A Deobandi Mullah’s Diatribe Against ‘Modern’
Education For Girls

Yoginder Sikand


In addition to widespread poverty and indifference on
the part of the state, one of the major factors for
the dismal level of education of Muslim girls in India
is the influence of large sections of the
traditionalist ‘ulama or Muslim clerics. As many
‘ulama see it, ‘modern’ education is calculated to
distort and finally destroy Muslim identity and faith,
leading to indifference, if not hostility, to
religion. For some ‘ulama this opposition to secular
education also stems from a fear that it might result
in a challenge to their own claims to authority as
‘spokesmen’ of Islam and the Muslim community and
might also undermine the structures of patriarchy that
they continue to defend.

Women’s education, for some ‘ulama, is a particularly
contentious subject. Education imparted in schools
where no provision is made for religion, they believe,
will leave girls, in particular, vulnerable to all
manner of immoral influences. Hence, they insist, the
only sort of education that Muslim girls should
receive is that provided in traditional madrasas,
restricted largely to religious education as narrowly
defined, in order to prepare them for the only future
that they envisage for them, as good wives and
mothers. This is the confirmed opinion of large
sections of the ‘ulama associated with the influential
Deobandi Sunni school of thought.

A good illustration of the Deobandi position on girls’
education is provided in a recently published book by
a Deobandi scholar from Bihar and a graduate of the
Dar ul-‘Ulum Deoband, Maulvi Abdul Basit Hamidi Qasmi.
The book, a collection of the author’s speeches
delivered at various religious gatherings, boasts the
pompous title of Nayab Taqreeren: Asr-i Hazir Ke
Taqazon Se Hamahang Sulagte Masail Par Mubni Chand
Inami Taqriron Ka Majmua , which translates as ‘Rare
Speeches: A Collection of Some Prize Lectures on
Burning Contemporary Issues’. The book contains short
forewords and notes of appreciation by numerous
leading Deobandi ‘ulama, including teachers of the
Deoband madrasa and the Jamia Rahmani, Munger, one of
the premier Deobandi madrasas in Bihar. Presumably,
therefore, the contents of the book reflect a
widely-shared shade of opinion among numerous Deobandi
ulama.

One speech included in the book, titled Talim
ul-Niswan Ka Nizam (‘The System of Girls’ Education’),
deals specifically with the issue of what Qasmi
believes to be the ‘Islamically’-appropriate form of
education for Muslim girls. The author argues that
Islam stresses the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ (ilm)
for all Muslims, males as well as females. However, in
contrast to modernist Muslim scholars, who take this
to mean sanction for both religious and secular
knowledge, Qasmi argues that here ‘knowledge’ refers
only to ‘religious knowledge’ (ilm-i din), or ‘that
knowledge through which one’s religious beliefs and
prayer are perfected’. He argues, contending with the
modernists, that when the Prophet insisted that all
Muslims should acquire knowledge as a religious duty,
what he meant was religious knowledge. He thus
critiques other Muslims who include ‘worldly’ subjects
under the rubric of Islamically appropriate knowledge,
arguing that ‘English, History and Geography are not
ilm, but, rather, skills (hunar)’. Hence, he claims,
what the Prophet intended when he insisted that all
Muslims, males and females, should acquire knowledge
was that every Muslim should have at least so much
‘religious knowledge’ as to lead a proper Islamic
life.

Restricting compulsory knowledge simply to religious
knowledge as narrowly defined, Qasmi opposes the
teaching of ‘non-religious’ education for Muslim
girls. He regards those who advocate this sort of
education for girls as ‘blindly imitating Europeans’.
He sees ‘non-religious’ knowledge as good only for
enabling people to work outside the home, and hence
argues that this is un-necessary for Muslim girls
because Islam, as he understands it, is against this
practice. Earning a livelihood, he insists, is the
duty of the man, not the woman, and it is binding on
the woman to observe pardah or seclusion. ‘Reason’, he
insists, ‘says that worldly knowledge cannot be had
while observing pardah’, thus ruling out such
education for Muslim girls. However, he relents and
says, under conditions of ‘severe necessity’ there is
no absolute prohibition on a woman learning modern
subjects, but this must be done in pardah and only
after completing her religious studies. For this
purpose, he lays down, she must study only from either
another woman, or, if this is not possible, then from
a mehram male, that is a male relative whom she is
forbidden by Islamic law from marrying. In case women
have no males to support them financially, he
grudgingly says, it is permissible for them to learn
some ‘worldly arts’ so that they can earn their
livelihood, but still, he warns ‘they should be
experts not in worldly but in religious knowledge’.

Qasmi insists that ‘worldly knowledge is not good for
women but can be destructive for them’, adding that
‘all the problems of women can only be solved through
Islamic education’, by which, presumably, he means
‘Islamic education’ as narrowly interpreted by the
Deobandis. He appears to equate modern education with
Westernisation, and condemns the latter outright,
arguing that ‘Western culture is blind, so how can it
provide light to others?’. To bolster this claim he
quotes some obscure Western writers, who, he claims,
are ‘great intellectuals’, who argue that the right
place of women is the home and who are opposed to
higher education for them. Interestingly, he does not
provide any references for these quotes. Thus, for
instance, he refers to a certain ‘Samuel Samails’,
whom he describes as ‘the greatest writer in England
and possessor of great morals’ , who says that ‘a
respectable woman is one who stays at home and spins
thread’, lamenting that women today refuse to do so.
‘Samails’ is also approvingly quoted as saying that
women should learn ‘only that modicum of chemistry
that will help them remove the froth from food cooking
in vessels and that amount of geography that will
enable them to learn the usefulness of windows and
ventilators’. As if this were not enough, Qasmi
quotes another Western scholar, a certain ‘Lord
Brain’, who he describes as a ‘Jew’, who insists that
woman’s library should possess no book other than the
Torah and the Bible, bemoaning the fact that today
‘besides their biological differences, differences
between males and females have been erased’. To
further reinforce his argument, Qasmi refers to yet
another Western writer, described as an ‘American
scholar’, a certain ‘Losan’, who argues that ‘women
have no capacity for higher education’, because such
education is ‘against their nature’.

Qasmi’s opposition to ‘modern’ education for girls
stems essentially from the argument, which that many
Muslim modernists would furiously dispute, that such
education must necessarily be defined as Western and,
therefore, as immoral and irreligious. Seeing
traditional Deobandi-style education as normative, he
cannot conceive the possibility of a harmonious
combination of Islamic and secular education,
something that numerous Muslim modernists have been
advocating. ‘Modern’ education, as Qasmi sees it, is
bound to lead Muslim women away from the path of
Islam. All ‘modern’ educated Muslim women are painted
with the same brush. Thus, Qasmi claims, making no
room for exceptions, that all such women ‘care nothing
about religion, do not distinguish between the
permissible and the forbidden, know nothing about the
angels, don’t know which angels used to deliver the
Divine revelations, or how many famous angels there
are and what their names are or the details of the
life after death, or the number of heavenly books and
which prophet received which book and who the first
prophet was, or the reality of faith and disbelief’.
‘Modern’ educated women, he goes on, ‘have no love for
Islam’. ‘They use magic and spells to subjugate their
husbands, very few of them know the Prophet’s mothers’
name and are not observant of prayers and are ignorant
of the rules of religious purity’. ‘Women today’, he
claims, ‘are interested only in fighting, abusing,
lying, backbiting, going to the cinema, watching
television, and cooking’. ‘They move around without
caring for pardah and engage in adultery’. He
describes Muslim women who study in colleges and
universities as doing so simply in order to ‘become
European and English’, and accuses their male
relatives who arrange for them to take admission in
such institutions as ‘sellers of their conscience’. In
short, he says, the have begun to ‘follow Satan’. ‘All
this’, he argues, ‘is because they lack religious
education’. Due to this, he claims, ‘their actions are
not good’.

To remedy this situation, Qasmi says, Muslim girls
must be educated only in religious madrasas. This is
also crucial, he contends, because if women lack
religious education their children and the future
generations of Muslims might be tempted to disbelief
and immorality. Ideally, he lays down, Muslim girls
should study in their own homes, from older female
relatives or, if this is not possible, then from
mehram males who have some knowledge of Islam.
Brighter girls can be given higher religious education
and for the others it is enough to teach them ‘basic
religious rules’ and encourage them to observe these.
This, Qasmi argues, approvingly quoting the Deobandi
scholar Ashraf Ali Thanvi, is the ‘best method’ of
girls’ education. If this is not possible then girls
can be allowed to study in an all-girls’ madrasa in
their own locality. They should not be sent to
co-educational maktabs or madrasas ‘because these are
bereft of shame and modesty’. In the maktabs and
madrasas girls should observe strict pardah. They
should not study with non-mehram male teachers and
must not have any contact with male employees in the
madrasas. In addition to religious subjects, Qasmi
says, they should also be taught various domestic
skills. Significantly, he makes no reference at all to
the teaching of non-religious disciplines, thus
suggesting that he is opposed to girls learning
anything other religious subjects.

Mercifully, Qasmi does not speak for all Muslims or
even for all ‘ulama, although his views find a
powerful echo among many traditionalist Deobandis. As
numerous studies have shown, many Muslim families in
India today are increasingly seeking to educate their
daughters, providing them with both religious as well
as secular education. It remains to be seen if, in the
face of this, the traditionalist ‘ulama are willing to
relent or, as seems equally likely, will continue in
their obdurate opposition to anything but a very
traditional education for Muslim girls, thereby
further reinforcing Muslim marginalization.