SPECIAL REPORT While Darul Uloom Deoband has stood as beacon of Islamic learning in South Asia, Al-Azhar University in Egypt has carried the light of learning through many centuries.

The two educational institutions carry a profound message, which reaches beyond their borders to the wider Muslim population who look to these institutions for guidance on matters related to faith, identity and religion.

Deoband and Al-Azhar have shaped the destiny of millions of Muslims and have paved the way for the Islamic renaissance and advancement. Together, these institutions represent the importance of knowledge, learning and dialogue in Islam.

Syed Nazakat in India and Gehad Hussein in Egypt worked together to examine what is the voice of Islam that comes from the two historical Muslim seminaries.

They were awarded Henry Luce Foundation fellowships to promote excellence in global religion coverage through the International Centre for Journalists, which paid for their travel and research.

Inside the Deoband

It's 7pm, and this small town situated in India’s biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, is still abuzz with energy. Along narrow streets shopkeepers are calling potential customers.

At one corner of the road, cows and sheep forage unfettered. A couple of yards away, dung dries atop the walls for use as fuel. Along the street there are students and young men everywhere with fervent expressions carrying prayer beads or quietly reciting the Quran. A few women hurry past a garment shop; draped in black veil.

In Deoband, the streets overwhelmingly belong to men. At the edge of a street, barricades prevent traffic from proceeding farther down the street, which leads to Darul Uloom (House of Knowledge) Deoband, which is the most influential seminary of Islam in South Asia.

Situated 150km northeast of Delhi, Deoband attracts students from different parts of the world. I followed some of them to find out what draws young men from faraway places like Africa and America to this remote dusty Indian village - and what ideas they will take back to their societies.            

To enter into the campus of Darul Uloom Deoband is to step back in time.

Inside the seminary, in the basement of the large beautiful mosque, students shrouded in white salwar kameez and wearing skull caps are seated cross-legged on the floor. Old copies of the Quran and handwritten manuscripts crowd the shelves.

"Bismi-llahi r-rah.mani r-rah.im,” they mutter, hands cupped in supplication, shuffling under the dim light. They are reciting the hadith, a collection of the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, as their teacher listens carefully. After every recitation, the teacher explains a hadith to them in Urdu, an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in South Asia.

What many in the America and Europe would think of as college-age students are enrolled in an eight-year course of study that focuses on the interpretation of the Quran and of the hadith.

The oldest of those attending Deoband - the post-graduates - are enrolled in the ''mufti course''. A mufti, in Islam, is a cleric who is qualified to give authoritative legal opinions, known as fatwa, or religious rulings.

The majority of the students are Indians but some have come all the way from Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States to acquire knowledge about Islam.

Public donations

At Deoband, I went to see Maulana Abdul Khalique Madrasi, a deputy rector of the seminary. Maulana Madrasi came to Deoband first as a student in 1968 and then later as a teacher in 1982. He has been teaching at the Darul Uloom since the mid-1980s.

“When the Quran begin to be revealed to Prophet Mohammad (PBUH),” said Maulana Madrasi as he stroked his long white beard, “the first word of its first chapter was Iqra, which means ‘read’. Thus Islam makes education a sacred duty.”

The mission of the Darul Uloom, he continued, is to spread education. “There is no need for all Muslim children to go to full-time madrasas to become ulama (scholars). However, some children must do so in order that the tradition of religious learning is kept alive.”

Darul Uloom Deoband was founded in 1867 to propagate Islam and to train well-educated ulama dedicated to scriptural Islam. Such ulama would become prayer leaders, writers, preachers and teachers and thus disseminate their learning in turn.

The students are trained in specialities such as the study of hadith, the study of the Al Quran and the study of the rationality, jurisprudence and Islamic law called fiqh. The most popular course at Darul Uloom Deoband is the eight-year Fazilat course, starting at Arabi Awwal and culminating at Daura e Hadith.

At present, more than 3,000 students are enrolled from all around the world and every year some 10,000 students apply for the admission against 1,000 vacancies. The education is free and seminary is completely run on public donations. That was done, as Maulana Madrasi said, to build association between people and the Darul Uloom.

“It was Deoband that kept the light of learning alive through the turbulent times of the 1800s,” said Maulana Arshad Madani, 72, a professor of hadith in Darul Uloom Deoband and a member of the Indian Parliament.

Maulana Madani is himself a product of Darul Uloom Deoband. “You know what happened in Spain,” he asked, and before I could reply, he said: “Muslims ruled that country for 800 years and when they lost power they were oppressed and mosques were converted into churches,” he said.

“In the 1800s we were facing almost similar situation in India after thousands of Muslim scholars were killed by the invading British forces, and later by the Sikh Army in a place called Balakote (now in Pakistan).”

After the double defeat, Muslim scholars feared that Islam was in danger in India. “Darul Uloom Deoband, in many ways, was a knee-jerk reaction to the colonial British rule,” said Sheikh Showkat Husain, a political analyst and a professor of law at Kashmir University.

Two views

Within Indian Muslims, he said, there were two views about the education. “One section was of the opinion that religious education is the solution to all the problems and this thought took the shape of Darul Uloom Deoband.

“Others believed modern education is the key to progress and this thought took the shape of Aligarh Muslim University which is now a world class university.”

Darul Uloom Deoband remained confined to its conservative vision of Islam. Its classrooms are still being run traditionally and every student still prefers to go straight from the classrooms to mosques in a faraway village or town, to preach and propagate Islam. Though an optional English language course has been introduced for the students, the main syllabus remains unchanged.

“I really don’t believe in this talk of modernisation,” said Maulana Madni. “You certainly cannot modernise the Quran and the hadith. Some people argue that madrasas teach some outdated centuries old texts and logic. But we must also note that modern universities also teach centuries old English classics.”

It is this opposition to veneration that makes Deoband a distinct style of Indian Islam that emphasis the diffusion of scripturalist practices. On the political front, Deoband never took part in elections. But it was never far removed from the politics either.

At the time of the partition of India, it threw its weight behind Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind, which joined the independence movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu, and opposed the separate Muslim homeland of Pakistan because Deobandi scholars believed that there was nothing Islamic about a secular Muslim state.

“Had there be no partition, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would have been one country,” said Maulana Madani. “The condition of Muslims would have been much better.”

The partition, however, didn’t weaken the Deobandi movement. It instead it gave it more space and made it more widespread with the Deobandi movement spreading beyond India, first to neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and then to Europe and America, where many Muslims now follow the Deobandi school of thought.

When on a visit to the dormitories, I met a 15-year-old boy, Suliman. He wanted to join a public school and to come an engineer, and dreamed of having a big house and an expensive car. But then his father wanted him to serve the cause of Islam.

“I was not happy to come here,” Suliman, a resident of the state of Rajasthan in India, told me candidly. “But then I realised that ‘dahwah’ (the preaching of Islam) is no less important work.”

When I asked him what he will do after he completes his education at the Deoband, he replied instantly: “There is so much work to do in the way of God.”

I heard echoes of that conversation everywhere in Darul Uloom Deoband.

Tomorrow: Of Al-Azhar, Deoband and the Islamic doctrine

SYED NAZAKAT is an Indian journalist based in Delhi. He is a special correspondent with The Week and as a broadcast, print and online journalist, he has reported from 21 countries. More recently he reported from South Sudan on the raging civil war there.