ABSTRACT
In late 2000 I submitted a PhD research proposal titled The Construction of Islamic Knowledge in a Women’s Madrasa in Contemporary India, intending to explore a ‘traditional’ institution of Islamic learning for young women in a society where Muslims form a minority. While in the initial setup of the study girls’ madrasas were framed as ‘traditional’ institutions of Islamic learning, this turned out to be problematic. During a brief pilot study in late 2000, carried out in Delhi and Hyderabad, my observations suggested that there was no historical precedent for having public, large scale girls’ madrasas. Even though girls’ madrasas were said to be modeled after the boys’ madrasas in terms of their curriculum, teaching methods, disciplining mechanisms, and the internal hierarchies reflected in the relations between the founders, teachers, and students, the emergence of public girls’ madrasas represents a ‘modern’ phenomenon, since the oldest public girls’ madrasas in post-Partition India were founded in the early 1950s.
