A brief history of Muslim women's education and religious reform in South Asia

Women's issues have been central to the efforts of socio-religious reform movements in South Asia since the late nineteenth century. Moreover, nineteenth- and twentieth-century advice literature shows evidence of a broad congruence in the moral vision promoted by different movements across religious divides. Whether the reformers were Hindu or Muslim, they advocated women's chastity, piety, personal self-restraint and modesty, curtailment of spending on weddings and other rites of passage as well as consumer goods, good housekeeping skills, and scriptural knowledge. Many nineteenth-century reformers also favoured women's seclusion (pardah), an upper-class and high-caste phenomenon, though over time it came to be associated exclusively with Muslims. The role of women was to support the patriarchal order, not to challenge it.Footnote ⁵ Harking back to an ancient, glorious past—Vedic in the case of Hindu reform movements such as the Arya Samaj, or the era of the Prophet Muhammad for Muslim ones—women were to embody the ‘modernity of tradition’, to borrow a phrase coined by Rudolph and Rudolph.Footnote ⁶

During the colonial era, as many scholars have shown, socio-religious reform as it related to women became ‘entangled with’Footnote ⁷ the nationalist struggle against the British. Nationalists argued that Indians (with reference here to Hindus rather than Muslims) were every bit as ‘civilized’ as the Christian British, if not more so, and that reform of the domestic sphere through a return to religious teachings was needed so that women could become the standard-bearers of a pristine and unsullied ‘spiritual’ Indian nation.Footnote ⁸ Indian women needed to be educated so as to become better wives and mothers—rather than becoming more Westernized, they were to be visibly different from and superior to Western women, whom the nationalists portrayed as materialistic and lacking in femininity. In the process, men sought to exercise greater control over women, denigrating women's customary practices and speech as backward, ignorant, and in contravention of scriptural precepts.Footnote ⁹ Their criticisms, in fact, replicated British criticisms of Indian culture as inferior to that of the British, which was portrayed as enlightened, progressive, and modern. The nationalists’ response was to construct a ‘new’ Indian woman, one whose behaviour marked her out as part of the emerging Indian middle class and the embodiment of middle-class respectability.Footnote ¹⁰

As the above indicates, Indian nationalist and Hindu and Muslim socio-religious reform movements had a clear class dimension. Not only did the new Indian woman not resemble Westernized women in her dress, language, or comportment, but she was also constructed as different from and superior to lower-class and lower-caste women who were seen as negative influences in the home and themselves in need of reform and education.Footnote ¹¹ Female protagonists of many an Indian novel were depicted as starting schools for the children of household servants in their spare time not only to educate the children but also to teach them proper etiquette and behaviour.Footnote ¹² These changing trends were closely associated with the rise of a popular print culture in nineteenth-century British India and the availability of cheaply printed books, newspapers, and pamphlets of different genres.Footnote ¹³ A single copy read aloud to even a small assembly of people was capable of reaching many.

Over the long term, however, the religious dimensions of the different reformist movements and, in a parallel development, the implications of the slow devolution of political power to elected bodies of local governance from the late nineteenth century onwards, increased the sense of Hindu-Muslim separation and division.Footnote ¹⁴ At the national level, Muslims increasingly saw the Indian National Congress as representative of Hindu interests alone, and in 1906 a small group of Muslim leaders founded the Muslim League to promote Muslim interests under British Indian rule. Hindu and Muslim reform movements, meanwhile, spoke in exclusive, and sometimes competing, terms to their co-religionists in an atmosphere of increasing religious distrust. In the 1930s and 1940s, the nationalists were battling not only the British but also one another, often along religious lines. In 1947, the two countries of Pakistan and India were born, the result of a painful and wrenching process of partition which killed, displaced, and uprooted hundreds of thousands of families on both sides of the eastern and western borders of British India.

Controversies about Muslim women's education were part-and-parcel of the history of the social reform outlined above. Some reformers, such as Sayyid Karamat Husain of Lucknow (1854–1917) and Shaikh and Begam Abdullah of Aligarh (1874–1965) and (1886–1939) respectively, favoured it, while others, such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), did not. Debates revolved around questions such as whether girls should be educated at home or in school, what subjects they should be taught, and what purpose was served by educating girls.Footnote ¹⁵ Literacy rates were abysmally low, especially for girls. In 1911, the census reported male literacy rates at 4 per cent and female literacy at 0.4 per cent in the west UP town of Shahjahanpur (the site of our ethnography), while all-India male literacy rates were at 6.1 per cent.Footnote ¹⁶ As Minault indicates in her meticulous study of ashraf (upper-class) women in North India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslim girls’ education began in the homes of (usually male) reformers in North Indian towns and cities which, by the 1920s, had gradually begun to grow into fully fledged schools.Footnote ¹⁷

In the post-colonial period, the literacy rate in India for girls over seven, while lagging behind that of boys, has been steadily increasing. Census figures in 2001 reported female literacy rates in UP at 42 per cent of the population aged 7 and above, while the rate for males was 68.8 per cent. (This was lower than the all-India rate for women, which was at 53.7 per cent, and at 75.3 per cent for men.) In 2011, the UP figures were 57.2 per cent for women and 77.3 per cent for men. (Again, the all-India rate was higher: women at 64.6 per cent and men 80.9 at per cent.Footnote ¹⁸) However, the government has been unable or unwilling to invest sufficient resources on public education, particularly in rural areas. As the Sachar Committee Report documents, the Muslim population has been the least well served of all socio-religious groups by government institutions across many sectors of the economy, particularly since the liberalization of the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁹ In general, the Sachar Committee Report findings were that Muslims suffer from many of the same deficits as the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in the country in terms of education and socioeconomic status. Among other things, they suffer from discrimination in housing and a pervasive sense of insecurity in public places, this being all the more severe for Muslim women. This is compounded by distrust of the government and fear that it is trying to reduce the Muslim birth rate. (In 2006 this led Muslim women to shun state-led efforts to vaccinate the population against polio.Footnote ²⁰) With regard to education more specifically the Sachar Committee Report notes that Muslims are ill-served by state-run schools for a variety of reasons. These include: the dearth of good-quality schools in Muslim neighbourhoods, a lack of hostel (residential) facilities, which deters Muslim parents from sending their daughters to schools that are far away, poor quality teaching, teacher absenteeism, the ‘communal’ content of school textbooks, a hostile environment in the school, and so on. The Report maintains that for these reasons Muslim parents often turn to madrasa education for their children, not because they want to but because they have few other options.

Scholars concur that this is the context behind the rise of privately funded madrasas in many parts of the country today, particularly in North India. While madrasas account for only 4 per cent of private educational institutions in India as a whole,Footnote ²¹ in UP it is estimated that madrasas could account for as much as 10 to 13 per cent of private schools.Footnote ²² While several scholarly studies and media reports on madrasa education have focused on its shortcomings—ranging from its irrelevance to contemporary life to its obscurantism, to actually being a training ground for terrorism—a few studies have written more insightfully about the importance of madrasa education in contemporary India,Footnote ²³ both in terms of providing a basic education to poor Muslims in rural and semi-rural areas and, in a few select madrasas such as Deoband and Nadwa, offering advanced instruction in Islamic studies and scholarship that is respected in the Arab world. The ‘deficit’, in this view, lies less with the madrasas than with the Indian government which has failed in its constitutional duty to provide free universal education to underserved populations.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, Taylor sees madrasas as ‘already “modern” and emplaced within contemporary Indian society and economy’.Footnote ²⁵ Unlike nineteenth-century madrasas (and the religious reform movements they represented), which were inward looking and sought to strengthen the community from within by emphasizing a return to the religious proof texts of Qur'an and Hadith in the context of the loss of political power to the British,Footnote ²⁶ Taylor argues that in today's context, madrasas such as the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow are outward looking and their students acquire linguistic and other skills not available elsewhere. This opens up employment opportunities in ‘north India's growing religious occupational sector’ and confers ‘transferable job skills obtained through Islamic studies’, not to mention the creation of opportunities for fundraising in the Arabic-speaking world as well.Footnote ²⁷

Nita Kumar also writes favourably of madrasa education. Madrasas are connected with the community and teach religious values, which secular government schools do not. For this reason, in her view, they are in fact more successful than government schools: ‘Insofar as they offer free or subsidized teaching to children, try to preserve a continuity between home and school, and invest in most of the paraphernalia of modern schooling, they are indeed institutions to be emulated.’Footnote ²⁸ However, Kumar faults them for their reliance on rote learning, their use of corporal punishment, and the fact that they limit students’ future prospects instead of expanding them. Nevertheless, she recognizes that there is great variety in madrasa education, especially between those schools that specialize in religious studies (Arabic, Persian, and the Islamic sciences of Qur'an, Hadith, jurisprudence, and so on) and the far more numerous madrasas that teach the Qur'an and Urdu, but whose focus is more secular and nationalist.Footnote ²⁹ More importantly, she believes that because madrasas do not teach Indian history, they fail in their task of producing rounded Indian citizens. We will return to these and other considerations at the end of our article.

One study that is directly related to our work here is that of Mareike Winkelmann,Footnote ³⁰ whose ethnographic portrait of a girls’ madrasa in Delhi, based on her fieldwork in 2002 with follow-up visits in subsequent years, is, to our knowledge, the only one of its kind. According to Winkelmann, madrasa education for girls in India took off in the late 1970s after a 1975 conference held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on the Islamization of education. The Indian conference participants decided to promote a ‘dual’ madrasa curriculum—one that would teach some secular subjects alongside traditional religious subjects—and girls’ madrasas in India.Footnote ³¹ The madrasa Winkelmann studied, much like the one we present below, was small (it catered to about 200 girls) and its students were from lower- and lower-middle class backgrounds. Located in Nizamuddin in New Delhi, it was affiliated with the Tablighi Jama‘at, an offshoot of the Deobandi movement. Winkelmann's conclusions were in many ways similar to our observations of the Barelwi madrasa Jami‘a Nur, as we discuss below.

Winkelmann notes the importance of the inculcation of adab, that is, an ideal of pious conduct, modesty, and submission to authority which becomes part of the student habitus. For the lower-class students from rural areas or poor urban areas who studied at this madrasa, this ideal and its accompanying discourse became a means of upward social mobility and improved marriage prospects.Footnote ³² Winkelmann notes that the concept of empowerment is problematic within the context of the girls’ madrasa, for it was their willingness to be taught, as Saba Mahmood put it, rather than resistance to authority, that characterized the student experience. Winkelmann concludes:

In this context, empowerment must be understood as being circumscribed by the ideals of devotion and piety, much as Mahmood's subjects actively make choices that appear to be counterposed to feminist and secular liberal values.Footnote ³⁴ It is also noteworthy that the difference in maslak identities between the madrasa studied by Winkelmann (Tablighi Jama‘at, an offshoot of the Deobandi school) and Jami‘a Nur (Barelwi) has no significant impact on the overall mission of the madrasas. The differences lie in the specifics of religious practice, following from the differences in their theological approach toward the Prophet Muhammad, as we indicate in this article.

Maslak identities in South Asia since the late nineteenth century and their continuing importance today

To start with, we need to discuss the concept of maslak. Since the late nineteenth century, Sunni Muslims in South Asia have distinguished between a number of reform movements which arose in the context of British colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These movements continue to inform Sunni Muslim identities and intra-religious perceptions of self and other to this day. Because many of the reform movements were led by religious scholars (‘ulema) who viewed education as a vital means of Muslim renewal and reform, many (though not all) were associated with the founding of madrasas for boys. The most important of these, as documented by Barbara Metcalf in her path-breaking study Islamic Revival in British India, was the Dar al-‘Ulum at Deoband, in west UP. The ‘uldma at the centre of this religious institution were steeped in the reformist ideas of Shah Wali Allah (1703–1762) who was a pioneer in emphasizing Hadith studies in Muslim religious education. His Madrasa Rahimiya in Delhi, led by his eldest son Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, was influential in the nineteenth century and attracted students from all over the Indian subcontinent and beyond. The ‘ulema at Deoband were, in juristic (madhhab) terms, Hanafis, as are most Sunni Muslims in South Asia, as well as Chishti Sufis. This balance between Hanafi jurisprudence which emphasized Hadith studies, with a focus on the life of the Prophet, and reform Sufism—obliterating the binary between scholar (‘alim) and spiritual seeker (sufi)—became a hallmark of what the Deobandis, and the denomination (maslak) subsequently dubbed Deobandi, stood for.

We must be careful not to think of the Deobandis and other groups as ‘sects’, as the lines of demarcation between Deobandis and others who defined themselves differently—as the Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at (or Barelwis), Ahl-i Hadith, Nadwis, Tablighi Jama‘at, and in the early twentieth century, the Jama‘at-i Islami—were at the level of family and individual affiliation and not accountable to an ecclesiastic authority (there being no such authority in the Islamic tradition, particularly in Sunni Islam). The distinctions were often quite fluid as well, though in the course of the twentieth century a hardening of boundaries occurred between many of the groups. While we translate maslak as ‘denomination’, in Arabic the term means ‘comportment’, ‘behaviour’, or ‘path’.Footnote ³⁵ We feel its original meaning is therefore best used, so as not to invite comparisons with terminology derived from the Christian tradition, which is different from the Islamic tradition in significant ways.

From the perspective of this article, the maslaks that mattered most were those of the Deobandis and Barelwis—in part, as Sanyal has argued elsewhere,Footnote ³⁶ because their theological positions were closer to one another than they were to any of the other Sunni maslaks. The Barelwis (so named after the west UP town of Bareilly in which they were initially centred, although they referred to themselves by the classic Arabic term Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at or ‘people of the [prophetic] way and majority community’) did not initially coalesce around a madrasa but around the towering personality of Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921). Both Deobandis and Barelwis agreed that: (1) the shari‘a—as interpreted by the Hanafi school of law (madhhab)—should be followed at all times, (2) that as long as Sufism does not cause a Muslim to transgress shari‘a norms, it is a necessary complement to the shari‘a, deepening a person's faith and spiritual life, (3) Sufi masters (murshid, pir) act as links in a spiritual chain between the Prophet and the individual believer (the murid, disciple), conveying blessings (baraka, barkat) and forgiveness for sins from God through the Prophet to the believer, (4) there is a vital connection between the dead and the living in that the rewards for good deeds performed by the living can be transferred (isal-i sawab) to dead ancestors to ease their fate in the hereafter, (5) the shari‘a must be followed not just outwardly but inwardly as well, as forgiveness is predicated on sincere repentance and having the right intentions (niyya), (6) all Muslims should model their behaviour on the life of the Prophet. To do so, in fact, is to follow the Prophet's sunna (way), which in turn is the defining characteristic of a Sunni Muslim.Footnote ³⁷

Since the late nineteenth century the crux of the theological disputes between Deobandis and Barelwis have revolved around the Prophet himself. Was he a mortal with human limitations like everyone else, given occasionally to error (the Deobandi position), or was he so loved by God that God gave him the gift of knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm-i ghayb), which no one has, beyond the innate abilities given to all humans (the Barelwi position)? Was he created from God's primordial light at the beginning of time, as a result of which his body casts no shadow (the Barelwi argument), or was he only the last prophet (not also the first), having been born in historical time in the sixth century ce (the Deobandi position)? Does he intercede with God—through a chain of intercession linking him with individual Muslims through an unbroken line of Sufi discipleship—on behalf of sinners at all times, as Barelwis believe, or only on Judgement Day, as Deobandis argue? Can his spirit roam freely in the world among humans and is his body sentient and intact in its grave in Medina, as Barelwis believe, or is this not the case, as Deobandis argue?Footnote ³⁸ These arguments were conducted in print and oral debate (munazara) from the very beginning of the emergence of the two movements in the late nineteenth century. Deobandis dubbed Barelwis polytheistic (mushrikin), while Barelwis called Deobandis ‘Wahhabis’ who were disrespectful towards the Prophet and belittled his abilities. Importantly, Ahmad Raza Khan, who articulated the Barelwi position, did so on the basis of his interpretation of the Qur'an, Hadith, and the classic Arabic texts of jurisprudence rather than on Sufi literature. This point bears emphasizing in view of the widespread scholarly perception that the Barelwis are primarily Sufis, not Islamic scholars (‘ulema), a point that is not borne out by the history of the movement.

In academic discourse, the similarities between the Deobandis and Barelwis, which are considerable, are seldom highlighted. Instead, the Deobandis are usually referred to as reformists (or, more recently, as fundamentalists), while the Barelwis are considered to be ‘popular’, ‘local’, or ‘counter-reformist’.Footnote ³⁹ As we hope to indicate in this article, the use of such terminology and its implied binaries of reformed versus unreformed, scholarly versus Sufi, universal versus local, urban versus rural, and so on, is to vastly oversimplify the realities on the ground.

While the Barelwis and Deobandis thus share considerable ground in jurisprudential and theological terms, there is a great distance between them and the Ahl-i Hadith on a number of issues. The most important of these is the Ahl-i Hadith's rejection of the authority of the four Sunni schools of law (madhhab) and their insistence that the ‘ulema engage in independent reasoning (ijtihad) based on their knowledge of the Qur'an and Hadith literature. This is the reason for the Barelwis’ pejorative term ghair muqallid (those who do not follow [a legal school]) when referring to them.

When it comes to the practical implications for women of the differences between these theological positions, however, the language of male reformers—and even that of Sultan Jahan, the ruler of Bhopal who was of the Ahl-i Hadith persuasion and the most notable female religious reformer of the early twentieth centuryFootnote ⁴⁰—appears to have been shared by the different movements. All of them spoke of the importance of pardah for women, encouraged them to study the Qur'an and Hadith, and condemned excessive spending on weddings and other rites of passage as well as practices they considered to be against the shari‘a, however interpreted. Nita Kumar notes that Deobandi–Barelwi differences at the madrasa level in Benares were negligible.

Overview of the girls’ madrasa

The madrasa, called Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at (Jami‘a Nur for short),Footnote ⁴¹ was founded in 2003 by a scholar (‘alim) named Sayyid Ehsan Miyan from the district of Kannauj to the south of Shahjahanpur. He taught at a boys’ madrasa in Pilibhit for many years before making a permanent move to Shahjahanpur in the 1990s in response to what he perceived to be an educational ‘desert’. By this he meant that there were no Barelwi madrasas in the region, only Deobandi ones, and therefore students were being indoctrinated in ways that he considered harmful.Footnote ⁴² All the towns in which he has lived and worked are in west UP, Pilibhit being north-northeast of Shahjahanpur district and Kannauj to its south, within a roughly 150-mile radius.Footnote ⁴³ To Shahjahanpur's northwest is Bareilly, the historical centre of the Barelwi movement and currently the site of Ahmad Raza Khan's tomb and the annual death anniversary (‘urs) rituals associated with it. However, as Sanyal explores elsewhere, Sayyid Ehsan Miyan, or Sayyid Sahib as he is affectionately known, has distanced himself from the epicentre of the Barelwi movement and has developed his own network of Sufi and scholarly ties.Footnote ⁴⁴

Sayyid Ehsan Miyan has founded a number of schools, some secular, some religious, in this region. The education of one of his sons indicates his personal educational philosophy (his other three children, two of them daughters, appear to have had a strictly religious education). Of his two sons, the younger one attends a Hindi-medium government school during the day while also studying the dars-i nizami curriculum at home in the evenings and on weekends. While not all students can be so dedicated, Sayyid Ehsan Miyan sees a need to add some subjects—Arabic, Urdu, and religious instruction or diniyat—to the standard, state-mandated secular school curriculum, while adding subjects such as English, Hindi, and simple maths to the madrasa curriculum. This pattern prevails in all the schools he has founded. Clearly, he wants the children to be able to navigate both worlds, the religious and the secular.

The girls’ madrasa, Jami‘a Nur al-Shari‘at, teaches a modified form of the dars-i nizami curriculum.Footnote ⁴⁵ New students sit an entrance exam which allows the administration to determine their linguistic and religious knowledge in order to place them in the appropriate class. There are three elementary level grades, then four years of study for the ‘Alima degree (equivalent to Intermediate), and two more years for the Fazila degree (equivalent to a BA).Footnote ⁴⁶ Most students are about 18 or 19 when they graduate at the Fazila level. Like other current South Asian madrasas, the subjects taught include Arabic grammar and literature, Persian literature, jurisprudence (fiqh), Qur'an, and prophetic traditions (Hadith). The last year of the Fazila course (the capstone year) focuses in large part on Hadith, as is the case in other madrasas, whether for boys or girls.

At the time of writing in 2016, the girls’ madrasa was growing, while the boys’ madrasa adjacent to it was shrinking in size. The latter used to have a five-year ‘Alim course, which has now been reduced to four years. The reason for this is that boys who are interested in getting an ‘Alim degree want to get it from the better-known boys’ madrasa, Madrasa Manzar-i Islam in Bareilly, or even further afield in Azamgarh, east UP, home to the Jami‘a Ashrafiyya Misbah al-‘Ulum, the largest Barelwi madrasa for boys in India.Footnote ⁴⁷ The girls’ madrasa, on the other hand, is one of very few Barelwi institutions for girls in the region and has also earned a reputation for offering a high-quality education. Consequently enrolments increased from 250 in 2014 to 400 in 2015. This was made possible in large part by the fact that in 2014 the madrasa moved from the cramped building in the heart of the city to new and more spacious buildings on the edge of Shahjahanpur. In 2015, for the first time, the madrasa began to accept girls as young as six, usually the younger sisters of older students. With fees set relatively low (Rs 800 per month, or US$15 for boarders), it is within the reach of many local families, although some students do receive financial assistance.

The politics of space/place

Before we can begin to understand how the madrasa enables personal ethical transformation, we need to think about its physical and social space. Following Foucault,Footnote ⁴⁸ we are mindful of the role of space in articulating social distinctions and forms of behaviour and comportment. Citing the example of supervisory spaces that isolate and organize human bodies, such as military and naval hospitals and factories, Foucault points out, ‘Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Spaces carved out through discipline are simultaneously ‘architectural, functional and hierarchical’ and enable effective organization and supervision.Footnote ⁵⁰ A good illustration of such a disciplinary space is Rebecca Lester's study of a convent for Catholic nuns in Mexico, in which she examines the use of techniques to demarcate spaces and bodies in order to facilitate the cultivation of specific behaviours and attitudes among the nuns in accordance with their level of initiation into the convent. The manner in which the convent is constructed vis-à-vis the external world as well as its structural organization within serves to underline Lester's claim that ‘social relationships . . . are often materially (re)created through the positioning of actual bodies in space’.Footnote ⁵¹ Arguing from the same position, we wish to emphasize that the space of the madrasa and the students’ homes play a significant role in determining and circumscribing the proper ways in which the girls can become pious subjects. However, the two kinds of spaces must not be seen as completely isolated and discontinuous; their close relationship is evinced by the techniques of discipline and nurture employed in both. Here we will discuss the space of the madrasa, turning to the home situation in the second part of the article.

The approach to the madrasa is significant in itself, part of a politics of spaceFootnote ⁵² that speaks to the administration's deep concern with the girls’ physical safety. It deliberately fails to call attention to itself. Apart from a small board on the main street with the name of the madrasa in Urdu, one would not know it was down the narrow dirt lane running at right angles to the street. Instead, one notices the boys’ madrasa buildings on both sides of the main street, on the corner of the street and the lane, and the boys entering and leaving the buildings, buying snacks from roadside stalls, and walking away singly or in groups. To get to the girls’ madrasa, students and staff walk or drive about a city block down the dirt lane (which is devoid of vendors and traffic unrelated to the madrasas) until they reach the tall metal gates of the girls’ madrasa straight ahead. Here, all who wish to enter must present themselves at the front office, which is equipped with a laptop computer, two-way mirrors on the walls, and a telephone, and identify themselves to the person seated behind the desk. If cleared to enter, they sign in and let themselves through the small metal door set into the big metal gate. Visitors must wait on the chairs provided for students to come to them. The madrasa itself, invisible until one crosses over to the other side of the gate, consists of two double-storey buildings facing each other across a large open courtyard.

Socially, the madrasa is different from both the home and the ‘amoral’ space of the public marketplace.Footnote ⁵³ It is an ‘in between’ space, neither private nor public but with some of the characteristics of both. To use a term coined by Gail Pearson, we could also describe it as a kind of ‘extended female space’, one that is intermediate between the ‘household and the public world of affairs’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pearson argues that the fact that women come to this space to further a goal such as education (although it could also be for other purposes, such as a women's social service association) makes it a training ground for the acquisition of organizational and leadership skills which can be applied in the wider public world of social—and even political—action. This is in fact what we observed, at the level of the neighbourhood, when we met a few madrasa graduates in their homes.

For those involved in the madrasa—parents, administrators, and students—it is a very special place. Parents feel they have sacrificed both financially and in terms of lost household labour by choosing to send their daughters here, and their mothers in particular feel the loss of their daughters' help in the kitchen and with child care. Administrators are keenly aware of the trust parents have placed in them by allowing their daughters to live away from home for months at a time and, as noted above, take great precautions to monitor the movement of both students and outsiders into and out of the madrasa's premises.Footnote ⁵⁵ Students too are aware that this is a special place where they have come to learn the knowledge of din, which Moosa translates as ‘salvation practices’ rather than simply as ‘religion’. To quote Moosa: ‘Din is semantically rich . . . Muslims often use the term din . . . to describe a vast life world that is inclusive of revealed morals and daily practice that can lead to salvation’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This conceptual expansion of meaning is helpful in terms of how we think about the kind of learning that takes place in the madrasa.

Unlike at home, students do not cook or do household chores while at the madrasa, although they do take care of personal laundry and help to keep their classrooms clean. Also unlike at home, they do not have access to the outside world beyond the confines of the madrasa, except when they go home for the long holidays. They lead rather spartan lives, with plain food and limited privacy, and they have to share facilities and resources such as water, required daily for ritual ablutions (wudu‘) and other needs, with hundreds of other girls. Most important, the authority figures to whom the students are accountable are not family members but teachers and administrators. Most of the teachers are former graduates of the madrasa, many only a few years older than the students themselves. However, some of the teachers, particularly for the Qur'an recitation and advanced Hadith and fiqh classes, are men. When students attend classes taught by men, they observe gender segregation by wearing a nose piece (a veil that covers the lower half of the face) in addition to their headscarf, unless the teacher, ‘in a kind of purdah in reverse’,Footnote ⁵⁷ sits behind a curtain at the far end of the room, in which case this becomes unnecessary. (A female warden keeps watch on the students from a quiet corner in the latter case.) This practice vividly illustrates what we call the ‘public-private’ nature of the madrasa space. It is an intermediate form of veiling between the simple headscarf worn within the madrasa and the all-enveloping black niqab worn when students and teachers leave the madrasa gates. Because the students are secluded from men inside the madrasa, they do not need the niqab but because their male teachers are unrelated men, they need the nose piece.

However, following the logic of gender segregation, for female students to be studying with male teachers at all is still a violation of the rules of pardah. It is significant, therefore, that students refer to many authority figures at the madrasa using kinship terms, as if they were members of an extended family. Thus, students refer deferentially to Sayyid Sahib, the founder, as Abba Huzoor (respected father), one of the wardens as Khala Ammi (mother's sister), and the teachers as Baji (elder sister). This enables social interaction between the two sides to take on a familial colouring, and also allows unrelated males to enter the madrasa premises in order to perform their duties, whether administrative or scholarly, by symbolically becoming mahram (outside the circle of permissible marriage partners) to the female students and teachers. In other words, the madrasa creates a new set of relationships modelled on the family but different from it as well.Footnote ⁵⁸

The use of fictive kinship serves multiple purposes. Minault notes that ‘[t]he Indian extended family, with its ability to expand virtually indefinitely through the device of fictive kin . . . provides a model for extending one's concerns beyond the kin group’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this case, by drawing upon the notions of care as well as authority which characterize the realm of kinship in the domestic sphere, the madrasa seeks to establish itself, and be accepted, as a substitute home for the girls, while at the same time re-creating the authority and hierarchy that characterize real kin relationships. For instance, the role of the father traditionally involves both indulgence and dominance over other members of the family. The father-daughter relationship expresses the affection between the two, while also emphasizing the father's legitimate concern that his daughter conduct herself ‘properly’. To this end, he exercises the authority vested in him in order to ensure her well-being. When students refer to Sayyid Sahib as Abba Huzoor, they are allowing the interaction between themselves and Sayyid Sahib to be structured by the norms that mark the relationship of a father and his daughters.

Having established that the madrasa space is different from both the private and public spheres, we can now ask in what ways it is transformative for students. As Ebrahim Moosa describes so eloquently in What is a Madrasa?, the patterns of daily life, both academic (ta‘lim) and non-academic (ta'dib, tarbiyya), are determined by the cycle of daily prayers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Foucault considers the regimentation of time a mode of discipline, as in the case of the timetable that regulates the lives of individuals in schools, workshops, and hospitals.Footnote ⁶¹ Such a timetable, centred on obligatory prayers, structures life at the madrasa as well. Students and teachers wake up before 5 am in the summer time in order to offer their morning (fajr) prayers before dawn. After a brief nap, they get ready for the school day, dressing in their uniforms of a green and white shirt dress (kameez) and loose white pants (salwar), with a white headscarf (dupatta). They then assemble in the open courtyard between the two school buildings by 7.45 am for morning assembly (called du‘a). Thereafter, from 8 am until 1.30 pm, they take a succession of classes (eight in all in the school day) with a short break in-between. Then, after the second prayer of the day (Ar. dhuhr, Urdu zuhr), lunch, and an afternoon nap, students spend most of the remainder of the day—apart from offering the remaining prayers at designated times—memorizing the lessons they have learned during their morning classes. This is a labour-intensive process, undertaken partly individually and partly with their peers in small groups. Differing from the popular understanding of memorization being done without understanding, however, our observations point to the contrary: students are expected to understand what they are committing to memory, as the teacher begins each class by doing a quick review of the previous day, calling on different students at random to read and explain the text studied. Inability to do so results in verbal admonition and the humiliating punishment of having to stand in place for the remainder of the class, as corporal punishment of students is not permitted.Footnote ⁶² Students therefore work in groups, quizzing each other both on memory and meaning, and if they have doubts they can, and do, seek out their teacher (who could be in the staffroom, the central courtyard which serves as a recreation space, or anywhere else) to ask them to explain it to them all over again.Footnote ⁶³

The madrasa as a nurturing space

The idiom of care was repeatedly invoked by former students when they talked about the madrasa, even several years after they had left it. During our interviews with alumni, almost all of them reminisced about having felt cared for at the madrasa. Once, when a girl complained to Sayyid Sahib about the poor quality of lentils (dal) served to the students, he immediately summoned the cooks to look into the matter. The food given to the madrasa teachers is better than that served to the students. While the girls receive nonvegetarian food only once or twice a week, it is served to the teachers much more frequently. However, when the teachers received something special, many were known to send any extra food they did not eat to the students. In many such ways, the bond between the teachers and students seemed to transcend the instrumental teacher-student relationship associated with their institutionalized roles.

The girls remembered most of their teachers very fondly. Many of those who taught at Jami‘a Nur had graduated from the madrasa just a few years earlier themselves and were therefore only a little older than the students. Also, because they lived together at such close quarters in a residential set-up, almost all the students knew each other. So, when a former senior student was appointed as a teacher, she already had a bond of friendship with the students. Ghazala, an alumna of Jami‘a Nur, mentioned to Farah that once when she fell severely ill at the madrasa, her teacher Darakhshan helped her with everyday tasks and even with her exams, with Ghazala answering the questions orally while Darakhshan wrote the answers down.

Another example of the teachers’ attitude toward the students and their concern for their well-being can be seen in Sayyid Sahib's efforts to establish a nurturing relationship with the girls. Most of them clearly admired him and his devotion to the madrasa. Nayla mentioned that he told the girls to treat him as their father and not their ustad (teacher), and they reciprocated by calling him Abba Huzoor. He encouraged the girls to let him know if something was making them uncomfortable at the madrasa. In fact, he also said that if the girls were reluctant to speak to him in person, they could express their complaints and feedback in writing and hand the paper over to him or his daughters, who also teach at the madrasa. Ghazala also mentioned that sometimes Sayyid Sahib would ask them informally if they wanted something special prepared for them by the cooks. The more confident students would speak up and express their preferences and soon enough, instructions were given for the item to be prepared for all the students. Such considerate acts on the part of Sayyid Sahib, the teachers, wardens, and office staff served to establish an atmosphere of care at the madrasa, as in a family.

The titles Abba Huzoor, Khala Ammi, and Baji indicate seniority in the family and their bearers are therefore vested with greater authority than other family members. At the madrasa, it is thus the prerogative of Sayyid Sahib and the wardens and teachers, as in a family, to discipline and reprimand students for any perceived transgression of convention. By evoking the indulgent yet strict attitude of the father, the eldest aunt, or the older sister, their authority is rendered acceptable and legitimate because it is wielded for the benefit of those who are subject to it. However severe their attitude might seem, it is understood that it stems from their underlying love and affection for their ‘daughters’, ‘nieces’, and ‘sisters’. Both discipline and nurture, therefore, are evoked through the kinship terms used by the madrasa authorities.

Alongside the madrasa's nurturing atmosphere, its disciplinary aspect is also premised on responsible behaviour rather than the use of arbitrary authority. To live disciplined lives does not imply unthinking submission to authority, as Ghazala's outspokenness against the madrasa on one occasion illustrates. When a girl from Bareilly fell seriously ill at the madrasa, the authorities informed her parents, upon which they immediately set off for Shahjahanpur. They arrived at the madrasa late at night and wanted to take their daughter home. However, madrasa rules do not allow students to leave the hostel premises at night. The authorities therefore refused to let the girl out despite repeated pleas by her parents. They had to spend the night in the open square outside the madrasa and were only allowed to take their daughter home the following morning. Ghazala thought the madrasa authorities’ treatment of the sick girl's parents had been very callous and she voiced her feelings to Sayyid Sahib, arguing that such behaviour was against Islamic norms. The nurturing atmosphere of the madrasa evidently made available the space and the environment for the articulation of dissent by students such as Ghazala. Impressed by her articulate defence and strong sense of conviction, Sayyid Sahib expressed his appreciation of Ghazala's forthrightness. Discipline at the madrasa, therefore, is not mute submission to norms, but involves students’ active agency to do what they deem correct in light of what they study.

Finally, the social relationships that characterize the lives of the girls in the madrasa enable the emergence of what Lester refers to, in the context of a Catholic convent, as ‘bonds of sisterhood’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Just as the postulants at the convent realize the intricate ways in which their lives are connected to those of others also on their spiritual journeys, the girls at the madrasa recognize that their strivings and their challenges are shared ones. Lester observes that the solidarity based on shared experience gives rise to a community in the convent that eventually becomes a source of strength for the postulants. In an analogous situation, the madrasa students establish strong bonds of friendship and affection with one another, some of which continue even after they leave the madrasa. Many former students who live in neighbouring areas stay in touch after they graduate. Often their families also start to meet each other and strike up a friendship. Many of the mothers of the alumni Farah met, knew about their daughters’ friends and other girls in their graduating class and were apprised of events in their lives such as marriage, relocation, the birth of children, or a death in the family. In this manner, the madrasa facilitated a range of nurturing relationships in the wider community over time.

The process of change: ta‘lim, ta'dib, tarbiyya

It is useful to think about the totality of the madrasa experience in terms of the three Arabic words used by Ebrahim Moosa to describe the educational process in a madrasa. Ta‘lim is a derivative of ‘ilm (knowledge) which, as Moosa points out, is more than information. In the madrasa, knowledge is that which promotes a ‘life [lived in compliance] with God's will—a life of obedience and piety’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the madrasa setting, it therefore refers quite specifically to religious knowledge. The term ta'dib derives from ’adab, one of the meanings of which is etiquette or the correct way to do something. In the madrasa context it refers to ‘moral instruction and discipline’,Footnote ⁶⁶ which is not unrelated to religious knowledge but deals with aspects of everyday life such as the correct way to read the Qur'an (never let it touch the ground and never handle it in a state of ritual impurity, for example), to eat (with the right hand, not the left, and sitting down, not standing), to address a teacher (never by his or her name, always respectfully by his or her title), and so on. It is to be open to correction and moral improvement and requires one to internalize a moral code to such a degree that it becomes, as Marcel Mauss termed it, a habitus.Footnote ⁶⁷ Finally, tarbiyya, which comes from the root rabb, Arabic for God, the ultimate nurturer of the world, refers to the cultivation of moral excellence by modelling oneself on the life of the Prophet and, more immediately, on one's teachers and other exemplary pious figures.Footnote ⁶⁸

The argument that we want to develop here is that the madrasa creates in its students the desire to become pious (students use the term dindar, devout), and it shows them how to do it. Related to this, we use the concept of agency in the sense of becoming, that is, as a process, rather than as a doing. As Mahmood pointed out, although agency tends to be identified with subversion or resistance to power, it should also include docility or ‘the willingness to be taught’. This active willingness, in which ‘the subject submits . . . to the often-painful regime of disciplinary practice, as well as to the hierarchical structures of apprenticeship, in order to acquire the ability’ to do something,Footnote ⁶⁹ sets in motion the process of change or of becoming someone one formerly was not. The internalized desire to become that person precedes any action she might take and motivates it.

A Nadwi scholar, writing from the perspective of one embedded in the Islamic scholarly tradition, echoes the points made by Mahmood. He objects to the Western scholarly emphasis on agency because it suggests that Muslim women had to wrest from men certain ‘privileges to speak or think or act’, whereas from the beginning of Islamic history ‘women and men both [knew] what their duties [were]’, and women taught the religion to others, just as men did. More importantly, he writes: ‘In the believer's perspective, the best of what we do is worship and, especially, prayer. Prayer, in its immediate, outward effects in the world seems to do nothing. However, the doer of it (and only the doer) knows how he or she is measured by it . . . Prayer builds (and tests) the stability of the qualities that Muslims have treasured most in their scholars, men or women, namely wariness (or “piety” in relation to God) and righteousness (in relation to other people).’Footnote ⁷⁰

The Jami‘a Nur, like other madrasas for boys and girls, creates the desire to develop a pious self in multiple ways, one of them being the act of storytelling in the classroom. By relating exemplary stories about the Prophet Muhammad, his Companions, models of conduct such as the Prophet's daughter Fatima or his wife ‘A'isha, as well as well-loved Qur'anic prophets such as Joseph (Yusuf), teachers impart Islamic moral values and convey the message that students should learn to behave as they did. In fact, the Prophet's life history (sira) through the Hadith literature has been an important subject of study in South Asian madrasas since the eighteenth century, which has been well documented.Footnote ⁷¹ Muhammad Akram Nadwi, whose views on the importance of prayer we quoted above, explained to an American journalist that ‘Islam is not an idea, it is a history.’Footnote ⁷² This history—specifically, the history of the Prophet's life—he told her, made his own life so much easier, because it showed him how to approach new situations.Footnote ⁷³ Like millions of Muslims worldwide, it provided a blueprint for his everyday life.

If reading about and studying the life of the Prophet is one way in which students connect with their history as Muslims, the daily offering of ritual prayers (namaz, salat) and Qur'an recitation, as Nadwi said, connects them to God, to one another, and to their communities. In their answers to Sanyal's questions many students reported that before they came to the madrasa they had either not prayed regularly or had not known how to do so correctly. Now that they had learned this, they would teach it their brothers and sisters, and others in their communities. One student, who was 16 in 2012 and had studied at the madrasa for three years, said: ‘I have benefited a great deal from my education at Jami‘a Nur. In terms of din, I learned how to offer namaz correctly and now I know the obligations (farziyyat) of prayer and fasting . . . Now that I have learned these things it is my duty (farz) that I tell others to offer their prayers, that I tell my parents and my brothers and sisters, and that I observe pardah and tell women and girls to do so. And that I make every effort to do good deeds and try to get others to do so too. This is what I wish to do when I return home.’ This sentiment was echoed by many of the other students who answered Sanyal's questions.

Students also commented at length on issues related to adab and tarbiyya. Thus, a 17-year-old student who had studied at the madrasa for four years, said: ‘I have learned to tell right from wrong, I can walk on the correct path by myself and can tell others how to do so as well, and [I know] how I should respect my elders and comport with them, which deeds will take us to heaven and which ones will take us to hell. All this I learned at Jami‘a Nur, and we will be successful in this world and the next only if we act upon the knowledge we have acquired.’ Another student said that the most important thing she had learned was to be ‘watchful over [her] character above all and other people's afterwards’. Had she not come to the madrasa, she said, ‘today I would be like those who wander about without pardah in the bazaar. Just as I am filled (ser-ab) with knowledge today, to that extent I would have been bereft of it.’

Matters related to prayer and ritual purification (taharat) or ‘prayer-readiness’, to use a term coined by Maghen,Footnote ⁷⁴ are of great practical import to the students and are discussed in class, in ever greater depth in each successive academic year, with recourse to the proof texts of the Qur'an and Hadith. This is where students come to learn to distinguish their practices as Barelwi Sunni Muslims from those of other South Asian Muslims from rival theological schools. Immersion in the madrasa-sphere, as Moosa calls it, connects the individual to others through a shared sense of history, to a larger community, and to a cosmology, ‘a complex amalgam of things that make up what we understand as the realm of existence or being, in other words, a true picture of reality consisting of fundamental meanings and feelings that provide a sense of fullness to all other meanings’.Footnote ⁷⁵ And to return to the individual, this cosmology is expressed in the very movements of the body through space and time, both during prayer and in everyday acts such as eating, drinking, reading, walking, talking, and sleeping.

If, on the one hand, these practices emphasize conformity to a collective Islamic ideal, it is significant that students, teachers, and administrators often brought the conversation back to the importance of individual desire for such an outcome. Unless the student had a desire (chahat, ichha) to learn, Sanyal was told, the madrasa was not the right place for her and she should return home. This was not a prison where students were being held against their wishes, teachers and administrators said. An incident at the start of the school year in 2015 brought this to the fore: a new student who had little prior education and was placed in a class with younger students was very homesick. One of the teachers, tired of trying to cajole her, told her that all the madrasa students were separated from their parents and yet they were going about their business. The new student at first responded rudely, then pretended to faint, in the hope that this would persuade the administration to call her parents and ask them to come and fetch her. This led to an extended discussion of the futility of trying to teach students like her who did not want to learn, and her father came for her two days later. This reference to the need for a personal desire for what the madrasa had to offer seemed a significant departure from the way in which matters such as girls’ education, socialization, and self-discipline would have been represented before. In Nita Kumar's terms, it seemed an important ‘slippage’ or discursive change,Footnote ⁷⁶ one that seemed ‘natural’ and perhaps not even worthy of comment, but that has implications for the students’ agency as well as for wider social relations between self and community.

Life in the wider community

The girls’ constant endeavour to become good Muslims is realized when they step back into the wider community after they have graduated from the madrasa. The training they receive at the madrasa through ta‘lim, ta'dib, and tarbiyya is meant to shape them into pious subjects for life. Therefore, to some extent the task of ‘becoming’ a proper Muslim is fulfilled only when the girls return to their communities and face the challenges they have been warned about with the help of the discipline inculcated at the madrasa.

While the space of a madrasa regulates and disciplines the lives of the girls in materially significant ways, it also draws, as discussed above, on nurturing familial ties that are fictively re-created within its domain. A parallel then seems to emerge—just as the madrasa appropriates the role of a familial guardian and provides the students with a ‘family’ that nurtures them, their lives back home provide them with an environment premised on nurturing ties, but one that has to be regulated and disciplined in accordance with the forms of knowledge the girls imbibed at the madrasa. In their home environments the madrasa students thus become ‘teachers’ who inform and instruct those around them, though they have to be careful not to directly challenge gender and age hierarchies. However, their piety becomes a source of empowerment because of the prestige associated with religious knowledge. Even those who are not scrupulous about following religious precepts are obliged to acknowledge and accept the importance of orthoprax religious behaviour.

Once the girls leave the madrasa and return home, they are not formally required to submit to the regimentation of everyday life as they had to do at the madrasa. By virtue of being a ‘total institution’ in the Goffmanian sense (or a ‘complete and austere’ institution, in Foucauldian terms), the madrasa regulates the students’ time and strictly regiments all their activities therein.Footnote ⁷⁷ In contrast to the madrasa, the home is a space where the girls enjoy much greater freedom in terms of the ways in which they can spend their time. Ironically, they see such a lack of regulation as a challenge that they must overcome in order to fashion themselves as pious subjects. After completing their educations at Jami‘a Nur, most of the girls begin to see the activities in their homes and neighbourhoods through the lens of Islamic practice. In so doing, they often encounter what seems to them to be deviations and transgressions which must be corrected and transformed in accordance with their understanding of proper Islamic behaviour.

Instead of being marked by rupture or discontinuity, the spaces of the madrasa and home should therefore be seen as forming a continuum precisely because the embodiment of proper Islamic practice transcends the two. In order to become a pious subject, the girls are required to bring to both spaces a sensibility and discipline that is informed by their knowledge of Islam. Both the madrasa and the home, therefore, emerge as sites of discipline as well as nurture, even though they are formally associated with only one or other of the defining aspects.

Discipline at home

As discussed earlier, the process of becoming a ‘good’ Muslim involves disciplining the body in a manner which ensures that one is always mindful of proper Islamic practice in the performance of everyday activities. In his analysis of the medieval Christian concept of moral discipline, Talal Asad observes that it was ‘through the concept of a disciplinary program that “outer behavior” and “inner motive” were connected’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Through the process of classroom learning and its practical application in the everyday, the girls at Jami‘a Nur were similarly made to internalize disciplined behaviour, which was intimately linked to an inner motive in order to effect personal ethical transformation. They were made to understand that the learning and training that they received at Jami‘a Nur should guide them throughout their lives in order for them to become ‘proper’ Muslims. For this reason, the girls’ desire to work on their lives so as to develop pious selves continued even after they left the madrasa.

When they returned to their homes and neighbourhoods the girls often encountered beliefs and practices which they perceived as antithetical to what they understood to be the proper Islamic way. Lester mentions the discontinuity and rupture that postulants experienced at the convent and analyses how they gradually learned to navigate the tensions between the temporal realities that they inhabited until they were able to develop a sense of self that embraced both.Footnote ⁷⁹ Because the students at Jami‘a Nur returned to live at home and would eventually marry and have families of their own, unlike the postulants at the Catholic convent, the knowledge that they imbibed at the madrasa caused them to experience a sense of rupture and discontinuity between the madrasa and their home lives. This prompted them to try to transform the spaces that they had inhabited earlier to bring them in line with their new-found knowledge. The subjective self, now shaped by their understanding of ‘proper’ Islamic practice, enabled them to incorporate into their lives at home the discipline they had internalized at the madrasa.

Having become accustomed to the rhythm of everyday life centred around the five daily prayers at the madrasa, most of the girls tried to offer their prayers regularly when they returned home and encouraged others in their families to do the same. Ghazala lived in a joint family with her parents and two brothers along with their wives and children. Although much younger than her, her nieces and nephews seemed to be close to her. On one of Farah's visits to Ghazala's house, she noticed that while she and Ghazala were talking, Ghazala's little nieces were waiting for her to begin offering namaz. They had spread their ja-namaz (prayer mats) neatly in a row alongside each other in the courtyard of the house and had tied their scarves around their heads in anticipation of the prayer. Ghazala's prayer mat was set alongside theirs so they could follow her gestures and movements, clearly being too young to know how to perform namaz correctly. Ghazala excused herself from her conversation with Farah and joined them for namaz. After some initial giggling, peeping, and shoving, the little girls tried to follow Ghazala's lead in offering their prayers. By teaching her nieces how to offer namaz properly, Ghazala brought her training at Jami‘a Nur into her own home.

Once the madrasa students have mastered the Qur'an, Hadith, fiqh, and other texts that the syllabus requires of them, they acquire the confidence to voice their opinions about what they deem to be correct or incorrect practices. Nayla and her sister Khushboo recounted an instance about a couple in Mumbai who were close to their family. One day the woman called on Nayla's family asking for advice because her husband had pronounced talaq thrice in a fit of anger.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nayla responded that in that case it was imperative that she move out of her marital home immediately because it was illegitimate for her to live with her husband any longer. However, she was unable to leave, which caused Nayla and her family extreme distress. Nayla felt that the woman was leading a life of sin and ruining her prospects in the afterlife as well. Nayla and Khushboo's mother acknowledged the family's disappointment. Although they had all tried their best to explain to the woman the proper Islamic way to deal with the situation, they were helpless if she continued to ignore their advice.

Similarly, Hajira found it difficult to adjust to people who did not adhere to proper Islamic practice. Ghazala's cousin and neighbour, Hajira had attended Jami‘a Nur very briefly. But as the only daughter of her parents and also the eldest child, when her mother needed help with domestic chores at home Hajira eventually had to drop out of the madrasa. Despite the relatively short time that she spent there, she continued to be interested in issues of piety and religion. She also continued to read about religion and to tell others about it. She was extremely critical of Ghazala's sisters-in-law because they often wore make-up, which she perceived to be against the Islamic way of dressing. In fact, her zeal for ‘correcting’ the practices of people around her led her to start elementary classes in Islamic belief and practice in her village along with Ghazala, as we describe below.

The training that the girls receive at the madrasa gives them the requisite knowledge, skills, and competence to perform their roles in their natal and marital homes. By performing their duties and discharging their responsibilities as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers, the girls believe they are fulfilling both their worldly obligations and their religious commitments. A much older girl, Nida, who had been among the first in her family and neighbourhood to study at Jami‘a Nur, felt that studying at the madrasa was a turning point in her life. Now married to a businessman in Bareilly, she took pride in the fact that she knew both her responsibilities as well as rights as a wife. After her marriage, Nida continued to read books pertaining to religion and often spoke to her husband about religious matters, although she conceded that her time for such activities was limited. Her husband took great pride in her considerable knowledge of religion and encouraged her not to stop reading and learning.Footnote ⁸¹

Nida emphasized that apart from their social rights and duties Jami‘a Nur taught its students the objective of their lives. She argued that people occupy a range of roles—as parents, teachers, students, husbands, wives, and children—during their lives but are often unaware of the rights and responsibilities these roles entail. By using this knowledge to inform their behaviour vis-à-vis others, they could fulfil the roles that Allah meant them to occupy. Drawing on Marcel Mauss's understanding of the human body as a technical object and tool, Talal Asad examines the ‘ways in which embodied practices form a precondition for varieties of religious experience’.Footnote ⁸² The embodiment of prescribed, institutionalized roles can, therefore, be seen as an enabling condition for the subject to become a proper Muslim.

Teaching as a religious duty

Most of the girls at the madrasa wish to become teachers when they graduate and, in fact, many do so after they finish their studies. They see teaching as a religious obligation because of the intimate relationship between knowledge and belief in Islam. The girls are very keen to disseminate information about the proper manner of inhabiting an Islamic identity. In this respect they are strongly reminiscent of the Egyptian women associated with the mosque movement studied by Mahmood.Footnote ⁸³ Although not part of an organized movement, the girls who graduate from Jami‘a Nur often take up teaching as a profession in order to impress upon others the importance of Islam and to inform them of their obligations and duties as Muslim women. The broader Indian context of their decision is that many educated middle-class women take up teaching because in India teaching (and nursing) are gendered as feminine. Having made the relatively uncommon choice to send their daughters to a residential madrasa, these girls’ parents are usually very supportive of their decision to teach. Indeed, Nayla and Khushboo's father had great ambitions for his daughters and insisted that they continue to teach and give speeches at religious gatherings after they had finished their education. Once married, however, the girls’ decision to continue or stop teaching depends heavily on the support of their in-laws. Most end up leaving because of pressure from their in-laws and increased responsibilities as married women. This trend may also be observed among women educated in ‘mainstream’ institutions who work in the secular sphere, and it highlights the cultural impediments against Indian women working for remuneration after marriage.

Until she married, Nida taught at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu‘minin, which is another madrasa for girls established by Sayyid Sahib on the outskirts of the city of Bareilly. Although the teachers at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu‘minin have a heavy workload and the authorities are very strict about punctuality, Nida was only too glad to get a chance to teach because she believes that teaching others is one of the purposes of learning. Preparing for her lectures (muta'ala) also deepened her own learning, although sometimes she was so drained by the end of the day that she would fall asleep at night with the book in her lap. Nida's younger sister, Naghma, was not married and was still teaching at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu‘minin when Farah interviewed her. Similarly, Nayla also taught at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu‘minin for a while after finishing her studies at Jami‘a Nur. She lived in the part of Bareilly known as Old City, which is in the heart of the town. Eventually she had to leave because of the long commute to the madrasa. She used to leave home early in the morning and return exhausted at night.Footnote ⁸⁴

Ghazala was also teaching at Jami‘a Umm al-Mu‘minin when Farah met her and had known most of her colleagues from when she was a student at Jami‘a Nur. Her nieces (who lived with her in the same joint family, as mentioned above) also attended the madrasa where she taught. Ghazala was passionate about teaching and claimed that education finds its fulfilment in teaching. Eloquent about her belief in the importance of teaching, she argued that as a student at the madrasa she had not quite realized the importance of everything that she was learning. In fact, it was only when she started teaching that she began to ‘understand’ all that she had learned. In a particularly evocative analogy, she compared herself to a sooty cooking pot that had been scrubbed clean by the teaching process (main bartan ki tarah manjhti chali gayi). By using this analogy, she credited her teaching with providing clarity of thought, something that she had not achieved merely by studying at the madrasa. This reinforced her belief that one must be able to explain and teach what one has learned in order to truly understand.

The obligation to ‘teach’ others about religion is not restricted to institutionalized pedagogical forms, but encompasses any situation which affords a knowledgeable person the opportunity to inform others about correct Islamic practices. Students at Jami‘a Nur are trained to speak at public events in a variety of different formats. They learn to give speeches (taqrir), to recite na‘t poetry in praise of the Prophet, and to recite hamd in praise of Allah. This training in public speaking gives the girls a good deal of confidence, which is particularly striking when one speaks to them. Nayla once recounted that once when she was making a public speech she noticed a woman in the audience who had applied make-up and painted her nails. She mentioned these details with obvious distaste because the madrasa teaches that such means of adornment are un-Islamic. Afterwards, when the woman came to Nayla to congratulate her on her well-delivered speech, which she confessed had touched her, Nayla remarked that painted nails were disapproved of in Islam. Upon hearing this, the fear of Allah (khauf-i khuda) engulfed the woman, Nayla said, and she immediately called for nail polish remover and got rid of the offensive nail polish. This illustrates yet again that it is the girls’ piety that confers on them the authority and privilege of engaging in public criticism. Indeed, in so doing they may occasionally even transgress, to a degree, the hierarchies of gender, class, and age. What matters, and what allows them to do so, is that they invoke appropriate Islamic norms of practice and behaviour and refrain from personal censure or criticism.

As mentioned above, Ghazala's cousin Hajira was unable to complete her studies at Jami‘a Nur and did not teach in an institutionalized setting. But she too was deeply interested in issues relating to the proper performance of religious obligations. After she had to leave Jami‘a Nur, she continued to participate in tabligh (Islamic advocacy and proselytization) and occasionally accompanied her brother on tabligh tours within the country. She once encountered a group of Muslim women in Hyderabad who were inappropriately dressed, in her view, so she educated them on the proper forms of dressing in accordance with Islamic norms and found that she made an impact on all of them. This tabligh project is akin to the mosque movement in Egypt because of the ‘pedagogical emphasis it places on outward markers of religiosity—ritual practices, styles of comporting oneself, dress, and so on . . . For the mosque participants, it is the various movements of the body that comprise the material substance of the ethical domain.’Footnote ⁸⁵

Even though she did not teach at a madrasa like many of her friends from Jami‘a Nur, Hajira's passion for spreading knowledge about Islam prompted her, together with Ghazala, to begin basic Islamic education classes in her village. Having become knowledgeable about Islam at the madrasa, both girls wanted to do something to teach the women in their village about religion. They strove to adhere to Islamic precepts in their own lives and were therefore dismayed to see young girls in their village dressing immodestly or engaging in un-Islamic activities. As Mahmood argues, the proper comportment of the body is one of the central ways in which an ethical self is constituted.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ghazala and Hajira were further troubled by the fact that there was no institutionalized authority to guide village girls on how to dress correctly, carry oneself, and live one's life. So they began organizing basic Islamic classes in the afternoons in order to educate the young women in their village about such matters.

Initially Ghazala and Hajira targeted young, unmarried women for their classes but these were so popular that a number of older married women decided to join as well. The classes were held for three to four months and Ghazala felt that they had a tangible and visible impact. She and Hajira used the Sunni Bihishti Zewar, the chief advice manual for women used by Barelwis,Footnote ⁸⁷ in order to inform women about their everyday duties, the importance of veiling (pardah), and the correct way of observing ritual purity (taharat) and offering prayers. They corrected the mistakes the women made when reciting the Qur'an and also taught them how to recite it with makharij (proper enunciation and intonation). The popularity of these classes further substantiates our argument that the girls’ authority derives from their knowledge of religious texts and adherence to norms of piety in their personal lives. The married women who voluntarily joined these classes were much older than Ghazala and Hajira and in other social situations would have greater authority than them on account of their age and marital status. Furthermore, the fact that Ghazala and Hajira initiated these classes shows how the madrasa students endeavour to inscribe the discipline they have internalized onto the space of the home, which cannot be associated with nurture alone.

Thus, the home and the madrasa cease to be separate domains as far as the pious subject is concerned. The girls are required to transcend both temporal domains in order to become proper Muslims. Both spaces therefore emerge as sites of discipline and nurture, and mirror each other in the ways in which they influence the lives of the girls or are shaped by their endeavours in turn.