Madrasas are more centres for religion than fanaticism

Jul 9 2008 Agenda

Are madrasas a breeding ground for Islamic extremists or schools that provide religious and moral teaching? Mohammad Ali Salih explains his father’s madrasa past and how it gave him conviction without fanaticism.

My Sudanese father, now in his mid-80s, didn’t grow up with access to public education. The ruling British authority hadn’t yet built a public school near the Nile River in Northern Sudan, south of the border with Egypt. They later built one in Argo, however, and I enrolled there, becoming the first in my Bedouin tribe to receive a formal education, which later lead to a graduate degree in America.

Still, my father became the first in the tribe to learn basic reading and writing, thanks to a madrasa – Koranic school – in the nearby Wadi Haj village.

In spite of his tribe’s objection, he was driven by a desire to escape a life of herding camels and renting them out for local transportation. And so, at the end of each day, he would take the three-mile trip by donkey from the tribe’s camping grounds to the village madrasa for a few hours of study, returning shortly before midnight.

A hospitable family near the small school noticed his dedication and sacrifice and offered him a bed whenever the classes ran late. Gradually, he moved away from Bedouin straw huts and well water and “moved up” to the village’s mud houses and water directly from the vast Nile. His tribe objected once again when he married one of the family’s daughters (who later became my mother.) They boycotted the marriage ceremony, telling him he shouldn’t marry outside the tribe.

Similar to the images we may have of madrasas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where students in white clothing squat on the ground in rows and read aloud from the Koran, moving their heads up and down in unison, my father’s schooling was all about the Koran.

The Koran was his book of A-B-Cs, teaching him how to read and write. It was his book of literature, teaching him classical Arabic, as well as his history book, teaching him stories of past prophets. Most importantly, it was his ethical guide, teaching him integrity, responsibility and hard work.

The madrasa where he went each day was also a social centre. Newly-married couples and newborn babies often visited to receive blessings from the sheikh on their way to the Nile to wash their faces, a “baptising” ritual that probably dated back to the era of the Pharaohs and later to early Christians. And when a villager died, mourners stayed in the madrasa, sleeping and eating, sometimes for 40 days.

Thanks to the madrasa, my father grew up to become a village shaman, or spiritual doctor, and a Koranic scholar who would issue local fatwas, or legal opinions.

I remember villagers frequently coming to our house to complain of severe headaches. My father would take a person to a dim, quiet place and place his right hand over the person’s head, whispering verses from the Koran and quietly repeating words like Haayy (everlasting life) and Qayyoom (sustainer of life), two of God’s 99 names. If a person complained of a stomach ache, my father would stack about half a dozen white china plates, and using an organic black ink, write verses from the Koran on them and draw Islamic decorations on each plate. The patient was instructed to take the plates home, and every night at bedtime, pour some water in a plate to dissolve the writings and then drink the black solution.

My father also wrote verses on pieces of paper to cure complaints such as measles, infertility and the “evil eye.” The patient was instructed to keep the piece of paper in a certain place, or to burn it and inhale its smoke.

He once made me a charm necklace – paper inside a leather wrap – to protect me from evil.

Make no mistake about it, my father’s madrasa education was very conservative.

It taught him that people were divided into Muslims and non-Muslims. That God’s messages to Jesus, Moses and other Biblical prophets were recognised, but that His message to Mohammad superseded them all. And that the best Muslims were those who sacrificed with their lives against injustice, calling that the “top jihad.”

But while the madrasa made my father religious, it didn’t turn him into a fanatic.

He wasn’t fanatical towards the British rulers. He was able to separate their Christian heritage from their achievements, which is why he eagerly enrolled me and my 12 brothers and sisters in the newly constructed British school. He appreciated the “hospital” they built, which was actually a two-room clinic; their post office that had Morse telegraph; and their ships that carried people and goods up and down the Nile.

He, like the rest of us, was fascinated by the power embodied in the British local administrator, the khawaja (white man), and his khawajiya wife. In fact, he even nicknamed me “Greenfield,” after a local British administrator. By 1956 the British were wise enough to leave Sudan peacefully. Had they been like the French in Algeria who were forced to leave after a revolutionary war that killed about a million Algerians, my father most probably would have declared a war against them, driven by both nationalism to fight against foreign occupation and religion to fight against the “infidels.”

Now, half a century later, my father would like to have me living with him, but he accepts – and is proud – that I am living among Americans, who he knows are free and highly advanced, and who, in his mind, landed on the moon and are looking to go beyond. At the same time, he is very angry with Americans because of what he strongly believes is their global war against Islam and Muslims.

Today, in Washington, DC, as the so-called post-9/11 fear has engulfed this greatest nation in the history of mankind, mobile phones have reached my father’s village.

A feeling of calmness surrounds me when I hear, from 6,000 miles away, the faint voice of a man in his mid-80s praying for me at the end of each conversation: “May God protect you; may God guide you; may God defeat your enemies.”

Mohammad Ali Salih is the Washington correspondent for the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service.