Who is ziya us salam

Abdulrazak Gurnah. Kiley Reid. Sign in Create an account. Sub-total excluding delivery. Shop in. Books Authors Discover Connect. Early Years Primary Secondary. Featured authors View all authors. About Us Overview. Our Story. Missions and Values. Diversity and Inclusion. Environmental Policy. Investor Relations.

Contact Us Customer Service. Trade Contacts. Writing for Bloomsbury. In a telephonic interview with Indianexpress. Excerpts from the interview. When you go to a typical madrasa, the atmosphere is one of deprivation and discrimination. I saw some 50 boys between the age of 8 and 16 staying there and they did not even have a dormitory to themselves. The boys would just sleep in the corridors be it winter or summer.

There was no proper educational curriculum being followed. They were just expected to read the Quran in order to memorise it. The madrasa had no concept of organising a social get together, picnics, a visit to a stadium or a cinema hall. Almost all the students were first-generation learners from very poor families who could not afford to give them two meals a day. So the boys were put into madrasas so that they could be fed and at the end of the day and would be able to read the Quran.

It did not strike them that the Quran has to be understood and not just read. As far as the teachers were concerned, it did not strike them either because they too were products of a similar education system wherein you were encouraged to read the Quran without ever understanding it. It is this atmosphere that prompted me to write the book. There was a time when madrasas brought out the best of physicians, economists, mathematicians. There were subjects like History, Geography, other languages, and poetry, which were taught there.

The madrasas seem to have forgotten their own golden past. Today they are reduced to producing first generation learners. There was a time when people from across the world would prefer to send their children to madrasas because that was the way to getting the best kind of education.

They were not Muslims, but their parents chose to send them to a madrasa because of the quality of education, much like the way many modern Muslims in India today prefer to send their children to convents. Things began to deteriorate from the early 19th century but became truly bad after Independence. When Lord Macaulay came out with the Minutes of Education in that made a distinction between sacred and secular learning, it was the death knell of the concept of madrasas.

Non-Muslim students who did not want to read the Quran, could read the Vedas, the Hindu epics. But Lord Macaulay wanted a generation of Muslims to come up where the secular, well-read Muslims would not know much about Islam and theologians would not know much about the subjects beyond religion. This was a well thought out division made with a view to weaken the Islamic learning system.

The modern Indian madrasas are following the same concepts even today. Along with the COVID 19 pandemic, The Tablighi Jamaat came in the main stream media, with fake news and hate campaign tarnishing their image contrary to their popular picture of humble beings who have nothing to do with the world outside. Though, the book comes around the COVID 19 controversy, it gives little space to the media framing of the Tablighi Jamaat and talks at length about the history behind the foundation of the Tablighi Jamaat and its working principle, which is to make Muslims firm on the basic principles of Islam and follow the rituals in the proper way.

Ziya Us Salam takes a critical look at the Tablighi Jamaat and presents a very critical character sketch of its members. Some of the accounts presented in the book seem inspired by the pranks and memes that circulate on the social media.

A constant comparison of the Tablighi Jamaat and other Muslim organizations like the Jamaat e Islami Hind and the Jamiat Ulama e Hind presents a biased narrative here and there and often are not needed.

Though the fact that the Tablighi Jamaat have to go a long way in making the link between deen faith and duniya world and establishing the essence of ritualistic practices cannot be omitted. While reading the book one can get that the members of the Tablighi Jamaat are not educated enough and often apolitical.

This can be only partly true as its members often are academicians, civil servants, doctors etc. Though as an organization they have taken no part in any socio-political issue, but outside the organization, its members have their political stand and at individual levels they have their engagements.

The Tablighi Jamaat does not interfere in such affairs and has no objections to these activities of its members and is concerned only with the spiritual reformation of its members. The women in the Tablighi Jamaat have their space where they work within their circle under the strict supervision of the male members.