Muslim group refutes terror allegations against Madrassas
Patna, Aug 5 : "Madrassas have nothing to do with terrorism," a religious group says in a report that also negates the allegations that Muslim seminaries in India are breeding ground for terror.
The report by All India Coordination Committee for Madrassas (AICCM) said "a concerted campaign... to malign madrassas" had led to the deterioration of educational standards in Muslim seminaries.
"A concerted campaign was going across the country to malign madrassas' image by branding them as breeding ground of terrorism. There is no truth in it," said AICCM general secretary Maulana Shaukat Ali Bastavi.
Bastavi said an AICCM team prepared a report on madrassas after visiting different seminaries all over the country.
"None of the madrassas across India has been a centre of terrorism," the report concluded.
It said the terror charges against madrassas and the students were baseless and "none of the madrassas in India is involved in any anti-national activity".
"We probed into allegations against madrassas," Bastavi said.
There are over 4,000 madrassas in Bihar, including the seminaries where the staff gets the salary from the state government.
There are 2,459 unaided madrassas. According to the first-ever status paper brought out by the AICCM, there are only 32 madrassas for girls under the government-aided category and 576 madrassas in the unaided category.
Some madrassas in Bihar have begun modernising their education system by introducing computers and science subjects.
They even encourage students to join the National Cadet Corps (NCC) training.
As much as we would like to believe the Muslim groups who deny that the madrassas are involved in training terrorists, we cannot get ourselves to believe them.
Evidence gathered from various terrorists who have been captured around the country gives a completely different picture.
Even the W. Bengal Chief, who normally supports the Muslims for vote bank politics has said the same thing in anguish. It is another matter that he had to withdraw his statement under pressure from his colleagues.
Just claiming that the madrassas are not involved won't wash the sins.
They will have to be more transparent and allow inspection and visits by neutral people of madrassas selected at random.
It is commendable that some madrassas in Bihar are modernising their education system. But just teaching computers and sciece subjects is not adequate.
They should bring their madrassas into mainstream education teaching all subjects as taught by ICSE, CBSE or any of the state education boards. Urdu and religion could be taught as subjects during single periods. If they really want to make progress, the medium of instruction in the madrassas could be made English
Unless they do this, they cannot bring their flocks in the mainstream and they will always be inadequately qualified for higher learning and better jobs.
In our school we had half an hour of Moral Science/Cathecism classes and half and hour of Hindi/Nepali/Bengali classes.
Cathecism was for the catholics and moral science for all the others.
Why can't the Muslims have the same system in their madrassas?
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