By Noor Mohammad
Last week I was in Deoband—my fourth trip to the town in the last five years—to attend the 30th convention of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind. Behind the image that the media projects, an image which the ulema of Deoband, too, carefully cultivate—of Deoband being the bastion of an unchanging tradition—the squalid Muslim locality that surrounds Deoband’s Dar ul-Ulum, possibly the world’s largest traditional madrasa, has changed much since I was last there two years ago.
The walls of the packed narrow lanes leading to the madrasa—and, indeed, the walls of the madrasa itself—are splattered with posters announcing not just religious programmes and newly-published Islamic tomes but also coaching centres offering courses in body-building, spoken English and computer applications. A dozen such centres have recently sprung up in the vicinity of the madrasa, their clientele mainly students of the Dar ul-Ulum. The most popular of the English tuition centres go by the pretentious-sounding names of ‘American’ and ‘Indo-American’. Posters hailing what they claim to be their excellent standards sport images of attractive, short-haired European women bursting into seductive smiles. A third such centre, ‘Howard International’, proudly displays an image of the Statue of Liberty in New York on its posters, promising prospective clients ‘100% placement in call centres’. Ironically, for many Deobandi maulvis, America is the ‘Great Satan’ and the ‘Number One Enemy of Islam’.
‘English is not taught in our madrasa, but today we simply cannot survive without a basic understanding of the language’, explains Nadeem, a student of the Dar ul-Ulum, who studies English at one such centre. ‘Most madrasa graduates don’t know English or Hindi, and so they feel helpless once they go out of Muslim localities. This often leads to a very deep inferiority complex’, he says. Till recently, the authorities of the madrasa frowned upon students studying English, he goes on. ‘They were scared that we would go astray, that we would become westernized and lose our Islamic identity, or that if we learnt English we would refuse to listen to them and would hesitate to work as imams in mosques.’ Now, however, the madrasa allows students to attend English classes at private centres after class-hours. ‘Some maulvis at the madrasa are very upset about this’, Nadeem says, ‘but they cannot openly oppose it for they know that many students will now simply refuse to obey them if they did.’
‘English is now a global language, and there is so much Islamic literature in English’ explains Abdul Haq, a third year student of the madrasa. ‘Only by learning English can the ulema explain Islam to non-Muslims as well as to Muslims who study in universities and colleges. If we continue to remain ignorant of English, we will remain unable to counter the mounting propaganda war against Islam and Muslims, much of which is conducted through English, through newspapers, magazines, books, television and the Internet.’ Abdul Haq receives five hundred rupees a month from his family as pocket money, three-fourths of which he spends on private English tuitions. ‘I want to learn English to defend and to spread Islam,’ he says.
Not every madrasa student in Deoband enrolled in the English-language coaching centres that have recently cropped up in the town do so for missionary motives, however. Says Iqbal, a student from Bihar, ‘I am learning English so that I can get a decent, well-paying job once I graduate, in a company, hopefully abroad.’ Because the madrasa authorities are still viscerally opposed to introducing modern subjects in the madrasa’s curriculum, he explains, the vast majority of students are forced to become either imams or madrasa teachers, both of which are low-paying jobs. If they had any other option, which they would if they knew English, most of them would choose it.’
Another sign of change —as well as possible resistance to the diktats of the madrasa’s maulvis—are the dozens of banners and hoardings that litter the lanes around the madrasa, bearing images of human faces—of women, too, and without the mandatory Deobandi face-veil. A recent fatwa issued by the maulvis of Deoband declaring photography ‘un-Islamic’ seems to have had little impact, if at all, on the immediate environs of the madrasa. The face of a bearded man bearing a Deobandi-style cap on his head—Muhammad Haseeb Siddiqui, the chairman of the Deoband Municipal Committee—beams down from a banner strung across the square just outside the madrasa. A pretty woman advertising a local English coaching centre smiles out of a poster pasted on a board tied to an electric pole planted in front of the madrasa’s mosque. A banner hung across the crumbling ruins of the Diwan Gate, half a minute’s walk from the madrasa, highlights two attractive woman decked in bridal finery, announcing the services of the newly-established ‘Sukun Beauty Parlour and Boutique’. Among the parlour’s many services, the banner boasts, are ‘tattoos, aerobic exercises, and various types of make-up’.
Along the row of bookshops that crowd around the madrasa is a newly-opened Internet café, located in the basement of a shopping arcade. Inside, I spot a number of madrasa students clicking away at computers behind low-level doors. If they could be skimming through Islamic sites, some of them, at least, could equally possibly be glued to sites that the authorities of the madrasa would sternly disapprove of. ‘We cannot guarantee that every student who comes here does so only to read about Islam’, answers a man who works at the café when I ask him if at least some of the boys—like others of their age elsewhere—might use it to watch movies or sites about women.
Located a hundred metres from the madrasa, a brand new eatery specializing, so it claims, in ‘fast food’, now does brisk business, its major clientele being students of the madrasa. Every evening after class hours the café is packed with students, clicking at their mobile phones while pecking at pastries, munching burgers and noodles and guzzling Coca-Cola and Pepsi—American products which the ulema of Deoband had once famously appealed to Muslims to boycott in the wake of the American invasion of Afghanistan. That fatwa seems, obviously, to now have no takers, not even among the ulema’s students. Leading Deobandis might rave and rant against Western consumerist culture (while, so cynics point out, many of them revel in such luxury hidden from the public gaze) but a sign that much of this is simply for public consumption is the massive shopping mall that is coming up in front of the new sprawling, mosque, Masjid Abdur Rashid just outside the madrasa, which is said to have cost almost twenty crore rupees. A massive hoarding at the construction site promises that the ‘Menara Bazar’ would provide the denizens of Deoband ‘the ultimate shopping experience.’
But, despite these changes, much about the Muslim ghetto that encircles the madrasa remains the same as when I first visited the area five years ago. The more than fifty bookshops in the locality continue to churn out tomes penned by Deobandi ulema, almost none of which have any relation to crucial questions facing Islam and its adherents in today’s age. Some of the books I purchased—out of curiosity rather than in the hope of learning anything instructive—dealt with issues that their authors apparently considered particularly salient for their Muslim readers: the ‘Islamic’ way of using mobile phones, the rules that must be observed while setting off on a journey, the regulations that must be followed while having sex, the many reasons why lying is a sin, the ample heavenly rewards for using a tooth-stick, the merits of sporting a beard and shaving one’s moustache, and so on. The contents of the Deoband madrasa’s official Urdu journal, Tarjuman-e Deoband, too, appear to show no signs of moving with the times. A copy of the magazine I picked up boasted a dozen articles about various rituals, exaggerated hagiographical accounts of Deobandi elders and even an elaborate discussion about whether or not Jesus, when he returns to the world before the end of times, would be a follower of the Hanafi school, the school of Muslim jurisprudence to which the Deobandis subscribe. It was as if the myriad social, economic and educational problems that most Indian Muslims face did not exist at all, or, if they did, were simply not worth discussing.
‘I know much of all this is utterly irrelevant, even silly’, confesses Faizan, a madrasa graduate who runs a bookshop in the busy bazaar, ‘but this is all that these maulvis can write about. They were kept ignorant of the modern world, including of the manifold challenges facing Muslims today, and so they can hardly write anything else.’ But why, I asked him, did he sell these books if he felt they were useless? ‘It’s only stuff like this that sells well’, he grinned. ‘Not many people want to read serious, well-researched books these days’
The students’ wall-magazines that hang along the inner walls of the madrasa and on trees scattered in the madrasa’s large courtyard are of no better quality either—much of these being crude, poorly-researched apologist propaganda. The only change I discerned was that some of them were now computer-printed and in colour, a case of modern technology being pressed into the service of reinforcing tradition. The topics that the magazines dealt with, a good reflection of the thinking of the students who had penned them, remained the same as when I had first visited the madrasa, as if time had stood frozen, once and for all. There were angry diatribes against non-Deobandi Muslims, such as the Barelvis, Shias and Ahl-e Hadith, who were described as virtual apostates. There were the usual pious proclamations about (the Deobandi version of) Islam, that enjoined the face veil and considered even a woman’s voice as ‘aurah’ or something to be ‘veiled’—as providing the best status to women. It was also hailed as the only genuine way to establish permanent global peace. Numerous articles were devoted to the importance of prayer and charity. One preached the absolute necessity for Muslim men to sport beards. To mock the beard, it declaimed, was to scorn an important practice of the Prophet, which, it declared, would result in one being at once removed from the fold of Islam.
Other articles rightly lamented the pathetic economic conditions of the Indian Muslims, stressing that it was time that Muslims stop depending on others in the hope that they might assist them. Yet others spoke of what they called heinous conspiracies, by the West, Israel and the Indian media, to destroy or malign Islam. One of these claimed that the Taliban had set up a genuinely Islamic government in Afghanistan and that they were on the verge of establishing the rule of the ‘Righteous Caliphs’ of the Sunnis over the entire globe, but this had so angered the Americans that they had engineered the Taliban’s downfall. Yet another article lamented the plight of the Muslims the world over, claiming that a major reason for this was the corruption and worldliness of a large section of the ulema and their abandoning of the spirit of jihad. This, it insisted, was a clear sign of the onset of the end of the world. It was, if the magazines were to be believed, as if the whole worldwide Muslim ummah was besieged by powerful forces on all sides who were carefully conspiring to destroy it.
‘Don’t take all this seriously’, said Nasir, a graduate of the madrasa, when I protested about how ridiculous I found some of these pennings. The wall-magazines did not reflect the official stance of the Deoband madrasa, he assured me. They simply provided space and an opportunity to the students to hone their writing skills, he said. The madrasa could not take responsibility for what they wrote, he insisted. But, then, surely, I retorted, the authorities must be aware of their contents, for they had been put on display at prominent places in the madrasa. Surely, too, I said, their claims and arguments reflected a certain mind-set that had been moulded by, and in, the madrasa—a mind-set rooted in a dogged commitment to a sternly patriarchal (mis-)interpretation of Islam, one which saw itself as viscerally opposed to other versions of the faith, a triumphalist, supremacist vision that considered Islam to be under siege from conspiracies and hidden enemies, and one that refused to concede that at least some of the manifold problems facing Muslims (and others) today might have at least something to do with the Deobandi creed and the politics of its ulema.
All this—as well as the nauseating filth that envelops the Muslim ghetto that crowds around the madrasa—seemed to have remain unchanged since I first visited Deoband. ‘Things can’t change substantially unless the madrasas modernise their curriculum and democratize their management,’ insisted Faizan, a graduate of the Dar ul-Ulum, who now teaches in a small madrasa in the town. ‘Today, the big madrasas of Deoband are run like family businesses, passed down, like heirlooms, from father to son. It’s a new form of Brahminism,’ he added. ‘The mullahs run the madrasas like their own little fiefdoms.’
The madrasas depend on public donations, and so the Muslim public must have a voice in how they are run and what they teach, Faizan stressed. He did not, however, seem hopeful that this might happen anytime in the near future. ‘The bosses who run the madrasas are sure to instigate Muslims to stiffly oppose any reform that might threaten their own privileges, projecting any such move as a conspiracy against Islam itself.’
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