A short history of madaris, misspellings and misunderstandings
My mother’s uncle, Sheikh Hadi-uz-Zaman of Banda, used to tell an amusing story from his days as a student in England. He was doing a PhD in mining in Leeds, when he heard that the singer Bade Ghulam Ali Khan (not to be confused with the ghazal singer of the same name, whose music videos are sometimes seen on TV and have the power to make grown men cry from a distance of 50 yards), would be performing in England.
Hadi nana attended the concert with a British classmate, and it was a classic, done in the old tradition, including a paan stuffed in Bade Ghulam Ali’s mouth, and a peekdan for the delicate red spit. Afterward, Hadi nana asked his classmate, tentatively, what he thought of the performance.
“Magnificent,” Hadi nana’s classmate responded. “It was simply magnificent! The singer was spitting blood, but he kept on singing, he kept on singing!”
Much of the amusement from such cultural interactions is because people are locked into their own cultural viewpoints and cannot understand other ways of seeing things. Sometimes it is amusing, but at other points it borders on insulting. For example, the US maintains one of its biggest military bases in Qatar, but on TV its politicians, TV pundits and military leaders quite often mispronounce the name as “Gutter.” In Paul Scott’s “A Jewel in the Crown”, the principal Indian character, Hari Kumar, raised and educated in England, becomes “Harry Coomer”, neither Indian nor British, and at the receiving end of the worst of both cultures.
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, in the famous balcony scene, says of Romeo, whose last name, Montague, makes him an enemy of her family, the Capulets, “What's in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” She insists that his qualities and hers have little, or nothing, to do with who they are. And yet the deaths that end the play, of Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, Romeo’s friend, Mercutio, and in the end of Romeo and Juliet both, seem to suggest that names matter a great deal indeed, something that we Indians, whose names are often mangled in an English speaking world, bear as a constant irritant.
In my own case, the mangling tends to be slight, and most people mispronounce my name only slightly, saying “Omar”, instead of “Omair”. Omar is the much more common name, and references the second Caliph, Omar ibn al Khattab, during whose leadership the Arabs defeated the Persians, captured Jerusalem (much to the delight of the Jews, who had been persecuted and disallowed to pray at their Temple under Christian rule – a part of history that both Muslims and Jews have conveniently forgotten), and released the first compilation of the Quran. He is justly famed. Omair is less known, and in fact his only reference is that he charged, single-handedly, the army of the Meccans at the Battle of Badr. He did not survive. (His courage is possibly celebrated more than his common sense.) But in the speaking of most people, my name is referenced to one rather than the other, merely because they have no knowledge of the meanings, nor wish to learn of them.
A similar problem arises when we see the use of the word “madrasas” in English media. Anybody who knows anything knows that plural of “madrasa” is “madaris”, just as the plural of “masjid” is “masajid”, or the plural of “alumnus” is “alumni”, and of “octopus” is “octopi”. The only thing that the use of incorrect wordage suggests is that people do not know the correct terms, nor – and this is more dangerous – care to learn what the correct terms are. This is important because madaris today are seen as exclusively religious schools, and yet anybody who knows anything, would know that historically, madaris taught logic, history, mathematics and all the skills of statecraft, and that many of the civil servants and jurists of the Sultanate and Mughal period in India were trained in madaris. They would know as well that Warren Hastings, the first governor general of the East Indian Company also founded a madrasa, Madrassa Aliah, in Calcutta in 1780, for the training and recruitment of judicial and revenue officers, which also became one of the first institutes of higher learning to train medical officers in India. It continues today as Aliah University. The Hindu College in Banaras founded in 1791, now Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, served a similar purpose.
And again, anybody who knows anything about madaris or local education, would know that after the 1857 Uprising, the British blamed Muslim leaders and religious scholars for a key part of the “rebellion”. Scores were sent into exile or to Kala Pani – the Cellular Jail on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – if they escaped being executed. Even before this, key British thinkers, most famously Thomas Babington Macaulay, were pushing for education in English alone. The 1857 Uprising was their great moment, not only was the management of British India taken over by the Crown, but the recruitment from any institution, patshala or madrasa, was banned for the civil service unless they were government-approved institutions shaped along British lines.
Of course, if everybody knew this, there might be more sensible proposals for madrasa reform, focused on employability and skill development. Unfortunately, as we speak English now, and are too arrogant to learn how to even spell madaris properly, we will most likely remain stuck with “madrasas” and all the problems associated with them.