Deoband Quotes

DuriAmong these imported Islamic schools, the Deobandis are the most powerful and closest to the Wahhabis. The name comes from the original madrassa set up in 1866 in a small town near Delhi called Deoband. The madrassa was part of the insular Muslim response to British rule in the nineteenth century, the work of men who felt that Western-style education of the kind proposed by the British, and embraced by the Hindus, would fracture the Muslim community, men who were convinced that a training in the fundamentals of the Quran and the Sharia would shield Indian Muslims from the corruption of the modern world.

The other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi – who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli in the Doab – founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital. With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.