To Kill the Mockingbird

...even if there is no terrorism being taught in the these places, these kids do not need islamic education...they need to learn science, math, and writing if they are going to succeed in modern india...otherwise they will forever be an unintegrated underclass....

An overdose of religion.

In good old days, Madressas were not so bad. They confined themselves to teaching Quran and how to say say prayers.

Not any more, at least not in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia etc.

They now discuss geopolitics & the conspiracies by the Christians, Jews, Hindues etc against Islam; and breed young green-eyes monstors.

To monitor and to keep them under a check is now not only desirable but an essential requirement to keep the world safe.

Very thorough, detailed and, great research.
Congratulations.

This article has certainly helped me, and I hope it will help others too, to remove the ignorance prevalent among the non-reality-check types like myself.

WOW!
Ram Mohan Roy from a madressah? And Hindus attending madressas in India? Hindus donating money to madressas?

---

How come these facts are not highlighted and emblazoned in the Pakistani press. What else can be a better sell to remove the taint of terrorism from both the BJP and the MMA?

Well done boys, well done indeed!

Write more and often.

Zafar Anjum:

I assume this article will not be limited to Chowk and you will publish this elsewhere. As a fellow Indian, let me say that your quoting a seperatist like Shahabuddin makes the entire article suspect.

In any case, all you provide in defense of Madarsas is your word. We have the example of Pakistan in front of us. In no circumstance can a Madarsa education be helpful to assimilation of Muslims in the Indian mainstream.

Madrassahs have been aroud for centuries, yet they have not helped Muslim literacy level through ages. The Muslim literacy level was close to 10 percent in Pakistan (west Pakistan then) at the time of partition. The rise of literacy level since then is attributed 100 percent to non-Madrassah schooling for both men and women....

If it hadn`t make any positive contrinution for more than 500 years, it is unlikely to do it now in a more hostile environment with more options available...

Look at the names of these institutions given in this article. They are totally misfit with local cultures. Do such practices not contribute towards creating a mutually exclusive sub-subgroup within a subgroup?

Sorry. I will be blunt. There is no need for a large number of madrassas in India and for that matter in any Islamic country. I have no objection in training limited number of religious leaders in madrassas. Even then it is confined to the education of young men in the 15-25 year group as religious leaders. Also madrassas should broaden their education to include diverse fields like sociology, pyschology, other religions, western philosophy and anthropology.

Re : Article
Nice Article Zafar. I really liked the “The Madarsah Modernization Scheme” and the “The way ahead” portion.

Faruk

The authors have put in good effort to prepare the article. It is informative and well balanced. It is such objective information that can clear hype from reality. One favourite tool of anti-muslim forces is degrade everything related to islam. All that hype needs to be countered with factual information, like this article.

It should also be realised that some people are so extremely anti-muslim that no rational arguments will make any sense to them. Hatred towards muslims is almost a religion for such folks so it should not be expected that any of their biased opinions will change with objective information.

This is real jihad. Please drum this and other such articles into the drums of ataturk-wannabees.

The deviants are already on the slippery slope. They will always be a miniscule minority and the reality-check tells us that like the US they just cannot venture outside the Kabuls of their culture or Baghdads of their beliefs. Death, their own shadow, lurks even where they think they have occupied the innocents` land or beseiged them by their borrowed-brains.

Some seige, some occupation.

Stuka,

Shahabuddin, a separatist?

bbabu

Let them eat cake?

Education in Pre-British India
by Pankaj Goyal
Posted 7/9/03

Dharampal, the well known Gandhian and historian of Indian Science, has given a detailed accounts of the extensive indigenous system of education that was thriving in India before the British came in his famous book, The Beautiful Tree. We give below a brief summary of his report. Dharampal`s account is based on the British Collector`s reports when the came to India and were asked to report on sate of the indigenous education.

Indian historical knowledge has been derived from the writings and some other valuable accounts left by the foreigners. For example, the universities of Nalanda and Taxila have been better known as some Greek or Chinese travellers had written about them centuries ago, which had survived in the form of some journals. Thus these journals provide us very useful information about indigenous education.

The information about indigenous education, which is available today, whether published, or still in manuscript form in the government records, largely belongs to the 1820`s and 1830`s period. It is significant to emphasize that indigenous education was carried out through pathshalas, madrassahs and gurukulas. These three institutions were the source of traditional knowledge systems in India and played a very significant role in the Indian education. These institutions were in fact the watering holes of the culture of traditional communities. Therefore the term school is a weak translation of the roles these institutions really played in Indian society.

The most well-known and decisive point, which emerged from the educational surveys, lies in an examination made by William Adam. He, in his observations found that there existed about 1,00,000 village schools in Bengal and Bihar around the 1830s. Men like Thomas Munro, had observed that `every village had a school`. Observations made by Dr. G.W.Leitner in 1882 show that the spread of education in the Punjab around 1850 was of a similar extent. At about the same time, England had very few schools for the children of ordinary people till about 1800, and many of the older grammar school were in poor shape. According to A.E. Dobbs, the University of Oxford might be described as the chief Charity School of the poor as well as the chief Grammar School in England. It was also one of the greatest places of the education for students of theology, law and medicine.

The men who wrote about India belonged to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of Great Britain. These surveys, based on hard data reveal a great deal about the nature of Indian education and detailed information on the background of those benefiting from these institutions.

According to this hard data, in terms of the content, the proportion of those attending institutional school education in India in 1800 is certainly not inferior to what obtained in England then; and in many respects Indian schooling seems to have been much more extensive. The content of studies was better in India than in England. The method of school teaching was superior in India at that time. The school attendance, especially in the district of Madras Presidency, even in the decayed state of the period 1822-25, was proportionately far higher than the numbers in all variety of schools in England in 1800. The only aspect in which India was behind was the education of girls. Girl schooling may have been proportionately more extensive in England in 1800.

However, the Madras Presidency and Bengal-Bihar data presents a kind of revelation. According to this data, the education of any sort in India, till very recant decades, was mostly limited to the twice born amongst the Hindus, and amongst the Muslims to those from the ruling elite.

Two of the collectors sent detailed information pertain-ing to those who were being educated at home, or in some other private manner. The collector of Malabar sent details of 1,594 scholars who were receiving education in Theology, Law, Astrono-my, Metaphysics, Ethics and Medical Science in his district from private tutors. The collector of Madras, on the other hand, report-ed in his letter of February 1826 that 26,963 school-level schol-ars were then receiving tuition at their homes in the area under his jurisdiction.

The government of Madras presidency completed a survey of Indian educational institutions in 1823-24. After that it came to be known that despite the poverty and disturbance, there were about 13,000 schools and 740 colleges under the presidency. According to this survey the original number of students in school and colleges were 1,88,650 out of which 42,502 were Brahmans and 85,400 were from the castes known as Shudras. The remaining were Vaishya, Mohammedan and from other Hindu castes. The numbers of girls were only 4540, but according to the report this lesser number of girls as alleged was mainly due to the prevalence of home education of girls. But the number of Mohammedan girl students in Malabar district was very large. The number of girl students there was 1,122 and for boy students 3196. How these institutions of education were destroyed is known to some extent by what Gandhiji said.

The Government of the Presidency of Madras on 10 March 1826 ultimately reviewed the reports of the collectors. The Governor, Sir Thomas Munro, was of the view that while the institutional education of females seemed negligible, that of the boys between the ages of 5 to 10 years appeared to be a `little more than one-fourth` of the boys of that age in the Presidency as a whole. Taking into consideration those who were estimated as being taught at home, he was inclined `to estimate the por-tion of the male population who receive school education to be nearer to one-third than one-fourth of the whole.

The caste-wise division of students provides the more interesting and historically more relevant information. This is true not only as regards boys, but also with respect to the rather small number of girls who, according to the survey, were receiving education in schools. Furthermore, the information be-comes all the more curious and pertinent when the data is grouped into the five main language areas -- Oriya, Telugu, Kannada. Malayalam and Tamil. These constituted the Presidency of Madras at this period, and throughout the nineteenth century.

In the Tamil speaking areas where the twice-born ranged between 13% in the south Arcot to some 23% in Madras, the Muslims were less than 3% in South Arcot and Chingleput to 10% in Salem, while the Soodras and the other castes ranged from about 70% in Salem and Tinnevelly, to over 84% in South Arcot.

In Malayalam-speaking Malabar, the proportion of the twice born was still below 20% of the total. Because of a larger Muslim population, however, the number of Muslim school stu-dents went up to nearly 27%, while the Soodras and the other castes accounted for some 54% of the school going students.

In the largely Kannada-speaking Bellary, the proportion of the twice-born (the Brahmins and the Vysees) went up to 33%, while the Soodras, and the other castes still accounted for some 63%.

The position in the Oriya-speaking Ganjam was similar: the twice-born accounting for some 35.6%, and the Soodras and other castes being around 63.5%.

It is only in the Telugu-speaking districts that the twice born formed the major proportion of the school going students. Here, the proportion of Brahmin boys varied from 24% in Cuddapah to 46% in Vizagapatam; of the Vysees from 10.5% in Vizagapatam to 29% in Cuddapah; of the Muslims from 1 % in Vizagapatam to 8% in Nellore; and of the Soodras and other castes from 35% in Guntoor to over 41% in Cuddapah and Vizagapatam.

The main subjects, which were reported to be taught in the schools of Bellary and also in Rajahmundry, were reading, writing and arithmetic. Ramayanum, Maha Bharata, Bhagvata, were some other books which were reported to be taught in these schools.

While several of the collectors observed that no institutions of higher learning were then known to exist in their districts, the rest reported a total of 1,094 such places. These were enumer-ated under the term `colleges` (as mentioned in the prescribed form). The largest number of these, 279, were in the district of Rajahmundry with a total of 1.454 scholars; Coimbatore came next with 173 such places (724 scholars); Guntoor had 171 (with 939 scholars); Tanjore 109 (with 769 scholars); Nellore 107; North Arcot 69 (with 418 scholars); Salem 53 (with 324 scholars); Chingleput 51 (with 398 scholars); Masulipatarn 49 (with 199 scholers); Bellary 23; Trichnopoly (with 131 scholars) and Malabar with one old institution with 75 scholars.

The books used in these institutions probably were the Vedas, the various Sastras, the Purans, the more well known books on Ganeeta, and Jyotish-sastras and epic literature.

Several collectors, especially the collector of Canara, who did not send any statistical returns at all, mentioned the fact that many of the boys and especially the girls received education at home from their parents, or relatives, or from privately engaged tutors. The data from Madras regarding the number of boys and girls receiving tuition at their home is equally pertinent. In comparison to those being educated in schools in Madras, this number is 4.7 times.

The number of girls attending the school was very small. Leaving aside the districts of Malabar and the Jeypoor divison of Vizagapatam district, the girls from Brahmin, Chettri, and Vysee castes were practically non-existent in schools. However, there were some Muslim girls receiving school educations: 56 in Trichnopoly, and 27 in Salem.

Thirteen years later, a more limited semi-official survey of indigenous education was taken up in the Presidency of Bengal, which is known as the Adam`s Reports. In spite of the controversies, Adam`s Reports have mentioned that there were perhaps 1,00,000 village schools in Bengal and Bihar in some form till the 1830.

Adam divided the period spent in elementary schools into 4 stages, which were: The first stage was a period of about ten days, during which the young scholar was taught to form the letters of the alphabet; the second stage, extending two and a half to 4 years, was distinguished by the use of palm leaf as the material on which writing was performed and the scholar was taught to read and write and also learn the Cowrie table, the Numeration table, the katha table and the Ser table; the third stage extended from 2 to 3 years, which were employed in writing on the plantain leaf and addition, subtraction and other arithmetical operations were taught during this period; and finally in the fourth stage, which extended up to 2 years, the writing was done on the paper and the scholar was expected to read the Ramayana, Manas mangal etc.

About 45 years after Adam, Dr. G. W. Leitner prepared an even more voluminous survey of indigenous education. This survey was more direct and much less complementary to British rule. Leitner`s researches showed that at the time of the annexation of the Punjab, the lowest computation gave 3,30,000 pupils in the schools of the various denominations who were acquainted with reading, writing and some methods of computation.

There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the field of indigenous education within a few decades after the onset of British rule. This is the major common impression, which emerges from the (1822-25) Madras Presidency data, the report of W. Adam on Bengal and Bihar (1835-38), and the Punjab survey by G.W. Leitner.

Gandhiji was very disappointed at the condition of Indian education during the British period. Gandhiji observed two main points in Indian education: (1) Today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or hundred years ago; and (2) the British administrators instead of looking after education and other matters which had existed, began to root them out.

Source:
Dharampal, 2000. Introduction in The Beautiful Tree, Volume III. Pp. 07-86. Mapusa: Other India Press.

Note: The archaic spellings have not been changed.

An excellent article. Well done! The Madrassah is essential to the well being of any Islamic society; people forget that every single one of the famous and great Muslim scholars of the past from Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, the 4 Imams of Fiqh, Imam Ghazzali and all of the great Sufis were products of the madrassah system. Indeed every single scholar of any school has been a product of the madrassah system. Highly educated and pious ulama are vital to the transmission of this Deen from one generation of Muslims to the next. This transmission of knowledge (sanad) is the secret of this Deen to quote Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson.

The problem is the general fall of standards in the students attending the madrassah system
(and hence in the teachers too). Even in the beginning of the 20th century, this madrassah system was producing geniuses and outstanding scholars such as Ala Hazrat Imam Ahmad Riza Khan Barelvi , Ashraf Ali Thanavi Deobandi, Haji Imdad Ullah Muhajjir Makki, Sayyid Naeemuddin Muradabadi, Sayyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani Kachchochavi etc. In previous centuries great Muslims of the calibre of Shah Wali Allah, the Muhaddith of Delhi, his son Shah Abdul Aziz, Imam e Rabbani Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, Hazrat Fazl e Haqq Khairabadi etc. were all products of the same madrassah system etc.

So what has happened? Why this change (massive drop) in standards? It is simple: previously a family would send their BRIGHTEST children to the madrassah to learn about the Deen and become alims (religious scholars) as traditionally in Islamic society the ulama and the Sufis occupied the highest respect in Islamic societies. Since colonisation and especially the last 100 years this has changed with creeping secularisation and irreligiousness of Muslims so that now most people will send their STUPIDEST sons to the madrssahs and encourage their brightest children to become doctors and engineers. The result of this is that these people make mediocre ulama and thus the respect for them in society goes ever lower; thus is is a vicious circle. Of course brilliant individuals still surface from the many mediocrities but no alim will disagree that the overall standard of the ulama has dropped (in Barelvi, Deobandi, Ahle Hadith and Shia madrassahs) considerably since the time of the likes of Ala Hazrat and Ashraf Ali Thanawi.

One reason for this has also been the gradual dumbing down of the traditional syllabus where a 16 year course is now pared down to 8 years in even the best madrassahs and in some even less! THat is one reason why if you compare a young alim in his 30s today to an alim in his 70s who have both down the complete Dars e Nizami course, the young alim knows a tenth of his elder counterpart in the same subjects! This is a generalisation of course.

Amazingly though, thanks to the general rise of what is known as the awareness of Islam amongst the younger generations of Muslims throughout the world, since the late 70s at least, and especially in Muslim diasporas and specially amongst Muslim converts in the West, there is now a growing trend amongst Muslims who are non-Wahabi and traditional Sunnis to go to those places in the Muslim world which have been unaffected by modernisation to a large extent, such as the deserts of Mauritania and the Hadramawt valley in Yemen, and seek out traditional Islamic knowledge in these madrassahs. (WAhabism has ample graduates pouring out of Saudi and Saudi funded madrassahs everywhere). These people spend up to a decade or more in these old style traditional madrassahs where they learn the traditional Nizami syllabus and then return to teach traditional islam to their own communities. Since most second generation MUslims who are either converts in the West, or from Indo Pak backgrounds, tend to be highly intelligent university graduates of western universities (or with at least A levels) the quality of ulama being produced by this group is noticably higher. This has encouraged more youngsters to go to these madrassahs (and also some in Indo Pak, eg Dar ul Ulum Deoband, Jamia Ashrafiyya in Faizabad, Mubarakpur, UP, Jamia Nizamiyya Lahore, Jamia Amjadiyya Karachi, etc etc) to learn traditional Islam and so it is likely that as this trend continues the quality of madrassah students and ulama will begin to rise again. For western Muslims a person who deserves special mention for creating this awareness of the vital role of the traditional madrassahs in Islamic education is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf who has almost single-handedly been responsible for making english speaking Muslims of the diaspora interested in being ulama again instead of doctors and engineers. He also is the Islamic adviser to President Bush.

Also first generation Muslim ulama who went to the West have also started to set up these traditional stlye madrassahs which teach the Dars Nizami along with English, science and other subjects. This is because a revival of the standards of education in madrassahs is vital for the revival of traditional islam.

Same old wine, water, new bottle. Actally, not just a bottle, but a huge Syntex water storage tank. Take water out, use for bath, sanitation, kitchen, garden, refill.

+++

What is new in your lengthy collection, Zafar Anjum?

You say ``past - present - future``. Where is your presentation on the future in this article, Sir? Where is the role of women, 50% of all Muslims, in your article? Who are the human beings who form the mass that are impacted by this alleged misunderstanding?

Read TKTM again. Please. The misunderstanding of the ``other`` was by white people to the complete ``other`` class, coloured people. Is that so in India, are all Muslims ``misunderstood``?

If you used the TKTM example, then please try to use it also, within the Muslim society in India, and see the results? Who is responsible for projecting small fundamentalist sects of Muslims as ``represenative`` of all Muslims? All whites were not the US, fundoos are not all Muslims in India.

One of the seldom spoken about roles of (oil money sponsored?) madarsas in India, and I have first hand knowledge of this, was to be the commercial routing for human movement towards Saudia. Whether for religious purposes, or as labour/menials, or simply to provide cannon fodder for assorted ``jihads`` worldwide. That is now drying up. As a result, we have the amazing sight of madarsas in non-Hindi/Urdu areas ``importing`` young Muslims from the Hindi/Urdu areas to swell the ranks. Did you observe that? Oh no, your madarsas beging and end within a few hundred miles radius of Delhi? Well, I am an Indian, and mine didn`t. I drive all over the country, and while others flock to bars, I do a quick round of the religious places in town.

And all over India, a pitiably small section of Urdu speaking Muslims in India with backward vision cannot be projected as the sole example of whatever it is that you are trying to put forth.

``Qaum khatre mein hai`` intones the typical beleagured ``Muslim leader`` in India. Yes, from within.

+++

The real role, and may I say victory. in changing society, of Islamic institutions of learning in India is being carried out elsewhere. Early days yet, but get a grip on how the healthcare support industry is changing demographics with an increasingly larger number of trained Muslim girls moving out of their homes in burqas to work in hospitals wearing whites. Not just Christians from kerala anymore. Absorb how the perception industry (media, entertainment, info-tainment, news) is finding new talent from the mean backstreets of the old cities, people who have diction and accent that can be understood, and where those young people are studying. Most of all, get to understand how Muslims returning from tenures in other parts of the country, serving time in uniformed forces or as labour in fields afar, seem to bring new ideas on best practices for rural economies without the barrier of caste that prevents Hindus from moving up. Whether it is in dairy farming, bottom end mechanical repair work, proper de-silting and crop rotations, there is a revolution going on in India which most static media do not have the least bit of idea about.

In fact, if you ask the old-timers, Muslims in some parts of the country are doing, with dint of sheer labour and hard work, what Sikhs did about 50-75 years ago. It is my take that the ``past & present`` variety of madarsas in India feel threatened by this evolution.

Water finds its own level, Zafar. While the ``Muslim leaders`` bemoan their fate, their flock is oving ahead. Let the past and the present look at the future, instead of bemoaning lost oil money which will not come back.

+++

Just one anecdote:-when my regular taxi driver who is otherwise as illiterate as they come and fundoo to boot tells me that his daughter has stood third in the all-India selection for Nursing Staff for a particular uniformed service in India, and that she is going to proceed for training to another State 2 days train ride away, and if my equally religious M-I-L could be her LG in that faraway city, then I no longer have to feel surprised whether she was wearing a burqa, ghunghat or covering her head at home.

That is India, my India today, and there are plenty of Muslims present in it. And increasingly, there is nothing but contempt for those who choose to be left behind and resistance if they try to drag others back with them.

There will be bumps, there will be problems.

++

Zafar Anjum,
A quick search revealed this as part of my continuing reality-check.
Thanks again.



Muslim Schools in U.S. a Voice for Identity
By SUSAN SACHS
The school year is already in full swing and still the parents come, crowding into the principal`s office at Al Noor School in Brooklyn, painstakingly filling in forms, proffering checks and pleading in Arabic and English for a chance to enroll their children in the New York area`s biggest Islamic private school.
``We turned down 400 kids because we don`t have space,`` said Nidal Abuasi, the principal, whose resources are already stretched to accommodate Al Noor`s 600 students. ``We have people who come hoping we have space even if their child has to be demoted to a lower grade. There is a huge demand.``

Across the country, Islamic schools like Al Noor that offer religion and Arabic classes along with a standard academic curriculum are expanding and flourishing, with many becoming oversubscribed so quickly that principals are scrambling for money to build more.

The reasons for the surge are as diverse as the American Muslim population itself, which embraces American-born converts and a swelling immigrant population from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

But the educational structure these schools have forged -- prayer, discipline and American-style teaching -- has an appeal that cuts across lines of national origin and background.



The playground at Al Noor School in Brooklyn. The principal said 400 students were turned away for lack of space at the 600-student school.
At Al Iman elementary and high school in Queens, as at the 23 other Islamic schools in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey, the day begins with prayer: rows of children, separated by sex, reciting in Arabic the ancient words of submission to Allah.

Posters of Islam`s most famous mosques and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed hang in every classroom. Children must wear uniforms: long shapeless robes and head scarves for the older girls and neat blue sweaters and gray trousers for the boys. Besides their regular studies, students take two classes a week in Islamic studies and three a week in Arabic, the language of the Koran.

A glance at Al Iman`s handbook for students and parents further underlines the differences from public schools. The rules are strict: three demerits for taking toys, comics, cosmetics, jewelry or other unauthorized materials to school, one for wearing nail polish, five for disrespectful behavior to teachers or for ``pursuing acts of romanticism`` like flirting with a schoolmate. The punishment for five demerits is detention during lunch for three days. After 30 demerits, a child is suspended for a week, and after 40, expelled.

For students who transfer from public school, the transition can be difficult.

``My parents insisted I come here and I didn`t really argue with them,`` said Amel Ahmed, 17, whose parents emigrated from Yemen in 1980. She admitted she had picked up some bad habits in public school, but said the individual attention and strictly enforced regulations at Al Iman had set her straight.

``I wasn`t on the right track there, maybe because you get influenced by your friends,`` Amel said. ``Here they don`t only teach you. They guide you.``

Until recently, a full-time academic course load combined with Islamic teaching was available mainly through the national network of Sister Clara Muhammad schools, named for the wife of the Nation of Islam`s founder, Elijah Muhammad, mainly serving African-American students. Two in New York City have been operating since the early 1970`s, although they are no longer associated with the Nation of Islam. Now a new type of school serving a broader group of Muslims has emerged. In a sudden growth spurt, the number of Islamic schools nationwide has jumped to at least 200, according to the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, an informal body that sponsors workshops for Muslim educators. But neither the council nor any other group keeps official track of school openings, and American Muslims say they believe that the national figures are even higher.


Al Noor School in Brooklyn and other Islamic schools offer religion and Arabic classes with a standard academic curriculum and use a formula of piety and penalties.

As recently as three years ago, fewer than 200 children in New York City and Long Island attended private Islamic schools. Today, with two full-time high schools in Queens and plans to build three more in Brooklyn and Manhattan, total enrollment is 2,400 spread among 13 schools, with the majority of students from immigrant families. In New Jersey there are now at least 10 private Islamic schools, not only in big cities, with their notoriously troubled public schools, but also in small towns with respected school districts.

Private school enrollment is up in general, and many of the attractions are the same for all parents, Muslim or not, who view public schools as too permissive, rowdy and crowded.

But a more subtle dynamic is at work in the national surge in Islamic private schools. It represents a coming of age, in the view of many Muslim leaders, for a community striving to define itself as a cohesive religious minority in the secular American society.

Long a community of distinct and often introverted parts, Muslims have begun a process familiar to many immigrant and ethnic groups. They are trying to reach beyond their internal demarcations of national origin and find a unified voice to defend and promote their interests in a multicultural society.

Convinced that many Americans have a distorted view of Muslims and their Islamic religion, compounded by images in the movies and the media, they have created national organizations, lobbying groups, voter-registration campaigns and outreach programs to explain Islam to their neighbors.

Those who help to create a school system see themselves as an integral part of this communal effort to define, for themselves and for others, what it means to be a Muslim in the United States.

``My father`s family survived in Bosnian society as a minority for centuries,`` said Saffiya Turan, a founder of Noor al Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J., whose father emigrated more than 30 years ago from Yugoslavia. ``To survive, you have to know who you are.``

The challenge for Islamic educators is to create a spiritual educational experience for young Muslims that is also relevant to their lives in a secular society. It has been a process of trial and error, ad-libbing and self-discovery.

Many schools cobble together teaching materials from other countries. Abuasi, who is Palestinian-American, said he experimented with books from Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere before settling on Arabic texts from Jordan to teach the Koran, which Muslims believe is God`s word as transmitted to the prophet Mohammed.

At Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, one teacher, Abir Catovic, decided it made more sense for American schools to write their own texts.

``Overseas, you aren`t taught to ask why,`` said Mrs. Catovic, 31, who grew up in New Jersey after her family emigrated from Egypt. ``Here you`ve got students who ask why, and you`d better be prepared to answer more than just, `Because it says so.` ``

Religious schools for American Muslims also have to contend with a widely diverse student body. At Al Iman in Queens, for example, any one class might have children from Egyptian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Indian and African-American backgrounds. For Souhair Ayach, who teaches Islamic studies, having that mix of cultures requires her constantly to stress the difference between old country traditions and religion.

One recent day, Ms. Ayach`s class strayed from a discussion of the divine source of human genius to a more worldly topic that was on the minds of her 11th- and 12th-grade students: arranged marriages.

``Is there something in Islam that, like, says a girl should get married at a young age, or is it just tradition?`` asked a teen-age girl who gave her name only as Sabih, whose parents came from Pakistan but whose accent announced her New York City upbringing.

Ms. Ayach, herself a recent immigrant from Lebanon, steered a cautious course. ``In the past, people had everything they needed to live,`` she said. ``They were shepherds. They were merchants. They had castles. They didn`t have all these expenses of life.

``Here,`` she continued, ``you have to have education because you need a good job, a respectable job, to make your living. So it`s better if you marry early, but under some circumstances it`s better to develop your life first.``

Private schooling still touches only a small portion of American Muslims, whose numbers are growing. There are no official national figures, but a 1992 study commissioned by the American Muslim Council, a lobbying group in Washington, estimated the Muslim population in New York State at 800,000 and in New Jersey at 200,000. A more recent study by demographers at the State University of New York at Cortlandt concluded that 450,000 Muslims live in the New York metropolitan area alone.

Islamic schools are still small players in the private-education business. In New York State, 480,000 students, 1 in 5 of school age children, attend one of 2,400 registered nonpublic schools, most of them Roman Catholic schools or Jewish day schools and yeshivas.


But Muslim educators say the numbers of full-time Muslim students do not tell the complete story. Many of their schools have only now reached a point of critical mass at which they can attract more students because they offer advanced grade levels and have a demonstrable academic track record.

Still, it is difficult to gauge the real demand for Islamic schools, most of which charge up to $3,000 a year in tuition. But school administrators say that in an area that already supports 450 mosques in New York City and Long Island, there is a vast untapped pool of families willing to pay for an alternative to the secular public schools.

``This year we added 140 students from the public schools, all coming with the behavioral and academic problems they inherited: name calling, taunting with labels and names, casual profanity,`` said Abuasi at Al Noor. ``Here they have to watch the way they walk, watch the way they talk and watch what comes out of their mouths.``

The formula of piety and penalties at schools like Al Noor seems to have whetted the appetite of Muslim parents. Al Noor opened only three years ago, with an initial enrollment of 350 students in six grades. It now has 600 children from prekindergarten through ninth grade and is raising money from Arabic and Muslim businesses in the area to build a $4 million addition to the school.

To meet expected demand in Manhattan, the Kuwaiti-financed Islamic Cultural Center of New York is building a $10 million, five-story school for 1,000 students, next to its complex at Third Avenue and 96th Street.

Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, one of the busiest in the city, is soliciting donations to convert its top four floors into an Islamic junior high and high school for girls.

Abdulhakim Ali Mohamed, the imam at the mosque, said the need for a girls` school is particularly acute in his neighborhood of immigrants. Families from conservative Arab countries abhor the mixing of boys and girls in public schools, he said, and panic when their daughters become teen-agers.

``Many are thinking of sending them back home,`` Mohamed said. ``We tell them that`s not a solution. If you take them back, you have to go back with them.``

Like new immigrants, more established Muslim families worry that their children may lose their religious identity or do poorly in public schools where their dress, holidays and religious taboos can make them curiosities.

Dawn El Mezyen, a convert to Islam, tried to help her son fit in at a conventional kindergarten, at one point acceding to his pleas to join in exchanging Valentine`s Day cards with his schoolmates. It took hours, she said, to sort through piles of store-bought cards and toss those with romantic messages she believed were inappropriate for a Muslim boy to give.

Then she transferred him to the Noor ul Iman School in South Brunswick, N.J. ``I needed him to be around other Muslim kids,`` Mrs. El Mezyen said. ``I wanted it to be a day to day thing. I didn`t want him to be the sore thumb that sticks out. Here we all celebrate a holiday together.``


At Al Iman School in Queens, robes are required and cosmetics, jewelry and flirting are forbidden

Dear All,

Thanks for your comments on the article. All the issues, including the question of women`s education, have been duly dealth with. Since this article is only an abridged version of the original one (40 pages), I request you to read the full text of the original piece available in pdf form at www.bazaarchintan.net. (the url is http://www.bazaarchintan.net/pdfs/madarsas.pdf).

Regards,

Zafar, Amir, and Saqib

Naqshnandi:

Think about it! You have chosen worldly education in natural sciences for yourself in a non-Muslim environment. How can you suggest parents to send their children with potential to be doctors/ engineers to a madrasssah in Lahore or Karachi? How would they earn living? What kind of product these madrassah educated folks will churn out to make money? As CEO of bioengineering comapny, would you preferentially hire Jamia Ajmalia graduate for research, development, sale, marketing, accounting, computer tech or administrative jobs?

About 7 percent of workforce in Pakistan is in military, 20 percent in government jobs and remaining in private jobs. Please name some institutions where these graduates can make enough money to put two meals per day on the table for their families. Does thriving on donations provide honest living, retirement benefits, health benefits and reasonable job security. What if people stop putting money in tinp cans placed by every shop in Islamabad by one or another religious group? Saudi money is not guaranteed for ever for deobandis and wahabis. Besides Saudis might be the next in line after Iraq, after congressional inquiry into 9/11 is pointing finger directly on Saudis.

Education for the sake of good reading of Koran, fiqah, sharia and ethics might have benefit for self improvement and decent behavior in a society but it is not sufficient in terms of skills or crafts to earn living. Nonody wants to spent 8 or 16 years in schooling only to be placing tin cans by the shops and emptying them once a week.

The governments run on revenue collection. How much revenue madrassah graduates have generated in Pakistan since 1947. Honest answer please and no fudging the issue. The rights of people in a nation depend upon contributions to run the affairs of the people. As they say here in USA, where is the beef? Did you know the source of revenue of Afghanistan Taliban government. Not a single Taliban, from Mullah Omar down to a volunteer ever paid anything to the government. How can the affairs of a nation be run with a group of people made up of consumption-only class. Smaller this group, better the country and society.