Asian Window

When 12-year-old Muhammad Imran’s widowed mother did not have money to feed her son, she put him on a train from her village in Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai’s Minara Masjid madrasa. Many of the estimated 1,035,000 children who live in Islamic seminaries across India arrived in the same way-shelter and food are as important to their parents as education.

Now, as India’s rising prosperity stirs new desires and gives birth to new dreams, the government’s initiative for modernization of madrasas is forcing a catharsis in the community about the kind of education they want to offer their children. But as Muslims largely embrace this change, they have already come to their first hurdle: Just how to do it?

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