Islamic education and colonial secularism: the Amroha experiment of 1895–96

In September 1895, a boldly innovative trial was begun with the teaching of Islam in a British government school in the town of Amroha, near Delhi. This article returns to the Amroha experiment to consider what it reveals about Indian Muslim exchanges with European administrators on the subject of secular colonial education and, more broadly, to bring under scrutiny the historical engagement of Muslim parties with colonial secularism. By the final decade of the nineteenth century, European officials had joined a number of their Muslim subjects in rejecting the imparting of exclusively secular education in schools and colleges under the management of the colonial state. Arguing for the reconciliation of religious and secular instruction, Viqar-ul-Mulk and his contemporaries capitalized upon growing British anxieties about the moral deficiency of Indian students taught in state educational institutions, exposing colonial concerns over the likelihood of inculcating moral improvement in the absence of religious teaching. Challenging the official separation of religion and pedagogy, they raised the possibility of the accommodation of multiple faiths within the modern Indian nation and state. The Amroha experiment served as a precedent for elite Muslim attempts to found an Indian Muslim university in which Islamic instruction would be imparted. Viqar-ul-Mulk’s successful negotiations with the government inspired further efforts for the revitalization of religious education on the part of Muslim leaders concerned about the survival and strengthening of Islam under colonial rule