Some Islamic English schools boast air-conditioned classrooms, swimming lessons and the latest computers, others like Al-Mumin must endure squalor and disrepair.

Empowered by English

Samar Halarnkar
Mumbai, October 23

Suraiya Khan knows why she is here - teaching junior kindergarten in the classroom filled with the smell of a blocked sewer, in the classroom where customers once flung fistfuls of rupees and leered at dancers, in the classroom that today sits directly atop a bar and overlooks a mall-construction site.

The wide-eyed, cherubic little boys - most from poor Muslim families, about half their parents illiterate - with green skull caps and matching pyjama pants remind Khan of her own family's struggle to create a destiny and an identity among the 16 million who cram India's rickety but booming commercial capital.

"My father was illiterate, and came to Mumbai from UP knowing nothing more than to deal in scrap," said Khan, a slim 21-year-old whose expressions are hard to discern. You can only see her gray eyes through her elegant leopard-print niqab or face veil; the rest ofher enveloped in a jet-black abaya.

"We found it hard to speak even Hindi when we came," said Khan in fluent English. "We speak the local UP dialect, Bhojpuri, at home…but five of us, my father put us all through convent school."

So, here she is: an articulate, confident - and proudly Islamic - Indian, part of a new breed of teachers in a growing set of schools imparting a strictly English and strictly Islamic education to those Muslims anxious about the changes sweeping the world and India, yet eager to make the most of globalisation.

The institution where Khan works is the Al-Mumin Islamic English school, a collection of six rooms really, run by the Moral Education Trust, set up by a group of Muslim builders and businessmen in 2003. It is one of 14 Islamic English schools that have sprung up across Mumbai in less than a decade, the teachers an unusual mix of ulema (preachers) and convent-educated - but conservatively garbed - women like Khan.

Salauddin Ahmed (34), is here to pick up his son from their home across the bay in New Mumbai, a 70-minute journey, part of a frenetic work day that runs from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. His thoughts encapsulate the desires of many poorer parents. "In learning English, kids often forget God," said the shy, slightly built labour contractor, who never finished high school. "With so many changes in our country, it is hard for me to know what is best for him. I know there are two things he must learn: English and deen (learning to live by the Koran's laws)."

Shamin Ansari (37), B.Com, an unshaven construction contractor said he was uncomfortable with the mixed society at his son's old school. "Dua padta tha ghar mein (He prayed at home), but it didn't seem nice, prayers from other religions in school, going to birthday parties." Like many parents, Ansari is happy his son will do what he could never could: learn Arabic and thus understand what the Koran says. "We read the Koran," said Ansari, "But we never understood."

Some Islamic English schools boast air-conditioned classrooms, swimming lessons and the latest computers, others like Al-Mumin must endure squalor and disrepair. Some schools require parents to discard television altogether, others permit specified cable channels (Discovery and Animal Planet are popular). Some offer international syllabi (one is affiliated to Cambridge University in England), some are not even officially recognised. Some teach science but leave out Darwin's theory of evolution, others teach Darwin but make sure preachers insist on the universality of a creator. Some parents pay Rs 50, some pay Rs 5,400 per month.

"Till about a decade ago, children from backward Muslim families landed up in madrasas (Islamic seminaries), the richer ones joined convent schools," said Mohammed Riyaz (41), Al-Mumin's "caretaker" and a mechanical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, as parents - drivers, seamstresses, lathe-machine operators, labour contractors, accountants - wait outside his office to pick up their children. Some travel upto 90 minutes to get here.

"1992 (when 900 died in Mumbai's worst religious riots) was a jolt," explained Riyaz, who supplies specialised refrigeration units to the Bhabha Atomic Centre in eastern Mumbai.

"We want to remove the inferiority that Muslims feel, the victim mentality," said Riyaz, the great-grandson of a Hindu mahant (priest) from Rajasthan. "Education is the only solution, the only way to grab opportunites that globalisation is throwing up. Once you have quality, no one will ask your religion."

The schools follow a variety of state, central and even international education boards. However, arriving at an Islamic syllabus has involved much innovation. A few lessons are borrowed-interestingly, from the U.S., which has nearly 400 Islamic English schools.

"A for Allah, B for Bismillah, D for Doomsday, E for Eid, H for Heaven…"go the alphabets on posters in the carpeted, airconditioned classrooms of the Al-Jamiatul Fikriya Islamic International School for boys. A giant signboard atop the school declares: "We are Proud to be Indian."

"Twinkle, twinkle little star, Allah made you what you are," recite little girls at the Al-Muminah school nestled in a teeming, treeless sidestreet in Mumbai's Muslim heartland. Garbed in shoulder-length head coverings, school girls are trained in Koranic Arabic, karate, Marathi, Hindi and English.

Parents eager for an English education but wary of the modern age love the school's slogan: "Education for both worlds (the living and the dead)."

"Accountability is the hereafter must come in from the start," said Shahnaz Shaikh, a medical doctor and former French pharma company manager who started Al-Muminah six years ago with 18 students in a small room (there are now 450 students up to the 9th standard).

Shaikh's personal journey embodies the dilemmas and beliefs that Indian Muslims face in an age of opportunity and religious revivalism. An articulate, bustling woman dressed in a hijab with her face open, she studied in the best convents across India and stayed in the best hotels across the world during her professional life. Neither did Shaikh's mother wear a hijab, nor did Shaikh.

About 10 years ago, Shaikh said, she listened to sermons by Islamic tele-evangelist Zakir Naik, and realised she was not a "real Muslim", despite praying five times a day and doing the Haj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia that every Muslim must make at least once.

Shaikh lives with her husband, a municipal engineer, and daughter in a building where they are the only Muslim family. She wants her students to learn spotless English, to be good Indians, proud Muslims, and understand what the Quran really says, on everything from personal life to holy war, or jihad.

"If we give them the best English and Islamic education, no one will take them for a ride," Shaikh said. "They are like sponges till the 8th standards, that's all the time we have."

Tabassum Khot (29), mother of Al-Muminah students Sania (8) and Anara (4), is happy that her daughters - previously in the Sir Jacob Sassoon Jewish School close to home - have started to absorb the Koran in Arabic. "I read the Koran in Roman English, and it bothered me that I didn't understand, that my pronounciation was not perfect," said Khot, an MBA from Newport University in the US, as she sat in her 15th floor drawing room in the bustling central Mumbai Muslim neighbourhood of Nagpada.

A convent-school student and gradute from Sikh-run Khalsa College, Khot took to wearing a hijab when her husband, a businessman, wanted her to after their marriage nine years ago. Her brother is a computer engineer, her sister is a gynaecologist, who, like her mother, does not wear the hijab. Khot, who also has diplomas in hotel management and software technology, hopes to rejoin the job market "once the girls are older".

A few parents, worried about assimilation issues later in life, given the strong emphasis these schools have on Islamic values and dress, have pulled children out of Islamic English schools. "There may well be assimilation problems," said Shaikh. "But I have to be true to my faith and my beliefs."

Tanveer Ahmed Shamsi (38), an affable handicrafts exporter and father of two girls at Al-Muminah, is willing to go along with Shaikh's experiments. "Except crying, Muslims have done nothing," he said, tapping away at his Compaq laptop in a quiet warehouse in a malodorous bylane in Pydhonie, a jumble of crumbling buildings, small businesses, restaurants and mosques. "There are so many changes today, it's hard to guide my daughters. I want them to first be good human beings and good Indians. I've taken the first step."

Almost all students in the schools are Muslim, though many are reporting requests for admissions from local non-Muslims. There are some non-Muslim teachers. Jamiatul Fikriya has five Hindu teachers, all wearing ultra-conservative hijabs with only the eyes showing. There's Nina Patil, biology; Seema Desalkar, Marathi; Nirmala Chettiar, geography and economics; Vaishali Bhuvale, the librarian.

"We are accepted whole-heartedly and given a lot of respect," said Desalkar. What did her Maharashtrian Hindu family think of the hijab? "They are fine with it," she said. "They understand."

The other end of the diversity in the school's teaching staff is represented by Maulana Mohammed Tariq (34) and Maulana Afzal Ahmed (45), both graduates from one of the world's premier Islamic seminaries, the Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh.

"We try to make it as simple as possible," said Maulana Tariq, a bespectacled, bearded preacher and one of the millions of migrants who must adjust quickly to Mumbai's creed of long, hard hours at work and its air of ambition, growth and change.

Maulana Tariq said he found it hard to impart Islamic education to his own six-year-old son. Does he study in a madrassa? "Umm, no," said Maulana Tariq with a smile. "My son studies in an English-medium school."
"When I reach home, he has finished his time for religious lessons and is invariably doing his English lessons," he said.
Would he like his son to be a preacher? Maulana Tariq paused, then smiled. He said: "I would like him to be an engineer."