|
Eighteen-year-old Safiya Rahatullah
is old for Class 9, but she doesn’t mind. She is glad she spent
four years memorising the Quran; she even leads namaz these days
at the women’s mosque in the campus of her madrassa, she says.
Rahatullah will take the Class 10 state board exam next year,
after which she will enroll in a four-year course in Islamic
studies at her madrassa.
“Then I will become a sports journalist and write about cricket,”
she says.
The madrassa Rahatullah has attended for 10 years, Kulliah Ayesha
Siddiqua, offers a dual syllabus of secular and religious subjects
and a course in higher religious studies for women. It is churning
out woman doctors, teachers and religious scholars. The waiting
list now bears scores of names from across the country; 40% of the
500 students are from Mumbai. Yet this school is nowhere near the
commercial capital. It is, in fact, in Malegaon, a Muslim-majority
textile town in Nashik district, about 250 km north-east of
Mumbai.
Over 32 years, the Urdu-medium Kulliah Ayesha school has been
doing what Mumbai’s Islamic English schools began experimenting
with only a decade ago — offering devout Muslims an educational
institution that helps them balance their faith and their
ambitions, integrating a madrassa education with a changing,
modernising world. And that is perfect for students like
Rahatullah, who feels as strongly about the cricket world cup as
she does about her headscarf.
Run by the Jamia Mohammediyah Education Society (JMES) trust,
Kulliah Ayesha is part of the sprawling, 56-acre Mansoora Malegaon
(Pearl of Malegaon) campus, which also houses a boys’ madrassa run
along the same lines. Children here study math, science, English
and Marathi based on the state syllabus, along with a parallel
syllabus of Islamic subjects such as Sharia law, Hadith and
understanding the Quran.
“Instead of focusing only on deeni (religious) studies, my father
[JMES founder and Malegaon native Maulana Mukhtar Ahmad Nadvi]
designed a curriculum that would help religious graduates find a
place in the outside world,” says Zubeida Mukhtar, principal of
Kulliah Ayesha. “I also hope to make the school semi-English over
the next three years, though teachers already use a lot of English
in the secondary classes.”
While some of her students leave after Class 10 to pursue a
mainstream education, most prefer to become alemas (female Islamic
scholars) through a four year course affiliated with Jamia Millia
in Delhi and Maulana Azad Open University in Hyderabad. Next year,
students will also be able to study further at Madinah University
in Saudi Arabia, which is planning a women’s wing.
After their course, the women head out into either religious or
secular fields.Mukhtar, incidentally, is one such crossover
student, having got a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from
University of Mumbai after completing her graduate religious
studies course from Kulliah Ayesha. While there are several
madrassas offering such graduate courses for boys in Mumbai, girls
have few such options even in the metropolis. Given that this
Malegaon madrassa also comes with a sports ground and computer
lab, it’s not surprising that it
is quite difficult to get into Kulliah Ayesha.
“Applications have been increasing every year, but we have a
strict upper limit,” says Mukhtar, who maintains a 20:1
student-teacher ratio in her school. “We conduct multiple
interviews to make sure our seats go to the best candidates.”
Still evolving to reach more women in more ways, the madrassa
launched a unique outreach programme three years ago to help train
senior students to spread their religious knowledge. Unlike alims
(male scholars), who can become clerics, alemas can practice only
by teaching, formally or informally.
“So now, every Sunday, we go about in Nashik, Dhule or Aurangabad
districts and preach Islam to uneducated Muslim women,” says
Aasiya Ibrahim, 19, who is working on a dissertation titled ‘Women
in Islam’ as part of her graduate religious studies course. “We
want them to understand that women can progress behind the veil.”
(Courtesy:
Hindustan Times, Mumbai)
|
Comments
|
Quick links