By Yoginder Sikand
The neatly whitewashed town hall is packed to its capacity and beyond. Well over half the audience of around two thousand people are women. On the dais, a woman announces the day’s programme. Men and women, boys and girls, come on stage to receive prizes for their academic achievements. This is followed by a series of speeches and announcements of the results of various competitions. Outside, crowds mill around a row of stalls selling books, tapes and video documentaries. This is the annual function of the Quran Learning School (QLS) programme of the Ittihadul Shuban lil Mujahidin (ISM), the youth wing of the Nadwath ul-Mujahidin, a Kerala-based Islamic reformist movement. The location—the small coastal town of Kadangalur (or Cranganore), which has the distinction of hosting the first mosque to have been built in India a thousand or more years ago.
The KNM runs several hundred part-time madrasas throughout Kerala, which cater to students who also study in regular schools. Other Muslim groups in the state have similar part-time madrasas. Owing to Kerala’s unique system of Islamic educational provision, most school-going Malayali Muslim children have a fair grounding in their religion and most ulema in Kerala have had regular school education of at least ten years. Launched in 1995, the QLS programme is specially designed to teach the Quran to adults who might not have had the chance to attend madrasas as their children do, and who, because they work or study in colleges and universities, may not have the time to take up a detailed Islamic Studies course.
In some 500 local units or mahals of the ISM across Kerala, students, both males and females, mostly between the age of 30 and 40, regularly attend Quranic lessons held in Quran Learning Schools two hours a day, twice a week in rooms provided by local ISM activists. Timings are adjusted to suit the students’ convenience. Many, though not all, of these schools are co-educational.
Between 35-40% of the instructors and around 65% of the students in the QLS centres are women. Says C.A.Sayeed Faruqi, Director of the programme, ‘Unlike men, women get less opportunities to learn about Islam in the public domain, in mosques and religious gatherings’. ‘Hence’, he says, ‘they are particularly enthusiastic about the QLS programme’. Adds Salma Anwaria, head of the ISM’s women’s wing, the Muslim Girls’ and Women’s Movement (MGM), ‘Older women students are particularly hardworking. If they miss a class they often ring up the instructors to find out what had been taught that day’.
The QLS programme is an almost cost-free way of popularizing Quranic education. Most of the instructors are unpaid volunteers, many of them being government school and college teachers, businessmen, graduates of Arabic colleges and even some professionals such as doctors and engineers. They undergo a short instructors’ training course that the ISM conducts before they take on their task. Annual instructors’ refresher courses are also held.
The ISM has prepared a detailed seven-year syllabus for the QLS centres. Students are taught to study the Quran, along with its Malayalam translation, as well as the art of Quranic recitation (qirat). They are provided with audio CDs for this purpose, and efforts are underway to prepare a set of textbooks. Annual examinations are held every year, the papers being sent out from the ISM headquarters in Calicut. No fees are charged for the programme, although many students give a nominal monthly donation of twenty rupees.
Kerala’s Muslim community, accounting for almost a quarter of the state’s population, is divided into three major groups: followers of the Nadwath ul-Mujahidin, the Jamaat-e Islami and a broad category locally referred to as ‘Sunnis’ (the former two groups also claim to be among the Ahl-e Sunnat wa’l Jamaat). Despite sectarian differences, the QLS programme is open to all Muslims. Roughly half the students are associated with the Nadwath ul-Mujahidin, and the rest with other Islamic groups.
A few Hindus have also enrolled for the QLS programme in the past. Abdus Salafi, a government school Arabic teacher from Pattambi vllage in Kerala’s Palakkad distict, tells me about two men from the ‘low’ caste Ezhava community who had studied in the centre in his village where he serves as instructor. He tells me of another such Hindu youth, who had spoken at the annual QLS function three years ago on his experiences in the programme, having enrolled in it after having read the Malayalam translation of the Quran. ‘In his childhood’, Salafi relates, ‘he was told that if a non-Muslim touches the Quran he would lose his eyesight, but after doing the course he came to know that by reading the Quran one can get new insights into reality’.
Salafi also tells me that the QLS centre in his village was inaugurated by two of his Hindu friends, one an advocate and the other the president of the local press club. ‘In Kerala, we have historically enjoyed fairly good inter-community relations, with a long tradition of sharing’, he explains.
I sit through the programme, struck by the novelty of it all. Women on stage, demurely dressed, addressing a mixed Muslim gathering, something that would be considered almost anathema in north India. 76-year old Moosan Kutty leans on a stick and walks to the dais to receive a prize—a set of books—for being first in a Quranic essay competition. Two young girls follow after to collect prizes they have won in a Quanic quiz. They are followed by a young man, who has stood first in an Arabic word game competition.
The speeches that follow—by men and women, including QLS students talking about their experiences—are all in Malayalam, which I cannot understand. I step out and browse through the bookstalls. A friend translates the titles, again all in Malayalam, for me. Books on wide range of subjects, seeking to relate Islam to issues of contemporary concern, from gender rights and inter-communal harmony to the struggle against imperialism, are on sale, all produced by Malayali Muslim writers who, because of the linguistic barrier, are unheard of outside Kerala. And as I wait for the programme to get over I muse about how novel the Kerala Muslim example truly is.