By Shaik Zakeer Hussain, TwoCircles.net,
Haridwar: In 2010, a year after he returned home from Casablanca, Morocco, where he had setup a trading business with his elder brother, Rao Waseem Khan started noticing that despite being 35% on the population scale, Muslims in Haridwar, especially in his native village in Salempur, were relatively backward in terms of education.
Though there were schools established in and around the village by both government and private institutions, the education imparted there, says Waseem, either lacked in quality or were run by organisations with vested interests. Giving an example of some of the practices in private schools, he says, “They teach that eating egg is wrong. And they make children do things, which are not compatible with our religious practices.”
He says children used to come back home, and start telling their parents that eating meat was not right, and refused to consume the food. “And the government run schools lack in quality education, parents who can afford, and because of no alternative would send their kids to these schools,” he comments.
The state of the madrasas were most alarming. Education here, says Waseem, was only for namesake. One such madrasa that he came across was the Madrasa Islamia Arabia Jaamiul Uloom. “The madrasa was in a dilapidated condition, he says describing the situation. Though the institute was established sometime in the 1970s, the state of affairs here was nothing but pathetic. “The Place would be lent for people visiting the village, during marriages, and most of the time it wold be occupied by drug addicts and alcoholics, chatting and sleeping their days off.”
Waseem, who has a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from Symbiosis University, Pune decided to put the house in order. With the help of some friends and likeminded individuals, he cleaned up the place and brought it together. “It took a year to bring things in place. Though it’s a decades old madrasa, for years, there was not a single hafiz who had come out of it,” he says.
But for him, only keeping the place tidy, and teaching a few chapters from the Quran was not enough, he wanted more, he wanted to include other subjects like math, science, and computers here. “That’s when the trouble started,” he says.
While the community was happy that their children were back at the madrasa without the regular interventions that they were subjected to for some time, but after the introduction of other subjects in the madrasa curriculum, a section of individuals from them and some from the ulama started voicing their objections against it.
“They started alleging that because I had studied at a christian school, I was spreading Christianity by teaching these subjects at the madrasa,” he says laughing. His other “offence” was that some of his teachers were women. “They wanted me to have a division between men and women,” which he says he was very much willing to accommodate, but due to lack of infrastructure and resources, he couldn’t. But Waseem says, “They just wouldn’t listen”.
The Madrasa has about 250 students, out of who 15-16 reside here. Apart from Arabic, Urdu, and Religious sciences, English, Maths, Social Science, Science, General Knowledge, Computers, Drawing, and Hindi are the other subjects taught here. The books are based on CCE syllabus currently, and Waseem says, he is working towards getting an official recognition to his madrasa cum regular school by the state board.
Most students who attend the madrasa, he says come from the lowest economic strata of the society. Governed by poverty and stigmatized by its effects, parents are left with little choice, but to send them here. Though he has been successful in bringing some of his detractors to his side, however, his fight against narrow-mindedness and naivety continues. His fight now, Waseem says is not only to get these children educated, but to educate the adults who are opposing it as well.
Rao Waseem Khan can be reached at:
+91 9627104786 / 9760002007
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.alamana.in