Dissertation

Mediating tradition, modernity and class: The private Islamic schools in Karachi

Riaz, Sanaa

2011

Overview

A school is a site where various class, ethnic, racial and ideological concerns of the students, administrators and teachers meet to produce various social subjectivities (Bourdieu 1990, Apple 2004). However, studies on Islamic schooling, particularly in Pakistan, are focused on orthodox religious seminaries (madrasas) and there is the assumption that the schooling process creates a homogeneous religious subjectivity that is fundamentally extremist, anti-modern and anti-secular in nature (Rahman 1998, Hussain 2008, Jones 2003, Esposito 2003). In this dissertation, I have argued against this limited analysis of Islamic education by presenting my participant-observation based on long-term fieldwork conducted in Karachi, Pakistan from June 2007–June 2008 inside private Islamic schools (PIS) or private parochial schools. The PIS are an emergent educational phenomenon in the urban centers of Pakistan that combine the secular and Western O-level educational system of private schools, which are a mark of status and prestige in the society, with the traditional Islamic educational system of the madrasas. I present observations collected by sitting in on pre-primary through 10th grade level classrooms and through interviews with administrators, teachers, students and parents in various PIS to highlight the way in which Pakistani urbanites are using the schools to define Islamic tradition in accordance with their various professional, class, sectarian, sub-sectarian, political and ethnic and linguistic identities. PIS are not only a growing phenomenon in diasporic communities, but in the post-9/11 political environment they are becoming increasingly relevant in South Asian Muslim communities (Hefner and Zaman 2007). In this dissertation, I have highlighted how Pakistani urbanites are using PIS as a response to the state's inability to provide affordable means of professionally promising secular and religious education, to the state's changing policy on Islamic practice and education, to the scandalization of traditional Islamic education in the international community, and as an alternative engagement with modernity and secular knowledge. Through this ethnographic study, I have argued for a more diverse and nuanced approach to examining the Islamic schooling by examining them in relation to the students, parents, teachers and entrepreneurs' socioeconomic and political dynamics.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Cultural anthropology / Islamic Studies / Religious education
• ISBN: 9781124903873, 1124903879