Introduction

Historically speaking, late-nineteenth-century Muslim reformist ideas influenced the establishment of the earliest public schools for Muslim girls. Prior to that period, education for girls in Islamic matters was mainly a private affair, but it eventually became one of the main issues of public discourse, as it unfolded in the then just introduced Urdu print-culture, in the reformist (male) madrasas, and in voluntary associations or anjumans, which formed the link between the domestic and public realms. By the early twentieth century, education for girls in the confinement of the zenana or women's quarters of the home existed side by side with the first public girls’ schools for Muslim girls. These developments, along with the overall increasing literacy, Urdu print culture, and the democratisation of access to Islamic texts were precursors to the establishment of girls’ madrasas. While there are several valuable studies examining boys’ madrasas in India, published information on their female counterparts is scanty. In the course of my research my interlocutors suggested that the first larger, public girls’ madrasas in post-Partition India still bore witness to the earlier forms of ‘home teaching’, for example in the preservation of value-oriented or adab education.

As practices are best discerned through participant observation, interviews, and informal conversations with students, teachers, and founders of girls’ madrasas over a longer period of time, a large portion of my study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a girls’ madrasa in New Delhi, which hosts roughly 180 students between twelve and seventeen years of age. The madrasa that I shall henceforth call Jamiᒼat al-Niswan was established in 1996 under the patronage of the Nadwat al-Ulama in Lucknow and recruits students from Delhi and other cities as well as villages from all over India. The links between the Jamiᒼat al-Niswan and the Tablighi Jamaᒼat formally began via the Nadwat al-Ulama madrasa in Lucknow, as the founders of the girls’ madrasa adopted its curriculum with its strong emphasis on Arabic. Moreover, the male founders of this particular madrasa and the male members of its core families are active in the lay preacher's movement known as the Tablighi Jamaᒼat.