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21 2 RELIGION AND CHANGE Oxford and the Madrasas of South Asia The University of Oxfor d was not cr eated; it emer ged. It emer ged after a long period of discontinuous and f tful scholastic activity , which only gradually r eceived the stamp of corporate identity in the f rst quarter of the thir teenth centur y. To understand how this came about it is necessar y to star t not at the time when the outlines of a corporate constitution appear ed, but mor e than a hundr ed years earlier, when a school existed which has a shadowy connection with what was later to become the university . —R. W. Southern, From Schools to University (1984: 1) These summaries of the dif ferent emphases given to dif ferent aspects of knowledge in the r egion of the thr ee empires at dif ferent times suggest that ther e may be connections to be made between these different emphases and changing political contexts. In a wantonly schematic and br oad-brush fashion we suggest that the rational sciences . . . tendedto f ourish when Muslims wer e conf dently in power . . . On the other hand, the transmitted sciences . . . tended to f ourish when Muslims felt that Muslim state power , either because of compromises with non-Muslim for ces within or because of compromises with non-Muslim for ces from without, was thr eatened or destroyed as the upholder of Islamic society . —Francis Robinson,“Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals” (1997: 172–173) At the dawn of the twelfth century, two migrations were taking place in pursuit of knowledge. Students aspiring to higher learning were traveling from England to Paris and Bologna to study Christian theology. Saints and scholars from Persia and Arabia were gravitating toward Hind (modern-day South Asia) to spread the teachings of Islam. The outflow of the young English students was a response to the growing domestic demand for higher ecclesiastical learning, and the inflow of Sufis and scholars into South Asia was creating a new demand for Islamic education through winning converts. Both were barren lands in terms of higher religious learning: Paris, not England, represented the heights of Christian theology , and Persia and Arabia, not Hind, enjoyed an international reputation for 22 CHAPTER 2 Islamic learning.1 Yet these migratory scholars led to the rise of organizations that, over time, acquired international repute for their expertise in interpreting the two religious traditions: by the fifteenth century the University of Oxford exercised considerable influence in the Christian world (Leff 1968). Three centuries later, Islamic scholars within the leading madrasas of South Asia were producing scholarship in a rationalist tradition that was being studied in Cairo and Damascus, prominent centers of Islamic scholarship (Robinson 2000). This chapter studies the processes of the rise, consolidation, and change within Oxford2 and the madrasas of South Asia in order to explain why, despite similarities in origin, the two pursued divergent trajectories in the twentieth century: Oxford and Christianity became synonymous with modernity and progress, and the madrasas and Islam with orthodoxy and regress. In tracing the divergent paths followed by these two organizations,the chapter highlights how the specific interpretations of Christianity and Islam prevalent at any point in time were a product of the developments within these organizations. For the purpose of such an analysis, the new institutional economics (NIE), which acknowledges that economic performance is not just an aggregate outcome of efficient transactions among free agents but is shaped by the socioeconomic and political institutions in which these transactions take place, provides some useful cues. Broadly summarized, the NIE literature presents two main perspectives on institutional change: one places emphasis on the strategizing behavior of the dominant players in the field (North 1990), the other on evolutionary forces (Bowles 2004).3 In the strategic or constitutional design approach prominently associated with the work of Douglass North (1990: 100), “the immediate instruments of institutional change are political or economic entrepreneurs who attempt to maximize at those margins that appear to offer the most profitable (short-run) alternatives.” In this approach, relative price changes so alter the incentives provided by the existing set of institutional rules that it becomes more profitable for the dominant actors to work toward institutional change; the other source of such change is change in tastes.4 In the evolutionary models of institutional 1. England was a slow developer in education; the continental universities had a hundred years’ head start (Leff 1968). Similarly, since Islam came to India from...

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