MWU on the mock (as ever)

(Update 12th April: I posted this after seeing Ginny’s comment on it. I thought this was a recently posted article, but it actually dates from last October.)

MWU has posted an article by one Pamela Taylor, The Miseducation of Muslim Kids, which takes MWU’s usual sarcastic, mocking tone towards the defenders of traditional Islam – in this case, madrassa teachers who do their job of educating children about the essentials of Islamic worship. What’s got her annoyed is their focus on wudhu and the type of water required to do it. Her daughter allegedly remarked that the lesson would be “very useful if you’re ever stranded in the desert with nothing but a humming bird feeder”.

It seems that they were teaching the children about levels of purity and what condition water has to be in for it to be useful for wudhu. Water – indeed substances generally – are of three types – the purifying, the merely pure, and the impure. Purifying water has to be pure as in unadmixed, at least as far as can be discerned by the naked senses. Most substances are pure, and a few well-known substances are impure, as in filthy – all the unpleasant body products plus wine, dog and pig products and a few other things. There is another catch: anything which falls into a large body of water, whether it’s pure or impure, does not change its state – it’s still purifying. So the discharge of sewage or industrial waste into a river, or its use by wildlife as a toilet, or fertilisers leaking into it doesn’t change the fact that river water is pure, and you can drink it or make wudhu with it and your wudhu is valid. (You boil the water to drink it, but although that kills the germs, it doesn’t purify it – it’s pure anyway.)

This has to be known for two reasons. First, the obvious – people need to know how to pray, because prayer is compulsory and, therefore, so is what makes it possible. People need to know this before they reach puberty (and yes, people in generations gone by did learn this as children – this is how they became great imams as adults), so it’s the job of adults to teach them. Second, it staves off waswasa, which is obsessive doubts and inhibitions which stop people praying. In 2001 and 2002, Shaikh Nuh Keller finished off two meetings of his students in the UK (yes, the famous Sufis of Birmingham and their friends in the provinces) with talks on waswasa and how to deal with it. Speaking from personal experience, waswasa can seriously damage people’s lives, and proper religious knowledge is its cure.

There is a genuine misunderstanding in this context, however. The common meaning of pure in English is unadulterated; so “pure wheat” means “wheat and nothing else”. The Arabic word tahir, commonly translated into English as pure, is used in a religious context to mean ritually pure, such that it can be used for religious purposes and that you can carry out acts of worship with it on you and your clothes. So sugar water is pure as in ritually pure, but it’s not pure water – it’s sugar solution, which although pure, is not purifying. You can’t use it to purify something any more than you can use orange juice for this purpose.

Ms Taylor then suggests that the school might be considering taking the children to Darfur, the West Bank or Tajikistan “where there are genuine problems finding clean water”. But the water is still pure for the purposes of purification (and there is another method of purification, tayammum involving earth, which is used where water is so scarce that there is only just enough to drink). Because it’s water straight out of the ground, it’s considered pure or mutlaq water, even if it’s not safe to drink. She suggests that this might not be the most relevant subject for the madrassa to teach children, given:

all the ills of our umma — with violence and corruption, bigotry, intolerance, stagnation, and reactionary extremism hailed as the hallmarks of modern Muslim society, with Muslim women struggling under oppressive customs and laws in the East and in the West, with extravagant materialism marking our ‘elite’ and narrow-minded conservatism marking our ‘scholars,’ with the near total lack of mercy and compassion and commitment to social justice evidenced in our communities …

But the community needs to find solutions for all this in Islam, not by neglecting obligatory Islamic knowledge in favour of turning madrassas into citizenship classes. The rest of Taylor’s article suggests a madrassa curriculum which appears far beyond the time available to a part-time madrassa whose schedule has to fit around a normal school timetable. She suggests, for example, teaching children suras other than those of the final thirtieth of the Qur’an. The reason people start memorising from the last suras is that they are the shortest; people can memorise an entire short sura better than they can memorise half of a long one, and for children this may lead to a feeling of achievement.

In her final paragraph, she suggests that madrassas discuss “hot button” issues like “polygamy, slavery, domestic violence, women’s rights and dress codes, jihad, gay rights” – frankly I don’t think a child would bring these issues up in class unless prompted by someone outside. They are, in fact, issues commonly used by anti-Islamists as weapons against Islam and the Muslims. The job of a madrassa is to teach the Islamic rule on any given issue, whether or not non-Muslims agree with it. “Maybe they’d rather discuss how to deal with feeling like they don’t want to have anything to do with an umma that seems to be increasingly polarized by violence, political manipulation, extremism, and intolerance,” she suggests. I suspect this is a sentiment an adult would more readily identify with than any Muslim child.

I’m not suggesting that madrassas are perfect. Some of them, for example, teach the position of a given group of scholars as the truth, and suggest that anyone who does not live up to it is a fasiq (corrupt Muslim) – the position of some Indian Muslims on the beard is the example that springs to mind. I don’t think for a moment that they do this without believing that their position is in fact the truth; a madrassa which does the opposite, teaching that something is not necessary when it in fact is, or is permitted when it is in fact not, is not only not doing its job, but also exposes the Muslims to outside pressure to abandon part of their practice, such as the hijab. But as far as I know, they do do the central part of their job, which is teaching children how to carry out the Five Pillars properly. Mocking them for doing this is really unbecoming of a Muslim.