Page 145 - Seekers Guide Book

The Seeker’s Guide
true sense of the word, such as what prevails in countries
like Japan and Germany. This does not mean that the
Indian Muslim community needs to completely give up
on religious education, but that it needs to go ahead in
secular education. Future religious scholars and leaders of
the Indian Muslim community need to be well updated
with the developing world and receive secular education
today so that they can help extricate the Indian Muslim
community from their current state of backwardness.

There is no discrimination against the Muslim community
in today’s society. The fact is that Muslims are backward
in secular education, because of which they have become
incompetent to thrive in the modern world. And
therefore, they are unable to avail opportunities. Almost
all the jobs and other opportunities are for those who are
trained in modern disciplines, and especially for those
who have professional education. Some Muslims have
now started entering the field of secular education. They
began setting up modern schools and have even started
to update the traditional madrasa curriculum. This is
the correct approach, but one should make sure that
these schools are not ghettoized to just one community
but have admissions open to all. History is replete with
examples of communities that supported and invested in
education to progress and meet the modern standards of
development.

Secondly, the mindset of loss is a major roadblock to the
progressive Muslim mind. The granting of the minority
reservation was a great disservice to the community
because it fostered in them a perennial sense of loss or
deprivation. Once the term ‘minority’ is labelled over

144