Boko Haram: The Antipathy between Islamism and Western Education Runs Deep
By
Arshad Alam, New Age Islam
17 December
2020
With the
Boko Haram now taking responsibility for the raid and capture of more than 300
school children, we are reminded again that Islamists have an antithetical
relationship to modern education. Indeed the very term Boko Haram means
‘Western education is forbidden’. Not just forbidden, but it seems that the
terrorist group is hell bent to wipe out its very existence from certain parts
of Nigeria. Earlier, the same group was responsible for raiding and abducting
hundreds of school girls, only some of whom were eventually released after much
international outcry. This time too, the rationale seems to be the same: to
ideologically convert these school children to the ‘cause’ of jihad through
radical indoctrination and arms training.
That small
children are being used for purposes of armed jihad should come as no surprise
because in the wider Islamic world, they have been used in similar fashion
before. The ISIS and other terror groups have made use of them in their
serialised violent videos, in which children could be seen brutally beheading
those who had been condemned to death by the sharia kangaroo courts. Much
earlier, children were sent to their death by the Iranian regime during their
war with Iraq; all such children were declared martyrs by the same regime.
One would
normally think that schools should be respected as sacred sites; that it should
be off limits for all manners of radical groups. But this clearly is not the
case for Islamists. From Chechnya to Pakistan to Afghanistan to Nigeria,
Islamist terror has shown no compunction in targeting schools for their own
nefarious ends. The reasons for such attacks might differ but what unites all
such attacks is their understanding that there is nothing morally wrong with
targeting schools and children therein. A major part of this reprehensible understanding
comes from an ideological standpoint which sees schools and modern knowledge
systems as inherently antithetical to Islam.
Marwa Hamza Kankara, a
parent of a missing Government Science Secondary School student waits for news
on her child in Kankara, Nigeria, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020. Rebels from the Boko
Haram extremist group claimed responsibility Tuesday for abducting hundreds of
boys from a school in Nigeria's northern Katsina State last week in one of the
largest such attacks in years, raising fears of a growing wave of violence in
the region. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
-----
For
Islamists worldwide, the central goal is to create an Islamic state, everything
else is subservient to this ideal. Education, although considered important, is
also to be analysed through its utility in terms of creating that Islamic
ideal. Moreover, the problem gets complicated when these forces realise that
western model of education provides the template for much of the educational
systems in the Muslim world. For terrorist groups like Boko Haram, the ISIS or
the Taliban, such schools and colleges teaching ‘western ways of life’ have no
utility and hence should be completely destroyed. The problem that these groups
have with modern education is not the science that they teach but the
‘lifestyle’ and ‘ways of thinking’ that they promote. After all, terror groups
are quite fond of western science and technology without which they would not
be able to wield their weapons or even indoctrinate through the social media.
Thus, western or modern education is only tolerable to the point that they
further the Islamist agenda. But when the same system starts to create doubt
about Islamic epistemology, then it is better to just bomb them out.
Young girls walk to school in Bama camp in northeast Nigeria. Girls have
been particular targets for Boko Haram militants and many were severely
traumatised by years of violence — Photo credit: UNHCR / Helene Caux
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Such
thinking however is not the monopoly of Islamist terror groups alone but is
widely shared by non-jihadist Islamists as well. The ideologue of Jamat e Islami,
Maududi used to call modern universities like AMU as ‘slaughterhouses’ rather
than houses of education. Although Maududi was appreciative of many features of
modern education, especially its methodology, but argued that such institutions
took out the religious soul of the person. For a Muslim, this constituted a
real problem as the whole point of education was to create an Islamic
personality ideologically committed to the creation of an Islamic state.
Similar
sentiments were expressed in Egypt by Muhhamad Abduh, who warned Muslims not to
blindly imitate the west in terms of education.
It is not
just the Islamists but even the ‘traditionalists’ like Deoband who campaign
amongst Muslims against the ills of modern western education. The earliest
Deoband curriculum positively forbade the study of Greek philosophy because it
‘corrupted’ the minds of Muslims. Identifying the study of philosophy and
science as western, the founders of Deoband argued that was no merit in
studying such sciences except when done with the express purpose of refuting
them. On their own, these did not constitute knowledge (Ilm) which was
only to be found in the Islamic texts of Quran and Hadees. Again, the
learning of allied and professional sciences was permissible only as
acquisition of skill (Hunar) without actually believing in their
theoretical underpinnings. The only theory worth applying was the Islamic one
through which all the mysteries of the world could be unlocked. In this scheme
of things, science could be studied but only as a peripheral aid which would
illuminate the central core of knowledge constitute by Islam.
This is not
to suggest that Islamism and its silent allies are the only ones who have
sought to reject the western system of education. In India, both Gandhi and
Tagore criticised the western system of schooling in their own ways. But what
distinguishes the Islamic critique from all others is its insistence on its own
monopolistic finality. Islamism wants to reshape the whole world in its own
image and wants to use education as a tool towards this end.
However,
even those opposed to Islamism share the same assumptions about western
education. Certainly, Boko Haram is a violent expression of a deep rooted
antipathy against western education, but we should not forget that such ideas
have considerable credence within the wider Muslim society.
-----
Arshad
Alam is a columnist with NewAgeIslam.com
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/boko-haram-antipathy-between-islamism/d/123789
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