Muslim Education: Lessons From Kerala

Muhammad Iqbal is a 30-year old social activist. Originally from Silchar, Assam, he shifted to Kerala some years ago, where he now works with several Muslim organizations in the field of community service. He narrates his story to Yoginder Sikand.

I came to Kerala in 2001, my first visit to the state. I had come to search for work, the sort of work that I had been doing in Assam—painting on cloth. One of the things that struck me first and most strikingly in Kerala was that the Kerala Muslims are far ahead of Muslims in other parts of India, in terms of both secular and Islamic education. I felt that I could learn and grow in Kerala, and that this was a good place for me to work. So, I decided not to go back to Assam but to stay here instead.

I decided to give up on cloth painting, and to engage in some form of social work. In 2003, I began working with a few Muslim organizations in Calicut. In association with them, I arranged for a large number of children from very poor families, many of them orphaned, from Assam, Manipur, Bihar and West Bengal, to be sent to orphanages and hostels run by several reliable Muslim organizations in Kerala, such as the Huda Trust, the Muslim Cultural Foundation School, the Islamic Cultural Society, the Jamiat-e Dawat-e Tabligh, the Muslim Education Society, the Nadwat ul-Islam and some orphanages-cum-schools run by the Kerala Nadwat ul-Mujahidin. Here these children receive free education, both religious and secular and are also looked after and cared for free of cost. Together, my friends and I have arranged for some five hundred such children to be looked after in various Muslim institutions in Kerala.

Most of these children are sent to English-medium schools to study. Some of these schools are run by the organizations where they also live. Others are run by various Muslim organizations and are located in the vicinity of their hostels. We arrange for the children to visit their homes once every three years so that they can remain in touch with their roots. We want them to start similar institutions in their own areas once they grow up. I hope at least some of them will.

I have had the good fortune of interacting with many Muslim activists and ulema here in Kerala and have learned a great deal from them. Unlike in my part of the country and in much of the rest of northern India, I find that in Kerala the ulema are also very socially engaged. It is not that just poor families send their children to madrasas to study, as generally in the north. Almost every Muslim child in Kerala, rich or poor, girl or boy, simultaneously studies in a madrasa and in a regular school. How well organized, how professionally run Muslim organizations here are! How clean they keep their institutions! What a contrast to north India! Most ulema here have also received some modern education. They, along with Kerala Muslims generally, have fairly good ties with their Hindu and Christian neighbours. They don’t engage in the sort of fatwa-warfare that some maulvis have become so notorious for! I wish north Indian Muslims would care to learn from the Kerala example, but, unfortunately, some of them, like many north Indians in general, have a misplaced sense of superiority and think that they have nothing to learn from south Indians.

I have helped some local Muslim organizations interact with north Indian ulema, hoping that in this way we can spread the news about the Kerala example and that Muslim organizations in north India can learn from it. We have, over the years, arranged for over five hundred ulema and Muslim social activists from north India to visit Muslim institutions in Kerala and interact with Kerala Muslim activists and religious scholars and also to participate in conferences here. We thought that in this way they might be encouraged to go back to their areas and help promote modern, in addition to religious, education, to set up social work centres and so on. But, I must confess, this venture has not been very successful. For some of those whom we invited, these visits were just holiday jaunts. Some others perhaps came on these visits in the hope of getting grants and projects.

But some of them have really done good work and have also learnt a lot from their visits here. There’s Aminuddin Bhai from West Bengal, who has set up a girls’ madrasa. We’ve arranged to provide hand-pumps in his village. There’s Arfan Khan from Assam, who was orphaned at the age of two. All his family lands were washed away in a furious flood unleashed by the Brahmaputra River. He began working as a clerk, and took care of a Muslim child whose parents had been killed in an attack by the Bodos. He now has a home for almost 80 orphan children and arranges for their education. Besides, he runs an organization for the physically challenged. He came and spent some time here, observing the work of Kerala Muslim organizations. I am so moved by his example that I am planning to make a film on him.

I am sure there are so many other people like them in the world, who are doing good in their own ways. Their voices need to be recorded, to be heard, to be remembered.

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Mohammad Iqbal can be contacted on iqbalcalicut@gmail.com