Traditionalist ulema lead educational revolution in
Kerala
Posted December 6th, 2007 by kashif
* Articles
* Indian Muslim
By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net
Kerala's Muslims are unique among their
co-religionists in India in fashioning a system of
education that enables their children to attend both
religious as well as regular schools at the same time.
Muslims account for around a fourth of Kerala's
population, and the state's Muslims, known as
Mapillas, are among the most literate of the various
Muslim communities in the country. Madrasas and
schools run by literally hundreds of Muslim religious
organizations in the state have made this possible. A
recent study by Zubair Hudawi, himself a madrasa
graduate from Kerala and presently a doctoral
candidate at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi, titled 'Development and Modernisation of
Religious Education in Kerala: The Role of the
Samastha Kerala Jameyyat ul-Ulama', discusses this
contribution in great detail.
The Samastha Kerala Jameyyat ul-Ulama (SKJU)
represents a traditionalist theological position,
quite opposed to Islamic modernists on numerous
points. Yet, as Hudawi argues, it has not hesitated
from championing modern education. Hudawi, who spent
several years studying at the Dar ul-Huda Islamic
Academy, the SKJU's leading centre for higher Islamic
education, seeks to explain this enigma through an
in-depth analysis of the organisation's evolution and
development, arguing against the notion that the
traditionalist ulema are necessarily and wholly
opposed to 'modernity'. He argues that the SKJU is an
excellent example of a traditionalist Muslim religious
organization that, rather than opposing 'modernity'
outright, actually facilitates it, albeit selectively.
Thus, today, he writes, the SKJU runs not just several
thousand madrasas but also numerous English- and
Malayalam-medium schools, and scores of women's and
technical colleges.
The proactive role played by the SKJU, Hudawi argues,
must be seen, in part, as a response to the emergence
of new Muslim religious organizations promoting mass
education in the early decades of the twentieth
century, when reformist Kerala Muslim scholars set up
institutions that combined both traditional Islamic as
well as modern education and championed modernist
interpretations of Islam. The Mapilla Revolt of 1921,
crushed brutally by the British, proved a major
turning point in this regard. It was similar in its
impact to the suppression of the 1857 revolt for the
Muslims of north India, creating a climate for
reformers, concerned with the plight of the community,
to emerge. They argued that the Mapillas had deviated
from the 'original' Islam by incorporating a host of
'un-Islamic' customs, many of which the
traditionalists upheld but which the modernists
condemned as wrongful innovations. They saw Islam as
positively encouraging, rather than, as some
traditionalists argued, opposing, modern education,
and called for a radical overhaul of the traditional
system of madrasa education.
Because they insisted that the Islamic scriptural
resources could be accessed without the traditional
ulema as intermediaries, the reformists were sharply
condemned by the latter. Some of them were even
condemned as apostates. Yet, they continued their
work, setting up educational institutions that
represented a major shift in the structure of
religious authority from that represented by the
earlier individual scholars or musaliyars. In place of
traditional mosque schools (called othupallis in
Malayalam) that focused on the memorization and
recitation of texts but ignored writing skills, they
set up modern schools that taught reading and writing
and provided education in both religious and secular
subjects. Several of these organizations, set up in
the pre-1947 period, still exist today, running
literally thousands of madrasas-cum-schools in the
state, such as the Jamaat-e Islami and the two
branches of the Kerala Nadwat ul-Mujahideen.
Faced with the growing challenge of the reformists,
which they saw as not only articulating what they
regarded as 'un-Islamic' views but also as challenging
their authority as interpreters of Islam, Kerala's
traditionalist ulema first reacted by issuing fatwas
against them and appealing to their followers to
boycott them. However, witnessing the expansion of
alternate Muslim religious groups at their expense,
they soon decided to follow their path. In 1926, a
group of traditionalist ulema, many of them also Sufi
shaikhs, got together and established the SKJU in
Calicut, the centre of the Mapillas of Malabar.
Although its principal aim was to defend religious
practices and beliefs which the modernists condemned
as 'innovations', particularly those related to the
cults of the Sufi saints, the SKJU also called for the
promotion of modern education compatible with Islam
and inter-communal harmony.
The primary focus of the reformists who challenged the
traditionalist ulema was on religious education, but,
in contrast to many of their counterparts in northern
India, they also sought to promote modern education,
Muslims then being (as now) relatively marginalized
compared to the other communities in the state on this
front. After 1947, when Kerala was still part of the
Madras state, the Government of Madras banned
religious education in state-supported schools. This
forced Muslim organizations in the region to set up
educational boards that established literally
thousands of part-time madrasas, enabling Muslim
children to attend these as well as regular schools at
the same time. In this way, most Muslim children in
Kerala were able to receive madrasa education for a
minimum of five years' public schooling. Separate
madrasa education boards were set up by the main
Muslim sectarian organizations, each of which prepared
their own textbooks for madrasa students, appointed
teachers and school inspectors and granted
certificates.
In 1951, the SKJU established its own religious
educational committee, the Samastha Kerala Islam Matha
Vidhyabhyasa Board, under which it set up a number of
madrasas, for which it prepared a uniform set of
graded texts, organized examinations, trained teachers
and provided scholarships to needy students. Till the
early 1970s, Hudawi writes, the SKJU remained aloof
from the field of modern education, running, instead,
a vast number of full-time madrasas in the traditional
fashion. However, faced with the growing demand for
modern education even among its followers, commonly
known as 'Sunnis', it began to adopt the pattern of
education of its reformist rivals. Today, the SKJU has
almost 9000 part-time madrasas across Kerala, whose
timings are adjusted in such a way as to enable their
students to study in regular schools as well. Until
2005, the SKJU's educational board had issued
certificates to over 19,00,000 students who had passed
the fifth grade. It has prepared a series of textbooks
in English for children from the upper kindergarten
grade till high school that are used in its part-time
madrasas, and is working on a similar set of texts in
Urdu to cater to Muslims in north India, where it now
has some branches. It has even expanded abroad, where
it runs educational centres in several Gulf States
where Malayali Muslims live.
Besides its thousands of madrasas, today the SKJU runs
a madrasa teachers' training centre, several shariah
colleges that combine religious and secular education,
scores of co-educational and women's schools and
colleges, a committee to provide financial help to
poor madrasa teachers, with almost 400 branches
throughout Kerala, a madrasa teachers' pension scheme
and separate magazines for children, women and madrasa
teachers. It also runs a number of orphanages, some of
which receive state funding. Some of these orphanages
run schools, polytechnics, industrial training
centres, presses, computer centres and dispensaries,
besides madrasas.
As Hudawi's study brilliantly demonstrates,
stereotypical notions about the traditionalist ulema
being wholly opposed to change need to be revised. The
SKJU case demonstrates that, far from being fiercely
hostile to modernity, many of them may be said to be
creatively responding to the demands of modernity by
attempting to fashion their own Islamic version of it.
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Zubair Hudawi can be contacted on zubyjnu@gmail.com
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