Is Mr. Ferouz not speaking on behalf of our Muslim fore-parents who came from Calcutta?

Aug 19, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
This is in reference to Mr. Rafeek Ferouz’s letter titled “Muslim lost the battle long before 1911” in which he responded to our letter. We wish to point out that first of all, the Calcutta “Aliya Madrasah” founded in 1781 by Warren Hastings was NOT the first madrasah in Hindustan since there were already several madrasahs which the Mughals had established long before the British set foot on Hindustani soil.

So maybe what Mr. Ferouz probably meant to say was that the “Aliya Madrasah” was the first madrasah established by the British Raj in that country, a point which is not relevant to the essence of our letter.We would also like to point out that the term madrasah has several connotations – it could be a medium of formal or informal teachings as well as teachings by private teachers and tutors – all of these methods of education existed in Hindustan eons prior to the British arrival in Hindustan. In fact, the early Muslim traders established madrasahs when they set up trading posts along the Malabar Coast since the 7th-8th Century.
More importantly, the main purpose of establishing the Aliya Madrasah was primarily to educate British citizens on Islamic Laws and languages – Urdu, Persian, Arabic – as well as astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and other skills which were being taught in the other “Mohammedan” schools so that the ‘students’, upon graduation, could help the British Raj in understanding and interpreting Islamic/sharia laws as well as be to be even better revenue and ‘lagaan’ collectors, the latter was of greater importance to the British.
The British also founded a similar institution – The Benares Sanskrit College – which was established in 1791 for the same purpose, i.e., inter alia, to enable the British citizens ‘occupying’ Hindustan to better understand the Hindu religious texts, laws, Hindi and other local dialects so that they could communicate with the locals without any misunderstanding on anyone’s part.
Another reason for the establishment of these two early ‘religious’ institutions by the British was that prior to the imposition of the British judicial system in Hindustan, their magistrates and judges had to rely on ‘pandits and moulvis’ for interpretation of the respective religious laws and based on that they would determine the appropriate “punishment or fine” to those who found themselves in the ‘court’. The reliance on the ‘locals to provide such assistance placed the British at a disadvantage and at the mercy of the respective Hindu/Muslim ‘leaders’ for obvious reasons. So, in reality the ‘birth’ of these two ‘educational’ institutions grew out of necessity for the British wanting their citizens to become “better administrators” which meant that they had to be well-versed in the languages and cultures of Hindustan. And we knew how their “administration” of the country went.
However, and more importantly, the majority of Indians who were brought over from India to Guyana were from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madras, only a handful were from Calcutta/West Bengal (and an even smaller number of Muslims came from Calcutta) where the “Aliya madrasah” was located and which at that time was NOT open to the “locals”. We hope that Mr. Ferouz was not speaking on behalf of the few Calcutta Muslims whom he deemed were taught by the British not to obey Allah and that they lost Allah, we also hope that Mr. Ferouz is not one of those who “lost Allah”, and if so then we sincerely hope that he finds Allah in the near future.
Shabnam Alli
Raymond Chickrie

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Is Mr. Ferouz not speaking on behalf of our Muslim fore-parents who came from Calcutta?

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