New Delhi
Speaking on “Educating a Modern India” at the Festival of Ideas hosted by NewsX, The Sunday Guardian, and India News, former deputy chief of Army staff and former vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Lt. Gen. Zameer Uddin Shah (retd), said: “Madrasas need to be modernised, and we are on the path to reformation.”
Speaking about why he joined AMU, he said that AMU required discipline in both students and teachers. “Today AMU is known for its research and has done the most important research, like cleaning up the Ganga, and we also presented a paper to the Prime Minister, who gave us a responsibility to clean the Ganga in 5 years, not by sewage treatment drugs, but by green technology. The second thing we are working on is the desalination of seawater,” he added.
Acknowledging the drawbacks of madrasas, he said, «The problem with the madrasas is that the teachers do only the Quran and nothing else; they are not widely travelled, they are not well educated, they are only educated in Islam.»
«So, we have carried out a programme of trained teachers where we get madrasa teachers to try and communicate modern knowledge, and only once they have invited modern knowledge will they be able to pass it on,» he added.
Asked about the meeting in 2022 he had with RSS chief Mohan Bhagavad with the prominent members of the Muslim community, he said, the meeting was very important and should continue, and “we are having another one; we had already two, and this is the third one. See, the problem between both the communities is the lack of communication; we need to understand each other›s point of view; we need to just dispel the misunderstanding; so it is important to have a constant dialogue between the leaders of the social organisations and the masters of themselves.”
«We want an India that is progressing; we want an India that is simulated; all communities, all languages, and all regions think this is the opening of the dialogue,» he added.