What the students are taught and the fashion in which their tender minds are moulded, time seems to have frozen many centuries ago

Mushirul Hasan continues his discussion on the state of Indian Muslims, 50 years after Freedom.

Much of it, as in Surat or Baroda, is not new. Apart from petty traders and groups of Muslim artisans who have carved out a place for themselves, the Bohra, Khoja and Memon communities continue to play trading and mercantile roles in western enterprise, including two cotton-spinning mills in Surat stared in 1861 and 1874, Ahmedabad had no Muslim mill-owners, and only one industrialist, Munshi Fateh Mohammad Fakir Mohammad, who started a match factory in 1895.

The situation improved over the decades because the textile and transport industries expanded, attracting large numbers of Muslim migrants into the city. Though still relatively backward in most sectors of the economy, especially in the professions and in private and government employment, Muslims in Ahmedabad have made their mark in textiles, transport, petty trading and shopkeeping.

The overall progress of the Kerala Muslims is aided by Gulf employment, reservations in education and higher rates of literacy achieved through sustained application. Farook College at Calicut in the Malabar region, from its humble beginnings in 1947-8, generated constructive movements of modernity and progress among the Kerala Muslims; it has been called 'the Aligarh of the south.'

Along with other voluntary agencies, the Muslim Educational Society, founded in 1964, promotes primary, secondary and higher education. By 1960, 46.3 per cent of school-age Muslim children were attending school; by 1970, Mapillas accounted for 30 per cent of college students in Malappuram and Calicut districts. At the beginning of 1974, about 700 lower and upper primary schools and 36 high schools flourished under Muslim management. In the state as a whole, there were nine first-grade Muslim colleges and several technical institutions.

The fortunes of the Kerala Muslim migrants to Madras city have improved since the 1940s when they first entered the metropolis. Those from the Malabar region did particularly well in running hotels, biscuit factories, textile concerns and import-export firms. A Muslim timber merchant who came to the city penniless now owns one of the largest timber firms in south India with twenty branches in Madras city.

The Malabar Muslim Association has reason to be proud of its achievements. It set up a medical relief centre, primary and secondary schools and colleges. The Islamic Foundation in Madras founded an engineering college in 1984 in the name and style of the Saleh Kamel Crescent Engineering College at Othivakam in Chengalpatlu district. The Al-Ameen Educational Society in Bangalore founded colleges, an evening polytechnic (1977) and a school of pharmacy (1982). In 1984 the society awarded scholarships amounting to Rs 89,745,63.

The picture is much less promising in UP and Bihar. These states have some isolated pockets of affluence, but on the whole a rather alarming percentage of the minorities, particularly the poorer sections among the Muslims, live in these states. The country's partition and the sheer scale and magnitude of migration of Pakistan from traditional Muslims centres like Delhi, Aligarh, Farrukhabad, Moradabad, Rampur, Meerut, Mufaffarnagar, Lucknow and Allahabad contributed to the professional classes being skimmed off. The loss has not been made good.

Zamindari abolition caused serious hardships to small landowners, zamindars and their dependants. When Hindi was made the sole language of administration and education, the affected sections were the very ones which sought employment at the clerical level, in lower government service or in educational institutions.

Indeed, it was difficult for many Muslims whose mother-tongue was Urdu to compete for government posts. This, and the constant fear of discrimination, largely accounts for so few taking the competitive examinations for government posts.

Widespread illiteracy and a higher drop-out rate at the elementary stage are additional factors. According to the Planning Commission, the average literacy rate among Muslims was 42 per cent in 1987-8, less than the national average of 52.11 per cent. Muslim women -- more than half the total Muslim population -- do not receive even school education, let alone higher education.

A survey conducted in 1967-8 in Lucknow showed that illiteracy among Hindu women was 32 per cent compared to 50 per cent among Muslim women. None of the latter who responded had a post-graduate degree. Most of the husbands of the 1,423 women surveyed also had not attended a school. On the other hand, 80 per cent or more of the upper-caste Hindus and Christians had received secondary or higher education.

The educational profile of Muslims is much lower in Khurja and Bulandshahr, though they constitute numerically one of the dominant groups along with scheduled castes. The number of Muslims who study in Khurja is about 10 per cent (the corresponding figure for women was 5 per cent) while of Hindus about 75 per cent.

It is not clear whether Muslim children are not sent to schools and colleges because of economic constraints, the absence of religious instruction, the sting of the prevailing bias against Urdu, or because parents in larger arts and crafts centres hardly consider it worthwhile to give their children higher education. What is evident is the lack of concerted effort in UP, though less so in Bihar, to promote literacy or modernise existing educational institutions. Initiatives in Delhi by the Hamdard Foundation or the Crescent School are modest compared to the scale of similar operations in Bihar, and west and south India.

The Dini Talimi (Religious Education) Council of UP had 6,000 small rural schools in which more than 600,000 pupils received religious instruction. Studies by A R Sherwani, whose brother was a prominent industrialist in Allahabad, indicate that instruction in such schools seldom goes beyond Class II and that the educational content is confined almost exclusively to Islamic religious texts. Urdu-medium schools, mostly government-run, teach physics, chemistry, mathematics, geography and economics, but Sherwani shows that such institutions fail to maintain the standards of Hindi-medium schools, either in UP or Delhi. Some schools have modified their curriculum, but most have not.

Take Karnataka's largest seminary on the outskirts of Bangalore. More than 400 boys, mainly from south India, are trained to lead prayers, recite the Quran and teach in makatib and madaris. But the curriculum has not changed, because of the traditions handed down from previous generations: 'There are great spiritual blessings to be had from ancient wisdom which modern education is totally bereft of.'

The library is stocked with books, but only on Islam and in Persian, Arabic and Urdu languages. Maulvi Haroon, as a recent graduate, had not heard of liberal and modernist authors; they find no place in the institution. The glass doors of the cupboards are covered all over with colourful stickers, all conveying in different ways the same message: 'No to the Uniform Civil Code'

In sum, what the students are taught and the fashion in which their tender minds are moulded, time seems to have frozen here many centuries ago.

The great seminaries at Deoband and Lucknow, which should ideally have given the lead, are sluggish in responding to the winds of change. The few cosmetic changes introduced in their curriculum have not helped to equip their graduates to compete in the wider world of employment, trade or business; many end up as school teachers or prayer-leaders in local mosques. Aligarh and Jamia Millia have attracted some bright students largely through a liberal admission policy, but their numbers are small and with a few notable exceptions their performance has been disappointing.

The GSC report found students at Nadwa totally devoid of modern secular education which is essential to help them face the realities outside. The Jamia Millia and Aligarh Muslim University have not lived up to their reputation.

The Jamia, founded in the year of great political upheaval is rocked by mounting corruption, misguided student agitations, increasing administrative lapses and strained teacher-students relations.

The university at Aligarh seethed with discontent caused by corruption, declining academic standards and inept administration. Other institutions, such as the Shia College in Lucknow, are little better.The Dar-al-Mussaniffin, Shibli Nomani's creation, languishes in Azamgarh, and Lucknow's Firangi Mahal, situated in Chowk, is a symbol of the Nawabi city's decline. Declining standards and financial mismanagement plague the once renowned Faiz Aam Inter-College in Meerut.

If so few go to school and college and if so many are inadequately equipped to face the world, it is easy to understand why only 5,336 (2.59 per cent) Muslims competed for the subordinate services commission examinations and so few found employment in the judicial, administrative, police and forest services. Figures furnished by the GSC report or Muslim India need to be updated, although the pattern is likely to remain much the same for many years to come. By and large, Muslims are like to remain outside the area of state employment and predominantly in the unorganised sector either as workers or as self-employed petty bourgeoisie.

Muslim organisations have not diagnosed the malady, but they need to do so. They must review the performance and functioning of educational institutions, including Aligarh, Deoband, Nadwa and Jamia Millia Islamia, and improve the working of huge numbers of charitable endowments which had once sustained vigorous and creative intellectual life at several urban centres.

Excerpted from Legacy of a Divided Nation, by Mushirul Hasan, 1997, Rs 495, with the publisher's permission.