The Religious Education of Muslim Women in Bangladesh

The Madrasas in present-day South Asia are bearers of the remarkable revival that Islamic religious education witnessed in colonial India during the late nineteenth century. This renewal began in particular earnestness with the establishment of the Dar-ul-Uloom Madrasa at Deoband in 1867. However, women were not part of this revivalist project in formal religious education, although on the level of informal religious education, they were taken into serious consideration by some Ulama who sought to promote individual piety, to re-Islamize household rituals and daily cultural practices, and to facilitate individual knowledge and observance of Qur’an- and Hadith-based religious injunctions as opposed to folk customs (Gail Minault, 1998, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India, Oxford University Press). One of the most well known among these reformist Ulama who showed significant concern for enhancing women’s informal/household religious knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Deoband Madrasa-trained scholar Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi (1864-1943).   His encyclopedic work, Bihishti Zewar (The Ornaments of Paradise), was primarily aimed at women (although Maulana Thanavi strongly encouraged men to follow it as well) and contained a vast amount of extremely detailed religious prescriptions for conducting numerous daily religious and household activities and for purifying bodily, mental, and emotional states. Maulana Thanavi’s emphasis on both Muslim men’s and women’s EQUAL obligations to seek knowledge and education was remarkably egalitarian for contemporary society, particularly the then worldview of many Indian Ulama and the Muslim elite (Barbara Metcalf, 1982, “Islamic Reform and Islamic Women: Maulana Thanawi’s Jewelry of Paradise” in Moral Conducted and Authority, edited by Barbara Metcalf, pp. 184-95).



However, despite Maulana Thanavi’s reformist emphasis on the egalitarian message of... [continues]

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