FROM BEHIND THE CURTAIN pdf download

FROM BEHIND THE CURTAIN A STUDY OF A GIRLS’ MADRASA

IN INDIA Mareike Jule Winkelmann

FROM BEHIND THE CURTAIN A STUDY OF A GIRLS’ MADRASA IN INDIA

Introduction

In late 2000 I submitted a PhD research proposal titled The Construction of Islamic Knowledge in a Women’s Madrasa in Contemporary India, intending to explore a ‘traditional’ institution of Islamic learning for young women in a society where Muslims form a minority.

While in the initial setup of the study girls’ madrasas were framed as ‘traditional’ institutions of Islamic learning, this turned out to be problematic. During a brief pilot study in late 2000, car-ried out in Delhi and Hyderabad, my observations suggested that there was no historical precedent for having public, large scale girls’ madrasas.

Even though girls’ madrasas were said to be modeled after the boys’ madrasas in terms of their curriculum, teaching methods, disciplining mechanisms, and the internal hierarchies reflected in the relations between the founders, teachers, and students, the emergence of public girls’ madrasas represents a ‘modern’ phenomenon, since the oldest public girls’ madrasas in post-Parti-tion India were founded in the early 1950s.

The question I wanted to focus on was how girls’ madrasas emerged in India, how they are different from madrasas for boys, what notions of Islam and of the self are generated, and in particular what is taught in girls’ madrasas and if what is taught allows the young women to claim authority in Islamic matters in the public.

With regard to academic literature about girls’ madrasas, their existence is mentioned in passing under the heading ‘Religious Education’ in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World (Barazangi 1995:409; Hoffman-Ladd 1995:328).

 But when I tried to find fur-ther information on the topic, it turned out that while there are substantial studies about boys’ madrasas in India1, there were hardly any comparable materials available regarding their female counterparts.2

In order to understand the background of the relatively recent estab-lishment of girls’ madrasas, I had to delve deeper into the educational past of the subcontinent.

 Academic sources on the colonial period suggested that late nineteenth century Muslim reformist ideas had influenced the establish-ment of the earliest public schools for Muslim girls (Minault 1998a).

Islamic education for girls had mainly been a private matter prior to the late nine-teenth century, but it then turned into a central issue of public interest.

By the early twentieth century home education for girls that took place in the confinement of the women’s quarters (zenana) existed side by side with the first public schools for Muslim girls.3 Along with the first public schools for