For the Benefit of Future Muslims Ban Madrassahs in the Subcontinent
Suddenly everybody is up in arms against my suggestion of banning madrassahs from the 3 countries of the subcontinent for the benefit of future Muslims. In support of their protest people are citing examples of 'good' and famous Muslim male personalities who had attended reputed madrassahs in the past! And here I'm talking about the future in view of the current situation. The logic of this argument is hard to fathom. Faulty logic is often the flag bearer of guarded falsehoods.
The 'protesters' are not professional educationists or people closely connected with education or even social work on the field level. Most of them reside outside Bangladesh and even if they lived there none of them would dream of sending his or her children to a madrassah.
Of the 3 countries, Govt. Primary Education system is dismal in Pakistan and has resulted in downward sliding literacy rate over the past few decades. So, it is true that these backward madrasahs are the only means of some form of schooling in certain rural areas. Girl children in Pakistan are deprived of learning anything beyond the Arabic 'ampara' reading lessons which enables them to read the Qur'an but leaves them too illiterate to sign their own name in their native language. A movement to ban madrassahs may provide a wake-up call to Pakistani authorities to improve their public education system.
Amongst the downtrodden Muslim communities in India madrassahs actually prevent what scant Govt. services there are from reaching the children of the underprivileged. As a result there is a noticeable absence of Muslim student representation in India's prestigious higher educational institutions.
Bangladesh can boast as the best of the 'three' in terms of providing free primary education for girls and boys, and making enough efforts towards its widespread availability. Hence the mushroom-like proliferation of madrassahs throughout the length and breadth of the country cannot be attributed to filling the vacuum left by Govt. negligence of public education. My contention is that, along with an extraneously generated social pressure to hijabize Muslim girls and women, these abnormally excessive, superfluous madrassahs are part of a shrewd, calculated political ploy by the Islamists to Islamize Bangladesh.
Madrassahs, as they exist now, are feeble embodiments of a figment of imagination. They have nothing to do with either religion or education, yet they exist for the purpose of some opportunist Muslim politicians, who in a most horrendous example of hypocrisy, tout the loudest for the cause of madrassahs where they do not send their own children for schooling. I can talk more about this subject. But first I would like people to read the article I wrote which is full of facts and a history of madrassahs in the subcontinent.
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WB Report on the Goodness of Qoumi Madrassahs Farida Majid The news of a new World Bank report on Quomi madrassahs in Bangladesh ...
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