I had written about the status of education among Muslims. Continuing on that, I would like to add different perspectives to it. I would like to analyze this issue based on male and female education. While some Muslims have taken steps to educate the male members of the community, the female members have been callously ignored and neglected to the background. Parents are ready to send their sons to far off places for education but they are wary with their daughters. Majority of Muslims are still in business, mostly small scale or the ubiquitous import-export business. Business class people are generally more interested in finding ways to expand their business and thus education is a mere formality, often a time pass activity. Their education itself is concentrated on non-science subjects. A friend, whose father has a highly profitable grocery shop, of mine once remarked that he cannot bow down to anyone in the workplace. So for him any job other than managing his grocery shop is like bowing to the wishes of someone else, a highly loathed prospective! And as I have argued why science is prerequisite and an absolute must for the progress of a civilization, the very nature of Muslim society in India has flaws.
There is no dearth of poets and linguists among Muslims today but when it comes to people of science, you need to look with a lamp in your hand and be extremely optimistic 
.
Females are rarely let out of their home town for education. The reasons, well many and the most important one being that parents fear that their daughters will be engulfed in the tide of modernity that is sweeping the youngsters. And then there’s this universal issue of security. They fear breach of society set norms. No doubt Muslims have taken steps in educating females but up to what extent? For majority of parents education of females is to be such so as to attract a modern Muslim guy! And even that education is restricted to a college near by or perhaps somewhere in the vicinity but never outside home city. That’s not all; girls are forced to marry early, 22 is the demarcation between senility and youth exuberance. So that means graduation is the maximum a girl is allowed to pursue. Post graduation or job is something like an act of blasphemy. Basically her whole education was just to attract a modern guy and nothing else. Parents still don’t see their daughters as an earning hand. The insanity doesn’t ends here. Marriage is generally preferred among family members so that means little interaction with others.
Aqsa has this to add to the topic.
Parents have another fear, those girls who got educated, earned themselves respectable PhD’s, have to spend ages to find a compatible guy. I have seen parents making their girls drop in from high school or college, because one of the girls in the locality is still unmarried as she’s too educated for the rest of the male mob!
But I see a drastic change, compared to what happened five years back! At that time, it was preferred for a girl to complete high school and then get into some home-making diploma course and get married. Marriages were fixed as early as in 16-17 years of age. But now, the situation has changed a lot, that too for good! Now most of the girls make it to a bachelor’s degree which was a luxury till a couple of years back. And some even make it to masters. The people who in their youth, thought that only girls from financially unstable families were supposed to get into a job are now making their girls get into a job themselves!
Though, the job spectrum isn’t wide enough. They have a narrow range to choose from. Still teaching is considered to be the best option for a girl. And if the girl is exceptionally good in studies, she’s asked to choose medical line. Again a respectable job for a girl! One of my friends, who happen to be a girl, chose science as her area of study. She was the only girl to take science at 10+2 level in her entire clan. People prefer arts just for the sake of a degree and those who want to work with their dads, prefer commerce!
Science is not a very popular option. And when someone takes up science, medical is considered as the only option. She had to spend long sessions explaining the prospects of research. But still time and again, the virtues of being a teacher/doctor were explained to her. Another preferred course is B.U.M.S which is hardly a first choice for any student these days, still many Muslim girls end up doing B.U.M.S or B.H.M.S. She was asked to leave her bachelors degree from Delhi University and join B.U.M.S! She is still struggling with B.Ed and research!
It’s true that Muslims are lagging behind in terms of education but a few small changes can be felt now. Not only girls are allowed to study, even the guys are moving ahead of their family business and looking for better options. The change is slow but its there!
Sharique,
Good Post!
The theme looks good but some of the links in the sidebar are not properly alligned. I mean most of the upper right hand space is blank and all the links and other matter come below.
Probably, you would like to look at them again…
Cheers,
HP
HP,
Thanks. I think you are using IE 6, isn’t it? Better upgrade to IE 7 or use firefox http://getfirefox.com
Sharique,
Actually, I would rather be caught dead using IE
I am pretty much a Firefox evangelist myself too.
Infact, after you said, I went and checked with IE and it looks pretty fine in that. So, not sure if there is a problem with viewing this site in Firefox 2.0 at my end.
Cheers,
HP
HP,
I checked out with my friends who use IE 6 and it was working perfectly for them. Even i use firefox 2.0 but never got this problem. I am surprised that it happened with you. BTW my IE 7 crashes when i try to open this blog or even my blog so you see things can happen in this IT world
Dear Adnan!
I feel the people who are praising you are blind. The IM blog is blinding me for want of any match as far as background and font colour are concerned. Be it mozilla or IE 7, it looks very bad and stressful to eyes. please change the background to light colur or white as our posts are seen on white background. a tile like what used to be on islamicvoice.com would fit the bill!
I feel your friends who comment do not have an iota of being good muslims. to praise a thing which is not at all fair but bad as very good is sinful. I feel they are logged on to any fried chawal (rice) which they call Biryani. They never commented fairly to their mothers, or the muslim hotel(restarurant) wala and later to their beloved sister/sister-in-law and lastly wife just not to loose the peace of mind they thought they had. This non-participation of 50% of muslims read ladies is the problem. Lets do it the islamic way!
Kaatib
Kaatib,
Its me not Adnan!
The background is white and the text colour black. Perhaps you should check your browser settings. Or if you still use windows 95 then i can’t help.
I don’t understand a word of your second paragraph. Please mention in lucid language which will simplify things for me.
Bro,
This is in response to this post, as well as your previous one:
The importance of art, literature, and human and social sciences, and their contribution to the development of humanity, is something you have deeply undermined. In a way, all kinds of studies are interrelated and complementary in nature, and you can’t (or shouldn’t) really make comparisions between them. But if you analyze the fields of study that have changed minds and given direction to lives over the years, you’ll find that most of them involve non-scientific subjects.
Your observation that Muslim artists, novelists, and poets have failed to make a difference is in fact and insult to our people, our language, our scholars, intellectuals and writers. It is the community that has failed to benefit from the monumental work done by Muslims in various fields, scientific or otherwise. When half of our people cannot even read and write even today, I wonder how anyone can do anything about any of our problems without taking care of this first.
A civilization cannot survive merely on scientific knowledge, nor just that of liberal arts or human sciences.
If you ask me, I’ll say that in the end it’s exactly how Umar (ra) put it – Before Islam, we were nothing. After Islam, we had everything (i.e. we excelled in all fields). And without Islam (ya’ni if we were to leave Islam), we’ll end up with nothing again.
Islam leads us to a balanced outlook, whic gives equal weightage to all forms of worldly knowledge. It also gives us a sense of priority, informs us that we’ve all been created with various talents, skills, and interests, and guides us to utilize our potential in the best way possible.
In my opinion, Indian Muslims lack in all fields of study, and equal importance should be given so that we may strive to excel in all of them, as we’ve done in the past.
Also, in response to Bushra, I’d like to say that there are a few genuine concerns while sending girls to study in distant places. Islamic law requires a woman to be accompanied by a mahram relative in all places, and at all times, in the absence of reasonable guarantees to her safety and security. This poses a major problem for parents while sending their girls to universities far away.
Apart from that, (western) education is usually seen as a means to establish a career. Other benefits of university education are usually overlooked by our people. This is a major source of the problem. The rest of the issues have been more or less covered in the post.
The solutions to all these problems are very simple in theory, but require a lot of study, time, and effort to make them successful.
Firstly, I feel that the (real) Ulema need to step up and start addressing their responsibilites towards the community in a serious matter. Encouragement and guidance from the Ulema will really motivate the masses, and InshaAllah lead to progressive change.
For that, we’ll have to make major changes in our “ulema-producing” mechanism. Quite frankly, most madrassas in India are hardly qualified to be called that. Graduates from such schools in fact have an ‘understanding of Islam’ that sometimes in contradiction to the very basics of our religion. Also, steps must be taken to meet the need for qualified female-alimaat.
Second, Muslim intellectuals and social-workers should work towards establishing schools and universities similar to the AMU, Azam Campus, Hamdard University, Crescent Colleges etc. that address Muslim needs specifically, for both boys and girls. They should also try to build (Muslim/Mixed) girls hostels in all major cities.
Apart from that, we should also try to open competitive exam coaching centres such as the one established by Hamdard (/Syed Hamid).
And lastly, we should all try to make sincere du’a for our communtiy. It’s the one way in which we can all contribute effectively, and yet the thing that we neglect the most.
I pray that Allah guides us all to be people of action, and not just words. Ameen.
saif,
ill suggest you to read my part carefully. i have not given any suggestion for sending girls out of their home towns for studying.
i hope you’ll be carefull next time.
My bad. I should have written ‘in addition to what Bushra has mentioned’, rather than ‘in response to’.
I did read your post carefully, but I kinda messed up while replying, and I apologize for that.
In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with sending girls to study at distant universities. There are just a few things that need to be taken care of first in order to do that.
I’ll be more careful in the future, InshaAllah.
Saif,
I never under-estimated the importance of people who are not from science but i was searching for an answer to which is the most basic and i concluded that science has to be the most basic (read my post again). I definitely agree that without the development of literature a society cannot survive. We need them to make us sensitive to things around us.
I don’t agree with that. Science is and will always be the backbone of every civilization. Science has revolutionized the world and would continue to do so. Can a man of literature solve the energy problem of this world? Can he wipe out poverty? He can only raise his voice, its upto the developments in science to really bring out the revolution.
Sharique,
Not regarding non-science subjects as “the most basic”, in fact the entire idea of trying to find “the most basic”, is an underestimation of the importance of non-scientific fields of study in my opinion.
Anyways, you totally missed my point. I guess I really do suck at communicating through the internet.
And yeah, I disagree with you on your final point. I do not consider science to be the backbone of civilizations.
I definitely agree that there are issues in sending the girl out to study and establishing islamic universities can solve this problem. But my point was something else. If you leave the security part and consider only the ‘orthodox’
mentality of parents towards female education then my post will fit in.
Dear friends,
I seldom get time to be on net as its still a luxury in India, barring the few who are working in IT sector or have the facility at their working place. Please bear with me, being in hurry I must not have formulated my sentences properly. To remind all friends, I wish to say that we should be very open as far as criticism is concerned. I am not very religious man as far as ‘salaat’ is concerned, nor highly paid to have an internet connection. My close circle laugh on me when they found that I must have been to public-net and they are 100% true.
Thats life, but life apart, I feel we Indians in general and Muslim in partucular despise people who do not think like what we do. I have tried a Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Official mechnic for my bike (again a luxury) but found that we have been criticising the Muslim mechanic only and were very linient to the Official (so much so for the business environment and taxed billing they do) and the Hindu and Christian mechanics. How can they feel and behave like the car owners who must surely be well educated or from affluent background.
The last comment from me for the day is that we should respect all the personalities we come accross. This is one of the Hadees (Hadith?). If we do not, we are going the Western way that are most of the time wrong. We are not the people to write ill about the mechnic because he happened to be muslim, do we ever do this? This is the high point of humanity and no bomb or luxurious devices of life could bring one to us.
Please remember that I do what the so called high tech people do and get paid!!
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