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Introduction
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction 1 1 INTRODUCTION In his best-selling narrative history on the rise of Wahhabism, Charles Allen made the following observation of the pertinence of the madrasah to social and religious life in South Asia: the Taliban were youngsters orphaned by war, who had been brought up and educated in the hundreds of religious schools set up in Pakistan with funds from Saudi Arabia. For many thousands of young Pathan boys the madrasah had been their home and its male teachers … their surrogate parents. Here the bonds and shared purpose had been forged which had given these ‘searchers after truth’ their extraordinary aura of invincibility, for the madrasah was not so much a school as a seminary, with curriculum made up entirely of religious instruction and the study of the Qur’an. Here they had spent their adolescence rocking to and fro as they learned to recite by heart an Arabic text whose meaning they did not understand but which they knew conferred on them absolute authority in all matters governing social behaviour.1 This excerpt echoes both the centrality of religious education in Muslim life as well as a common tendency among Western scholars towards orientalist narrations that perpetuate a stereotypical view of Islamic education as a stoic and static pursuit. Such a view on Islamic education has been advanced further with former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous October 2003 memo that queried if the U.S. was “capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrasahs and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?”2 It is clear from the frenzy that Rumsfeld’s controversial question stirred up in 01 IslamEdu&Reform Intro 4/23/09, 2:31 PM 1 2 2 Islam, Education and Reform the international media, policy circles, and the terrorism analysis communities, not to mention the caustic reactions across the Muslim world, that Islamic education is a highly controversial and contested issue, and that the institution of the Islamic school is subject to intense scrutiny. Education has always been a key feature of Muslim life and society. In Islamic culture, however, knowledge has never been an end unto itself. Nor has the role of educational institutions been envisaged as a production line churning out individuals equipped to contribute to the bureaucracies and economies of the modern nation-state and global capitalist enterprise. Instead, Islamic education has had two overarching objectives at its core: the transmission of Islamic heritage and values on the one hand, and the spiritual, moral, and ethical transformation and advancement of Muslim societies on the other. This long-cherished traditional role of Islamic education has, however, come under immense pressure and scrutiny in this modern age of development, globalization, and the nation-state. Notwithstanding the fact that the lines between secular and religious education are often far more complex and fluid than have been popularly portrayed, secular governments, for whom education is an efficacious tool of modernity, increasingly demand that these religious institutions produce students who can contribute to the instrumental ends of economic prosperity and national development in the name of the “greater good”. Since September 11, 2001, another factor has come to the fore, and Islamic schools throughout the Muslim world find themselves under the microscope of state surveillance for the declared purpose of “uprooting” the Islamic radicalism that fans the embers of terrorism. The subtext is of course clear — terrorism is rooted in the extremist religious ideology that some Islamic schools perpetuate. These pressures on Muslim societies are, at least in part, symptomatic of the “crisis of modernity” that many pundits suggest confronts Islam today, and that continues to be the subject of great scholarly interest. This “crisis” itself has been dealt with substantively elsewhere and is not a matter of concern for us here. How the tensions that define this crisis have been mirrored in Islamic education, however, is. That the perceptions of Islamic education described above have been gaining currency should not detract from the fact that Islam remains fraught with tensions. Despite romanticized notions of it being a unified religion, the realm of Islamic education has long been an arena for the interplay of various, and often contending, social forces.3 This book is an attempt to document and unpack this interplay in the context of Islamic education in Muslim-dominated southern Thailand. It will focus primarily on the Malay-Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, but will also allude to trends...