What Does It Mean To Be A Muslim Child In A Non-Madrasa School In India?

By Syed Ali Mujtaba, New Age Islam 26 December 2022 Kids Are Apparently Calling Their Muslim Peers In Primary Schools Are ‘Osama’, ‘Baghdadi’, And ‘Mullah’, And Are Asking Them To ‘Go To Pakistan.’ ----- A recent book “Mothering a Muslim” by Nazia Erum captures some of the realities of what it means to be a Muslim in non-Madrasa Schools in India. A day after a bomb blast in Europe in 2018, a teacher at a popular Noida school read out headlines to her Class VI students. A student loudly called out the name of the only Muslim boy in class; ‘Yeh Kya Kar Diya Tumne?’ he asked. The teacher heard the exchange but did not say a word. Some of the things that kids are apparently calling their Muslim peers in primary schools are ‘Osama’, ‘Baghdadi’, and ‘Mullah’, and are asking them to ‘Go to Pakistan.’ Katuwa, Jihadi, and Mussallah are other such slurs that are non-Muslim kids' favourite vocabulary, to address Muslim peers in school. Some thirteen years ago, a friend’s son was in a fancy Delhi pre-school, voted by a leading education journal, as “the best preschool in India”. It decided to schedule its annual PTA meeting on Eid-ul-Fitr – the ‘big’ Eid, a joyous celebration at the end of the month-long Ramzan fast. I don’t have to tell this audience that it is the biggest Muslim festival of the year, on par with Diwali for Hindus and Christmas for Christians. The mother of the Muslim child gently chided the Principal and the teacher but eventually went for the PTA. But there was more to come. One day, a phone call came from the principal. “You know, it was Eid on November 17, and now December 17 is Muharram. Is that important to you? Because you see, due to the Commonwealth Games, we lost a lot of working days and there are only three children, who are Muslims in the school, and one of them is a Pakistani diplomat’s child, and they are out of town anyway. None of our teachers are Muslim, so I will speak to the one remaining parent to keep the school open, is it is OK with you?” My friend was in fury, the same preschool had declared Karva Chauth a holiday because all the teachers were busy fasting for the wellbeing of their husbands. She ranted, she raved but she ‘did not escalate the matter’. “I don’t want my three and half-year-old child to be singled out as the one with the troublesome mum,” she said. Salman, 13 years old, was one of three Muslim boys in Class VIII in the upper primary school at Nandnagri, in Delhi. Most children participating in cultural programs are Hindu. I want to participate in cultural programs too. I learned a patriotic song but the class monitor in charge of deciding who gets to participate refused to take me to the event…. Sometimes I don’t like being Muslim. I feel insecure when there are Hindu- Muslim fights because most Hindus get together and surround the Muslims. My mother asks me not to stray too far from home when there are communal tensions. Sara, 14 years old, in Class VIII in a government upper primary school in Nandnagri, regrets choosing Urdu instead of Sanskrit as her second language. All the girls who chose Urdu sat in the same classroom. There are some teachers who… say: ‘you Muslim people have no brains, you read the Quran and pray to Allah, but don’t respect knowledge.’ … A few months ago, we had a substitute teacher who said the floods in Uttarakhand happened because Muslims have opened meat shops there. She said that it’s a place of worship for Hindus but Muslims go there and treat God badly. It’s because of Muslims, she said, the disaster happened, to pay them for their sins. We felt really bad when she said all this about Muslims. The whole time she kept saying Muslims do this, Muslims do that, and no one in the class objected because we were afraid of being hit by her. Sahir is 12 years old, in grade 5 in a government school in Qutub Vihar in southwest Delhi says; we don’t feel like going to school because the teachers always single us out to beat us. The Hindu boys laugh at us. The teachers don’t let us participate in any sports. Class monitors are always chosen from among Hindu boys and they always complain about us Muslim boys. The teachers never believe us. They insult us by saying ‘You children come to school only to eat and to collect [scholarship] money, but you don’t want to study.’ Whenever they check our workbooks, they make negative comments about our work and throw the workbooks at our faces. Another boy, Javed, from the same school, said: The Hindu boys are allowed to go to the toilet but we are not given permission. Whenever the teachers are angry, they call us Mullahs. The Hindu boys also call us Mullahs because our fathers have beards. One of our classmate’s father came to submit a form to the school. The teacher referred to him as ‘the man with the beard’ and made fun of him in front of the whole class and laughed at him. All the Hindu children laughed too and we Muslims felt terrible. … Only the Hindu boys are happy in this school. So, this is where we are today. A nation forged from the fires of Partition was promised a secular India but 75 years later the nation still blames 9 and 10-year-old Muslim children for sins their fathers did not commit. Why our classrooms are paying this price for such tough conversations we never had? The Indian education system is one of the largest in the world with over 1.5 million schools, 8.5 million teachers, and 250 million children. If that is what is happening in non- Madarsa Schools, then advocating reform in the Madrasa system of education should think twice about which system of education needs reforms, the non-Madrasa school or the Madrasa. Is calling Muslim children names, an act in nation-building or an anti-national activity? The moot point here is those who are working for reforming the education system in India should stop the kettle from calling the pot black. This piece is an excerpt from Farah Naqvi's talk delivered on October 19, 2022, at the 5th Anita Kaul Memorial Lecture, 2022, titled ‘The Elephant Outside the Classroom: Education for a Democratic India.’ It was delivered at the India International Centre, New Delhi --- Syed Ali Mujtaba is a journalist based in Chennai. URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/muslim-child-madrasa-school-india/d/128714 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism