Muslim Education and Empowerment in India: Book Review



M. Akhtar Siddiqui, “Empowerment of Muslims Through
Education”, New Delhi: Institute of Objective Studies,
2004, ISBN: 81-85220-58-21, pp.374. Reviewed by:
Yoginder Sikand


Muslim educational marginalization is an accepted
fact, and, according to official figures, Muslims rank
among the least educated communities in India today.
This owes to a host of social, economic, cultural and
political factors, which this admirable book very
succinctly points out.

The first part of the book deals with the classical
madrasa system of education in India. It provides a
broad historical survey of madrasas in India, and then
focuses on the contemporary situation. In the
aftermath of the Partition, the author says, Muslim
education suffered a tremendous set-back, with the
dissolution of princely houses and feudal estates on
which numerous madrasas had depended for patronage,
and discriminatory policies adopted by the state
vis-à-vis the Urdu language. Siddiqui shows how
Muslims in north India have sought to maintain and
promote the tradition of Islamic education in the face
of tremendous challenges through novel experiments.
For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, as a response to the
marked Hinduisation of the government school syllabus
and the numerous negative references to Islam and
Muslim personages in government-prescribed textbooks,
the Dini Talimi Council established a number of
maktabs that provide religious and secular education
as well as Urdu till the fifth grade and allow their
students to join government schools thereafter.
Similarly, the author refers to the
government-recognised madrasa education boards in some
states that provide teachers’ salaries and prescribe a
syllabus for affiliated madrasas that combine both
religious as well as secular subjects. In Assam and
Maharashtra, he says, some madrasas are now directly
affiliated to the State Board of Secondary Education,
which has allowed for their students to join the
educational ‘mainstream’ because their certificates
are recognised by the Boards.

The author stresses the need for modernisation of the
madrasa curriculum, and points to the often ignored
fact that many ‘ulama themselves are in favour of such
changes, provided, however, that the religious core of
the madrasas remains intact. He also argues that the
‘ulama, in general, believe that reforms in the
madrasas should be initiated by the ‘ulama themselves
and not by the state as this might impact on the
autonomy of the madrasas. If state assistance is at
all to be accepted, the ‘ulama believe, it should be
in kind, in the form of books, teaching equipment
etc., and not in the form of money. Similarly,
Siddiqui says, many ‘ulama do favour state-level
madrasa boards but they insist that it should be
outside the direct control of the state.

Siddiqui challenges the notion of madrasas being
impervious to change, offering examples of several
Indian madrasas that are seeking to modernise their
curriculum. An interesting model that other madrasas
could emulate, Siddiqui suggests, is that provided by
the Jamaat-i Islami’s Darsgah-i Islami in Rampur,
western Uttar Pradesh, which includes both secular and
religious subjects in its primary level eight-year
course and then specialises in religious education in
its secondary level seven-year course. Several
madrasas in India are said to follow the Darsgah’s
syllabus, enabling their students to prepare both for
the ‘alimiyat degree given by the madrasas and for the
senior secondary examination conducted in regular
government schools. Another interesting experiment in
madrasa reform is the Jamia Hidaya in Jaipur,
established by the noted Naqshbandi Sufi and ‘alim,
Maulvi Fazlur Rahman Mujaddidi. Students study both
secular and religious subjects, and after the initial
four-year course, which begins after the sixth grade,
they can choose to continue with religious education
or else join a regular school. Students intending to
become religious specialists are obliged to learn one
among a range of numerous trades and crafts.

The next part of the book deals with the conditions of
Muslim schools in India. Siddiqui sees the state’s
discriminatory policies vis-à-vis the Urdu language as
one of the major reasons for Muslim educational
backwardness, particularly in north India. However, he
argues, while Urdu is ‘an important element’ of Muslim
identity, it is wrong to identify the language as
‘Muslim’ as such, even though today, for all practical
purposes, non-Muslims have abandoned it, as a result
of which Urdu is today restricted largely to madrasas.
This is one reason why many Muslim families prefer to
send their children to madrasas instead of schools, he
says. In the Urdu ‘heartland’ of Uttar Pradesh, Urdu
today languishes, dying a sow death, there being
hardly any Urdu medium schools in the state, this
being a gross violation of the Constitutional right of
Muslims to be taught in their own mother tongue. The
situation is considerably better, however, Siddiqui
points out, in states beyond the Hindi-Urdu belt, such
as Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, where
state governments have funded several Urdu schools,
although their standard is said to leave much t be
desired.

In the face of state indifference, if not hostility,
to Muslim education, numerous Muslim organisations are
today playing an important role in the field of
education. This is particularly marked in Maharashtra
and southern India. Siddiqui provides interesting
details about the schools, colleges and vocational
training centres run by a number of Muslim NGOs in
these states, contrasting this with the grim situation
in north India, where, he says, Muslims run relatively
few educational institutions other than madrasas.
While Siddiqui welcomes this investment of community
resources in education, he points out that much of
this investment has been in institutions of higher
learning, such as engineering, medical and technical
colleges, while basic education, especially for the
poor, has been ignored. Further, many of these
institutions have more non-Muslim than Muslim students
on their rolls because of the high capitation and
other fees that they charge. Many of them are actually
commercial ventures and do little for the community,
especially for the poor among the Muslims.

The third section of the book deals with the state’s
policies on minority education. Given the magnitude of
the problem of Muslim educational marginalization,
Siddiqui stresses that Muslims cannot address the
issue alone. Rather, they have to work in tandem with
the state. Siddiqui quotes with approval the Programme
of Action for Minorities laid down in the National
Education Policy of 1986, in which, for the first
time, the state recognized Muslims as an
educationally ‘backward’ community. Yet, he laments,
little has been actually done by the state to
ameliorate the situation. One reason for this is that
the suggestions put forward in the Programme document
were left to the state governments to be implemented,
and many of these are indifferent to Muslim education.
In fact, Siddiqui argues, many state governments
deliberately create hurdles for Muslim organizations
that wish to set up educational institutions. Hence,
Siddiqui suggests, there is need for statutory action
at the Central level to fully implement various
minority-related programmes funded by the state and to
streamline the procedure for recognition, affiliation
and funding of minority educational institutions. This
could possibly be done by providing additional
statutory powers to the National Minorities Commission
and the various State Minorities Commissions, each of
which should have a separate unit to deal with
educationally marginalised minorities, or by
establishing a Minorities Education Board at the
Central as well as state level to help the governments
implement various programmes meant for educationally
deprived minorities.

Another major difficulty in developing effective
educational programmes for Muslims and other
educationally marginalized minorities, Siddiqui says,
is the acute paucity of publicly available statistical
information on Muslim education and employment.
Although the government has these statistics, it
refuses to make them public, on the specious grounds
that this would promote ‘communalism’. Siddiqui
rightly argues that suppressing such vital information
leads to ‘worse results, untested hypothesis, and
unfounded claims and complaints’, and insists that
these figures be made available so that the extent of
Muslim marginalization as well as the role of state
policies in addressing it can be gauged.

Yet, gathering and highlighting statistics are not
enough, and, in the absence of political will, surely
this cannot work wonders. Siddiqui refers to the High
Powered Panel headed by Gopal Singh in the 1980s to
look into the conditions of the Muslims, and which
found that Muslims were one of the most marginalized
communities in the country, hardly better off than the
Dalits, providing detailed statistics to back this
claim. It also suggested various measures for the
state to undertake to help address the problem of
Muslim educational and economic marginalization and to
prevent communal riots. The then Prime Minister,
Indira Gandhi, had issued a 15-Point Directive after
the submission of the interim Report of the Gopal
Singh Committee, laying down elaborate rules and
guidelines for promoting Muslim education, which was
later reiterated by her son and successor Rajiv
Gandhi. Yet, no action was taken. Recognising its
failure to do anything substantial in addressing the
issue of Muslim educational ‘backwardness’, in 1992
the Union Government came out with what it called a
Revised Programme of Action, whose pious proclamations
on Muslim education later met with entirely the same
fate, with both the Union and several state
governments showing clear lack of interest in doing
anything about Muslim education at all. In this light
it appears that the present Congress
government-appointed ‘High Powered’ Committee set up
by Manmohan Singh and headed by Rajinder Sachar to
look into the socio-economic conditions of the Muslims
might meet the same dismal end.

Elaborating on his argument of state neglect of Muslim
education, Siddiqui provides detailed information on
the failure of various government-funded schemes
ostensibly meant for minority education as well as the
routine harassment that Muslim educational
institutions seeking recognition and grants-in-aid are
subjected to in many states. Even schemes that were
officially declared to be ‘successful’ were often a
mere hog-wash, Thus, for instance, the Programme of
Action 1992 claimed that all 41 districts in India
with a high minority concentration had been covered
under the community polytechnic scheme but in many
districts it was found that Muslim representation
among the students of such polytechnics was between 3
and 12 per cent, much less than the Muslim proportion
in the total population of the district. In several
places it was also found that the polytechnics were
located at a considerable distance from Muslim
localities. Another scheme that was advertised as a
‘success story’, the setting up of resource centres in
selected universities with a high Muslim presence,
soon turned defunct. Other schemes proved to be major
flops. The scheme of providing Urdu teachers, Urdu
textbooks and Urdu teachers’ training facilities,
envisaged in the Revised Programme of Action, proved
to be a non-starter. A good indication of the
indifference with which the government greeted the
scheme is the fact that in Uttar Pradesh, home to the
largest Urdu-speaking population in the country, there
is today only one Junior Basic Training Institute for
Urdu-medium primary school teachers. Likewise, despite
the Programme of Action’s show of firm commitment to
the official three-language formula, it still far from
adequately being followed in many states, with
Urdu-speaking Muslim children denied their right to
learn the language in state schools.

Yet another much-touted government-funded
programme—the Madrasa Modernisation Scheme, launched
in 2000—failed, being hardly taken seriously, by the
government, the bureaucracy and the madrasas
themselves. The scheme provided for small grants to
madrasas to employ part-time teachers for mathematics,
science, English and Hindi, plus a one-time small
grant of Rs.7000 to each madrasa to purchase science
and mathematics kits and set up libraries. The scheme
failed due to several reasons, not least because in
many madrasas who joined the scheme the teachers did
not get their salaries and also because of suspicion
on the part of the madrasas about the intentions of
the government, given the fact that the coalition
ruling the Centre at that time was headed by the
Bharatiya Janata Party, notorious for being
anti-Muslim. On the other hand, as Siddiqui points
out, some other schemes, such as the Area Intensive
Programme, are said to have benefited at least some
Muslim families in various states.

Overall, Siddiqui argues, despite its ambitious
programmes for minority education the Union government
has been able to do little in this regard due to a
combination of various factors: apathy and
indifference; political compulsions; lack of funds;
and inability to force state governments, who are
responsible for implementing the schemes, to comply.
Such is the state’s indifference to the plight of the
minorities that, Siddiqui laments, that for several
years now the annual reports of the Minorities
Commission have not been tabled in Parliament although
the Commission is actually obliged to do so, thus
making the Commission, in the author’s own words, ‘an
exercise in futility’. While recognizing the
culpability of the state in perpetuating Muslim
educational marginalization, Siddiqui also recognises
the role of the Muslim leadership in this regard. He
says Muslim leaders’ apathy towards education of the
community might have further encouraged many state
governments to ignore the schemes conceived by the
Union government. This apathy might well be due to the
vested interests of sections of the leadership that
sees mass education as a challenge to its own claims
to authority, but, Siddiqui opines, is could also
reflect the fact that many Muslims have completely
lost all faith in the state and its promises. This
situation cries out for urgent remedy and Siddiqui
argues that addressing Muslim educational backwardness
requires joint efforts on the part of the state and
Muslim community organizations. It also requires a
climate of peace and tolerably good inter-community
relations which can allow Muslims to focus their
attention on community development, rather than, as at
present, on defending their lives and identity in the
face of a hostile or indifferent state and Hindutva
chauvinists thirsty for Muslim blood.

Siddiqui concludes by providing an impressive list of
suggestions for promoting Muslim education:
establishing adult education and vocational training
centres, involving Muslim youth in state developmental
programmes, modernization of madrasa curricula, using
madrasas as adult education centres, encouraging the
‘ulama to participate in educational awareness drives,
forcing the Muslim leadership, both political and
religious, to make education a top priority, and
encouraging Muslim NGOs to work with the state to
promote awareness of and to implement various
development projects. He calls for the Union
government to set up stricter regulatory mechanisms to
ensure that state governments actually implement
various schemes meant for minority education. He
suggests that the Minorities Commission be armed with
statutory powers, which it presently lacks, to address
the educational and other problems of the minorities,
which generally go ignored by state and Union
governments. He proposes the setting up of a
Minorities Educational Financing Corporation or Bank
in each state, with initial capital from the Union
government, to provide soft loans to minority
educational institutions and NGOs working for minority
education. Along with this, he asks that the
government substantially raise the meager corpus fund
and annual grant of the Maulana Azad Education
Foundation to help improve infrastructural facilities
and quality of teaching in minority educational
institutions.

For their part, Siddiqui suggests, Muslim community
organizations should seek to mobilize zakat, sadqa and
other such funds for educational purposes, including
for scholarship schemes, girls’ hostels, research on
Muslim education-related issues and curricular and
teacher development programmes in Muslim-run
institutions. Siddiqui also points to the need for
Muslim NGOs to be run more efficiently and in a more
professional manner, arguing that they should work
with non-Muslim organizations and the state in order
to improve their own standards and be more effective.