorough revamping of the madrasa curriculum to make it consonant with modern demands. However, their voices are barely heard. In his recent book Dini Madaris: Masa’il Aur Taqazey (Religious Schools: Problems and Demands), the well-known Islamist scholar and leading Jamaat-e-Islami ideologue, Nejatullah Siddiqui, writes that the madrasa system desperately needs to be revamped if it is to have any relevance in today’s context. The measures that he suggests include the teaching of modern disciplines along with the traditional Islamic sciences, new methods of instruction, and a climate of critical debate in place of blind conformity. Some local-level madrasas have taken up these suggestions, but it is yet to emerge as a major wave in the world of the ulama.

A sharp dualism characterises Muslim education in South Asia today. On the one hand are the madrasas still relatively impervious to change, barring minor, local-level experiments. On the other hand are the modern, western-style secular schools. Given the complete de-linking of madrasa education from the job market, it is not surprising that few middle class Muslim families send their children to madrasas for higher education, being content with the basic religious education that the part-time mosque-school or makatib provides to young children if at all they choose to send their children there. If madrasas were once the preserve of the Muslim elite, providing them an education that trained them to take up posts in Muslim courts and in the administrative services, today most madrasa students come from families which cannot afford the cost of modern education for their children. To make matters worse, few madrasas, if any, have any facility for vocational training for their students.

A visitor to the grand Dar-ul Ulum, Deoband, will be appalled to discover that all that this biggest of all South Asian madrasas had by way of vocational training were classes for book-binding, calligraphy and watch-repairing—all three declining trades with little or no scope for large-scale employment. Not surprisingly, many unemployed madrasa graduates have gone on to become ready fodder for militant Islamist groups in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Given the sort of education that they receive, madrasa products may be equipped to work as imams in mosques and teachers in madrasas, but little else, and even these positions are limited. The bulk of the students are probably led to join the ever-growing mass of the unemployable unemployed. Organisations based in Arab countries, most notably Saudi Arabia, are said to liberally finance several Wahhabi-style madrasas in South Asia, but, predictably, have shown little interest in promoting economic development projects where madrasa graduates can find gainful employment.

Changes in the madrasa system are slow in coming, and given the rise of violent Islamophobia, on the one hand, and Islamist militancy, on the other, the emerging voices for reform seem to be doomed to silence. One has only to remember that it was the medieval Arab madrasas which provided the prototype of the modern western university at one time to realise the enormous distance that the madrasas have traversed since. Bridging the dualism that sharply divides the world of the madrasas from the modern education system remains the only way out for madrasas to be able to positively engage with the demands of modern life, in particular with the vastly transformed global context, characterised by religious pluralism and the demands for accommodating the interests of traditionally marginalised groups such as women and ethnic and religious minorities. But given the twin challenges that the Muslim world is today con-fronted with—Islamism and Islamophobia—there seems little hope for any major breakthroughs in the years ahead.