The Religious Education of Muslim Women in Bangladesh

Abstract

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 Darul-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 womenis 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.