Competency Appraisal of Islamic Schools in Mumbai

Abstract

There are often numerous schools in any given city, most of all in a metropolis. This paper shall analyse one such metropolitan city’s—Mumbai’s, located in Maharashtra, India—selected Islamic schools. The objective is to appraise how students from Islamic schools stand against those of other schools, and the questions this study intends to answer is how these Islamic schools hope to strike a just balance between the religious and the secular subjects and the overall curriculum, whether students’ higher education and career choices are affected by their Islamic schooling, whether a protected environment makes it necessary for students to cope when released into the outside world, and whether and to what extent does politics affect schooling and schools. Since Islamic schools are a fairly recent phenomenon in the city (one of the earliest of which is just over two decades old), there has been very little literature addressing this topic. The one text found (and referred to) by the author analyses Muslim schools, and with a different lens. Madrasas are also looked at, in order to assess the schools’ claim that it gets difficult for students to go to a regular school first and then attend day madrasa afterwards. Additionally, with the independence of day madrasas around the city, there is little to no quality control of the content taught to these students, which makes for a problem since the children are taught how to recite the Quran and du’as, often with a heavy leaning towards an Urdu pronunciation of the Arabic. With the use of questionnaire and interviews, data was gathered to assess the various factors that the researcher wanted to measure. It was found that alumni from Islamic schools, firstly, do opt for higher education, secondly, place above the average in academic performance, and thus cope well academically, yet often lack the social skills required to interact with people from other religious backgrounds and with the respective opposite sex. Students were insulated from the actual political effects of the changing status quo of Muslims within the school, and often felt that their schooling was unaffected by the country’s politics.