[This essay draws from a recent speaking engagement in Kathmandu, Nepal]
“Islam” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Kathmandu. Seated in a predominantly Hindu and Buddhist country, the fabled city is ablaze with gods and piety, just not those of the Muslim or even Abrahamic sort. And yet late July of last year I found myself in Nagorkot, a village outside Kathmandu in the Himalayan foothills, to participate in a multi-day conference on “The Future of Islamic Thought: Engaging History, Tradition, and Science.” I was scheduled to deliver several lectures on Christianity, tradition, and modernity. My remit was to provide insight into aspects of Western religious history that might foster conversation about Islam’s own attitude toward, and struggles with, modernity. Though invited as an instructor, I gathered quickly that I had a lot to learn.
For starters, this was no typical academic conference. Its participants were not mainly disinterested academic experts, but young men—and several women—who had studied in one of the thousands of madrasas scattered across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Faith commitments were palpable, as were religious vocations. The conference represented one element of the Madrasa Discourses initiative, itself a component of the Contending Modernities project based at the University of Notre Dame and generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. A practicing Muslim with a decorated resumé spanning East and West, Notre Dame faculty Ebrahim Moosa ably directs the project with the help of the scholar of religion Josh Lupo.
The Madrasa Discourses project, launched in 2015, operates with the working assumption that today’s South Asian madrasa education has become too static, indifferent to history and basic scientific literacy. The project’s organizers hope that this tendency can be corrected if madrasa graduates are exposed to a broader range of voices from their own Islamic intellectual tradition and brought into conversation with “modern knowledge,” the intellectual formations and debates of the Western or at least Western-shaped academy. The project webpage describes its aims thus: “To bring the classical intellectual heritage of Islam into conversation with contemporary academic perspectives on science, history, and theology.”
A Muslim with South Asian parents who grew up in South Africa, Ebrahim Moosa decided after a crisis of faith in his teens to travel to India to pursue madrasa education himself. Overcoming parental objections, he eventually spent six years in madrasas, learning Urdu, Arabic, the Qur’an, and theology. He graduated from the prestigious Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow, India, but also spent two years at the famous Darul Uloom Deoband, also in India, normally viewed as the mother of all Sunni madrasas in South Asia. He then decamped first to journalism in the United Kingdom and South Africa and then to the Western academy, obtaining further degrees and teaching posts that took him to the University of Cape Town, Stanford, Duke, and now Notre Dame. Moosa is now what sociologists call an insider-outsider. He has written movingly about his experiences in What is a Madrasa? (2015), a gem of a book that provides Western readers with a close-up look at “the most common type of school for religious instruction in the Islamic world.” Though critical of its contemporary limitations, Moosa still esteems madrasa education, recognizing it as a time-tested institution, a transmitter of Islamic culture, and often the only source of education for Muslims with limited means. “I remain a friendly critic of madrasa education,” as he puts it in the book. “Properly harnessed, [madrasas] are repositories of classical learning and seeds for intellectual sophistication that might challenge the shallow discourses of fundamentalism and revivalism that often pass for Islam today.” Moosa’s book is an excellent antidote to the post-9/11 caricature of madrasas as mass hatcheries of terrorists. So, for that matter, was the conference in Nepal. Most of the people I met there were warm, humble, fluent in multiple languages, and deeply curious about the world. Many had a good sense of humor…
One can read the remainder of the essay here in the journal Commonweal, where it was first published.
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