A Historical Survey of Language-Teaching Among South Asian Muslims

            Arabic entered South Asia with the coming of the Muslims to this part of the world. The Sind and the Punjab were conquered the first in 711-712 and the second in 1026 A.D – but the Arabs came to India as merchants ever since historical records exist.  Thus Arabic derived a number of words, generally referring to goods imported from India, and there were settlements of Muslims in Sri Lanka (Sirandip), the Maldives and the Malabar coast (Nadwi 1972: 69-71 & 259-301).  Thus a number of works were produced in Arabic by Muslim scholars of the Carnatic (Koken 1974) and Tamil written in the Arabic script is still called Arwi.  Indeed, while north India was more under the cultural influence of Persian, South India derived much inspiration either from indigenous Dravidian roots or from Arabic.  Thus schools called Pallikoodam taught Arwi and the Quran in South India from very early times (Alim 1993: 54).  By the late thirteenth century Alauddin Khilji and Malik Kafur (1290-1316) laid the foundation of Muslim (non-Arab) rule in the South but the Arabic influence lingered on and even now Muslims demand instruction in Arwi as it is an identity symbol for them (Alim 1993: 125).

            According to historians Persian was the official language from 1030 A.D i.e from the beginning of the Ghaznawid rule in the Punjab (Saleem 1980: 92).  However, it may have been used earlier too because Abu Ishaq al Istakhri tells us in 951 A.D that ‘the people of Multan wear trousers, and most of them speak Persian and Sindi, as in Munsura’ (Istakhri 951: 29). However, Ibn Haukal tells us that ‘the language of Mansura, Multan, and those parts is Arabic and Sindian. In Makran they use Persian and Makrani’ (Haukal 1193: 39). One does not know quite what to make of the statements of these Arab writers but it is likely that some members of the elite, the kind of people who meet foreigners socially, must have picked up Arabic and Persian.  Indeed, on the evidence of certain Arabic sources, the historian Athar Mubarakpuri, concludes that some Hindus rulers knew Arabic or at least some verses which they could quote on appropriate occasions (Mubarakpuri 1989: 315-316).  Some Arab families, settled in Sind and Multan during the Arab conquest, must also have retained their mother tongue and, of course, Muslim children must have been taught the Quran, and grown ups advanced subjects, probably in Arabic.  However, at some period Arabic must have been the official language of what is now southern Pakistan.  We are told that:

Walid next abolished the Greek language and character from the public office of finance, and substituted the Arabic, -- thus still further freeing the Arabs from the trammels which these foreign systems had interposed (Kami 1768: 461)1.

As Walid was caliph between 705-715, this suggests that Greek was used even till the 8th century.  Greek entered this part of the world even before Alexander’s conquest of this area before 327 B.C and was used here ‘for at least a century and a half even upto 44 A.D. When Appolonius of Tyana encountered it during his journey to Taxila (Woodcock 1966: 130).  If this statement is true, Greek remained in use in this part of the world longer than most accounts would have us believe (for the language of the Indus valley upto 1000 A.D see Rahman 1996). Although the Turkish conquerors of the Punjab, and later the rest of north India, used Persian as the official language, Arabic was used in more domains – especially those connected with ceremonial, liturgical and religious symbolism – than it is now.  For instance, upto the reign of Humayun inscriptions were mostly in Arabic.  A survey of such inscriptions in north India states that:

Persian started gaining ground at the end of the 13th century.  Scattered examples of Persian inscriptions dating from the 12th and the 13th centuries are also found in other parts of India.  But the first Persian inscription in the states under survey dates from Muharram, 687 (the month began on 6th February, 1288). By the time of Akbar, Arabic became reserved for the Quranic and other religious  inscriptions only (Parhar 1985: 1).

Whether Arabic was actually the medium of instruction at any level is not clear.  According to Sufi it was ‘no doubt, the chief medium of classical study’ (1941: 34) before the 13th century but Sufi presents no evidence of its being no nor is it clear as to what ‘classical study’ was.  It is, however, clear that Arabic was an important part, possibly the major part, of the curriculum in pre-Mughal times.

 

1.1       Pre-British Curricula in Arabic

            By the time of Sultan Balban (reigned 1266-1287), the outline of the course in Arabic studies – part of which is still in place in South Asian madrassas – is discernible.  Among the books of grammar were: Misba, Kafiya, Lubbul Albab and Irshad while the chief text in literture, or rather belles leters, was the Muqamat al Hariri (Sufi 1941: 17).  The Muqamat was written by Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri of Basra (1054-1122).  He composed these prose pieces, embellished by verses as was the fashion of the day, as a model of elegant prose.  The writings revolve around the adventures of a character called Abu Zaid of Seroug.  This character deceives people into giving him charity, indeed makes deception a fine art.  The narrator, Hareth ibn Hammam, who is also deceived by him, comes to admire his wit and linguistic abilities.  Indeed, the Maqamat was written as a model of elegant Arabic prose style.  The sheer power of rhetoric is such that none can resist Abou Zaid’s chicanery.  Theodore Preston, explaining this power writes:

It was not uncommon for a destitute stranger to enter the learned circle where the choicest wits of a province were assembled, and, as soon as an opportunity was offered, compel them all to acknowledge his superiority to themselves, and win their bounty by some feat of marvelous improvisation, or a lucid decision on some perplexing difficulty in grammar or rhetoric (Preston 1850: xi).

This was because the Arabs attached tremendous importance to the Arabic language.  Even before Islam, poetry was held in great esteem (see pre-Islamic poetry in English translation in Clouston 1986).  Later, because the Quran was written in classical Arabic, its language took on a unique religious significance (Preston 1850: x).  Indeed, as the Arabs came in contact with foreigners and Arabic began to change, the changes were seen as a catastrophe and even a heresy (Shalaby 1954: 44-47; Ibn-e-Khaldun n.d: 322).  Arabic grammar, therefore, was written to guard against this change – ‘corruption’ in the words of Ibn-e-Khaldun – and the first to codify the rules of classical Arabic was Abul-Aswad al Du’ali who did so upon the advice of the Caliph Ali (Ibn-e-Khaldun n.d: 322).  Thus, those who were skilled in the use of Arabic were held in special esteem such as only famous scholars are in certain academic circles today.  Thus linguistic elegance of the Maqamat became a model from which some of the traditional theological seminaries madrassas have not escaped so far in India and Pakistan.

            The Maqamat were often memorized.  In India, it appears from Hazrat Nizam-ud-Din Awlia’s discourses (Malfuzat) that he had read the Maqamat under the instruction of Shams-ul-Din Khawarazme and had memorized forty muqam’s (Rizvi 1981: 198).  R.P Dewhurst, a British officer who inspected Darul Uloom Deoband, wrote in his report on 29 March 1902, that ‘many of the students are able to compose with facility in the language [Arabic]. Several of them have even committed to memory substantial portions of the Makamat of Hariri’ (quoted from Rizvi 1981 Vol 2: 270).  Arabic was part of the traditional course of studies of a Muslim gentleman though only those who wanted to specialise in Islam to function as judges (qazis), theologians (ulema) or clergymen (maulvis) learnt it in greater detail in the Arabic schools and theological seminaries (madrassas).  Thus Sher Khan (d. 1545), who wrested away the Mughal empire from Humayun, studied ‘thoroughly the Kafiya with the commentaries of Qadi Shihab al-Din and also some books on other subjects.  He read the Gulistan, Bostan and Sikandar Namah, etc’ (Sarwani circa 1586: 9).  Abdul Haq of Delhi (1551-1642), a notable religious scholar of his day, learnt the usual treatises on Arabic grammar from his father Shaikh Saif Uddin (d. 1582) and even wrote a treatise in Persian on the Kafiya (Sufi 1951: 57).  Shah Waliullah (1702-1760) also read Arabic grammar (Kafiya and Sharh Jami) before proceeding with his studies in Islamic theology (Sufi 70).  Courses of reading revolved around these paradigmatic texts but it was in the eighteenth century that a fixed syllabus came into being.  The person who is created with having made it was Mulla Nizam Uddin of Sihali (a town near Lucknow) (d. 1748) and it is, therefore, known as Dars-i-Nizami.  Arabic was, of course, the focus of teaching in this course because it was meant for people who would use it.  It was not a revolutionary syllabus but a conservative one because it further endorsed the canonical texts already in use, some from the thirteenth century (like the Kafiyah).  The Kafiya, written by Jamal al-Din bin Abu Umar Uthman, is in rhymed couplets in Arabic. The couplets are mnemonic devices which illustrate the principles of Arabic grammar and appropriate usage in an aphoristic manner.  But in India where Arabic is not a mother tongue the book is so obscure that it is taught through a commentary called Sharh Ibn-e-Aqil. The commentary itself, let alone the original, is often the dread of students who memorise most of it.  The teacher who is said to have mastered it is generally one who can quote from it freely.  Memorization is tantamount to mastery. The memoirs of eminent theologians abound in the recounting of miraculous feats: such as Imam Taq ud Din having learned three of the maqamat of al-Hariri in less than a day (Shahabi n.d: 6).

1.2       The Dars-i-Nizami

            The Dars-i-Nizami gradually became a symbol of identity. As this identity took shape in reaction to the reality of British conquest and the introduction of modernity as a consequence, it was seen in the light of a bulwark of defence against the onslaught of modern (hence anti-Islamic) ideas.  The British went away but modernity came to stay and Arabic, especially as taught through the Dars-i-Nizami, became a major part of the defence against the modernist threat.  This aspect of Arabic will however, be taken up later.  At the moment let us look at the way the teaching of Arabic changed as a result of British rule.

2.         Arabic Teaching Upon the British Arrival

            When the British arrived they found the following kinds of schools in India:

1.                  Quran schools

2.                  Quran and Persian schools

3.                  Arabic and Persian schools

4.                  Arabic schools

5.                  Persian schools

The Quran schools merely taught the Arabic alphabet and the Quran without understanding.  The Quran and Persian schools also taught a little Persian in addition to this.  The Arabic and Persian schools taught both Arabic and Persian but not at a very advanced level.  The Arabic schools, on the other hand, taught mostly Arabic using either the Dars-i-Nizami texts or other texts of a similar kind.  The Persian schools, which trained students for being employed as clerks, letter writers, accountants, physicians and teachers, taught mostly Persian.  The number of Arabic schools was always less because Arabic did not lead to jobs in the apparatus of the Mughal and even the British (till 1837) state to the extent Persian did.  The Quran schools were the most numerous.  In the Punjab, according to British sources, they ‘are started by a Mianji [a local teacher] in a village’ and have, on the average, about 20 pupils each (PEI 1909: 322-323).  The same was true for the rest of north India.

            One does not know what most British officers felt about the teaching of Arabic but those who wrote official reports were generally not sympathetic.  Henry Stewart Reid, reporting on the teaching of languages in the schools of parts of U.P in the middle of the nineteenth century, says that those who read the Quran only memorise it in the Quran and Persian schools.  Thus, he opines, ‘the boys reading therein might otherwise be employed in acquiring a store of useful knowledge’ (Reid 1852: 41).  He was not sympathetic even to those who read Arabic with understanding because he mentions elsewhere in the same report that ‘Arabic learning had declined and good teachers of it were hard to come by’ – a state of affairs which he views with some satisfaction (ibid, 39).  Because of this decline, writing in Arabic decreased.  While a number of people had written in the language earlier (as evidenced by the entries in Nuzhat al-Khawatir which records their names), this number declined in the British period as the teaching of Arabic declined.

2.1       Arabic Teaching and Colonialism

            The role of Arabic among Indian Muslims was not confined to teaching.  The question was larger than just the teaching of the language; it was one of change in world view.  According to a report:

The older system stands for an education based upon religion, for the acceptance of authority, for respect of persons and institutions; the newer system stands for rational teaching, for liberal views, and for the spirit of development and evolution and each system has much to learn from the other (PEI 1929: 235).

The central concern here is that of world view and power.  The older world view, based upon the acceptance of traditional institutions and values, reinforced the power of the traditional elite.  Indeed, the purpose of language-teaching -–as indeed of all education – was moral.  It was to produce, in Gail Minault’s words, ‘an adult who was competent but modest, aware of his place in the social and administrative hierarchy, but able to speak when it was appropriate and learn from experience (Minault 1998: 20).  The new world view, consisting of Western rationalism and liberal ideas, reinforced the moral and intellectual authority of the British and the Anglicized Indian elite which they had brought into being.  Hence the question of which language was taught and how (as a sacred duty as in the case of memorising the Quran or reading it without comprehension) was really part of world view and power (on memorization also see Eickelman 1978).

            By the middle of the century the Anglicist policy of education (dated from 1835) had already been in force for 15 years and the tide had turned much against Arabic.  In 1780, when the British created the first educational institution in India, the Calcutta Madrassah, the policy was Orientalist i.e continuation of traditional Persian and Arabic education for the Muslims and Sanskrit for the Hindus in order to conciliate their elites and prevent an uprising against British rule.  This does not mean that the traditional system of education was not disrupted because of the colonial impact.  It was disrupted because, whereas the older system was personalised and flexible, the colonial one was not. In the older system boys went to the homes of teachers generally reading specific books with those who were reputed as being masters of them.  The British opened institutions and the old forms of patronage to the individual teachers dried up.  Thus the new system, though concentrating on predominantly traditional courses to begin with, brought about a far-reaching change in education – it became institution-based and bureaucratized (Eickelman 1978; Mottahedeh 1985).

2.2            Colonial Changes in the Curricula of Arabic

            At the Calcutta Madrassah Arabic was taught.  The course was traditional in that Arabic grammar was taught through traditional books, many of them part of the Dars-i-Nizami, and the literature part included works other than the Maqamat (Sufi 1941: 92-92). However, gradually the traditional syllabus would become the preserve of the madrassa-based religious elite while the teaching of Arabic was modified by the state

The change is clearly evidenced by the syllabi of the newly created universities – those of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay – after 1857.  In Calcutta the Arabic texts for the matriculation examination of 1857 was The Alf Laila wal Lail (One Thousand Nights and a Night) and Nafhat ul Yaman.  For the B.A course more material from these books as well as Ikhwan us Safa, Maqamat and other prose works were prescribed.  The poetical works of Ibn Farid and other books of Arabic verse were also prescribed (Sufi 1941: 112).  The syllabi of Bombay and Madras differ only in details.  Basically, the traditional pattern of concentrating more on old books of grammar had been broken. The emphasis on prose and poetry was new.  As a consequence of this emphasis a number of new texts were produced.  Maulana Zulfiqar Ali, an alumnus of Delhi College, specialised in Arabic literature and wrote commentaries and Urdu translations of Divan-e-Hamasa, Divan-e-Mutanabbi, Sab’a Mu’allaqa and  Qasida-e-Bant Sa’ad (Rizvi 1980: 163).  Moreover, the texts themselves were, as it were, more imaginative and pleasurable than the traditional language texts.  The Alf Laila, for instance, is known as a highly delectable collection of tales which has hilarious, aesthetic and erotic passages of the kind which not only madrassas but even ordinary schools would not countenance in contemporary Pakistan and north India.

            Arabic was slowly phased out, often with the open or tacit support of the Muslims, from state institutions in British India. In 1873, Nobin Chandra Rai, a member of the Punjab University Senate said:

It is quite unnecessary, and a water of educational funds, to give more encouragement to the study of Persian and Arabic in Government Schools and Colleges, inasmuch as the people have every means of studying these languages in their own institutions (Home 1873: 89).

In the 1870s Arabic (like Sanskrit) began only in class 7.  Students came to the classical languages with knowledge of Persian and Urdu.  Already by this date, at least in state institutions, Arabic was a marginalised subject which the students did not master.  The Muslims generally did not complain about this though there are instances of people doing so.  One such complaint, recorded in the proceedings of the Punjab University, is that of Mohammad Latif, editor of the journal of the Anjuman-e-Punjab, who wanted an improvement in the standards of learning Arabic (Home 1883).  Even in the madrassas, or at least those of them which were influenced or controlled by the state, there was much discussion on teaching Arabic.  In the madrassas of Bengal, where Bengali and Urdu were also taught in addition to the usual Persian and Urdu, it was considered too much of a burden for small children and it was proposed in 1940 that it should begin from class 5 rather than class 3 (MEC 1941: 78-79).  However, Muslim reformers who emphasized the Muslim identity of Indian Muslims, or sought to reinforce it through symbolic means, made it a point to teach Arabic.  Thus, whereas most private reformer’s schools taught the Quran (without understanding), Abdul Haq, a highly religious reformer from the Punjab, set us a boys’ school in 1908 and a Girls school (Madrasat ul-Banat) in 1926 at Jalandhar in both of which he taught the Arabic language and literature in addition to the usual subjects (Minault 1998: 251-252).  Modern Indian universities, like the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, started teaching Arabic on modern lines to train interpreters.  Even the traditional madrassas sometimes genuflected in the direction of modernity.  In its 1980 session, the Darul Uloom of Deoband, the foremost Islamic seminary in South Asia, declared that ‘it is necessary to popularize the Arabic language on a public plane’ and that arrangements should be made for teaching it through modern linguistic methods (Rizvi 1980: 381).

            By the end of British rule, Arabic was taught in two different ways.  The state schools and universities offered it as an optional subject.  It was generally taken by students as an easy option which increased one’s marks in the overall examination.  Even at the M.A level a pass degree in Arabic did not generally reflect one’s ability to read and write the language.  It was also taught in the madrassas but here the texts were so anachronistic and difficult and such was the emphasis on rote learning that students emerged with as little ability to use it as a living language as their counterparts in the universities.  This, however, may be changing in India, at least on a limited scale.

3.            Arabic-Teaching in Pakistan

            Because Islam was the major identity symbol of the Pakistan movement, the rulers of Pakistan, however secular and westernized, could not ignore it once the new state was established.  Precisely because of its symbolic significance Islam continued to be used as a symbol of national integration in the face of the threat from Bengali ethnicity.  Arabic, being an Islamic language, was often considered an antidote to ethnicity, especially Bengali ethnicity. Hence one reason why it was proposed as the official language of Pakistan, even as late as in October 1971, was because of its political neutrality and assumed integrative potential (Shaheen 1971).  It was also considred, along with Persian, a repository ‘of our vast cultural heritage’ and the first educational meeting of the new state gave it a place, albeit a vaguely defined one, in Pakistan’s educational system (PEC 1947: 12).  But, while the secular elite used Islam for political purposes, there were people who subordinated politics to its demands.  For them Pakistan was not obtained for Muslims so as to save them from Hindu domination and competition for resources and power, it was obtained to create an Islamic state and society.  Thus the tension between the religious and secular was part of the politics of Pakistan from the beginning.  Arabic, being a symbol of Islam, was part of this ongoing debate also.

3.1       Arabic and Ethnic Politics

            To take the proposal to use Arabic to counter ethnicity first.  In April 1950, Zahid Hussain, Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, said that Arabic should be the national language of Pakistan during his presidential address at a meeting of the Halqa-e-Arabad-e-Zauq, a literary organization.  He was opposed by many people, notably Abdul Haq of the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu (