Slokas After A Noon Namaaz

Muslim children study Sanskrit and Hindu ones read Quran in these UP madrassas

We arrive at Madrassa Anwarul-Islam Salfia at 12.45 pm, a little before namaaz. As the students gather around the row of taps to wash their hands and feet and line up for prayers, this modest building in the dusty, narrow bylanes of Chauri in Jalalpur, in eastern UP's Jaunpur district, looks exactly how we expect a madrassa to be: a place for rigorous study of Islam, Urdu, Arabic. What we encounter instead is a complete contradiction. The bare, red brick walls of the Standard 7 classroom are yet to be plastered, the window frames still to be fitted. Here, 12-year-old Nadima Bano and Hishamuddin are reciting, their pronunciation perfect and elocution chaste, this ode to India, "Yasyottarasyamdishibhati bhumao Himalayah parvatraj eshah..."

It's a sloka in Sanskrit that translated means 'the land shielded by the Himalayas in the north'. "Sanskrit padhne se zubaan saaf ho jaati hai (the diction becomes clear by learning Sanskrit)," Hishamuddin tells us. "Sanskrit is considered the mother of all languages," says their teacher Rabindra Kumar Mishra. "It's ironical that institutions like this madrassa should be nursing it while it's vanishing elsewhere."

That it's no exception we have stumbled upon becomes clear to us as we proceed north to Ambedkarnagar district, to Madrassa Azizia Islamia in Kamharia village. The hands of the wall clock might be stuck at 6.45 in this primary school or maktab, but the school itself has progressed in other ways. Space is obviously at a premiumClasses 2-5 are being held simultaneously in separate, little rows in a large hall. Sirajuddin is teaching Sanskrit grammar to Class 3. "It was my favourite subject when I was a child," he says with a smile. "Balakah pathati; Sah pathati; Balakau pathatah (A child studies, he studies, they study)...," his student Muhammad Shahid recites for us. They soon move on to another lesson. "Asmakam deshasya asti ateev shobhanah (our country is very beautiful)...".

However, this story is not only about Hishamuddins learning Sanskrit. It's also about 13-year-old Ravi Prakash Pandey, a Brahmin and the son of a Sanskrit professor, opting to learn Quran in Class 1. A former student of Azizia Islamia, he can now recite the holy text from memory and has a copy at home that he peruses religiously. "Quran teaches that we must help others and do good deeds and stay away from evil," he says, without batting an eyelid, and then rushes to wash himself and wear a cap before reading it aloud for us.

We hear this echo back in Salfia where two Hindu - year-old Arti Kumari and Anita Kumari - are writing about Prophet Mohammed in Urdu on the blackboard: "Jab hamare Hazrat ki umr paintees baras ki thi (when our prophet was 35 years old)...". "They face absolutely no problem in writing, reading or understanding Urdu," their teacher Kaiser Jahan informs us.

At Madrassa Arbiya Zia-ul-uloom in Mandey in Azamgarh district, sisters Manju and Ranju Kumari have been learning Urdu from Class 1. They mean it when they recite: "Urdu hai jiska naam hamari zubaan hai, duniya ki har zubaan se pyaari zubaan hai (Urdu is the sweetest of the languages in the world)." Passing by Class 1, you can hear Prashant Kumar explaining Urdu numerals to his classmates.

The teachers on either side of the linguistic divide find much in common between Sanskrit and Urdu: both languages, they say, have an evolved, complex grammar. "Their grammar must be the toughest," says Muhammad Tariq of Madrassa Arbiya. They see this coexistence of Sanskrit and Urdu as normal and not deliberately symbolic in these troubled, divisive times. "How can you associate a language with any religion?" asks Brijesh Kumar Yaduvanshi, a long-time resident of Jaunpur and president, All India University Students' Union."Urdu doesn't belong to Muslims nor does Sanskrit have to do just with Hindus."

Nevertheless, the focus on Sanskrit, a language that has long gone out of everyday use, is intriguing. "It's not about helping students get jobs," says Qari Jalaluddin of Salfia, "but about teaching them humanity, about great thoughts and the right way to live, about being able to distinguish right from wrong." Sanskrit is taught at Salfia till Class 9, Urdu is compulsory in Class 1-5, after which it's up to the Hindu students to decide whether they want to study it further. Well versed: Ravi Prakash reciting Quran.

This easy cohabitation of Sanskrit and Urdu in Jaunpur's madrassas could well be regarded as a legacy of the town's liberal Sufi past. "It was a centre of education in the middle ages," says Yaduvanshi, "has never witnessed a single Hindu-Muslim riot, and has always been a symbol of unity." The Salfia madrassa has, in fact, been built on land bought from a Brahmin family in 1987.

The Azamgarh-Mau madrassas too offer a counterview for an area that has of late been made infamous for its alleged association with terrorist activities. "After all, it's the land of Rahul Sankritayan, Maulana Shibli, Firaq Gorakhpuri," says Sanjay Srivastava, professor at the Poorvanchal University. "It's a literary and cultural centre and people here have been feeling humiliated for being targeted for all the wrong reasons."

At a time when stereotypes about madrassas, especially those in eastern UP, as breeding grounds for terrorists have been gaining currency and every succeeding terror attack has boxed Indian Muslims further into neat categories as either educated, patriotic liberals or misinformed, misled fundamentalists, these madrassas are a powerful rejoinder, a heartening testimony to the unspoken, uncelebrated, broad-mindedness and inclusiveness of the common, faceless Muslim. The madrassas we visit have a sizeable number of Hindu students. Salfia currently has 475 students, of whom about - 45 per cent - are Hindus. In Azizia Islamia, 35 of the 143 students are Hindus. The newly set up Madrassa Faizul Quran operates out of a small makeshift building in an obscure corner of Amari village in Azamgarh district. The maktab has 100 kids, of whom 20 are Hindus. At Arbiya, 22 of the 374 students are Hindus.

There is little to distinguish students. You know Vinky and Reena Yadav from Soni and Rehana Banu only by their names or in the way they wear their head scarves. "We don't believe in bhed bhav," says Salfia's Jalaluddin. "Tameez and tehzeeb are the same in every religion." And though the madrassas do teach hifz, or memorization of the Quran, all have a progressive vision too. "You can't move forward with religious education alone, our students need to be taught everything: science, geography, math, English," says Salfia principal Muhammad Saikat. It is the only school in the village which offers high school education for girls, or else they'd have to walk 10 km to the next school. The aim now is to start computers and electronics classes.

Like many others, these madrassas are yet to get government aid. There is no midday meal scheme, nor are students given free uniforms; it is all provided by the madrassa management boards. Azizia and Arbiya give students free books and charge no fee. In Salfia the fee's just Rs 5. Faizul Quran charges Rs 40 but only 10 per cent of the students pay up. The teachers themselves get no regular pay from the government but survive on the grants patrons give to the madrassas, the salary averaging from Rs 800-1,500. In contrast, teachers on the government payroll get a princely sum of Rs 3,000.

Humble and ill-equipped though they are, these madrassas are incredible examples of how Hindus and Muslims live as one than as separate entities in these forgotten hamlets."They represent the Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti of our villages. Why would anyone want to break the sacred thread of this age-old relationship?" asks Srivastava. Why indeed?

[From Outlook Magazine, 22 December 2008 issue]

At a Fork in the Road

By: Arundhati Roy

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian cities this year [2008] in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded.

Though nothing can ever justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America’s ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan is careening towards civil war. The Pakistani government is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam should rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much as it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India’s shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of ‘non-state actors’ with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbors.

How should we view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful in as much as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which

have made the United States the most hated country in the world. These wars have contributed greatly to the unravelling of the American economy. Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives. The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies and US interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically.

Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It’s not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor, we have a military occupation in Kashmir, and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than a hundred and fifty million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half-a-million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

What we’re experiencing now is the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds.

The only way to contain terrorism is to look at the monsters in the mirror: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says ‘Justice’, the other ‘Civil War’. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

[Edited by Mahendra Meghani from Outlook : 22-Dec-2008]

Once Upon A Time In Hinduism...

By: Anna Sujatha Mathai

Hinduism once had a large and open heart (Bowstringed!, Oct 20). It can no longer claim that, if the bullying and mob violence by its extreme fringe goes unchallenged by the all-too-silent majority. If there were mass conversions, why are Christians still such a small minority? Hindus too go abroad and set up ashrams and temples everywhere. Hindu literature is freely distributed in the West. The first state-aided temple has opened in London. Diwali is celebrated right across the UK, and it should be so. It is good to be able to share one’s view of the sacred. Equally, one should reserve the right to have one’s own view of the Universe, which may not be religious at all.

Christianity has always served the lowly, the dispossessed. Christians have set up so many great institutions, hospitals, schools, colleges. Did these not serve people of every religion? Did Mother Teresa refuse to hold a dying Hindu? Have Christians ever asked for a separate state or retaliated with violence? I write all this with a heavy heart. People who raped and killed children at an orphanage can’t claim to be high on the scale of human evolution. Gandhiji believed violence against fellow humans ultimately degrades us and prevents us from building a fine society. Christ too was a radical and revolutionary against a barbaric Roman empire and a caste-conscious Jewish people. India should be proud to be home to so many faiths. Kerala’s indigenous [Christian] church is 2,000 years old; it also has the first Indian synagogue. There was no persecution of Jews here. This is the country we must regain. We can’t be run by fear and mob violence. In a civilized country, we can follow any religion we choose, read any book, see any film and draw conclusions by virtue of our reason and compassion.

[Outlook Express, 3 Nov, 2008]