Untold Facts

Madarasa Curriculum: Government on the Defensive?

Promise Made
On the 1st November a news item published in a Dhaka Bengali daily quoted the Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid in verbatim, ‘MADARASA SIKHHAR CURRICULUM EK CHUL O NOR CHOR KORA HOBE NA’- in English version that means, the Bangladesh Government would not change even a hair measure or even a single minute element of the Madarasa learning curriculum. The audience present in the grand meeting the previous day might have been impressed by the rhetoric the minister used, but others would have fingers crossed not only because, most power hungry politicians use such confusing, meaningless and high sounding rhetoric as time servers but also because once they leave office nobody would chase them for words given and not met more often than not before being lost in oblivion. So there is no risk for any such minister in making such rhetoric and giving any such assurance.

The 1204 A.D. Model
The Madarasa curriculum in Bangladesh is not a new learning materials but age old of nearly eight hundred years that started in 1204 A.D. by the first Muslim ruler Ikhtiaruddin and the first Madarasa he established at the location what is now we know as Rangpur town. There had been many ups and downs and the first Madrasa site is unfortunately not exactly traceable now but the continuity broken though has kept its onward march until this day. In historical truth that is how Muslims wherever they have gone into and settled either as selfless Sufis or as rulers, they established Madarasas for they were asked to do as FARD or compulsory learning of the Holy Quran based learning from the basic items to the highest level of Islamic learning and practices.

British Curriculum of 1835 A.D.
Unfortunately during the British rule, the Madarasa curriculum got divided, one claimed to have been keeping up the model of Medina as the renowned one the Delhi’s Rahimia model of eighteenth century, another taken up slightly differently by the Indian Deoband model of nineteenth century and the new one to suit the English company rulers needs as the Calcutta Alia Model established in 1781. The Calcutta model was finally bundled off and sent to Dhaka in the aftermath of the partition of the British India in 1947 and creation of Pakistan, Dhaka being the capital of the Eastern province of the Muslim Independent State of Pakistan. In independent India both the Rahimia model and the Calcutta model was soon dead after 1947. But the Deoband model alone has survived intact through support of the Muslim people independent of India’s secularization state policy imposed particularly on the Muslims of India. However, West Bengal has lately a model of reformed Madarasa to meet their present need in social matters different from the Deoband curriculum.

Previous Models
Until the end of the Pakistan period, the Calcutta model survived in East Pakistan separately alongside with the Deoband Model better known as the Qaomi Madarasa curriculum. Things took problematic turn as soon as East Pakistan became independent of Pakistan as Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Constitution adopted in late 1972 and the Education curriculum required conforming to the Constitution, particularly, for Bengali nationalism, secularism and socialism, the Madarasa curriculum considered to be irrelevant. Neither socialism nor secularism nor even Bengali nationalism was taken to be relevant to Islam and Islamic values. That is why the first Education Commission of 1972 left Madarasa curriculum outside their purview. They concentrated on the education system that the Englishman bureaucrat T.B. Macaulay had prescribed in 1835 A.D. and kept in operation since then despite independence in 1947 and 1971. However, the post 1975 government of Bangladesh founded a committee for doing something for education curriculum that though did not do anything for the Qaomi system, they did some changes in the Alia model (Former Calcutta Model). That is how the two systems survive as of this day.

Stiff Dissent
The 2009 education committee has made their latest reform proposal in further revising the Alia model and nothing doing for the much older Qaomi system except providing for registration with the government records. But the committee and government have been facing stiff opposition from many concerned in the matter. The Education Minister’s declaration mentioned above was made in the context of the opposition they have been consistently facing.

The Fifth Amendment
One must keep fingers crossed for quite a few other reasons, rhetoric and developments. The country is run since 1979 under the Constitution with the 5th Amendment intact that made it binding to pursue every work by the government in accordance with the basic principles, one being the Absolute Faith and Trust on the Almighty Allah, clearly implying the fundamentals of Islamic belief system. Could education curriculum be anyway outside this constitutional basic principle? No. In other words, educational curriculum must conform to the basic faiths of Islam, notwithstanding the fact of religious tolerance of other faiths that Islam permits for certain.

Conflict
Now that many in the government, the Law Minister and even the Prime Minister has said in open and reiterated that the government must go back to the 1972 Constitution abandoning the present one with the 5th Amendment. If that would be so, the government could not only change the Madarasa curriculum but also could not abandon it altogether. What would then the Education Minister say in response to this likely proposition in the Madarasa curriculum change for reverting back to the 1972 Constitution?

1972 Constitution
Seen in the above constitutional context of one or the other the assurance given by the Education Minister is not only utterly confusing but also contradicts the statements made by the Law Minister and the Prime minister so far as their commitment reiterated to going back to the 1972 Constitution was concerned. But the Minister as well as the Government looks like on the defensive against the ongoing popular dissent.

Author: Dr.M.T. Hussain