Town Moves Against Islamic School

Don't you hate it when people say "We're (insert nationality here) you Muslims don't belong here." Read More...

Keeping busy

Today we got quite a bit of work done.




This is a free-writing exercise about spring and how it affects our surroundings. She was supposed to write something without any help.This is a part of the Saxon Math program.



We made 3D fruits(a watermelon and an apple courtesy of enchanted learning) today and yesterday and made a mini-mobile with them. Do you know how hard it was for me to find a wire hanger in the house?! We had one. Makes me think of this.

We're also exploring the different phases of the day, such as morning and afternoon.



Once noon comes in my daughter switches the clock. This is actually part of the Saxon Math program but we are also using it to talk about other parts of the day and night in relation to prayer times and the rising and setting of the sun.

Since the baby is on it's way, InshaALLAH, I've also got to keep busy studying Arabic in the evenings. I've taken three courses online through Shariah Program and Sunni Path. I have most of what I need to keep going on my own, InshaALLAH but I need to strengthen my vocabulary and focus on the ten forms of verbs. Arabic is not easy and takes lots of endurance.

I've also been busy getting sweaters, blankets and booties ready. I made this sweater using a pattern by Lorraine Major

and I started the Vintage Stripe Blanket via Bella Dia
by chaining 150 but it might still be a wee bit too big. It is made with odds and ends of yarns that I have. Oh well, this will be a warm baby, InshaALLAH.



You can also check it out on ravelry and I shall also need to make Saartje's Bootees to go along with the sweater. Read More...

The Sufi Maulvi of Gandoh

Yoginder Sikand

The narrow road snaked its way through towering slopes, throwing up enormous clouds of dust. It passed by little hamlets, comprising a couple of houses built around pagoda-shaped mosques and box-like temples with sloping roofs made of corrugated iron. Tiny patches of wheat and mustard, like patchwork quilts, straddled the edge of the stream that rushed down from the snow-capped peaks in the distance with an irrepressible passion to merge into the Chenab beyond. Children played cricket on improvised pitches on patches of land left fallow or lazed around on conical haystacks. Weather-beaten Bakkarwal men, with their hennaed beards and loosely wound turbans, led flocks of hairy mountain goats. Their children and womenfolk followed after them, driving mules laden with pots, pans and bedding—their mobile homes. The perfect picture of serenity.

That picture is, however, frighteningly deceptive. Like the rest of Jammu and Kashmir's Doda district, the Gandoh tehsil has been wracked by fifteen or more years of ongoing conflict. Gandoh is one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Doda. Straddling the border with Chamba in Himachal Pradesh, it has a Muslim majority, with a Hindu minority of a little more than a third of the population. Historically, relations between Hindus and Muslims here have been fairly cordial. Many of Gandoh's Muslims are descendants of converts from various local castes, although a sizeable number are also ethnic Kashmiris. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to distinguish local Hindus from Muslims from their facial features, although sometimes it is possible through their dress, as in the case of Muslims associated with the Deobandi-inspired Tablighi Jamaat (a relatively new phenomenon in these parts), with their distinct way of wearing their shalwars above their ankles, their long, bushy beards and their shaven moustaches. In terms of economic conditions, too, Hindus and Muslims appear, on the whole, roughly equally poor, Gandoh being one of the most 'backward' parts of Doda. Most people here earn their livelihood through animal husbandry and tilling tiny patches of terraced land up in the mountains and in the narrow valleys between them.

It was a little after noon that we arrived in Bhatias, a settlement consisting of a row of houses and shops along the main road, some seven kilometers from Gandoh town. Exhausted and ravenous, we entered a tea-shop, whose amiable owner rustled up for us a sumptuous meal of rajma-chawal, standard fare in these parts.

We shared the single table with a friendly young Muslim man, a peasant from a village nearby. 'Times are bad', he said gravely. 'Just the other day, a young man was killed in a village in this area'. He went on to speak about how a group of militants had stopped the vehicle of a local BJP activist, demanded that the Special Police Officer accompanying the man hand them his weapon, and then fled into the forest on the other side of the river. In retaliation, he said, a Hindu member of the local Village Defence Committee (VDC) had shot dead a Muslim lad in the village, the only son of his parents. The boy, he stressed, had nothing to do with militancy. The enraged Muslims of the village demanded that the VDC member be arrested and his weapon, provided to him by the state, be seized. Consequently, he went on, several Hindu families had left the village and were camping in Gandoh in order to prevent this from happening.

'The situation in the village is still very tense', the man said, when we asked him if we could go there to see things for ourselves.

The man shortly left us, and a short while later we were joined at the table by an elderly Hindu, a shopkeeper. His version of the recent events was quite different. According to him, the boy had been killed in cross-firing between militants and the VDC team and had not been deliberately killed by the latter. Fearing retaliation by militants, he said, several Hindu families had fled the village and had taken refuge in Gandoh.

Although we could no verify whose claim was correct, the two very different accounts of the same event brought home to us the sharp communal divide in Gandoh, a result of the many years of unrelenting conflict and violence the area has witnessed. At the same time, what was equally striking was how, despite the walls of suspicion that have come up between local Hindus and Muslims, the two communities continue to live together in the same towns and villages in relative peace, barring occasional incidents. While sporadic killings of civilians lead to further polarisation and mistrust, there are other forces that are at work that help maintain centuries'-old bonds between Hindus and Muslims in this area. And one of these was a Sufi we had come all the way from Doda town to meet, Haji Sahib of Akhiyarpur.

A two-hour walk up a steep slope brought us to Akhiyarpur, to Haji Saheb's modestly furnished meeting chamber. We were accompanied half the way by two local Muslim youth, who, while they said they were the best of friends, were politically completely at odds. The older one was bitter about the militants, and insisted that most locals, Muslims, and, of course, Hindus, felt the same way. His cousin, he told us, had been kidnapped and killed by a group of militants because he had refused to pay them a certain sum that they had demanded or else provide them with one of his own sons as a recruit. 'Earlier, many militants were in the movement for purely ideological reasons and that is why they enjoyed considerable support', he stressed. 'But now', he said, 'unemployed and illiterate youth have joined the movement. Wielding a gun gives them a sense of power, which some of them don't hesitate to misuse to settle their own personal scores'.

The man's friend shrugged off his comments. 'Don't listen to him', he insisted. He made no effort to conceal his support for the militants and their cause. 'Muslims continue to be persecuted in India. See what happened in Gujarat', he said. 'So, how can we ever willingly agree to live in a country where Muslims have no place?', he wanted to know.

The men left us roughly half way up the mountain. For the rest of the strenuous walk ahead I juggled in my mind what they both had said, trying to imagine how I would have looked at the world if I were in their place. The thought was hardly comforting, for, clearly, like almost everyone else in the area, they had seen or else heard of death and destruction in their neighbourhood on an almost daily basis.

When we finally arrived at Akhiyarpur and entered Haji Sahib's room, he was sitting in a corner on a mattress with a crowd of supplicants in rows in front of him. Most of them were Muslims, but some, I later discovered, were Hindus, too. A few of them had come from so far as Poonch and Kathua in the hope of a miraculous cure to their woes. One by one they narrated their troubles to Haji Sahib in hushed tones. He listened to each of them patiently, advising them on what to do.

After the last of his other visitors had left, Haji Saheb turned towards us. His eyes were soft, yet sad, gentle and the same time firm and determined. He looked considerably younger than the roughly seventy that we were told he was.

Haji Sahib, we had been told, was a Sufi who was held in considerable respect and reverence by many local Muslims as well as Hindus. He went on, on our asking him, to tell us about himself.

He had, he told us, taught for over four decades in various government schools in Gandoh tehsil and was now running the one of the area's few private schools. In this relatively inaccessible and impoverished part of Doda, this was no mean achievement. The school is till the tenth grade and is affiliated to the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education. Most of the roughly 1000 students come from poor families, and the fees are relatively low. Numerous very poor children receive education free of cost. The school has a number of Hindu students, and almost a tenth of its teachers are Hindus, the rest being Muslims. In addition to the school, Haji Sahib has set up a madrasa, the Jamia Ganiatul Ulum, which has some fifty students training to become ulama or Islamic clerics. Most of these children are from impoverished families, and in the madrasa they receive free education, boarding and lodging as well as the possibility of a job as a religious specialist once they graduate.

Our conversation turned to the ongoing conflict in the region. Hindus and Muslims, Haji Sahib assured us, had traditionally lived harmoniously in the area, even in the tumultuous days of the Partition. Killing an innocent person, he referred to the Qur'an as saying, is tantamount to slaying the whole of humankind. That principle applied in every case, he stressed, when I asked him about the atrocities committed both by militants as well as Indian soldiers, which were not few in number. 'May God grant the world His blessings', he cryptically replied in response to my query about the possibility of a realistic resolution to the Kashmir conflict.

The Haji Saheb insisted we spend the night in the village. In any case, we had missed the last vehicle to Doda and it was simply too dangerous to trek back to the main road after sunset. And so we were directed to the house of a friend of the Haji Sahib, a steep ascent ahead.

An hour later we found ourselves snuggled under layers of thick cotton quilts, tucking into a sumptuous meal in the house of the principal of Haji Sahib's school. The principal and his son were impeccable hosts, and despite the fact that we were complete strangers and uninvited guests we were treated like some long-lost friends.

We talked late into the night, mostly on the ongoing conflict and the impact this had had on Hindu-Muslim relations. Before we finally retired for the night, the principal read out to us a letter written by him and recently published in a Jammu-based Urdu newspaper.

To protest the deadly massacre of more than two dozen Hindus in Kulhand, a hamlet near Doda, this May, the letter stated, Jammu town observed a complete shut-down. That very morning the principal's grandson, a student in Jammu University, had to appear for an important examination. He assumed that because of the strike the examination had been postponed. In the afternoon, he rang up a Hindu friend of his, who told him, to his shock, that the examination was actually on schedule and that he had just entered the examination hall. No vehicles were plying in the streets that day and the principal's son had no way out to reach the university. However, his friend magnanimously rushed out of the examination hall and sped on his motorcycle all the way to his house and picked him. They arrived in the examination hall just in time to write their paper.

'Such examples of Hindu-Muslim harmony and friendship must be regularly highlighted in the press', the letter stressed. It concluded with a line in which the principal revealed that he had sent an appeal to the Chief Minister to announce a reward to his grandson's Hindu friend for having 'served as a model of communal harmony'.

The next morning, after a heavy breakfast which we had to accept after much protest, we trudged down the mountain back to the main road to head back to Doda town. And as the principal hugged me in farewell, I promised him that I would, in my own modest way, do what he had advised in his letter: to highlight this instance of love and friendship beyond communal boundaries as a lesson that others could emulate.

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Innovative NGO-Ulema Collaborative Effort for Muslim Education: The Jeevan Talim Project in Kutch

Yoginder Sikand

The Jeevan Talim project in rural Kutch in northern Gujarat represents a pioneering and innovative effort to bring Muslim ulema or religious scholars to work along with secular NGOs for Muslim community development. A joint project of the New Delhi based Jamiat-e Ulema-e Hind and the Ahmedabad-based Janvikas, through its initiative Udaan, a resource centre working on primary education, it started in 2004 with a grant from Misereor, a Germany-based Catholic relief and development agency.

Hitherto, the Jamiat focused mainly on providing religious education to Muslim children through a vast chain of madrasas and maktabs, and providing relief in the event of natural disasters and anti-Muslim violence. In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Kutch in 2001, the Jamiat played a crucial role in relief and reconstruction efforts. This, says Ahmad Shaikh, a senior Jamiat leader based in Ahmedabad, marked a significant change in its policies and priorities, because its activities in the state had till then been restricted largely to providing religious education and constructing and maintaining mosques. It was for the first time, in the course of its relief work in Kutch, that the Jamiat had the chance to work with some secular NGOs.

The almost complete loss of faith in the system of the Muslims of Gujarat in the wake of the genocidal anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002 provided the context for the Jamiat, as well as a few other Muslim groups in Gujarat, that were earlier concerned almost wholly with issues of religious education and identity, to become more involved in practical efforts to address the pathetic educational, economic and social conditions of large sections of the Muslim population of the state. This set the ground for collaboration between the Jamiat and Janvikas to work together to devise and launch the Jeevan Talim project.

Janvikas has been working with marginalized communities in Gujarat, including Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims, for several years now, mainly on issues of education, economic empowerment and human rights. In the wake of the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat, it played an active role in relief work, in highlighting widespread human rights abuses and in fighting legal cases on behalf of a number of innocent Muslims who had been arrested on false charges. The menacing rise of Hindutva fascist forces and the consequent escalating enforced ghettoisation of Muslims across Gujarat were viewed by Janvikas activists as a dangerous phenomenon that urgently needed to be tackled on various fronts. One of these fronts was the educational sector. In many cases, Muslims were barred from studying or working in private Hindu-owned schools, faced increased discrimination in government schools and continued to be neglected in government-funded educational programmes. To add to this was the tendency on the part of some Islamic groups who sought to promote insular tendencies among the community, particularly through the madrasas. Many of these Muslim groups and their educational institutions focused only on Islamic education, lacked inner democratic functioning, paid little or no attention to issues of Muslim girls’ education and had few or no links with non-Muslims, including even secular groups. Hence, Janvikas felt it imperative to work in the field of Muslim education and to interact closely with traditional Muslim religious and other community leaders in order to promote a new sort of Muslim leadership that would address the community’s economic and educational marginalization and work with secular, non-Muslim forces on issues of common concern, such as the struggle against communalism, fascism, and mounting social and economic inequalities and exclusion.

It was in 2002, in the wake of the state-sponsored campaign of horrific violence unleashed against Muslims in Gujarat, that activists from Janvikas and the Jamiat first met. This was in the course of seeking to provide relief to the victims of this unprecedented wave of anti-Muslim violence in the state. Working jointly on common issues and projects at this time, such as providing legal aid for Muslim youth indiscriminately arrested, mostly on false charges, and constructing houses for violence-effected families, activists of both organizations were able to cement a strong bond of trust and confidence. Building on this, the next year Janvikas and the Jamiat decided to work together in the field of Muslim education in the dry and relatively barren northern parts of Kutch district in Gujarat, home to a sizeable and largely poverty-stricken Muslim population characterized by very low literacy levels. This pilot project, christened Jeevan Talim or ‘Life Education’, was envisaged as a community initiative of the Jamiat undertaken with assistance from Janvikas through Udaan, which the local community would eventually manage on its own and sustain in the long-run in cooperation with the Jamiat.

The aim of the project was to provide access to remedial, pluralistic and inclusive education and basic numerical and literacy skills to Muslim children in the age group 4-10 years in selected parts of Kutch where no government-funded educational facilities exist. It was hoped that in this way these children would be enabled to later take admission in a government school at the fourth or fifth grade level. The project entailed using the Jamiat’s existing network of maktabs. The Jivan Talim classes would be organised in the maktab precincts, or, in villages and hamlets that did not have maktabs, in the porch of the local mosque, with the timings suitably adjusted so that the children’s Islamic education would not be interrupted or disturbed. In this way, the project was seen as helping to expand the scope of maktab education. Where possible, the maulvi or Islamic scholar teaching in the maktab would be engaged to take the Jeevan Talim classes as well, for which he would be paid an additional sum. If there was no maulvi available in the village or hamlet or nearby, then a local youth, male or female, would be engaged for this. Because the levels of education in rural Kutch, particularly among Muslims, are extremely low, provision was also made for providing suitable pedagogical training to the maulvis and the local youth selected as instructors in the Jeevan Talim centres. Subjects to be taught in the centres included basic literacy in Gujarati, the official state language, numerical skills, environmental awareness, as well as songs and theatre. It was expected that after finishing the Mahatam course, children would be able to join the nearest government school.

To begin with, a total of 14 villages in northern Kutch, many of them on the fringes of the Rann, a vast stony desert that spills across the border into nieghbouring Pakistan, were selected for purposes of the project. Most of them had no government schools, and in those few that did the teachers came very irregularly or not at all. Two villages had Hindu and Dalit inhabitants also, including one where the students who attended the Jeevan Talim centres were all Dalits. Today, the project runs 32 centres in different parts of rural Kutch, with a total of some 900 children, boys and girls, studying in them in all.

Despite various challenges that it has faced, the Jeevan Talim project has been able to make considerable headway, although not as much as was envisaged when the project was formulated. The number of centres has expanded, and a team of four supervisors and one coordinator regularly visits the centres, monitors and evaluates them, and, along with the instructors, sets periodic examinations for the children. The development of the curriculum remains an on-going project, and this is discussed at the monthly meetings of teachers and Udaan activists at the Jamiat’s office in Bhuj. In addition, instructors’ training and refresher programmes are organised every three months, where teachers also share their experiences and the problems that they and the children face.

Given the extremely harsh terrain in which the Jeevan Talim project functions, the pathetic economic conditions of the people, their lack of a culture of literacy, the poor communications, the inability to get trained teachers, the rapid turn-over of the teachers and so on, the project has been able to at least help galvanise people’s interest in educating their children. The fact that literally hundreds of Kutchi Muslim children, whose families do not know how to read and write at all, are now able to recognize letters and write them and solve basic mathematical calculations, a result of the project, is no mean achievement.

The project has also had a positive impact on people’s attitudes towards education. As Saleem, a resident of Umrani village, puts it, ‘Now only very few people, especially the elderly, will say that there is no use educating our children because in any case they will not get a government job and because they will, like their ancestors, grow to become cattle-grazers. Even the poorest families are now aware of the need for education, and in this the Jeevan Talim project has played a central role’. ‘It has’, he adds, ‘made us feel that the centre and its work are our own, that through the centre the children can receive education joyfully’.

Another positive outcome of the project has been to undermine the process that was leading to the enforced ghettoisation of Muslim education, a result primarily of discrimination practiced by the state and large sections of the Hindu community. Although the vast majority of the children, teachers and supervisors associated with the project are Muslims, a substantial number of Hindus and Dalits are also closely involved in the project in different capacities, including as teachers, students and project support staff.

This gives the children, their parents and the ulema of the maktabs as well as Jamiat leaders opportunities to interact with people of other faiths in the course of the work of the Jeevan Talim centres, a process that helps undermine prejudices on both sides. As Maulana Hakimuddin Qasmi, in-charge of the Jamiat’s Children’s Village in Anjar, and closely involved in the Jeevan Talim project, says, ‘In the Quran, Allah says that we should help each other in good deeds. This also means that people of goodwill of all faiths should work together for serving the needy. That’s what the Jeevan Talim project is all about. Likewise, the Jamiat has built houses for some needy Hindus, whose houses were destroyed in the riots.’

‘Some people might ask us why we are working with non-Muslims for educating our children’, he goes on. ‘My reply to them is that after the Battle of Badr, the Prophet Muhammad agreed to release the prisoners of war if they would teach a certain number of Muslims to read and write. So, if he could ask the enemies of the Muslims to educate his people, why cannot we seek the help of those non-Muslims who are certainly not our enemies, people like the Udaan staff who are our friends, to help us educate our children? We all can, and must, learn from each other’.

Maulana Hakimudin also explains that although the Jamiat is associated with the Deobandi school of thought, several villages where the Jeevan Talim centres are located are associated with another sect, the Ahl-e Hadith, and one centre is located in a Dalit settlement. ‘As this illustrates, true religion means that one should work for the welfare of all needy people, irrespective of caste and religion’, he insists.

The Jeevan Talim project has also had an impact on several Jamiat leaders in terms of the vision that they have set for their organisation. ‘Experiments like the Jamiat’s Children School and the Jeevan Talim project have convinced us of the need for more ulema and ulema-led organizations to work on issues related to modern, including girls’, education and economic empowerment, in addition to religious education’, says Maulana Hakimudin. He reveals that the Jamiat now plans to set up two colleges in Kutch, having already launched some training courses for women at its centre in Bhuj. ‘All these years’, he notes, ‘because of persistent anti-Muslim violence and threats to Muslim identity, Muslim organizations have been forced to focus almost wholly on relief and rehabilitation and provision of religious education. But now we must expand the scope of our work.’

‘We need to get more professional’, he admits. ‘As of now, we can run only madrasas properly, and so we recognize the continuing need for working with NGOs like Udaan for the educational projects that we have in mind. I think that there is a lot of good that can come about if non-Muslim or secular NGOs work together with Muslim organizations, including those led by ulema, for the benefit of the marginalized. The ulema and other Muslim leaders must give this more serious thought’, he stresses.

Likewise, the impact of the project on local understandings of appropriate gender-related behaviour and notions concerning gender-relations cannot be discounted. For many families, their girl children are able to study for the first time because the centres are located in the village itself and because the instructors are from the local community. Besides, the female instructors in some villages and the female members of the Udaan support staff who regularly visit the various centres might, through their very presence, impact in a positive manner on local people’s ideas about the roles of girls and women. The same is true in the case of the ulema whom these women interact with, including both the maktab teachers as well as the maulvis of the Jamiat.

Thus, for instance, Maulvi Ghulam Muhammad Qasmi, rector of the Jamiat Arabia Ulum ul-Islamia, the large Deobandi madrasa in Bhuj which is associated with the Jamiat, who is also associated, through the Jamiat, with the Jeevan Talim project, says, ‘Initially, we did have some hesitations and misconceptions about working with a non-Muslim NGO, especially since many of its activists with whom we had to interact are women. But after several meetings with Udaan activists all our fears were put to rest. I have observed these girls, they are so respectful. They are now like my own children. Now, we regularly meet them and give them whatever help they want because we trust them. We believe that the work we want must be done properly, no matter by whom.’

The teachers and the villagers recognize the fact that the work that the Jeevan Talim project aims to do is actually the responsibility of the government, which is bound by the Constitution of the country to provide free and accessible education to every child. Thus, Hakim Bhai, a village elder from Tanka village remarks, ‘Our conditions can only change if the government is pressurized to do something’. ‘Till then’, he grimly adds, ‘the efforts of groups like the Jamiat and Udaan are welcome, but of course they can hardly suffice on their own.’

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