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A lesson on Islamic schools
By
Qurratul-Ain-Tahmina
DHAKA - The film Matir
Moina (Clay Bird), which recently won hearts in the
West, portrays life in a madrassa, or Islamic
religious school, and in so doing confronts issues of
tolerance and the perception that such institutions are
a breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalists.
The film is set in the 1960s against the
backdrop of Bangladesh's (then East Pakistan's) national
liberation war and follows the life of Anu, a quiet
teenager who is sent off to a madrassa by his
orthodox father because the boy's left-thinking liberal
uncle is exposing him to "heathen" festivals.
But coming from a financially comfortable
family, Anu is a misfit at the madrassa, where
most of the children belong to Bangladesh's underclass.
But soon the teenager finds a receptive ear in an
affectionate, liberal teacher who tells his class
mythological stories and encourages them to open their
minds.
Anu also finds a friend in Rokon, a
highly imaginative orphan who tries to cope with the
seminary's strict order by creating his own world,
leading the director to explore themes of freedom of
thought and belief within the confines of the madrassa.
The setting of this 98-minute feature also
coincides with the period during which East Pakistan
rejects the political ideology of Muslim Pakistan,
culminating in the West Pakistani military regime
targeting millions of Bengalis in a systematic campaign
of mass murder.
"Ours was a madrassa,
essentially non-political," reminisces Tareque Masud,
the film's director, about his early schooling in an
Islamic seminary, "but feeling threatened by the
secularist views getting stronger outside, some of my
teachers began taking a stand".
In the film, the
head teacher tells his Friday congregation, "We should
be ready if needed for jihad in order to save our Muslim
country from the irreligious influences of the
secularists." But the liberal teacher declares, "We are
to raise the poor and orphan children given into our
care as true Muslims, not to involve them in politics."
In many ways, Matir Moina is a film about
human bondage in all its forms, as embodied in the
film's Clay Bird metaphor and given life by the movie's
mystic singer who implores, "Why did you infuse my heart
with longing if you did not grant my wings the strength
to fly?"
In today's Bangladesh, about 15,000
primary school level madrassas, with over 2.6
million children enrolled, provide the only shelter
available to many of the country's poor kids and
orphans.
The film offers a sympathetic view of
madrassas. "But it's not a film about
madrassas," says Masud. "It's essentially about
the conflict between rigidity and openness, about
relationships between people blindly or naively stuck
with a belief system and people open to life."
"Such contradictions and such relationships
exist in all societies," says Masud, "within families,
at social and cultural levels, in politics, and even
within strict institutions like madrassas."
Denouncing madrassas as breeding grounds
for Islamic militants neither portrays the reality in
Bangladesh, nor helps these children, says Masud.
Bangladesh, after all, has not been spared the
fallout from the US-led hunt for terrorists and the
concurrent representation in the mainstream media that
sees potential militants and fanatics lurking in all
Islamic countries and in Islamic schools.
"I
wanted to address the 'Islamophobia' of the wealthy
Western nations, and also to explain to our upper
middle-class, more-Western-than-Western, secularist
intelligentsia the complex role of madrassas in
our society. It simply cannot be perceived in black and
white," Masud explains.
At the Marrakesh Film
Festival in Morocco, where the film won the best
screenplay award this year, reviewers said that Matir
Moina brings out the inner beauty of Islam while
exploring the dangers of its false facade.
The
film in October also won the Director's Award at the
Cannes Film Festival and received French government
financial backing early in its conceptual stage after
winning a screenplay competition for projects from the
developing world.
"Islam essentially encourages
individual pursuit of knowledge and provides the scope
for debates and dialogues while agreeing on the basic
faith," says Masud of the other themes explored in the
film. "In rural Bangladesh, propagated mainly by the
mystics or the Sufis, Islam evolved into an inclusive
faith."
Masud believes this syncretism, the
blending of different beliefs or religious practices, to
be a "living culture" in Bangladesh, despite the
population being overwhelmingly Muslim, and despite
arguments that "room for debate within Islam there is
shrinking".
The people in Matir Moina are
neither demons nor heroes. They are human beings with
insecurities, pain, hopes and frustrations. What is
more, it is a depiction that has gripped audiences
abroad and at home.
A nominally censored version
of the movie premiered in Bangladesh in late October
after being cleared by government censors, who had
initially said that it was unfit for screening within
the country on the grounds of "religious sensitivity".
The censor's code terms such sensitivity as
material that has the potential to create communal
disharmony, to hurt a section of the religious
community's feelings, or which may ridicule religious
sentiment.
The intervention provoked a lot of
curiosity and debate, and generated reports, editorials
and letters to the editor in major newspapers,
overwhelmingly supportive of the film's message and its
screening.
"The film takes a very sympathetic
view of madrassa education, which contrasts
radically with the Western depiction of Muslim religious
education in such institutions," an editorial in the
English-language Daily Star said. "Whatever has been
shown in the movie would be critical of any
religion-based education system in any society in any
part of the world," the editorial added.
(Inter
Press Service)
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