Colonial Education Systems and the Spread of Local Religious Movements: The Cases of British Egypt and Punjab

Abstract

Most education in the pre-colonial Middle East and South Asia was inextricably permeated by religion, in that it relied heavily on study or memorization of religious scriptures and rituals for the purpose of training believers, or on the use of religious texts or stories to teach ostensibly secular subjects such as geography or history. Colonial penetration of these areas introduced a new model of Western education, in which the curriculum was dominated by material whose truth claims were not based on religious faith, and which were not taught through the medium of religious texts. Religion, if allowed at all, was confined to discrete classes on the topic. This marginalization or exclusion of religious material did not necessarily mean that the resulting education was inexorably secular: Gauri Viswanathan has demonstrated that British educators in India circumvented policies forbidding the teaching of Christianity in government schools by creating English literature courses designed “to convey the message of the Bible.” In contrast to its predecessors, however, Western-style education was based on the conceptualization of religion as a discrete subject separate from and incapable of shedding reliable light upon worldly matters, and on the premise that it was mastery of these worldly matters, rather than knowledge of sacred scriptures and rituals, that would bring students success. In this model, religion would be understood “as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions and practiced in one's spare time.”