Education Gap: Can the Tide Be Turned?
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
The Islamic world, along with Africa, is headed into the backwaters of history. The explanation lies in large part in the growing education gap not only between the Islamic world and the West but also between the Islamic world and the rapidly developing economies of China and India.
Recently, Shanghai Jiao Tong University of China published a list of the top 500 educational institutions in the world. One searches in vain to find even one Muslim institution of learning among the top 500 universities. India can boast of one while China has six institutions in the top 500. Even tiny Israel has produced four universities that are considered world-class.
The rankings were based on a composite score that rated the quality of undergraduate education, facilities, teacher-to-pupil ratio, publications and ideas emerging from the institutions as well as the accomplishments of their alumni. Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech and Cornell are there. But where is the University of Cairo or for that matter Al Azhar, Qum or Nadva? It is no excuse to argue that the ratings are biased in favor of science and technology. The schools in the Islamic world can do better.
The statistics are more dismal when we examine basic education and literacy rates. Illiteracy is rampant in the Islamic world and Africa. According to Wikipedia, the literacy rates in Europe, North America and Australia are in the range of 95 to 99 percent. China has a literacy rate of 90 to 94 percent. By contrast Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh and Niger have literacy rates of less than 50 percent.
The literacy rates in Iran, Algeria and Saudi Arabia are in the 70 to 79 percent bracket while Malaysia and Indonesia can boast a literary rate of 80 to 90 percent. India, which has perhaps the second largest concentration of Muslims in the world, presents a mixed picture. While the overall literacy rates have improved from 18 percent at the time of independence to 65 percent today, the figures for Indian Muslims are not as encouraging. The recently published Sachar Report, commissioned by the Government of India, confirms that the economic, social and educational conditions of Muslims, especially those in Northern India, are worse than those of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
The condition of women is even more appalling. Illiteracy rates among Muslim women may be twice as high as those for men. 70 percent of the women in Kashmir, for instance, are illiterate. It means they cannot even sign their names. Among the Arab states, while 19.8 percent of the men are illiterate, the corresponding number for women is 41.1 percent. The first commandment in the Qur’an was “Iqra…read…” How can a woman know her religious obligations, her rights and responsibilities when she cannot even read the Qur’an?
The reasons for this abysmal picture are both external and internal. Externally, military conflicts, occupation and political domination have taken their toll. Ever since the Islamic world was dismantled and fragmented by the victorious European powers in World War I, the Islamic world has struggled in vain to find a firm political footing. Most of the political conflicts that consume the energies of Muslims today have had their origin since World War I. Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and the horn of Africa are examples. It is impossible to think of education when your life is at stake. Internally, the Islamic world is at loggerheads with itself, rife with dissension and civil conflict, unable to find a common platform and a common focus. The ongoing Shia-Sunni row, the Iran-Iraq war (1978-86) and the Bangladesh conflict (1971) offer glaring illustrations of a Muslim world at war with itself. Tribal divisions, disputes over language, hair-splitting arguments about rituals, and nationalistic chauvinism are common.
Corruption is rampant. Politicians are more focused on stuffing their pockets than paying attention to education. Dictators and kings are more common than elected heads of state. Millions of dollars have reportedly been siphoned off from national treasuries and hidden in Swiss bank accounts by corrupt politicians. Educational infrastructure is crumbling. Many of the universities are nothing more than concrete buildings for the assembly of huge gatherings of students where they are harangued by underpaid professors. Ancient books become fodder for bookworms and rot in decrepit libraries. School officials are more concerned about ceremonies, degrees, decorum and pleasing the politicians than improving the quality of education. Given this environment, students learn more about disruptive politics than about arts and science.
The drag of religious conservatism on education cannot be underestimated. Several years ago I gave a talk to a group of children near Bangalore to inspire them to excel in mathematics and science. Immediately after my talk a mullah stood up and offered a rejoinder in Urdu, “La’nat ho us hisab per, aur la’nat ho us science per, jis se insaan Allah se dur ho jata hai” (curse be on that mathematics and curse be on that science that takes man away from God). Smug in their self-righteousness and comfortable in the darkness of their own ignorance, the mullahs do not wish to see the light of knowledge shine on anyone else. They do not know history, science, mathematics or sociology and they are suspicious of what they do not know. They are like ghosts from the past on the stage of the modern world. Historically, the conservatism of the religious establishment has been a bane of Islamic societies.
For three hundred years, the mullahs of the Ottoman Empire objected to the introduction of the printing press saying that the Word of God (the Qur’an) would be defiled if it came in contact with the wood or the metal of the press. It was only in the year 1728, three hundred years after it made its appearance in Christian Europe, that the printing press was allowed into the Ottoman Empire. It was introduced into India even later, after the Mogul Empire had long passed its zenith.
Illiteracy feeds on poverty and the two reinforce each other in a vicious downward spiral contributing to a high dropout rate. When I was in school, in pre-partition British India, I had a classmate named Ameer. He was among the most brilliant fellow students I came across in my career, Caltech and Cornell included. He always scored 100 out of 100 in mathematics, history and Urdu. His father was a destitute street vendor who sold kerosene from a pushcart. Ameer was forced to drop out of school after the sixth grade to support his family. In 1967, long after I had finished my doctoral work in the United States, I ran into Ameer, in tattered clothes, pushing a dusty, grimy oil cart in the village, just like his father had done twenty years earlier.
There are thousands, perhaps millions of Ameers in Pakistan, India and throughout the world who are forced to drop out because their parents cannot support them in school. Poverty is a curse on humankind. It enslaves the self and saps the very essence of the soul. It must be extirpated.
There is a one to one relationship between education and economic well being. Poverty is a sister of illiteracy. The world has moved from a commodities-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Illiterate men end up as porters and taxi drivers. Educated men and women become CEOs and presidents of corporations.
A visit to Dubai, for instance, is very instructive. So much of the brainpower that transforms the desert into burgeoning cities comes from Europe and America while the low paying muscle power comes from Pakistan and India. China and India are emerging as powerhouses of the future not because they have enormous natural resources (they always had them) but because of their education base and the value-add they provide in a world economy. So much of the Muslim world splurges in oil wealth. Oil is a deplete-able commodity and will run out one day. But knowledge will endure and knowledge-based economies will survive and prosper.
A thriving knowledge-based economy forms the foundation of political power. It is instructive to note that there is a movement afoot to bring in Japan, Germany, Brazil and India as permanent members into the security council of the United Nations. By contrast, there is not a single Muslim country that has the political or economic power to aspire to such a position. Japan and India command knowledge-based economies. The Islamic world does not.
Education fosters self-awareness. It awakens us to our spiritual heritage, lights up the consciousness of our culture and history and brings about an understanding of our place in the world at large. It opens our horizons to what is within and what lies beyond. It helps build bridges to other cultures and civilizations. Self-awareness makes us human. “I am aware, therefore I am”, is the succinct way to put it. In all of God’s creation, there is nothing as unique, as inquisitive, and as daring as the human mind. It is the seat of rational thought and the monarch of the world of possibilities. How can a person reach for heaven when he or she cannot even conceive of the possibility of heaven?
