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Hem Borker, Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018
Reviewed by Usha Sanyal, Wingate University, for the Journal of Islamic Studies (Oxford,
UK)
In India, madrasas for Muslim girls have been increasing in number since the early 1990s, the
result in part of rising levels of female literacy but also of the shortage and majoritarian ethos of
government schools, leaving Muslim communities to rely on their own local leaders and
resources to educate their young. Thus far, there have been few ethnographic studies of girls’
madrasas in India. Hem Borker’s book Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood (2018)
is only the second major ethnography to date on the subject. By a happy coincidence, both her
work and the earlier study by Winkelmann (2005) deal with girls’ madrasas in New Delhi, and
both are affiliated with the same Sunni school of thought (maslak), the Tablighi Jama`at, which
is part of the Deobandi network. While Winkelmann examines the academic content and
pedagogy of the madrasa in some detail, Borker is more interested in the social aspects of
students’ lives, thereby complementing Winkelmann’s study in interesting ways. Read together,
they give the reader a good understanding of the academic curriculum as well as the social
implications of madrasa education for girls in contemporary north India, particularly in the
capital, New Delhi. This said, I do have some reservations about certain underlying scholarly
assumptions made by the author, as I point out at the end.
Borker has a background in social work but no knowledge of the Urdu script, in which written
communication at the madrasa takes place. As she notes, this factor shaped the contours of her
study in significant ways (13, 156). Given that both she and the students can read the Devanagiri
script, however, she was able to gather questionnaires from them in this way. She conceptualizes
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the study in terms of the students’ journeys from their homes in villages or small towns to the
madrasa in metropolitan Delhi, their experiences at the madrasa, and their lives beyond the
madrasa after they graduate. Borker examines the girls’ intellectual and mental transformations
at each stage of their educational journeys as well as their future aspirations. Additionally, she
uses personal stories (ethnographic “self-portraits,” as she calls them) to great effect throughout
the book. Several of the chapters begin with a vignette about a student at a key moment in her
life, whether a graduation ceremony (121-23), a decision to attend Jamia Millia Islamia
University (210-11), or a wedding. In several of these vignettes, Borker is also a part of the story,
as when the student getting married tells her excitedly about her new job offer as a high school
teacher and the student’s husband’s acceptance of her desire to teach there (240-41). Through
these stories, Borker conveys her knowledge of the students’ personal lives and their acceptance
of her as an honorary member of the madrasa community (umma), as indicated by their use of
the honorific apa, a respectful (often fictive) kinship term for an older sister, when addressing
her. Casting a reflexive lens on herself, though, she also explains how it was initially difficult for
her to gain their trust (17-25)—an experience familiar to many scholars who have done
qualitative fieldwork in order to get to know their subjects closely.
The book consists of an Introduction followed by seven substantive chapters about the history of
girls’ madrasa education in colonial India (chapter 2) and the everyday lives of the students at the
Madrasa Jamiatul Mominat (a pseudonym) during Borker’s yearlong fieldwork during 2012-13
(chapters 3 through 8). Chapter 5 has an interesting section on parents’ perspectives on the merits
of madrasa education for girls (127-39). Their emphasis on the value of religious education (dini
talim) in preparing the student for the afterlife (akhirat), teaching them how to “practice Islam
the right way” (130), and the social benefits of such an education overlapped in large part with
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the school administration’s own self-representation of its mission. The book ends with a very
useful discussion of Government of India policy recommendations for “madrasa modernization”
since the 1960s, a process that she divides into three phases (Coda). Borker’s overall conclusion
about government efforts to control and direct the course of madrasa education in India is that it
is ill-conceived and premised on false dichotomies of the “modern” versus the “traditional” that
are rooted in an uncritical use of “the western-liberal language and concepts of women’s rights,
gender equality, and empowerment without taking into cognizance the conjoining political and
intellectual projects that underpin such conceptions” (266-67). Rather, her research shows that “it
is not dichotomies but a continuum at work” (263). Moreover, while the recognition by many
universities of madrasa degrees on the recommendation of the 2006 Sachar Committee Report
did facilitate the “mainstreaming” of madrasas and permitted madrasa students to attend
universities such as Jamia Millia, Borker believes that “concrete measures such as bridge
courses, remedial classes, scholarships” and so on are much needed on the ground (215-16, 265)
in order to help madrasa students successfully transition into college or university.
This is an ambitious book. Side by side with the madrasa ethnography proper (in chapters 4-6),
Borker also discusses (in chapter 4) the role of madrasas in the national landscape of Muslim
marginalization in contemporary India, referring to madrasas as “in-between spaces.” They are
“in between” the increasing communalization of secular public spaces in urban India, which have
left Muslims feeling increasingly vulnerable and anxious (91-98) and the South Asian Islamic
reform movements which seek to exercise ever greater control on “women’s bodies, their
conduct, and deportment” (99). Thus, Borker sees the control of women’s bodies at the madrasa
as the product of both internal and external socio-political factors.
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Additionally, Borker engages with existing scholarship on Muslim women in two different
contexts, namely, South Asia and the wider Muslim world. First, with reference to scholarship
about South Asian Muslim women, Borker takes issue with existing studies that “examine the
relationship between madrasa education and broader patterns of social change” (44) on the
grounds that they fall into one of two categories. Either they emphasize the role of madrasas in
inculcating notions of “domesticated femininity” and the creation of “docile subjects”—this
being a means for the “reproduction” of patriarchal norms (44)—or they fall on the side of
“empowerment,” seeing madrasa education as an avenue for female empowerment through the
community’s increased respect for madrasa graduates, the possibility of their employment as
madrasa teachers, upward mobility through marriage, and the like. Borker believes that both sets
of scholars are guilty of “the tendency to reify modern Islam, modern education, and women’s
empowerment … and present a rather unidirectional account of madrasas” (46). She posits her
study as a corrective that pays attention to everyday life (a key concept in her theorization of her
study) and the “complex manner in which girls negotiate the multiple constraints posed by
parents, madrasa gatekeepers, institutional rules, or broader social structures in order to fashion
their own definitions of becoming educated Muslim women” (47). In other words, Borker wants
us to recognize Muslim women’s agency in the madrasa context, but also to be attentive to
“nuances,” “paradox,” and changes of direction in madrasa students’ lives that—rather than
conforming to our expectations of greater orthopraxy in adulthood—sometimes move in
unexpected directions toward greater secularism. She explores this alternative trajectory in
chapter 7 through the stories of a few madrasa students who, despite opposition from their
families, decided to pursue a university education at Jamia Millia Islamia University.
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Turning to scholarship on women in the Muslim world at large, Borker’s work makes an
intervention in the important debate in the anthropology of Islam occasioned by Saba
Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005). While acknowledging that Mahmood’s insights helped her
understand “practices of piety among madrasa students” (195), Borker aligns her work with those
who believe that Mahmood “creates an illusion of coherence[,] obscuring the complexity of lived
experiences of piety” (54). Instead, she sees “unintended consequences,” “oscillation” of goals
and aspirations between the religious and the secular, and “complexity, ambiguity, and fluidity”
(55) as being more important. The examples of “ambivalence in the practice of piety” include the
madrasa students playing badminton and other games in their spare time (the curriculum did not
include any sports); spending long periods of time staring outside the madrasa’s trellised walls
(which allow a person to look out without being seen from the outside) at the street and the river
Yamuna below; occasionally going out into the lanes outside the school in groups on the pretext
of sudden illness; taking photographs of each other, and other small transgressions of madrasa
rules (198-208). Borker believes that “paying close attention to these ambivalent and
contradictory expressions illustrates the sense of pragmatism and flexibility inherent in the girls’
understandings and practices of piety. [They] do not necessarily view pious submission … and
engaging in practices that transgress madrasa norms in oppositional terms” (208). The students’
behavior is best understood, Borker believes, as a process of tactical negotiation between the
Islamic norms of the madrasa and “greater access to opportunities that lie outside the defined
realms of gendered piety” (250). As noted above, a very small number of madrasa students went
on to study at Jamia Millia Islamia University for a B.A. degree and some took exams as
distance learners.
Conclusion
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While Borker’s study provides many valuable insights derived from fieldwork, I turn now to
some of my reservations about her book. First, she devotes all of four pages (156-60) to
classroom instruction, writing that “lessons were employed as a pedagogic tool to teach moral
values, social etiquettes, rules, regulations and bodily practices that were considered central to
becoming pious Muslim women” (160). While this is certainly true, the content of the Islamic
education at this madrasa is completely sidestepped as being of negligible importance. (Indeed,
Borker writes [174] that when asked what they had learned at the madrasa, students “ignored
classroom lessons” in responding to her question.) Likewise, there is no exploration of the
significance of the Tablighi affiliation of this madrasa in terms of the education imparted. Borker
instead speaks of “Islamic reform” in general terms, as articulations of a “puritan Islamic
identity” (99) responsible for the internal policing of Muslim women’s bodies. All madrasas of
“Islamic reform” are presumed to impart an identical message in the interests of exercising
greater control over women’s bodies and lives.
Dismissing previous scholarship on Muslim women’s education in South Asia, Borker argues
that these scholars’ “grand narratives” (250) fall into the trap of arguing for either the
“reproduction” of patriarchal norms or the “empowerment” of women. What is required, rather,
is the “nuanced” study of “everyday life” at the madrasa, which shows that madrasa students
strategically “circumvent madrasa rules” in a spirit of “pragmatism, flexibility, and fluidity”
(248). The suggestion that students engage with the madrasa’s values tactically rather than from
conviction, however, is undercut by her own interviews with students (chapter 6), which reveal
that students internalize the religious ethos of the madrasa deeply. Furthermore, Borker herself
seems to be making an argument for the “empowerment” of those students who broke barriers by
going on to study at Jamia Millia or to pursue paths other than the one favored by the madrasa.
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Ultimately, I question the way Borker uses the category of “the everyday” to imply that it
is by definition oppositional to the “Islamic” message of the school. The “nuances” of everyday
life end up being an index of “un-Islamic” behavior. Once “everyday life” is excluded from the
realm of that which is “Islamic,” we are left with the larger question of what constitutes Islamic
behavior. If “Islam” is not lived in the everyday, then where is it lived? In my view, how a
person lives his or her life “Islamically” changes over time, based on life experience and
transition through adulthood. It would be interesting if Borker followed the lives of some of the
students five or ten years later, to see what had changed. Perhaps even the Jamia students do, in
fact, live their lives “Islamically” in the long term.
References:
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
Mareike Jule Winkelmann, ‘From Behind the Curtain’: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005).
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