Winston

Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship 2010

Changing Islam A journey through Egypt, Sudan and India Rachel Aspden

Contents Itinerary Introduction Cairo and the exorcists of Port Said Khartoum: dervishes and bureaucrats Journey up the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo Cairo: Islamic televangelists, pop stars and youth activists Delhi, Aligarh, Lucknow and Deoband: a battle of ideas in Indian Islam Conclusions Acknowledgements rachelaspden@gmail.com blog: cairotodelhi.wordpress.com Twitter: @rachelaspden

3 3 6 13 18 20 27 44 46

Itinerary Egypt and Sudan June-August 2010 Cairo Port Said Khartoum/Omdurman Wadi Halfa Aswan Cairo India November-December 2010 Delhi Aligarh Lucknow Delhi Mumbai Deoband - Delhi Introduction Over the course of my fellowship I drank cappuccinos with girls in designer headscarves, watched housewives dance to placate evil spirits, saw a new pop star shoot his first music video, shared dinner with students planning to conquer the west, sat with exorcists as they smoked hashish in coconut pipes, and heard government officials praising Hitler in the back of an Indian limousine. All of these people described themselves as good Muslims practising true Islam. The shifts in belief and behaviour were dizzying. I set out from London aiming to find people working to promote a moderate, tolerant Islam in the Muslim world. I wanted to know whether the consensus on what made a good Muslim was changing; what part was played by perceptions of western mores, media and foreign policy; how people viewed religious extremism and what was being done to tackle it within mainstream Islam. It was a project I had had in mind for the last seven years. In 2003-4, I spent 18 months living in Cairo, studying Arabic, working on local newspapers and magazines and travelling as much as I could in the country and the region. I returned to the UK in 2005 but took every opportunity to return to the Muslim world. During the next few years, I travelled in and wrote about Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Yemen, the UAE, Morocco and Pakistan. Over this period, in the countries I visited, I saw changes in society and the practice of Islam. Some were obvious even to me as an outsider, others were described by the people I met in approving or fearful tones. In general, they identified growing conservatism in behaviour and dress, greater concern for outward shows of piety and increased social pressure to conform to more strictly interpreted Islamic norms. Many people who found themselves on the fringes of these changes such as liberals, artists and religious minorities said they felt pressured in ways ranging from social disapproval to legal or employment discrimination to the threat or reality of physical violence. They expressed a wish for greater support from the Muslim mainstream, which they saw as being sidelined by more strident (and better-funded) hardline voices. Changes such as the growing popularity of the niqab (traditionally Gulf Arab dress) in Egypt and the Arabisation of Islamic terminology in India pointed to friction between this emerging Islamic orthodoxy and traditional practices, many of which incorporate elements of other cultures and religions. They also 3

reflected anxieties about globalisation and the spread of western values, or lack of them. The situation in each country I visited was unique. But many of these common concerns also apply to British Muslim communities and their sometimes fraught relations with the state and the British media (almost exclusively produced by non-Muslims). One of the complaints I heard repeatedly was that the west and particularly the western media demonised Muslims and was full of misconceptions about Islam. (This view is also widespread in the UK. As I write, the Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi, described as the most powerful Muslim woman in Britain, is criticising media use of the terms moderate and extremist to divide Muslims into good and bad camps.) Working in the media myself, I was frustrated by its tendency to focus either on the radical Islamist fringe or on ultra-liberal, westernised Muslims whose views would be immediately discounted by the Islamic majority. I wanted to examine this mutual resentment and mistrust and explore ways in which the media, when discussing Islam, could inform rather than inflame. I began my journey with an outsiders abstract ideas about Islam and was constantly forced to revise them. In interviews and conversations I often felt that I was asking the wrong questions, emphasising the wrong subjects and thinking in terms that were completely foreign to my listeners. These situations required patience and persistence on both sides and, used to working as a journalist, I tried to maintain a degree of objectivity. But even the pretence of detachment was often impossible. People insisted I dance with them, eat with them or argue with them. I was harassed, pursued, hugged, fed, protected, entertained and given generous gifts. As a visiting westerner, I was asked to address madrassa students, youth activists and university professors, to justify conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, explain the 9/11 attacks and defend sex before marriage, atheism, skinny jeans and western pop music. The results changed much of my own thinking and forced me to confront many of my own assumptions and prejudices. Looking for threads to start unravelling these issues, in Egypt and Sudan I planned to research zar, a musical healing and exorcism ritual I had encountered on previous trips. I knew it drew on elements of Christianity and animism and had been banned by the Sudanese government, while participants in Egypt were harassed and discouraged by everyone from organised Islamist vigilante groups to pious neighbours. I was also fascinated by Islamic popular culture and how it was contributing to growing youth activism in Egypt. My research happened to take place on the brink of the great changes that have taken place, and are continuing to unfold, in 2011. They have overtaken some of the observations in this report, but I was able to observe some of the pressures building and the direct or indirect contribution of Islam to these changes. In India, I aimed to examine the widespread madrassa system of Islamic education, often criticised as a bastion of religious prejudice and even extremism. Having spent so much time in the Muslim-majority Middle East, I also wanted to learn about Muslims experience of living as a minority in the worlds largest secular democracy.

Another reason for my journey, perhaps personally the most important, was my love of the culture, places and people I had encountered in the Muslim world. I wanted to share some of this excitement and appreciation with people who were less familiar with them. The category for my Fellowship award was adventure and exploration, and some of my fellow Fellows undertook far more arduous expeditions in more remote places. My aim was to explore a different kind of distant territory: to visit places non-Muslims dont often go to and meet people we dont often talk to. And, for me, it was also a great adventure.

Cairo and the exorcists of Port Said On 6 June 2010, I set out on the first stage of my fellowship from London to Cairo. I arrive at midnight, when the heat of the day has subsided enough for Cairenes to crowd the pavements for the days shopping, eating and tea-drinking. I can immediately see that the centre of the city has changed since I last spent a long period of time here, in 2004. There are more western fast-food chains, more ATMs, more neon, newer cars. There are other changes, too the vast majority of women are now veiled and many men display a zebiba, a bruise caused by striking their foreheads against the ground during prayer. But the raucous energy of the city is the same. I check into a cheap hotel perched high in a dilapidated 19th-century colonial building, with high ceilings and slowly rotating ceiling fans that struggle to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The temperature hovers around 40 degrees and in the middle of the day the streets are stifling, so many people stay up all night (Egyptians just have more energy, they say when I ask how they manage to stay awake for work but admit that not much gets done in the summer months.) In the afternoons, evenings and late into the night, when musicians are awake, I go looking for traces of zar. Zar is a musical healing and spirit-taming ritual that exists on the fringes of Egyptian society. It is nominally Islamic but, like other African slave religions such as Santeria, Candomble and Voodoo, it draws on elements from many other religions, including Christianity, Judaism and African animism. It is most often practised clandestinely by groups of women, who meet to dance, play music and propitiate the spirits they believe are causing their illnesses and troubles. All of these elements the syncretism, music, dancing and the participation of women make it problematic in terms of orthodox Islam, and zar is suffering as a result. Away from the scholars and theorists, I am keen to see how changes in the practice of Islam are affecting ordinary Muslims who follow unorthodox traditional practices such as zar.

My initial guide is Zakaria Ibrahim, a musician, former political activist and expert on traditional Egyptian music. He runs several groups who play music ranging from the fishermen and smugglers lyre music of Suez to the desert laments and love songs of the Sinai Bedouin. But his latest passion is zar, which he is determined to save from obscurity. Zar is like a dying man, Im trying to give him some breath! He mimes CPR. We must not just analyse it we must revive it. 6

His audiences are largely composed of expats and their English-speaking Egyptian friends. Most Egyptians, he says, prefer the glossy Arabic pop manufactured in Beirut and Dubai to their own indigenous music. Over the next two weeks I spend time with Zakaria and his musicians in Cairo and the Suez Canal city of Port Said, attend zar ceremonies and meet dancers, priestesses and other experts. We meet most often late at night in the scruffy Downtown bars frequented by Egyptian liberals, a beachfront cafe in Port Said with mismatched plastic chairs under a bamboo awning, a pavement coffeeshop overlooking the shrine of the Prophets grandsons Husseins decapitated head and the crowded front rooms of apartments in poor suburbs of Cairo and Port Said. These are the kinds of places in which zar survives. ***************************** Songs for the spirits (published in Index on Censorship July 2010) Late on a Monday night in one of the hundreds of winding mud alleys of Cairos Darb al-Ahmar district, a middle-aged woman in a black robe and headscarf is welcoming friends to her one-room house. Salaam aleikum. She offers an elbow in greeting rather than her hands, which are red to the wrists with fresh blood. Behind her, the turquoise-painted room is hung with round goatskin drums and rough handmade lyres decorated with beads and bright scraps of fabric. On the worn carpet is a shallow dish of blood half-submerging a clutter of gold rings and amulets: the remains of the animal sacrifice that begins the zar ritual. Zar is a semi-secret musical ceremony for healing mental and physical illnesses its followers believe are caused by spirit possession. The ritual is practised throughout the Muslim communities of North and East Africa and the Arabian peninsula, largely by and for women. At its heart is a repertoire of thousands of magical songs and rhythms each associated with a particular spirit that can cause or cure maladies ranging from depression to infertility, broken bones and heart disease. During a zar, women are free to cast off social constraints and behave as the spirit possessing them demands to dance, sing, shout, weep and enter tranced states even, sometimes, to dress in mens clothes, smoke hashish or drink alcohol. Inside the room the home of Leila, the zar leader eight 40-to-60-year-old women in long flowered gowns and headscarves have gathered on cushions along the walls, smoking waterpipes and drinking glasses of sugary tea. Darb al- Ahmar is a poor working-class district and their faces are lined with hard work and worry. As the ritual begins, Leilas assistant carries round a small brazier smouldering with heavy incense and, muttering prayers and blessings, douses each woman in its smoke. In return, each offers 30LE (3.50) a significant sum to pay the musicians and cover the cost of the incense and sacrificial chickens. Then three musicians strike up the opening music of the ceremony, their voices rising roughly over the thunder of their drums. In the tiny room, the sound is wild and overwhelming, designed to entice the spirits and intoxicate the 7

participants. As each woman hears the rhythm associated with her spirit, she is drawn up to dance in the centre of the room, a blood-spotted white veil thrown over her head and face, before collapsing exhausted to the ground. The spirit is pacified for the moment. This is when the healing takes place, Leila explains later. When we are all gathered together to help and focus on the patient. Despite their social benefits, zar gatherings are increasingly rare. This is partly due to changing fashions the ritual, which arrived in Egypt with Sudanese slaves in the early 19th century, is seen as too old-fashioned and baladi (country) for a modern urban environment. But it is also the result of a religious reaction against zars heterogeneous roots in Islam, Christianity and African animism. The spirits it summons include the Prophet and familiar Islamic figures such as his granddaughter Sayyida Zeinab, Cairos patron saint alongside Christian, Ottoman, western and pagan figures such as Yawra Bey, a cigar-smoking, whiskey-sipping dandy, and Mariam, the sister of a Coptic Christian priest who is part-mournful-lady, part-prostitute. Zars blurring of doctrinal boundaries the figure of al-Araby, for instance, a Bedouin nomad who leads a camel, blends into that of Mohammed is anathema to the increasingly conservative Islamic mainstream. In the Suez canal city of Port Said, I visit Sheikha Zeinab, a motherly 65-year-old zar leader, and her musicians Araby Jacomo and Awad. Thirty years ago, people respected zar, she explains, handing round glasses of 7-Up in her tiny cluttered living room. But in the last few years, Egyptians have grown more closed- minded and fanatical. The musicians fear that the influence of religious satellite TV channels such as al-Rahma, whose charismatic tele-sheikhs regularly fulminate against zar, and the proliferation of Islamic guidance websites may drive the ritual and its music to extinction. Zar is based on superstition and the belief in devils, admonishes a fatwa (Islamic legal opinion) on the Egypt-based website IslamOnline. Islam is totally against it, and it is just a kind of delusion and deception. Until the government moved to suppress extremist groups in the 2000s, zar sessions in Port Said were frequently disrupted by threatening visits from the bearded ones local Islamist vigilantes. Even the zar musicians disagree on its orthodoxy. It is completely Islamic we sing to the Prophet and his companions. There is nothing against zar in the Quran, says Araby Jacomo defensively. But the sheikha is prepared to disagree. Its not Islamic it draws on Islamic elements, she says. It is something more open than any one religion. It is this open and accepting quality, she believes, that can attract even the most religious to it. People who have problems started to follow the religious scholars on TV rather than the zar, says Sheikha Zeinab. But when they have a problem caused by the spirits, they call the TV channels freephone hotlines or go to medical doctors, who cant cure it. They spend so much time and money searching for a cure, and finally they come back to zar, even if they dont want to believe in it. The hostility to zar reflects an unease with music and dance especially where women are concerned that dates back to the earliest days of Islam. For centuries, scholars have debated the ground between the purest form of music 8

 the call to prayer and recitation of the Quran and lesser or forbidden forms. The 12th-century theologian al-Ghazali famously warned against the disruptive power of music. The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy, he wrote. At different times, the percussion, stringed instruments and dancing of zar have all been considered un- Islamic as has womens singing. Sawt al-mara awra, states a famous proverb: a womans voice is a shameful thing. But as well as providing women with a rare opportunity to escape the pressures of a conservative society, the zar repertoire tells the story of Egypts last 200 years. Its songs and the spirits they invoke even hold a mirror up to the changes that threaten its own survival, explains Hager el-Hadidi, an anthropologist who has been a zar participant herself for the last decade. With the Islamic revival, the Muslim zar spirits the Prophet and his Companions and family are beginning to dominate the rest, she says. The Jewish spirits that were prominent in zar songs of the 1940s and 1950s reflecting Cairos then-thriving Jewish community have disappeared. Their place is being taken by Christian spirits associated with western consumer goods such as freezers and plasma- screen TVs, and new songs adapted from soap opera theme-tunes. As society becomes increasingly concerned with maintaining the appearance of piety, its easy to sacrifice zar, which is something marginal, says al-Hadidi. But if zar vanishes, an irreplaceable piece of Egypts history will be lost. ***************************** As the report above suggests, zar a music of slaves and women mirrors elements of Egyptian history and society that have no place in formal records. The ritual has its deep roots in the movement of people through Africa and Arabia. Ibrahim explains there are several historic strands of zar, some of which are now lost. Iskandarani comes from Alexandria and Egypts north coast, Sudani from Sudan and Saidi from Upper Egypt. Sawahli, coastal, zar comes from Zanzibar via Ethiopia, and was brought by African soldiers drafted into the Egyptian army to protect the ports and Suez canal in the 19th century. There is an area in Port Said called Ishla el-Sawahil, the Swahili Camp, he says. And another called Manshiet el-Obeid, the Place of Slaves the location of the former slave market. El-Hadidi explains the confusing role of the Sudanese in the zar story. There has always been a deep stigma attached to being the descendant of black African slaves, she says. Sudanese or Nubian doesnt mean from Sudan, it means from black Africa. Slaves came to Egypt from all over Africa via two routes, some brought from west Africa by Hausa traders, some from the east, which is why some people say zars roots are in Ethiopia. Once in Egypt, many slaves converted to Islam to gain their nominal freedom (the Quran prohibits enslaving a fellow Muslim). But a deep respect for Christianity and animism as Sheikha Zeinabs remarks show remains embedded in the ritual. 9

 The few zar practitioners who remain also follow separate traditions. Abu al- Gheit are an all-male Sufi order who hold hadras (gatherings) for worship and religious ecstasy. The Sudanese community not recent migrants but the descendants of slaves, soldiers and cotton-field workers who arrived in the 19th century still use zar music in public to mark weddings and other festive occasions. And a network of women across Egypt use zar in women-only private ceremonies for healing and socialising. Each group has a different repertoire of songs and uses different instruments, though all share the duf, a large flat goatskin drum used to mark out the basic rhythms that summon the spirits. In the Mastaba Music Centre in Cairos Seyyida Zeinab district, I see some of the instruments used in Sudanese zar. The rango is a xylophone with painted gourd resonators that, the musicians believe, contain the spirits of dead rango masters. The mangor, a percussion belt, is made of leather and velvet embroidered with beads and cowries and hung with hundreds of dried calves hooves. The tanboura is a large wooded lyre with a sweet, dry tone also used in Egyptian zar ceremonies. Even the instruments mingle cultures that are usually distinct: the rango, for instance, is from Christian and animist south Sudan, the tanboura lyre from the Muslim north. In his home in Imam as-Shafii, a rundown area on the edge of the City of the Dead cemetery, the zar percussionist Toutou shows us the African ritual costume he wears while dancing: an ostrich-plumed headdress, rows of beads, grass-fibre skirt and fearsome clawed feet that represent the feet of the spirits his dance is taming.

Though the existence of djinn kind or malevolent spirits made of fire is mentioned in the Quran and accepted by Muslims, elements of these spirit- taming zar rituals have little to do with mainstream Islam. Even in its more prosperous days, zar has always hovered on the edges of religious orthodoxy. In 19th-century Egypt zar rituals were held in mosques, until al-Azhar banned the practice in 1880. The Mahdi of Sudan banned zar when he proclaimed his leadership in 1881, but was reportedly forced to allow it in private when a favourite servant became sick. Zar is currently banned in Saudi Arabia, though in the 19th century there was a Mecca style. Zar is an extreme case of Sufism,

10

says el-Hadidi, referring to the mystical, esoteric tradition of Islam. Sufis accept the mediation of walis, saints or friends of God. In zar, the spirits are the walis. Writing of Egyptian zar in the early 20th century, the anthropologist Brenda Zeligmann observed: Though the celebrants profess to be Muslims and often make use of pious expressions throughout the ceremony, these customs have no religious sanction; indeed, so great is the Mohammedan feeling against them that the Ulema of the Azhar Mosque of Cairo have asked the assistance of the Government to suppress them. The declining fortunes of zar today are partly the result of changing fashions young people are unwilling to learn the huge repertoire of old-fashioned music, and many songs have already been lost. People of 45 years and older are the last zar generation, Sheikha Zeinab tells me. Thirty years ago, there would be at least 20 people at each zar. Now it is maybe five or six. In the less Islamically orthodox 1930s and 40s, the ritual was fashionable amongst Cairos society ladies. Wealthy women held big sumptuous parties, everyone wore cocktail dresses, they were catered by Groppi [a high-society caf that still exists in Downtown Cairo], people would give diamond amulets or $20,000-worth of gold as offerings, says el-Hadidi. Zar is still a relatively expensive ritual participants must offer 30-50LE to the carrier of the bokhour incense burner and, often, provide animals for sacrifice. Poorer people struggle to afford the fees. There is just not enough audience any more for us to make a living, says the tanboura player Araby Jacomo; musicians must supplement their income by working as taxi drivers, blacksmiths, fishermen and bakers. In Cairo, traditional musicians are also undercut by government-sponsored troupes such as the Tannoura ensemble, which performs in a state-owned venue and offers free state-subsidised tickets to tourists. But these performances offer none of the social benefits of a ritual that treats depression, illness and isolation in those who have no alternative outlet. Perhaps the bride [the woman who comes to be treated] works in a dark place, she can feel the bad spirits around her, she sleeps with sadness, says Sheikha Zeinab. Like many of the musicians, she works to offer zars as a kind of social and medical service. Zar encourages social cohesion and tolerance, says el-Hadidi. If you are seen as odd, its not you, its the spirit who possesses you. It makes it OK for women, in particular, to defy their husbands, to smoke, to get together with their friends and dance. Meeting the zar musicians and participants offers a window on a vanishing world. The healing rituals suggest the breadth and variety of traditional Islam, which can accommodate practices increasingly regarded as unorthodox by a modern, globalised faith.

11

Khartoum: dervishes and bureaucrats As the sun sets on a Friday in Omdurman, the wilder, dustier twin city across the Nile from Khartoum, small groups of people begin to trail up a sandy track towards the bright onion domes of the shrine and mosque of Hamid al-Nil. They mark the grave of a 19th-century leader of the Qadiriyah Sufi order (founded by the 11th-century Baghdadi saint Abd al-Qadir al-Jailani who appears as a favourite spirit in zar.) Among the men in gallabeyas and women in bright tobe wraps are single men in gold or bright green robes with dreadlocks and rastafarian-striped caps. Some carry drums or long sticks curved like a shepherds crook and one tiny ancient man is weighed down by thousands of wooden beads wrapped around his body. They are the dervishes, says a man leading his three small sons up the track. We come every week to watch them and join in the dhikr (invocation). Waiting for the weekly ritual to begin, families squat in a semi-circle around women boiling black tea on tiny gas burners. Men sell tapes, prayer beads, sweets and religious pamphlets to the raucous, milling crowd. Finally, to the thunder of goatskin drums, hundreds of devotees in scruffy white robes and skullcaps form a wide, ragged circle in the orange dust. Crowds of spectators gather behind them. While the men on the perimeter chant and sway to drums and percussion, the dervishes spin, dance and leap in the centre, encouraging the crowd to an ever-greater frenzy. The invocations Ya Allah are familiar from the Arab Middle East, but the music and dance are wild and African. They remind me of the fierce sound and movement of zar. One of the reasons Sufism became so popular here is that it incorporates elements of pre-Islamic African religions, like exorcism and witchcraft, drumming, dancing and following sheikhs, says Rashid, a Sudanese journalist who has accompanied me to the ritual.

Two miles down the road in Omdurman, a very different group of Sufis is gathering. In a neat gated courtyard, two rows of men in clean white robes, white skullcaps and leather cross-belts face each other on carefully aligned strips of carpet. As the light fades, they bow and sway in dhikr. Their words Ya Allah. Allah-hu are the same as those chanted by dervishes at Hamid el-Nil. But there is no wild drumming and their movements are sober and disciplined. These are the devotees of the Sammaniya tariqa (Sufi order), an order founded in the 18th century by the Saudi Arabian mystic Muhammad ibn Abdulkarim al-Samman. 12

While the chanting continues outside, I am led into a lavish room off the courtyard to talk to the leaders of the order. Our feet sink into thick plush carpets and we sit on long velour sofas while servants offer silver trays of fizzy orange drinks. The sheikh, the leader of the order, is travelling but he has left instructions for me to talk to one of his lieutenants. Abdel Rahman is a plump, prosperous- looking man in a white turban. As we talk, he plays with a Nokia smartphone. Why is Sufism so popular in Sudan? I ask. People come to Sufism because it offers a practical solution to their problems, he answers. Take me, for instance. I was an alcoholic. I was a leftist. I did all sorts of bad things. He raises his eyebrows suggestively. I didnt have any time for religion. Then I realised there was a vacuum in my life, and a colleague suggested that following this sheikh could save me. Your practice here looks very different from the Sufis at Hamid al-Nil. We are not like these dervishes, the dirty, uneducated ones, he says sharply. I have a PhD from Edinburgh and I work in the interior ministry. He points round the room to the other senior Sufis, who are taking mobile calls or talking in undertones about business. Hes an army colonel, hes an academic, they work in other government ministries, they are journalists for Khartoum TV. Many of the men in the room turn out to be related to the sheikh. Sufism is a powerful organising force in Sudanese politics and an integral part of the establishment. Though historically at odds with the Islamist principles of Omar al-Bashirs government, tariqas and the allegiance they command are so influential that al-Bashir has recently begun to court them in the wake of his split with his former Islamist mentor Hassan al-Turabi. Its obvious that the Sammaniya order has a strong political presence and tribal character, but when I ask about them Abdel Rahman answers in the oblique phrases of an international governance report. Religion can never be politicised, he says. The different tariqas never compete with each other. The listening family nod in agreement. Anyone can join our tariqa we have a lot of diversity in Sudan, so we know its important to create cohesion and draw on the strengths of others. And what about your relationship to the government? I ask. Do you feel you can worship freely when religious practice is so controlled by the state? There is no authoritarianism in Sudan. Even in this tariqa, we strive for good governance. The relationship between the sheikh and his followers is a highly consultative one. As we leave the compound, the junior Sufis are arranged in neat ranks on the carpets listening to a sermon. Returning from Omdurman, I drop into the Musicians Union to talk to Abdelgadir Salim, a famous Sudanese jazz musician. Like the Sufi tariqas, most musicians in Khartoum have a close relationship with the state, through the union. Only through membership can a musician obtain the necessary licenses to perform in major venues, sell legal tapes or cds, or have his music played on the radio (The state-controlled Radio Omdurman, launched by the British in 1941,

13

remained Khartoums only radio station until recently now, according to Salim, there are more than 20.) The union now has 400 members. Salim gives me a copy of a UN-sponsored government report on prominent Sudanese musicians. As you can read in that report, here in Khartoum we make modern music, he says. We take influences from everywhere. This is what people like and we must please them: 70% of our income comes from playing weddings. Outside in the courtyard, a huge wedding is underway, complete with crowds of girls in bright tobes, a band playing synthesisers and three men with big video cameras. This is the public face of music in Khartoum. But for the last week, I have been searching for traces of zar, with little success. The ritual has been banned by the government since the early 1980s and zar musicians are flogged and imprisoned. Despite this, I know it still takes place. I hear of an Ethiopian priestess who would hold a ritual for me for $500, given three weeks notice. I hear that once every few months there is a government-sanctioned zar for patients with psychiatric disorders at the Al-Teghani Mahi hospital in Omdurman. I hear that if you have the right contacts and enough money, you can go to a police station and buy a licence to hold a zar at home. The next day, in the concrete suburb of Khartoum 2, Im shown the former office of a government-funded anti-zar organisation called Preventing Bad Practices. The ground floor of the shabby office block is empty and abandoned. It closed down, says a neighbour. There was no need for it, because there is no more zar. ***************************** After Cairos verve, Khartoum feels subdued and depressed. The temperature hovers in the mid-40s, and the sky is beige with sandstorms. The streets almost empty by early evening, when the sparse street lighting is supplemented by giant neon Chinese characters glowing from the top of new hotel blocks. Packs of feral dogs colonise the roadside mounds of sand and rubble, fighting and snarling at passers-by. People are wary of the government and reluctant to speak openly. In some way, most people depend on it for survival. Sadiq, an artist, makes a living designing commemoratives shields and plaques presented to generals and bureaucrats who have been elevated within the regime. I write some nonsense poetry, whatever comes into my head Oh general you are a great date palm we shelter under or something and have it engraved, and they are so grateful, he says. Its funny but its also depressing. People go in and out of favour so quickly I am always occupied. In search of an insight into the realities of life in Khartoum, I meet Aziza, an academic, and her daughter Safia in the once-graceful, now crumbling colonial brick buildings of Khartoum University (formerly Gordon College). They are beautiful and dignified but strain shows on their faces as they speak. Youre right, the Sudanese have a veil or reserve, says Aziza. Partly its innate we are a mix of Arab, African and Islamic. We are so proud to be educated and cosmopolitan, and feel that were better than Egyptians and other Africans.

14

And partly its the government. They keep people living at a level where its a luxury to think about politics and freedom. The men are broken. We have no more heroes, no one whos willing to stand up for us says Safia. And the middle classes have been bought my uncles, my aunt opposed the regime and were exiles for 10, 15, 20 years. Their children were starving. And in the end you take a government job and you get free electricity, free petrol my aunt was handing in the yellow petrol token that says hukooma [government] and she said I never thought it would come to this. I dont have many friends here, agrees Aziza. Everyone has left or been bought. The rest of the family have money and we dont have anything because we dont want to be a part of this. What are things like for young people in the city, for students? I ask Safia. Its so hard. For instance, I wanted to study music, which I love her face lights up but I had to study clinical nutrition. My sister writes beautiful Arabic poetry its like Shakespeare in Arabic but my mum wouldnt let her follow her dream and study literature. She said youll starve. So she is a medical student. Theyre studying dissection but they dont have any cadavers. So the professor says imagine theres a vein here or an artery here. How can she learn? We need a man to drive us in the city our driver is a university graduate in engineering but he can make twice as much working as a driver. His cousin is a doctor, seven years in medical school and he cant find work. Hes at home, depressed maybe now and again he can pick up a shift for very little money. Like everyone else we get exhausted and we want to leave. I was certain that the spirit was still here, that Id stay and fight, but now I dont know. Im sitting at home, I dont have a job, Im losing my life there are two ways forward. Either I get a PhD scholarship and move abroad, or I must find a Sudanese husband. We have so little contact with the outside world, says Aziza. The internet works, but sporadically. Everything is censored. At the university we used to read Time and Newsweek, the New Statesman, all the foreign press. Professors would come from the west and wed send academics abroad our standards were so high. Now, because of the government, there is nothing. We just want people to know what we are really like, what the real situation is here. The massive centralising force of the government stifles everything. It took real Sudanese culture and replaced it with a manufactured brand of political Islam. The Sufi tariqas have also been bought theyre a networking group for government employees. Even religion, here, has become something corrupt.

15

A journey up the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo At the end of June, I leave Khartoum to travel up the Nile to Cairo. At present, the only border crossing between Egypt and Sudan open to foreigners is the route via Lake Nasser. The journey from Khartoum to the Sudanese ferry terminal town of Wadi Halfa used to take two or more days on the desert railway built by the British army under General Kitchener in 1897-8. In his dramatic account of the campaign to reconquer Sudan, The River War, Winston Churchill described the land between the capital and Aswan as: twelve hundred miles of surpassing desolation. It is still amazingly barren, inhospitable country, but in 2009 the last stretches of the desert road were paved, cutting travel time to around 12 hours on a new Korean coach, which periodically stops to let passengers off in the middle of the wilderness.

Wadi Halfa is a new port town built when the construction of the Aswan Dam submerged the old town in 1971 a loss that still saddens its Nubian inhabitants. I stayed with a Nubian family in a traditional courtyard house with tall clay jars for cooling Nile water (for drinking and washing), a thatched roof and iron bedsteads which the family dragged out into the courtyard each evening to catch the cooler night air. At night, far from city light pollution, the stars are huge and low. Scorpions, which have a habit of climbing up trailing blankets to sting outdoor sleepers, rustle over the sand around us.

The rusting weekly ferry from Wadi Halfa takes about 24 hours to reach the Egyptian town of Aswan at the northern end of Lake Nasser. The Nubian captain and his crew navigate by the stars, by their knowledge of the terrain on either shore and by the lakes infrequent buoys and markers. The passengers crammed onto the ferry are a mix of families and single businessmen. 16

Near Aswan the Nile flows between boulders and islands in one of the most beautiful scenes in Egypt. From Aswan, it takes 16 hours to reach Cairo by train along the Nile valley. From the windows you can see emerald-green fields, stands of palms and village scenes, farmers washing their buffalo in canals and boys riding donkeys down dust tracks.

17

 Cairo: Islamic televangelists, pop stars and youth activists I return to Cairo in July 2010 eager to discover more about Islam as it is understood and practised by Egyptian youth. I am lucky enough to be befriended by a group of young Muslims in their early 20s, either still studying or recent university graduates, but unmarried and relatively free to spend time with friends. These are the urban middle classes educated at Egyptian universities, usually English-speaking and adept with computers and social networking, but overwhelmingly frustrated by corruption, political stagnation and a lack of opportunity. Since then, they have all played a key role in the Egyptian revolution attending protests, organising their peers on the internet and creating initiatives to promote democracy. I also meet some of the Islamic thinkers and entrepreneurs keen to bring a new, more dynamic understanding of Islam to young middle- and upper-class Egyptians, often through online activism, televangelism and Islamic pop music. The following report examines the links between them, and captures a moment in time when young Egyptians frustrations, energy and desire for change were obvious but no one could have predicted where they would lead only six months later.

18

A new Islam emerges in Egypt In an anonymous Cairo hotel room, a young Arab man is anxiously preparing for a trip to the west. He packs a suitcase with jeans and t-shirts, gazes sadly at a photograph of his family, then shakes out a small carpet and prostrates in heartfelt prayer. As his forehead touches the ground, the silence is shattered by a booming disembodied voice. Rabea! Move the prayer carpet backwards and start again. Rabea Hafiz, aspiring Islamic pop star, sits up on his heels inches from the film camera and does as he is told. In the next room, the Egyptian media entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Haiba squints critically at the monitor over the directors shoulder. They are on the set of the latest music video clip, The Story of Success, being produced for the Islamic pop channel 4Shbab. In it, Hafiz plays a Muslim youth who travels to the west to study, is bullied and ridiculed for his faith, but emerges stronger, more pious and with enhanced employment prospects. The clip, Abu Haiba explains, shows young Muslims it is possible to be both religiously observant and financially successful, cosmopolitan and devout. In 4Shbabs inspirational storylines, 15- to 35-year-olds can enjoy all the benefits of 21st-century technology, travel and entertainment even business and romance while maintaining the purest Islamic values. We show the bright images that anyone would like to have, but with Islamic morals, says Abu Haiba. It is a timely message. In common with many of their peers across the Muslim world, a generation of affluent, well-educated young Egyptians are rediscovering the allure of Islam. But this new vision of faith reaches beyond the mosque and the madrassa to pop videos, talk shows, mobile ringtones, fashion stores, Facebook and YouTube. Its figureheads are not stern bearded sheikhs but dynamic young televangelists, chiselled pop stars who sing about faith and fidelity, or well-travelled scholars who speak fluent American-accented English and are as likely to wear a designer suit as robes and a prayer cap. Egypts upper- class urban youth may live with political stagnation and economic uncertainty, but religion is booming. Suddenly, it is not only acceptable but cool to be devout and to be seen to be so. Religion used to be regarded as poor and ugly, says Marwa al-Hosseiny, a 19-year-old pharmacology student at Cairo University. Now were realising it can be young and fresh. In Cairos fashionable suburbs, the lines between religion and consumer culture are increasingly blurred. The giant Citystars shopping mall, in the upmarket northern district of Medinat Nasr, is a favourite meeting-place of the citys wealthy youth. Huge fast-food courts serve burgers, doughnuts and ice-cream to shoppers in black abaya robes and full-face veils, while groups of brightly- headscarved teenage girls gather round plasma screens showing looped clips from the newest Twilight movie. Under a giant billboard of a tousle-haired Guess jeans model, Heba al-Sayyed, a 17-year-old high school student, is chatting to friends about TV and music. She is immaculately but properly dressed in a pink Burberry-check headscarf, a pink halter vest layered over a black long- sleeved top, a floor-length denim skirt and vertiginous gold heels.

19

We watch Prison Break and Desperate Housewives, and of course we love Amr Khaled and Moez Masoud, she says, naming two of Egypts most popular televangelists, who enjoy the kind of adulation usually reserved for pop stars and Hollywood celebrities. She shows off the ringtone on her new Nokia mobile an Islamic cover version of Leonard Cohens Hallelujah that replaces the chorus with Ya Ellahi O, my God in Arabic. This song shows that whether we say Hallelujah or Ya Ellahi, we are all the same, she explains. Ive loved it ever since I heard it in the movie Shrek. It is media svengalis such as Abu Haiba a solidly-built 42-year-old with sharp, amused eyes and an iPhone who are helping to shape this new sensibility. A one-time activist for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group, he abandoned its traditional methods of dawa calling to Islam to reinvent religious media for a generation reared on MTV and American soaps. One of his most successful tactics is to revamp secular western TV formats from music videos to reality shows for a devout Muslim audience. I created Mona and Her Sisters, for instance, to showcase female stars who had started to retire, he says referring to the growing number of Egyptian actresses who have adopted the veil and abandoned their film and TV careers. I based it on The View [a longrunning US talk show hosted by a female panel including Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters] and it became a groundbreaking Muslim womens chat show, discussing love, money, the veil all the controversial issues. This dovetailing of materialism and religion may seem incongruous or self- serving to a western tradition that remains more squeamish about the division between faith and finance. There are ascetic traditions in Islam that would take a similar view. But there has always been a powerful strand of Islamic thought that does not so much distinguish between dunya and deen the material world and religion as link them. The Prophet himself was a highly successful merchant, and success in worldly matters is often considered to be a direct consequence of piety. This is the genius of Islam it gives us a complete system for living, explains Abu Haiba. Some are optimistic that halal consumerism will bring the Muslim world closer to the secular west uniting cultures through a shared love of mobile phones, social media and music videos. Beneath the bright colours and cheerful demeanour of the new Islamic media, however, is an undertow of darker social, financial and political insecurities and a fierce battle for influence over an upcoming generation. Media ventures such as Abu Haibas, for instance, are made possible only by Saudi Arabian money and infrastructure. Most of his groundbreaking programmes have been funded and broadcast by the Saudi billionaire Sheikh Saleh Abdullah Kamel, owner of the ART media network. Such backers tend to provide not only investment but moral guidelines based on the far more restrictive interpretation of Islam current in the Kingdom a factor contributing to growing social conservatism in Egypt, which also has a large number of expat workers in the country. The effects can be obvious. The popular Saudi-owned Al- Majd religious satellite channel, for example, is ostentatiously conservative in both style and content. It features only the most traditionally minded scholars and bans music or images of women forcing international brands such as 20

General Motors and Unilever keen to access its otherwise media-averse audience to create dedicated halal adverts. But funders sensibilities also shape media content more subtly despite its slick international look, no female singers have yet appeared on 4Shbab, and even veiled women are rarely shown in its clips. Increasingly, it is the best communicators who are able to set the ideological agenda. Fadel Soliman, a former IT and marketing expert in his early 40s, is head of the internet-based Bridges Foundation, which trains young Muslims to present the true face of Islam through Powerpoint presentations and educational, enlightening and entertaining videos shared on its dedicated YouTube channel. With his transatlantic accent the result of years living and working in Washington DC and white Ralph Lauren shirt, Soliman epitomises the new-style Islamic entrepreneur. Over coffee in his lavish villa in one of Cairos new desert satellite developments, he explains the thinking behind his emphasis on new media and western-inspired presentation techniques. We complain that the media is not open to Muslims but we have excluded ourselves from it. How many journalists are Muslims? he asks. Why do Muslim parents encourage their children to become doctors or engineers rather than to work in the media? Solimans online activities are not all entertaining. He is proud of his harder- edged YouTube anti-extremism debates with the American-Yemeni scholar Anwar al-Awlaki wanted by the US for his role as a recruiter and spiritual guide to al-Qaeda and Adam al-Gadahn, the US-born al-Qaeda propagandist and media spokesman. You need to talk to extremists in their own language, he explains. Weve reached a point where moderate Muslim voices are afraid to speak out. So I have to talk about jihad. I dont go to the US now because the government doesnt like the way I speak. He provides a deft, detailed analysis of sharia rulings on the killing of non-combatants to prove his point. They [Christians] raped our women in Bosnia, but does this mean we should do the same to them? No, Muslims have the sharia to put limits on our behaviour. This combination of unapologetic Islamic rigour and new technology has proven enormously successful in attracting internet-savvy young Muslims. People like Fadel Soliman are the cream of our society, says Amr Fahmy, a 23-year-old dentistry student who has completed two of Bridges training programmes. They have travelled and they understand the west, unlike the old sheikhs but they also understand religion. Solimans organisation has so far trained 10,200 young presenters in 16 countries. Abu Haiba who like Soliman trained as an engineer rather than as a traditional religious scholar is similarly well-versed in Islamic law and thought. He quotes fluently and thoughtfully from the 20th-century ideologue Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, alongside the Quran and Sunnah (narrated traditions of the Prophet) to defend seemingly harsh orthodox Islamic views on homosexuality, polygamy, veiling and corporal penalties such as amputation and stoning. The youth in our audience dont know these thinkers so we show them Islam in a form they can understand, talking about jobs, relationships, family, hopes and dreams, he explains. To many Egyptians, such soft religious instruction provides a welcome ethical education to youth 21

otherwise at risk from the amoral forces of global consumerism. But to some who do not share these social values, the result is a threatening shift in the moral climate of Egyptian society long regarded as more liberal and diverse than its Arabian Gulf counterparts. We are being edged out, says Sherif al-Asyouti, a radio journalist, blogger and member of Egypts embattled Coptic Christian minority. As the mainstream becomes more conservative and more Islamically observant, there is inevitably less and less room for Christians, for women who dont want to veil, for homosexuals for any outsiders. Such anxieties have not prevented the emerging nadhif (Islamically clean) media from attracting not only elite young consumers but top professionals who would once have worked for their secular rivals. 4Shbab For Youth was launched in 2009 as a direct competitor to the hugely popular Arabic music channels such as Mazeeka, Melody Hits and Rotana that show clips of sultry female starlets and smouldering well-muscled crooners. The director of The Story of Success, Nour made videos for the secular channels top stars before Abu Haibu pursued him to create the same sophisticated look without the smouldering for 4Shbab. Slim, black-clad and stubbled, with intense brown eyes, Nour looks like any auteur from Paris or Berlin. But the experience of working with 4Shbab, he says, has transformed his career. I did it all, he says, tapping ash from a Marlboro Light. I worked with all the big names, made clips about love and beautiful women. But I became bored. Now Im finally making a clip with a real meaning about the relationship between man and God. His star, the 27-year-old Saudi Arabian singer Rabea Hafiz, agrees. With 4Shbab I know Im making something clean, he says. Its not a dirty clip. The Story of Success shoot is his first for the channel and the first time he has met Abu Haiba, who has selected him to join his roster of new celebrities. We need more handsome stars like this one, with a good commercial mentality, Abu Haiba observes. He looks the slight, sweet-faced Hafiz over briskly, coaxes his dark hair into a more telegenic wave and persuades him to show off a voice trained for Quranic recitation. Hafiz shyly opens his mouth to sing and is transformed, smiling slightly as the beautiful plaintive sound echoes through the hotel corridor. Its a mawwal, a very old Arabian poem set to music, he explains. But I really like do you know them? Take That. And in the same solemn, exquisite voice, he launches into Rule the World: You and me we could light up the sky, if you stay by my side. Yahya Hawa, a Syrian singer and another of Abu Haibas protgs, is equally positive about his new career. 4Shbab started to present Islamic musicians as mainstream stars to show that were not just for Fridays, he says. Now my clips are also shown on Mazeeka and Ive played concerts at non-religious venues like the Biblioteca Alexandrina and the Arab League headquarters. I want to break down the walls between religious and non-religious people. Hafiz and Hawa are hoping to follow in the footsteps of the biggest Islamic music stars English-language singers such as the British-Iranian-Azeri Sami Yusuf, the king of Muslim pop, and the Swedish-Lebanese Maher Zain. Zain originally 22

collaborated with RedOne the Swedish-Moroccan producer who went on to conquer the global charts with Lady Gaga before becoming Islamic musics premier international heart-throb. His 2009 album Thank You Allah, which mixes R&B with traditional nasheed devotional music, has captivated English- speaking young Cairenes such as 22-year-old Hanan Ezzeldin, a university administrator who listens to it as she negotiates the citys notorious traffic. Insha Allah [God willing], Insha Allah, Insha-Allahhhhh, well find a way croons Zain gently as she inches her car forward in a cloud of choking fumes. This is my song for today, says Ezzeldin sweetly. Maher somehow always brings me the right message at the right moment. To their devout fans, the Islamic stars offer a precious commodity their secular competitors lack the ability to draw meaning and hope from everyday frustrations. This is also the appeal of charismatic Egyptian televangelists such as Amr Khaled a 43-year-old former accountant whom Abu Haiba helped become the worlds most famous and influential Muslim television preacher and Moez Masoud, a handsome 32-year-old graduate of Cairos prestigious American University. Young people love Khaled and Masoud, they say, because you feel like they are already your friends. Abu Haiba, who co-devised Khaleds 2001 breakthrough TV talk show Kalam min al-Qalb, Words from the Heart, puts it more baldly. Amr is not a beard-man an unapproachable traditional sheikh he says. Other sheikhs might explain what Islam is more perfectly, adds Fahmy, who is also a Khaled fan. The sheikhs at Al Azhar, for instance, know a lot about religion. But they dont know about tolerance and coexistence and their English is not as good, so we prefer to listen to the younger preachers. Khaled pioneered the technique of addressing his audiences everyday concerns about school, religion and love in a chatty register that is at once intimate and glamorous. Far from being a dowdy or impoverished scholar, he is now a designer-suited aspirational role model NGO leader, entrepreneur, motivational speaker and media celebrity in his own right. Hes a very sincere person and we can measure his sincerity by his success, says Fahmy. The tremendous influence wielded by these Islamic celebrities over the young elite has spooked the Egyptian regime (which, on the other hand, considers it expedient to ignore the steady creep of Saudi religious influence). In the early 2000s, Khaleds weekly sermons in the affluent Cairo suburb of Mohandiseen began to attract audiences of thousands so the government banned him from preaching and he moved to the UK in 2003. Other media figures have had their activities similarly curtailed. Masoud is also currently based in the UK, and Abu Haiba has been forced to broadcast 4Shbab from Bahrain. With Egyptian institutions and mainstream media popularly discredited by their close links with government, the religious establishment is also nervous of its young competitors. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the recently appointed Sheikh al-Azhar head of Egypts most prestigious seat of Islamic learning recently fulminated against the unqualified young preachers of a religious TV channel that has borrowed the al-Azhar name and insisted that the ancient institution must urgently launch its own.

23

Government officials have reason to be nervous. There are hints that the consequences of the Islamic media boom may go far beyond fast-paced music videos, colourful headscarves and downloadable call-to-prayer ringtones. The televangelists Khaled in particular have inspired thousands of upper-class young Egyptians to join NGOs such as Life Makers an international youth organisation based on Amr Khaleds 2003 TV show of the same name. Members work in social projects, education and Islamic outreach in Egypts many slum areas as well as setting goals for personal and spiritual development. Far from being passive consumers of Khaleds message, high school and university students have begun to create their own NGOs, complete with all the western corporate-inspired trappings of success junior CEOs and organising committees, Powerpoint presentations, funding proposals, aims, objectives, missions and visions. For young people who face political repression, professional struggle and the day-to-day frustrations that Cairos bureaucracy, corruption and overcrowding present to even the relatively wealthy, the realisation of their own potential is proving exhilarating. The government is the big ghost, the big illusory monster for us, says 22-year-old Mamdouh Abu Zayd, who volunteers with an organisation that distributes food to needy families during Ramadan. With this NGO, we tried to do something and we did it. I cant describe the smiles and the happiness of the people we helped. I didnt need the government for anything, and they couldnt stop me. The Islamic singers and television preachers seemingly innocuous narratives of personal betterment such as 4Shbabs The Story of Success have tapped into a deep and growing desire for social and political transformation in the Arab worlds most populous country. We are learning that if we organise and reach a critical mass we can make a change, says Abu Zayds colleague, 21-year-old trainee doctor Seif al-Rizq. Allah promises that good people will prevail and achieve what they are aspiring to. Without the religion weve learned from these preachers who inspire us, we would have given up long ago.

24

Delhi, Aligarh, Lucknow, Ajmer, Mumbai: A battle of ideas in Indian Islam In November 2010 I arrive in Delhi to investigate Islamic education in India. It is the first non-Muslim-majority country on my itinerary, and I am keen to see how developments in Islam here contrast with those in the Arab world. Indias estimated 177-million strong Muslim community, the third largest in the world, is socially and economically disadvantaged and has a strong sense of its lack of privilege compared to the Hindu majority. As a result of colonialism and migration it also has strong historic ties to the UK, and many of the currents of thought in British Islam are influenced by Indian scholars and institutions. South Asia journalists in the UK tell me that Indian Islam is a non-story compared to neighbouring Pakistan, there is little domestic violent extremism (which is also a comment on media priorities). But the battle of ideas I find in Indias madrassas (Islamic schools) goes to the heart of the countrys struggles to maintain its secular democracy and finds many parallels in Britain. Indias Islamic institutions, like the country itself, are disparate: madrassas in Delhi have little in common with those in Kerala or Assam. I decide to focus on the traditional heartland of Islam in India, the old Mughal capital of Delhi and the neighbouring province of Uttar Pradesh (UP). According to government reports, Muslims make up about 13% of the total population of India (though this figure is highly contested), but in UP, where more than one-fifth of Indias Muslims live, the figure can reach 18.5%. The countrys oldest and most influential Islamic educational institutions are also located here: mainstream universities such as Jamia Milia Islamic University in Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, 130km south-east of Delhi and large traditional madrassas such as Nadwat ul- Ulema in UPs state capital Lucknow and Dar ul-Uloom in the small town of Deoband, 150km north of Delhi. Madrassa education in India ranges from small village schools providing a basic Islamic education to a handful of primary-school-aged children to vast, wealthy, university-style institutions with many thousands of students. The majority of the students are boys and young men girls madrassas have developed only over the last decade and they still make up a tiny percentage of the total. The proportion of Indian children educated by the system is, again, contested, but sources agree that it is very small around 4% (according to the governments 2006 Sachar Committee Report) of the total. (The Hindu community and middle- class Muslim families tend to prefer the state education system, which offers a mainstream education and the chance to learn English.) This figure is far higher in more deprived Muslim-majority areas, where the madrassas influence is strongest largely because they offer free education, board and sometimes vocational training to their students. But madrassas impact on the community far outweighs their direct reach. They are responsible for producing all the ulema (Islamic scholars, who often double as Muslim community leaders, particularly in the absence of secular political, academic or business leaders who are willing to identify with the religious community) and for determining the tenor of Islamic thought in the country.

25

The ulema hold the key to reform in the Muslim community, Waris Mazhari, an Islamic studies scholar and graduate of Dar ul-Uloom Deoband, tells me. ***************************** In Delhi, at the beginning of November, the nights are growing longer but the heat is still intense in the middle of the day. Cows lie beside market stalls or forage among heaps of garbage at the side of the road. On the way from the airport to my hotel, I pass a towering statue of the monkey god Hanuman that looms beside a flyover. Conquered and destroyed and rebuilt (at least) seven times, the city is a strange strung-out conglomeration of disparate neighbourhoods, from the boutiques and international chain restaurants of wealthy Khan Market to the down-at-heel bazaars of Old Delhi to the concrete high-rises of the western suburbs. Dotted throughout are spectacular monuments to its periods of Islamic rule: ruined medieval Tughlaqabad and Firoz Shah Kotla, the 13th-century Qutub Minar tower, Shah Jahans Jama Masjid and Red Fort, and his great-grandfather Humayuns beautiful garden tomb. Alongside them are reminders of the British colonial period: the villas and tree- shaded avenues of New Delhi, the 24-hour bustle of the immense New Delhi railway station and English spoken everywhere. In the Islamic institutions I have come to visit, these two histories are entwined: they have been shaped by both the idea of a glorious Islamic past and the anti- colonial struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries. First is Jamia Millia Islamia, one of the countrys top Islamic educational institutions, which offers courses in both the Islamic sciences and languages and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering and technology, in addition to modern subjects such as mass communication and peace studies. It was founded in 1920 by a group of nationalist Muslims who left the more western-leaning Aligarh Muslim University in response to Mahatma Gandhis call to boycott educational institutions linked to the colonial regime. JMI remained close to the Indian establishment after Independence, and in 1988 was made a central university (a public university supported by the department of education rather than a state government) by act of parliament. But it has retained its roots in the Muslim community and by accepting madrassa students into its Islamic studies department, it also plays a part in integrating them into the educational and social mainstream. From my base near the old city, I travel south across the city to the southern suburb of Okhla, where JMI moved in 1936. Behind the campus walls, men and women students are mingling cheerfully in every variety of dress from shalwar kameez to abaya and niqab to prayer caps to jeans and t-shirts. The academic year has recently restarted and huge signs warn No Ragging on Pain of Expulsion. Im here to see Professor Akhtarul Wasey, head of Islamic studies at JMI and editor of the scholarly English-Urdu journal Islam and the Modern Age. In keeping with his universitys history, he is the first of many people to emphasise Indian Muslims pride in India as a secular democracy as opposed to the faith-based state of Pakistan. 26

How would you characterise the Muslim communitys relation to the secular state? AW: At Independence, our leadership maintained that India must be a secular state, in the face of strong provocation [the creation of Pakistan]. The heartening thing is that more Muslims opted for India than for Pakistan. Secularism is not a new concept for us its rooted in our religious traditions. The Mughals had the concept of sulh-e-kul, harmony among all religions, while the Hindus had sarvdharm sabhav. This is different from the western concept of secularism in that its not anti-religious. We want to maintain our religious and cultural identities. India is a flowerpot with all types of flowers growing in it its not and has never been a melting pot, like the US. India can be a role model for what is happening in the west: is the majority willing to accept a minority with different cultural, linguistic and religious values? Why does this ideal sometimes break down in India and what role does the Muslim community play in these troubles? AW: The overwhelming majority are not communal [a loaded word in India the UK equivalent might be sectarian.] But Partition created a vacuum where the Muslim middle class had been that took four decades to fill. That creates problems. What role do madrassas play in the Muslim community and what problems do they face? AW: At the time of the Prophet, knowledge was monopolised by a small section of society. The Prophet made it a universal obligation to acquire knowledge it is mandatory for every Muslim man and woman. The hadiths state You must go even as far as China to seek knowledge. In the golden age of Islam, madrassas educated architects, doctors and philosophers as well as religious scholars. Here in India, until 1857 madrassas supplied the bureaucracy and the judiciary. After that, madrassas were marginalised and defined as purely religious institutions. In order to revisit the glorious traditions of our past we must have an integrated system of education. Why does the global media portray madrassas as hotbeds of violent extremism? AW: Radicalism is not taught at madrassas at all. It is a political symptom. Osama bin Laden was created by the State Department to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan. The radical madrassas were funded by the CIA to further US political interests. ***************************** Jamat ul-Banat, Delhi The next day, I visit a nearby girls madrassa, Jamat ul-Banat al-Islamia, beside the Yamuna River in south Delhi. It is run in tandem and shares some facilities with a Muslim English-medium modern school for girls, Zayed Public School, so parents can choose the type of education that best fits their priorities. Like most girls madrassas, ten-year-old Jamat ul-Banat is strictly shielded from the eyes of men and outsiders. It is physically sheltered from the outside world 27

by heavy curtained doors and unused to receiving visitors. But Syma, a senior teacher and daughter of the madrassas founder Maulana Ilyas, welcomes me kindly. She leads me from the road through storehouses, up and down staircases and through a final curtain into a long, low hall where the girls are having lunch, gathered around bowls placed on plastic mats on the floor. The volume of chatter is overwhelming and the girls are lively and curious, jumping up to squeeze my hands in greeting and practice a little English. A common complaint from critics of the madrassa system, as Akhtarul Waseys comments on their marginalisation suggest, is that their graduates have few employment prospects. Because of their narrow education, the majority are restricted to becoming imams in local mosques, madrassa teachers or, for the more enterprising, opening their own madrassas. The vocational training that was commonly provided in madrassas in the 19th and early 20th centuries had almost disappeared, though some madrassas are now attempting to address this lack. Options for the girls educated in madrassas since such educations emerged in the last couple of decades have been even more limited. The system is also criticised for being conservative and hierarchical, with dynasties of scholars often controlling the major institutions. It is largely Urdu- medium, another factor that separates it from upper- and middle-class Muslims, who largely choose to educate their children in the mainstream state system and who aspire to English-language education and employment. It is entirely divorced from the India shining and Indian economic boom stereotypes. Jamat ul-Banat, Syma tells me, was founded in order to address these issues. The madrassa educates 600 girls from six to 17 in Arabic, English, Urdu, Maths and Islamic studies and encourages its graduates to go on to university. (Syma herself has an MA in English and a BA in Urdu literature from Jamia Millia.) At the top of the building, the students show me a small computer centre where the older students learn IT basics. In the upper years, they are also offered teacher training a way into a profession that is acceptable to even more conservative families who do not wish their daughter to mix with men in the workplace. Though its environment is obviously strictly Islamic, the madrassa is progressive in terms of its emphasis on integration with the educational mainstream and efforts to provide its graduates with vocational skills. In educating the girl, you educate the whole family, explains Syma. So it is very important to give her the best possible preparation for life after graduation. ***************************** Madrassas and history These arguments about the role of Islamic education in Indian society date back to the rise of British influence in India and the decline of Mughal power and prestige particularly to debates over how the Muslim community could best respond to the trauma of the uprising of 1857. At Delhi University, I meet Professor Farhat Hasan, an expert on Indias Islamic history, who expands on their context. 28

 How did British colonialism affect the educational aims of the Muslim community? FH: There were three responses to the establishment of British rule in India. The modernists, like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, wanted to move with the times and learn from the English systems but to preserve their cultural heritage as well. This was reflected even in attire at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College [the forerunner to Aligarh Muslim University, founded by Syed Ahmed as an Indian Oxbridge in 1875], you had to wear a sherwani [traditional long buttoned coat] if you were called to see the vice-chancellor, for instance. They wanted to maintain a conscious distance from western culture, but to march shoulder-to-shoulder with the developed western world. In the same way, Syed Ahmed wrote commentaries giving a rationalist reading of the Quran, stating that any apparent contradiction between modern science and the Quran must be due to a misinterpretation of the text. We know him as a social reformer but his contribution in religious thought has been marginalised both now and then. Some ulema rejected his views, either because of his loyalist politics or his interpretation of Islam, but he has always been held in tremendous respect by the wider community. The traditionalists, like the Deobandis [reformists based in Deoband, north India], the Firangi Mahalis [a group based in Lucknow] and the Wahhabis [a group influenced by Saudi Arabian reformism], wanted to close ranks and defend their culture. The Deobandis were actively hostile to western culture, while the Firangi Mahalis were more tolerant but focused on preservation. Unlike the elitist movement of Syed Ahmed, these organisations reached down to the lowest levels of society. They were organic, firmly rooted in the wider Muslim society, and received no state funding, preserving their distance from the state. And what about the idea of the Mughal empire? Is it regarded as a golden age of Islamic education and achievement? FH: Historically, the Mughal empire was a composite, not Islamic. The nobility were made up of all sections of society, and the state made provision for all religions through the policy of sulh-e-kul, universal peace [also mentioned by Akhtarul Wasey, this policy was introduced by the emperor Akbar (r1556- 1605)]. There were revenue-free grants to religious classes and establishments, and even a so-called puritan such as Aurangzeb [Mughal emperor who ruled 1658 1707 and had a fearsome reputation as a Muslim zealot] found he could not repeal them. So in one way it was an age of tolerance but in another it wasnt that strictly Islamic at all. How it is used rhetorically, though, is another question altogether and it is often held up as a golden age that good Muslims must strive to recreate. ***************************** Aligarh Muslim University The Muslim reformer Syed Ahmed Khan (18171898) mentioned by Farhat Hasan encapsulates many of these debates. Born into the Delhi nobility at the end of the Mughal era, Syed Ahmed lived through the uprising of 1857 and 29

emerged with the conviction that the British would be the dominant power in India for the foreseeable future. In order to thrive, he believed the Muslim community must co-operate with the Raj, abandon its superstition, feudalism and aversion to modern technology, and emulate the modern, scientific education of the European elite. His views made him popular with the British administration though his closeness to them and his rationalist commentaries on the Quran led many Indian Muslims to distrust him during his lifetime. In 1869-70 Syed Ahmed visited Britain and came away convinced that Indias Muslims needed education in the English pattern and that India needed an Oxbridge-style institution. In 1875 he founded the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, which aimed to give a largely Muslim elite the best possible synthesis of eastern and western education, and produce a new generation of Muslim intellectuals and leaders. In 1920, thanks to its good relations with the colonial government, the college was made a central [government-run] university and renamed Aligarh Muslim University. It was at this time that the founders of Jamia Millia left AMU to establish their own, more nationalist, institution. Today, Aligarh Muslim University is one of the largest universities in India, with 32,000 students of both sexes, 30% of whom are non-Muslim. It remains influential within the community as a pattern for combining modern education with Islamic values though some question whether it has maintained its academic standards or allowed itself to become an intellectual backwater compared to JMIs more cosmopolitan setting and outlook. Walking in the red-brick quadrangles at the centre of the huge campus today, it feels like a transplanted Oxford apart from the palms, exotic blossoms, Islamic arches and calls to prayer. In the central office, I met Rahat Abrar, its public relations officer, before continuing to the theology department to meet its head, Maulana Saud Alam Qasmi.

What was Syed Ahmeds vision when he established the MA-OC? RA: There were many competing visions of what Islamic education should be in India after 1857. Some sections of the community were so traumatised by the events that they decided they wanted nothing to do with modern, scientific education whatsoever they rejected anything connected to the west. But Syed Ahmed was a visionary. His father was a courtier at Bahadur Shah Zafar [the last Mughal emperor]s court, but he did not cling to the legacy of the Mughals. He 30

was a close friend of Maulana Qasim [the founder of Deobands Dar ul-Uloom seminary] and appointed his son-in-law Maulana Abdullah Ansari the first dean of religious education at MA-OC. So he maintained links with the more traditional sections of the community and attempted to create a real fusion of east and west. Hence Anglo-Oriental. How important was womens education at the MA-OC and, later, at AMU? RA: We opened our first school for womens education within MA-OC in 1904, with the help of gifts from Sultan Shah Jahan, the Begum [female princely ruler] of Bhopal. In 1920, her daughter Khaikhusrau Jahan, who succeeded her as Begum, became the first chancellor of AMU. Now 40% of the student body are women. What is the ethos of Islamic studies at AMU? SAQ: We teach theology as an academic subject, along the lines of Oxford and Cambridge. Its not taught as it is in madrassas at AMU, were not confined to teaching one school of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), for instance. We follow an objective, not subjective, school of thought. We also place an emphasis on the study of comparative religions. Theology classes are also compulsory for Muslim undergraduates studying for degrees in commerce, arts or science. Why have madrassas and mainstream schools and universities drifted so far apart? SAQ: The problem is that most madrassas dont teach English there is a literal communication gap in our society. The environment at universities is so different from that of madrassas, which tends to be so confined. But we are working to achieve greater crossover. At AMU we have so far assessed and recognised 45 madrassas from different schools of thought and accept students that have achieved their fazhilat degree there. And we admit both Sunni and Shia students to study their respective theologies here. About 35% of our intake for the BA course which is about 200 students annually come from madrassas. ***************************** As Saud Alam Qasmi mentions above, madrassas are generally affiliated formally or informally to one of the main Indian maslaks or schools of Islamic thought: the Ahl-e-Hadith (Salafi reformists), the Barelvis (Sufi-leaning traditionalists), the Jamaat-e-Islami (socially active Islamists) and the Deobandis (orthodox reformists). There is considerable tension between the schools, and some madrassas spend much time educating their pupils in refuting the theological errors of rival schools. As private institutions, madrassas funding is opaque all the institutions I visit, including those with multi-million-rupee budgets, insist that their funding comes entirely from private Indian donations. They are eager to deny receiving any money from either overseas donors (ie Saudi or Gulf Arab organisations or individuals) or from the Indian state. Officials at Dar ul-Uloom Deoband are

31

particularly keen to emphasise they had turned down state aid in order to preserve their independence and Islamic credibility. Part of the reason for this emphasis is that madrassas feel besieged by the ramifications of the global war on terror particularly after they came under heavy pressure to reform and become more transparent from the Indian government. After 9/11, the government really cracked down on madrassas, Adil Mehdi, an expert on madrassas at Jamia Millia, told me. It became very difficult for overseas students once a high proportion of the student body at prestigious institutions such as Dar ul-Uloom Deoband to get visas to study at madrassas, for instance. Though Indian madrassas do not have much in common with their sometimes more radical Pakistani counterparts (many of which, however, follow the Deobandi tradition), they came under local and international suspicion for training and harbouring extremists. The changes they made to become more modern and mainstream were not always profound, however. They tended to make cosmetic changes introducing a few computers for the students or a little, limited English language teaching, says Mehdi. For a brief period following 9/11, the madrassas of Delhi and UP experienced intense scrutiny, including by the global media. The larger institutions produced English-language press releases, publications and even videos to justify their activities to non-Muslims. This defensive mindset can colour their comments and the subjects they emphasise when talking to me, a member of the western media. But in general I find principals welcoming and certainly keen to show their institution to outsiders in order to prove their worth and refuse accusations of links with extremism. Near Aligarh, I am able to visit two small boys madrassas linked to larger institutions. In Damanpour, a rural village 60km from Aligarh, I visit the Madrassa Wazir ul-Uloom, which follows the Deobandi school of Islam though it does not receive any funding from the large Deoband madrassas. It is typical of the majority of Indian madrassas a modest institution with a village-school feel, linked to a mosque endowed by a local noble family. Its few buildings are set among trees with the domed family mausoleum, home to families of nesting parakeets, nearby. The boys line up to greet me and the principal, Maulana Haroon, tells me that there are 150 students from seven to 22, 80 of whom board full-time. About 25 of them are orphans, and all of them receive free education and lodging. We are providing this service to the community, says the maulana. If such boys didnt come here they wouldnt receive an education at all.

32

The boys tell me that they study basic Maths and Hindi in addition to the Islamic curriculum, and the maulana adds that he wants to provide a computer for them and other vocational training but that money is too tight. Currently, his graduates either go on to study in higher madrassas or become self-employed. Smaller institutions such as Wazir ul-Uloom spend much time and energy pursuing donations from the community, and he argues with a local benefactor over whether the madrassa should charge students whose parents can afford a modest tuition fee. (The maulana contends that education is a religious right the more business-minded benefactor, that it will make his institution more sustainable.) What are the challenges facing the Muslim community in India, and how is your madrassa addressing them? MH: My worry is that Islam in India will be just like it was in Spain, where the Muslims disappeared. So we are educating more good Muslims to counter this. How do you think madrassas are perceived by people outside the community? MH: The west and outsiders dont know us but they say we are terrorists. This is untrue and unjust. What can we do to improve that relationship? MH: No one comes here, so they dont know what is really happening inside the madrassas. You must send more people to see the truth and stay among us. In conversation afterwards, I realise that such questions are at odds with the maulanas more pragmatic priorities securing funding and the day-to-day running of his school. Later Adil Mehdi, who has conducted research at hundreds of Indias madrassas, observes that many are run not on ideological but on financial lines: Most madrassas are run as small businesses by enterprising madrassa graduates like a start-up business, he says. In some cases they are almost Dickensian youll see poor conditions for the boys, a Land Cruiser (or an Indian SUV, depending on how well theyre doing) parked outside, and a comfortable house for the owner.

On the outskirts of Aligarh I visit the Madrasatul Uloom al-Islamia, which is affiliated to the large and influential Nadwatul Ulema madrassa in Lucknow. The madrassa, established in 2003, has more facilities and a larger budget than that of Damanpour and its 375 students have greater opportunities to integrate into mainstream education or employment. They are taught English and encouraged to apply to higher madrassas run by the Nadwatul Ulema network or carry on to 33

universities. I arrive at an examination and presentation ceremony, where boys display their command of languages and rhetoric by making speeches in praise of the Prophet in Urdu or Arabic, and I am invited to give the students a message from the west. Though Aligarh is considered a centre of Muslim learning in India, the madrassas managers are highly consciousness of its position in relation to the Hindu majority and its responsibility to act as a bastion of the faith. A senior student gives a welcoming address in English and Urdu, which tells me again of the example of al-Andalus and the Indian Muslim communitys need to fight against encroachment by other religions. The schools leaders point me to their English-language publicity materials. An appeal for donations points out that: The majority of students of the madrassa are from disadvantaged areas where the Hindus and Christian missionaries are working very hard to convert them. For this, we have admitted these students with the sole purpose of preserving their imaan [faith] and training them to serve as ulema in their areas. The madrassas governing document, meanwhile, states that it was founded To promote and protect the religious, moral, educational, social and cultural interests of all Muslims living in India, (especially those who are living in Hindu- dominated areas, under the influence of Hinduism to convert them to Hindu culture and costume) with the sole purpose of uplifting the Muslim ummah [global community of faith]. At least rhetorically, the madrassa is an island of faith in an ever-encroaching non-Muslim sea. ***************************** This mindset is also apparent in Lucknow, where I meet the young scholar Khalid Rashid Firangi Mahali in his new Islamic centre. Lucknow is traditionally a famous seat of Islamic learning before 1857, its Muslim rulers were famous for their culture, refinement and education. (The popular image of Lucknow in these days is captured in Muzaffar Alis 1981 Bollywood classic Umrao Jaan, the tale of a beautiful and cultured courtesans life during the uprising). 36-year-old Rashid comes from a long line of Islamic scholars. In the early 18th century the emperor Aurangzeb granted one of Rashids ancestors, Mullah Qutubuddin, a mansion in Lucknow the Firangi Mahal (named after an earlier inhabitant, one of the European traders who were known as Franks or Firangis). There, his son Mullah Nizamuddin Sehalvi drew up a madrassa curriculum known as the dars-e-nizami (Nizamuddins syllabus). For its time, the curriculum was relatively broad and progressive, incorporating grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and geography alongside the Islamic sciences. For the next several generations, the Mughal courtly elite (including some Shia and Hindu students) were educated at the Firangi Mahal to fill positions as bureaucrats as well as imams or judges. As many of my interviewees point out, there was no separation of secular and religious education. The fortunes of the Firangi Mahal declined over the 20th century and the building itself is now in ruins. But with few modifications, the dars-e-nizami still forms the 34

basis of the madrassa curriculum in India today a fact that frustrates many reform-minded ulema. In an attempt to revive his familys legacy, Rashid has set up a new madrassa, the Madrassa-e-Nizamia, and an associated Islamic centre. His cousin, Hasan Miyan, teaches at the Nadwat ul-Ulema madrassa in Lucknow and his brother, Tariq Rashid Firangi Mahali, is director of the Islamic Society of Orlando, Florida. Rashid, who unlike many Islamic scholars speaks fluent English, is known to have liberal views on reform of the madrassa curriculum and the uplift of the Muslim community. But perhaps conscious that I was from the western media, he concentrated many of his comments on their damaging role and the threat posed to Indian Muslims by outside interests. What part do madrassas play within the Muslim community? KR: Madrassas play a 100% positive role in terms of education. They provide free education to the poorer section of society and in areas where the state schools are in a bad shape, such as UP. The standard of education is much higher in madrassas than in the state system. You will never see a single madrassa graduate begging or out of work, or involved in anti-national or antisocial activities. These misconceptions about Muslims are created by the Jewish lobby and by western countries and their media. What kind of misconceptions do you mean? KR: The Jewish lobbys target is to malign Islam. We focus on producing ulema who work for the welfare of the Muslim community. Weve tried to dispel misconceptions about Islam but we are a victim of a conspiracy by the Jewish community. What do you see as the motivation for the conspiracy you describe? KR: Because Islam is spreading very fast they are threatened by it and have conspired against it. For example, Osama bin Laden is a creation of the west he does whatever the US asks him to. Post-9/11, the biggest losses have been suffered by the worldwide Muslim community. The US government has been able to get its hands on the wealth of the Arab world by creating this hype about Islamic terrorism. So you feel it is based on furthering western political and economic interests? KR: US influence in India, and elsewhere, benefits only the US. We can see this with Obamas visit here [KR is speaking at the time of Barack Obamas November 2010 visit to India] he wants only to discuss business agreements and American outsourcing. Wait and you will see how so-called terrorist activities are related to securing a nuclear agreement after Obamas visit the number of terrorist incidents will magically decrease. What can the government do to improve the situation of Muslims in India? KR: The political and economic leadership of India does not respect Muslim religious leaders, and they neglect their responsibilities towards us. It is the governments responsibility to provide reservation, for instance, for Muslims and 35

they have not done so. OBCs [Other Backward Classes] are defined on Hindu criteria. The constitution does not discriminate on religious grounds but the government does. There is a double standard in how we are treated. Following the interview with Rashid, I return to my hotel with the people who brought me to the centre an articulate, highly educated and affluent Muslim family of civil servants and academics. I ask them what they think of his observations and their frustration boils over. How many doctors or scientists have his madrassas contributed to society? They are living off charity! As these comments suggest, there is a basic dispute within the community over the purpose of madrassa education. Middle- and upper-class Muslims tend to argue that madrassas neither provide real opportunities for their graduates nor contribute to the community by educating doctors, lawyers, journalists or businessmen. They also fail to provide the political leadership that a minority community needs. The majority of ulema respond that it is not their purpose or responsibility to create political leaders or secular professionals their aim is to safeguard the faith of the community. The government also has a part to play in these arguments over integration with the mainstream. Flaws in the reservation system for government jobs and state education a quota system designed to tackle socio-economic exclusion are one of the Muslim communitys major complaints. The scheme is huge 49% of places in central universities (such as AMU and JMI) are reserved, for instance but there is much debate over who qualifies for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes designations that should benefit from it. Rashids comment about the Hindu basis for determining backwardness is a case in point. What is certain is that the Muslim community is disproportionately disadvantaged (a situation that became much worse after Partition when, as Akhtarul Wasey observes, much of the Muslim middle class chose to leave for Pakistan). 40.7% of the total Muslim population are classed as OBCs, while Muslims make up 15.7% of the total OBC population (according to the National Sample Survey Organisation, 61st round, 2005). But these statistics do not capture the whole story. Few states have included Muslims in the category of backward classes. Some Muslims enjoy reservation quotas in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and now in Andhra Pradesh By contrast, states with a high demographic concentration of Muslims have been tardy in giving them reservation. Therefore, Muslims do not have the benefit of reservation where they most need it because 60% of Indias Muslim population live in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam, writes the social scientist Azra Khanam in Islam and the Modern Age. There is little agreement, however, over who is responsible for addressing this situation. ***************************** 36

Darul Uloom Deoband Towards the end of my time in India, I travel to the small town of Deoband, 150km from Delhi, to visit Darul Uloom, Indias most powerful and influential madrassa. Like AMU and JMI, it has its roots in reaction to British dominance in India and particularly the catastrophic events of 1857: it was founded in 1866 by a group of orthodox Islamic scholars with the aim of preserving Islamic culture and education against western encroachment. Today, it has 3,600 students and 10,000 applications for admission each year. The boys follow a general primary curriculum that includes Hindi, English, science and geography for five years before progressing to the seven-year dars-e-nizami course, which can then be followed by a specialisation in Islamic studies. Each year, around eight to 10 of its graduates continue their studies at JMI or Delhi University, but the majority become imams, madrassa teachers or found their own madrassas. Adil Siddiqui, a madrassa spokesman, explains the institutions ethos to me. How would you respond to suggestions that madrassas do not contribute to the wider Muslim community? AS: The ulema may not have not provided political leadership but they lead the community from cradle to grave. Islamic education is very much needed in the community. And there is great demand for our graduates: each mosque needs at least two maulvis, so demand is much greater than supply. There is no gap between the ulema and the common man Darul Uloom has influenced the whole of India and countries beyond it, for instance. Do you feel you are misrepresented by outsiders? AS: After 9/11 madrassas came under pressure. The USA and Jews used Osama bin Laden for their own purposes against Russia. Now they are blaming the Taliban and Islamic institutions for the results. After 9/11 all the western media came here and their ideas about us were changed altogether. They accepted that we were not extremists, that they were wrong. Terrorism is the result of economic problems. We teach students to live within their means, so they are self-sufficient and able to live peaceful lives. What is the relationship between the community and the state? AS: Muslims have proved themselves to be the best citizens of India. They love their country this institution, for instance, played a key role in liberating India. We realise that Indian freedom was brought about by the union of Muslims and Hindus, and we are proud of living in a democratic, secular country. But at Darul Uloom we do not accept any state funding. We must maintain our independence.

37

 Later, I discuss Darul Uloom with Waris Mazhari, a graduate of the madrassa and editor of its alumni newsletter who now teaches at Jamia Millia. He has a humane and thoughtful perspective on reform and the challenges facing the community, but is frustrated by the slow pace of change. Why is the madrassa system in such turmoil? WM: Madrassas are trying to accommodate themselves to the Indian environment, to a multipolar society. Their views are not inclusive. They are debating how to shape their identities as a good Muslim. There is a vast literature based on Islamic ideas of conflict with others and coexistence with others how to construct their identity as those who believe in accommodation. On the eve of Independence, Deobandis were the first to say they believed in a nation-state, and they were criticised by other Islamic institutions. Composite nationalism is a revolutionary idea not catered for in traditional Islamic thought. After 9/11 madrassas were in defensive mode their whole efforts were devoted to defending their identity as good Muslims. For a long time the Muslim community has been trying to shut mouths who speak against Islam like the Hinduttva. There is a stagnation in the thought of those running madrassas. Since the beginning there has been no reform in the madrassa curriculum and a big section of madrassas are no longer relevant to the modern world. Their graduates are unaware of the modern issues that should bring about change in madrassas. They are separate from the mainstream. Have there been any positive developments and do you feel optimistic about the possibility of reform? WM: Post-9/11 there has been introspection in some quarters. In the past five to six years some madrassas have opened a department for English, for example. Reforms should go further, but they will have to happen slowly. We will gradually see more pressure on the madrassas from their graduates, more of whom have started joining regular universities. Graduates want to join universities and complete their education, and to be able to participate in the mainstream economy. In this respect, Deoband is very conservative and inflexible. Who do they feel threatened by? WM: Their publications in English are all directed towards what they see as the predators of Islam Hindu groups like the RSS. Many of the ulema think that non-Muslim journalists and Hinduttva [right-wing Hindu] activists get their ideas from the west or from the Jewish lobby. They believe that Muslim intellectuals play into the hands of those who conspire against Islam. 38

There seems to be a real division in the Muslim community between Islamic leaders and the elite is this true? WM: There is a gap in understanding between the ulema and the Muslim intelligentsia. The madrassa curriculum means they cant interact with people outside their own world, and they are not aware of modern issues. Their education confines them to the Islamic sphere. Any modern society needs all of these things: artists, activists, ulema, intellectuals and so on. Its wrong to say it is not our duty to produce medical scientists, artists or whatever. In the whole of Islamic history there has never been this dichotomy of Islamic and non-Islamic subjects. This is the result of British rule. Deobands founder believed that graduates should join modern universities and complete their education that Deoband did not offer a complete education, that you must participate in the mainstream of society. But his successors believed in two streams of education Islamic and non-Islamic and we have been unable to bridge this gap. What has happened in Pakistan shows that this dichotomy is a big problem for Muslim society. What are the factors preventing reform in the system? WM: In the last 10 years some people have been trying to change this situation. There has been a big discussion on the curriculum, for instance. But there is no democratic culture in madrassas. The managers are often the third- or fourth-generation successors of their ancestors who founded the madrassa. I do not wish to be harsh but they are often very ignorant their education and learning is very confined. People who think broadmindedly do not dare to speak out in front of them. Those who want change are not in positions of authority to implement their ideas. Only people outside the system dare to voice any criticism. My hope is that there will be more pressure from outsiders and it will become more convincing. There are some positive examples of change. Dar ul-Uloom Deoband Waqf [a second school located close to the more famous Dar ul-Uloom Deoband] has introduced modern subjects and are trying to create a postgraduate university. Also, madrassas are the subject of increasing interest from journalists and theyve had to consider how to deal with the media. The first problem was to teach themselves English the language of our national media. In 2002-3 the debates around the role of madrassas were all in the Urdu media, and they were very insular. For example, the ulema were busy discussing whether or not it was halal for students to watch TV. But there is no programme, confererence or seminar organised by Muslims where cameras are not used and its not recorded! This is the kind of thing that has distracted us. And then there are the internal conflicts. The Ahl-e-Hadith (the Salafis) 90% of their publications are translations of teachings by Saudi Salafi ulema. The Deobandis dont accept money from Saudi Arabi, so some Saudi ulema say that Deobandis and Barelvis are not practising correct Islam, that we are influenced by paganism and Sufism. Then some Deobandis criticise Barelvis for visiting 39

saints graves and shrines but people dont realise that the founder of Deoband was a Sufi himself and that Deobandis believe in Sufism, just not those practices. The differences are far less important than people think. ***************************** Finally, in search of a female perspective on reform, I meet the activist Uzma Naheed at the office of her Mumbai organisation for womens education and rights, Iqra. Naheed is a respected voice in the Muslim community. Like Khalid Rashid, she sits on the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (which liaises with the government over the administration of Muslim personal law) and comes from a long line of Islamic scholars, in her case, the founders of Dar ul-Uloom Deoband. She feels it is important to use this credibility with the Muslim establishment to bring about changes that more conservative ulema can agree on even though this is a slow and difficult process. Why do Muslims feel afraid that Hinduism is encroaching on their faith? UN: Its partly because we are so greatly outnumbered here, and partly to do with culture. Hindu converts to Islam brought a lot of cultural baggage with them that held back the community. For instance, Muslim women used to wear nose studs as a sign they were married. In South India they would use mangalsutras (marriage necklaces) and bindis. Illiterate women accepted this, though it is not part of our religion. In Islam, non-Muslim neighbours also have their rights. The problem starts when there is discrimination and inequality. What stands in the way of integration with the mainstream? UN: We are treated differently. Schools dont celebrate Eid or Ramadan, for instance, but they do celebrate Diwali and Christmas. Muslim children dont feel welcome in the mainstream. How can women contribute to change within the Muslim community? UN: Women are coming from a difficult position in Indian Islam. There are no facilities for us in mosques and there is little Islamic education for women. Even the few womens madrassas that exist are run by men they impose their own views on them. The ulema dont listen to women. But it is the ulema that must bring change they are the authority in the community. We must work with them, not against them. Some people dont understand this. I took part in a debate with Amina Wadud [a US Muslim feminist], for instance. She doesnt have a solid Islamic background she is coming from a western perspective of human rights and feminism. So her views on reform in Islam are never going to be acceptable to the Muslim mainstream. Let me give you another example. In 1994 I designed a conditional nikahnama [marriage contract] that was more equitable for women and I invited all the ulema in Mumbai to a roundtable. I wanted to produce it with their co-operation. In 2005, we released the new nikahnama. It took over ten years. Not all the points in it were those I wanted, but it was an improvement. This is the pace we 40

have to accept and work with. Co-operating with the establishment is the only way of creating real change.

41

Conclusions In each of the three countries I visited, the legacy of British colonial rule is close to the surface. (Winston Churchill served with the British military in all of them.) On my journey, I saw reminders of this history in seemingly disparate places: the brick quadrangles of Khartoum University (originally Gordon College, after General Gordon), for instance, closely resemble the Oxbridge-inspired cloisters of Aligarh Muslim University. The people I spoke to had an acute and often painful awareness of events from the bombing of Port Said in 1956 to the siege of Lucknow in 1857 that are little taught or discussed in the UK beyond academia. As I travelled, I became aware that I was observing only the most recent in a long line of developments shaped through interaction with the west. Indias top Islamic institutions particularly Darul Uloom Deoband, Nadwatul Ulema in Lucknow, JMI in Delhi and AMU in Aligarh were all founded in response to the cultural, political and economic threat posed by contact with the British and the trauma of the events of 1857. The defensive, conservative mindset inherited from this period persists in the madrassa system and to some extent the wider community today. The perceived threat, however, is now that posed by right- wing Hindu activism, along with the influence of US foreign policy, western culture and the western media or at least popular conceptions of them which is also feared and resisted. Though I had no direct contact with Islamic extremism over the course of the fellowship, it was repeatedly emphasised to me that the ideologies that inform violent Islamism were also formed in reaction to the west or the excesses of western-supported autocratic regimes. Sayyid Qutb, Maulana Maududi and contemporary ideologues such as Anwar al-Awlaki, people told me, were responding to the physical, moral, social and political threat posed by western influence as they understood it. Their views may be characterised as extreme by western commentators (though there is a real divergence of views over what constitutes extreme or moderate Islam), but they remain influential even within the Muslim mainstream. Similarly, the increasing Islamisation of society that I observed and that was reported to me by the people I met is not an isolated religious phenomenon but a process of response and readjustment to political, economic and social forces. Different conditions apply to each of the countries I visited but, for instance, it can be partially interpreted as, in Egypt, an expression of defiance against a corrupt and repressive government, in Sudan, a refuge in the face of lack of opportunity, in India, an expression of solidarity with an embattled and underprivileged community. In addition to this, there are overarching factors which affect all the countries I visited, including the influence of Saudi Arabian money and ideology; of satellite TV, Islamic channels and superstar sheikhs; of US and UK foreign policy in the Muslim world, particularly with regards to Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine; and of the growing reach of western consumer capitalism. 42

Combined, these elements risk creating a harder and more uniform Islam with a more prescriptive and ritualistic, and therefore narrower, understanding of what it is to be a good Muslim. There is less tolerance of religious difference, especially with regard to traditional cultural practices. This is what I saw in relation to zar in Egypt and Sudan, in the fears expressed by Coptic Christians and atheists in Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, in most ulemas harsh attitude to traditional practices such as ziyarat (visiting graves) and qawwali (Islamic devotional music) in north India (though the situation is far more extreme in Pakistan). I went in search of people working for greater reform and tolerance within Islam and, as I expected, I met several liberal activists (who frequently found themselves under pressure from more conservative quarters). But they also emerged in more unexpected places. My conversations with Ahmed Abu Haiba and Fadel Soliman, for instance, encouraged me to reassess my ideas of who plays a beneficial role and suggested that it is possible to find common ground against violent extremism with people who hold apparently very different views on society and faith. I also saw the positive role played by the Islamic revival in encouraging Egyptian youth activism. Speaking to Uzma Naheed confirmed my belief that it is best to engage with, not reject, an Islamic establishment that is instinctively conservative. This kind of engagement is increasingly rare. The end of the colonial era meant, in some respects, a decline in real contact between the west and Muslim countries. For most less-wealthy Egyptians, Sudanese and Indians the west is an abstraction experienced through advertising, movies and magazine images through received ideas. The repeated comments about a Jewish lobbys control over US foreign policy or in setting the global media agenda, for instance, were made by people who had never met a Jewish person nor had any contact with the organisations they describe. We grow up with these ideas and everyone accepts them as facts, one educated Indian Muslim woman told me when I questioned her. Similarly, the Middle East and Muslim India appear to us most often through sensational news bulletins or holiday brochures. Misconceptions (in English) was a favourite word of many Muslims I met on the journey who argued that the west had no true picture of them or their faith. Many people expressed an overwhelming feeling of being misrepresented and victimised by western politicians and media. Alongside this resentment, I found a real and surprising desire for communication with and understanding from the west. For this reason, even conservative institutions or individuals were usually happy to admit me and explain their views. These divisions and frictions are largely the result of perceptions and beliefs rather than experience. (Because of this, I chose to present the India leg of the fellowship largely through a question-and-answer format that presented interviewees opinions with a minimum of editorialising.) A major factor in the creation of these beliefs is the real difficulty of communication between people with very different worldviews. In the introduction to this report I commented on the challenges of establishing a shared language, and over the course of the 43

fellowship I conducted interviews at the Nadwatul Ulema madrassa in Lucknow and elsewhere that failed completely because I was unable to do so. It was also difficult to listen to speakers expressing views that I personally found threatening or offensive. Rather than recoiling, I attempted to understand how these currents of thought have emerged. From Port Said to Deoband, it became obvious that isolation and lack of contact distorts our view of each other. It may be hard to begin to tackle this mistrust, but the warmth and openness I experienced in many unexpected places on the fellowship suggest that it is important to try. ***************************** Acknowledgements Thanks to the following for their generous help, advice, hospitality, company and co-operation throughout the fellowship: Zakaria Ibrahim and the staff of El Mastaba centre, Vincent Moon, Seth Kingery, Sadakat Kadri, Michael Whitewood, Nagia el-Said and family, Peter Riddell, Ekbal el-Assiuti, Jeff Allen, Etaa el-Hosseiny, Doha Loay, Sara Refaat, Ehab Taha, Osama Yusuf, Guy Gabriel, Maurice Chammah, Ahmed Abu Haiba, Peter Verney, Nesrine Malik and family, Midhat, Moez, Mohib and Mazar Mahir and family, Adil Mehdi, John and Aziza Butt, Farrukh, Faizana and Asma Said Khan and family, Salil Tripathi, Ehsan and Ruhi Khan, Ifra Khan and family, Yoginder Sikand, Waris Mazhari and the many others who shared their time and ideas with me. Special thanks to the WCMT for giving me the opportunity to make this journey and to my family, Hazel and Steve for their support and encouragement during it.

44