An educational oasis in the Kutch desert
Posted May 22nd, 2008 by Tarique Anwar
* Articles
* Indian Muslim
By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,
Kutch, in northern Gujarat, on the border with
Pakistan's Sindh province, is, in terms of area,
India's largest district. Much of it is uninhabited,
consisting of vast stony, sandy and uncultivable
plains that stretch till the horizon, interspersed
with low-lying rocky outcrops. More than a third of
Kutch's population is Muslim, comprising of over three
dozen endogamous caste-like groups. Muslims are
concentrated more in the northern tehsils of Kutch,
particularly on the fringes of the Great Rann, a vast
desert, much of which turns into a massive
inaccessible swamp during the monsoons.
The Muslims of rural Kutch are, by and large, small
peasants and impoverished cattle-grazers. Their
literacy rate is no more than 15 per cent, and even
among those who are officially classified as
'literate', many can only read and write their names.
The female literacy rate among rural Kutchi Muslims is
estimated to be less than 3 per cent.
It is in this context that the Jamiat Arabia Ulum
ul-Islamia, the only large madrasa associated with the
Deobandi school of thought in Kutch, is engaged in
pioneering educational work. It is located on the
outskirts of Bhuj, the largest town in the district.
It was founded in 1986 by the now aged Muhammad Ilyas
of Surat, a graduate of the famed Mazahir ul-Ulum
madrasa in Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. He first
visited the interiors of Kutch on a tour with
activists of the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim reformist
movement. The stark poverty and the pervasive
illiteracy that he saw led him to want to establish a
school in Kutch, which would provide both Islamic as
well as modern education to children from poor Kutchi
Muslim families. In 1986, he started the madrasa in
Bhuj, with just five children. Today, it has almost
300 boys on its rolls from different parts of Kutch,
mainly from very impoverished families.
The amiable Maulvi Ghulam Muhammad Qasmi, a wonderful
host, is the rector of the madrasa. He insists that
we—myself and four other friends—spend the nights in
his madrasa during our week-long visit to Kutch.
Originally from Barmer, a district in the western
Rajasthan desert bordering Kutch, he graduated from
the Deoband madrasa in 1984. He has been associated
with the Bhuj madrasa for almost two decades now.
The course of study in the madrasa consists of both
traditional Islamic as well as modern subjects. The
madrasa provides Islamic education till the fourth
grade, or Arabi Chaharum, after which students, if
they wish to carry on with the subject, can transfer
to a higher-level madrasa outside Kutch, elsewhere in
Gujarat or beyond. At the same time as the students
study the traditional Islamic subjects (Quran, Hadith,
Fiqh, Arabic Grammar and so on) in the madrasa, they
also enroll in the Madani Primary School, located in
the same campus, which provides modern education from
the first to the seventh grade. The
government-approved curriculum is employed in the
school. The timings of the madrasa are suitably
adjusted to enable the children to study in the school
as well.
'By structuring our course in this way', Maulvi Qasmi
explains, 'we have left the choice open to our
students to decide what sort of education they want to
pursue after they finish the fourth year Arabic course
and the seventh year regular school course. They can
choose to carry on in a higher-level madrasa or else
join the eighth standard in a regular school'. Several
students of the madrasa have selected the latter
option, and some of them have gone on to complete high
school, and fifteen, an impressive figure by rural
Kutchi standards, have graduated from colleges.
Slide show
'Many people have a wrong impression that the ulema
are all opposed to modern education. If that was the
case, obviously we would not have a regular school in
the same campus as the madrasa. Nor would we make it
compulsory for our students to attend it', says Maulvi
Qasmi. He adds that the opposition to the school
initially came, not from his fellow maulvis, but from
the concerned government authorities. They tried to
create all sorts of hurdles to begin with, refusing
the necessary permission, even by going so far as to
say that the school was not needed at all! Finally, in
2003, after considerable effort, the
madrasa authorities managed to get government
recognition for the school.
In contrast to most other madrasas, the Jamiat Arabia
Ulum ul-Islamia has both madrasa-trained maulvis and
college-trained lecturers on the rolls of its staff.
Its seventeen teachers of Islamic subjects have at
least an alimiyat, if not fazilat, degree. The six
teachers in the school attached to the madrasa have
mostly done their B.A.s, and some
also have a bachelor's degree in Education. So far,
the madrasa has produced 47 certified ulema, who,
after finishing the fourth grade here, went on to
complete their alimiyat or fazilat degrees from
madrasas outside Kutch. Almost all of them are now
teaching in madrasas and schools in different parts of
Kutch, thus playing an important role in educational
progress in this educationally deprived district.
The madrasa has a vast collection of almost 60,000
Islamic texts in its library, probably the largest in
Kutch. It also has some 70 delicately crafted
hand-written Arabic and Persian manuscripts, some
several centuries old, including Quranic texts, which
Maulvi Qasmi proudly displays to me. Some of these
were recovered from an ancient dry well in Bhuj, and
others were procured from the custodian of a local
Sufi shrine.
The madrasa is unique in another sense: it is actively
associated with a secular NGO, the Ahmedabad-Jan
Vikas, headed by the noted human rights activist Gagan
Sethi. Jan Vikas, which, in collaboration with the
Jamiat-e Ulema-e Hind, runs a network of non-formal
schools, called Jeevan Talim centres, in more than
thirty Muslim settlements across Kutch. Many of these
centres are located in the premises of Jamiat-run
village maktabs, and several of their teachers for
subjects such as Gujarati and Mathematics are also
maulvis who teach in these maktabs. The
joint-secretary of the Jamiat's Gujarat unit, Noor
Muhammad Raima, is also the secretary of the Jamiat
Arabia Ulum ul-Islamia madrasa, and he is one of the
overseers of this educational project.
Interestingly, girls and boys study in the Jeevan
Talim centres. Some centres also have Hindu and Dalit
students as well as women instructors are women
including some non-Muslims. There are also several
women in the Jan Vikas team who work with Jamiat
leaders in supervising the activities of the centres.
Students from several of these centres have taken
admission in the Bhuj madrasa to carry on with Islamic
and modern education.
I ask Maulvi Qasmi what he feels about working with a
non-Muslim NGO, especially since many of its
volunteers, who regularly interact with the ulema
involved in the project, are women.
'That's no problem at all', he tells me, to my
pleasant surprise. 'We believe that the work we want
must be done properly, no matter by whom.'
'Initially', he adds, 'we did have some hesitations
and misconceptions about working with a non-Muslim NGO
as we did not have the experience of this before. But,
after several meetings with Jan Vikas activists all
our fears were put to rest. Now, we regularly meet
them and give them whatever help they want because we
trust them.'
Sukhia Sab Sansar Khaye Aur Soye
Dukhia Das Kabir Jagey Aur Roye
The world is 'happy', eating and sleeping
The forlorn Kabir Das is awake and weeping
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