Madrassas help students make sense of the world (Comment)

April 20, 2012 at 3:25 PM

When I first came to Jamia Millia Islamia to teach, some 30 years ago, the madrassa in my mind was a quaint holdover from the past. In the course of studying colonial Indian history I had read about the Darul Uloom at Deoband and the Nadwa in Lucknow, but I didn't think of them as living institutions; they belonged to the past as firmly as Humayun's tomb did.