Lessons of the Past: Madrasa education in South Asia

Madrasas first emerged in South Asia under the patronage of medeival Muslim rulers, who sought to create a class of clerics to interpret Islamic tradition in ways that suited statecraft. From then till now these institutions have persisted with a curriculum that has seen few changes. The Islam they teach leaves little room for creative interpretation, and it is from this tradition that many political tendencies in the Subcontinent, including the Taliban have emerged.

With the seemingly ineluctable march of modernity and secularisation, Western-style development planners in much of the postcolonial Muslim world had hoped that traditional Islamic centres of education—the madrasas—would be rapidly replaced by Western schools. These schools would train a new generation of educated Muslims who, while rooted in their own cultural traditions, would imbibe the best that the West had to offer. Madrasas were seen as centres of obscurantism and superstition, and as one of the principal causes of Muslim decline at the hands of the West. In different Muslim countries the attack on the madrasa system took different forms. In Turkey, for instance, a government decree in 1925 ordered the closure of all madrasas in the country with a single stroke of the pen, soon after the Republicans under the staunchly secular Kemal Attaturk took power after deposing the last Muslim Caliph.