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VIEW: Another take on madrassa life —Farish A Noor

Pakistan’s decision to expel foreign students, as India’s policy of limiting student visas to foreign madrassas students, will destroy a natural international network system that took decades if not centuries to build

Pakistan’s decision to expel more than a thousand foreign students from its madrassas should not surprise or bewilder anyone of us. The notion that madrassa have become dens of terror and training camps for militant Islam is as common today as it is fraudulent. Worse of all, these allegations have come from those who often know little about the daily life of a madrassa themselves, and their ignorance is telling.

Thankfully there are still some level-headed scholars and politicians who would rather check the facts out for themselves. Just a few weeks ago the British High Commissioner to India visited the Dar’ul Uloom madrassa of Deoband, said to be the nerve-centre of conservative Islamism in the Indian subcontinent. After touring the institution, the High Commissioner delivered a speech in which he stated that he “was convinced that this institution has nothing to do with the phenomenon of terrorism and that it is a respectable scholarly institution.”

Working on religious educational networks and the transcultural transfer of ideas between South and Southeast Asia means that I have spent a considerable amount of time in madrassas myself. Over the past three years I have visited, lived in, and even lectured in some of the madrassas I have visited in Indonesia, Malaysia, Southern Thailand, Pakistan and India. While it cannot be denied that some of the ram-shackled madrassas cobbled together along the Pak-Afghan border in the 1980s were indeed used for dubious reasons, it would be wrong — both analytically and ethically — to summarily condemn all of them as dens of terror.

The recent bombings in London have aggravated the situation even further, compelling the government of Pakistan to announce that they would send back hundreds of foreign students who have come to study in its religious seminaries. The net result of this drastic decision, however, are manifold.

For a start, there is the evident problem of what to do with thousands of ordinary Muslim boys who come from poor families who otherwise would not be able to afford any kind of education at all. Over the past two weeks I have been staying at the Dar’ul Uloom Deoband and the Nahdatul Uloom of Lucknow, and the stories that I recorded repeated the same litany of desperation: many boys who had come to study there were thankful that these institutions had taken them in and given them a shot at life.

Said a young 19-year old from Bihar: “My family consists of my parents and my brothers and sisters, nine in all. I am the eldest and the first to be educated, if I don’t succeed who will support them later?” Heads of states and technocrats may spin the story anyway they choose, but the reality is that the loss of educational opportunities for these boys will entail untold poverty and suffering for a host of families. The human costs of these political decisions will be spread wider.

Then there is the question of the deliberate and unnatural break in inter-cultural and inter-national ties. My stay in Deoband and Lucknow was linked to my own research into the long-established inter-cultural links between south and southeast Asia, a form of globalisation that predated the arrival of the Western colonial powers and which proves yet again that Asia was a vast interconnected space where networks of commerce, trade and ideas were laid long before the advent of the English East India Company and Dutch East Indies Company (VOC).

For more than a hundred years institutions like Dar’ul Uloom Deoband and Nahdatul Uloom Lucknow were cultural magnets that attracted scholars from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. These boys from Southeast Asia came all the way to India to pursue their studies and then proceeded to Egypt, Arabia or Africa. In their wake they created trails and paths that evolved into networks used by their successors. Asia was on the move and the networks that kept Asia together were built by these itinerant scholars.

Pakistan’s decision to expel foreign students, as India’s policy of limiting student visas to foreign madrassas students, will destroy a natural international network system that took decades if not centuries to build. They will be dismantled for the sake of realpolitik. The losers are not the students themselves solely, but also the countries concerned for these students would have later played the vital role of scholar-ambassadors for their respective nations.

The irony is despite the hullabaloo about madrassas and their alleged links to terrorism and violence, I personally witnessed nothing even close to that during my stay in Deoband and Nadwa. On my final day at the Nahdatul Uloom, there was a report that bombs were discovered on the campus of Lucknow University. A couple of days later, members of the student union of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi were barred from the campus for violent behaviour. Rather than bashing the madrassas non-stop in their misguided crusade against terror, perhaps the secular politicians of Asia and the West should focus on the secular modern universities instead!

Dr Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist, based at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin

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