madrasah
Arabic
lit. "a place of study,"
from loc. prefix ma- + stem of darasa "he read repeatedly, he studied."
Online Etymology Dictionary,
© 2010 Douglas Harper
***
Among Western countries post-9/11, the Madrasas are often perceived as a place of radical revivalism with a negative connotation of anti-Americanism and radical extremism, frequently associated in the Western press with Wahhabi attitudes toward non-Muslims.
The word madrasah literally means "school" and does not imply a political or religious affiliation, radical or otherwise. They have a varied curriculum, and are not all religious. Some madrasahs in India, for example, have a secularized identity.
Although early Madrasahs were founded primarily to gain "knowledge of God" they also taught other subjects including mathematics and poetry. For example, in the Ottoman Empire, "Madrasahs had seven categories of sciences that were taught, such as: styles of writing, oral sciences like the Arabic language, grammar, rhetoric, and history and intellectual sciences, such as logic."
This is similar to the Western world, in which universities began as institutions of the Catholic church.
The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization examined bias in United States newspaper coverage of Pakistan since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and found the term has come to contain a loaded political meaning: "When articles mentioned 'madrassas,' readers were led to infer that all schools so-named are anti-American, anti-Western, pro-terrorist centers having less to do with teaching basic literacy and more to do with political indoctrination."
Various American public figures have, in recent times, used the word in a negative context, including Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. During Soviet occupation in Afghanistan many CIA official[who?] were found involved in breeding terrorist activities in some of the madrassa schools in northern Pakistan. Those who were involved were not yet handed over to the Pakistani government to present them to courts. It was several times accepted by USA government and admitted by several involved like Donald Rumsfeld, Colon Powell, Bush Sr. etc.[citation needed]
The New York Times published a correction for misusing the word "madrassa" in a way that assumed it meant a radical Islamic school. The correction stated, "An article... said Senator Barack Obama had attended an Islamic school or madrassa in Indonesia as a child referred imprecisely to madrassas. While some (madrassas) teach a radical version of Islam, most historically have not."
(lifted from Wikipedia's article for Madrasah)
Terms and talking points containing loaded political meaning:
He's a(n)
No comments:
Post a Comment