Over the past century the madrasas of northern Kurdistan have assumed the very important role of preserving Kurdish culture, social life, language and literature. This task has often been difficult and fraught with hardship. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, the Turkish government officially banned the system as a whole and actively shut down the majority of existing madrasas. Nonetheless, Kurdish scholars and local people in the Kurdistan region have managed to sustain the institution of madrasa education even under these difficult political and economic circumstances. For decades these madrasas have survived, unofficially or semi-officially, under the name of associations and foundations, thanks to local facilities and resources.
The importance and function of the madrasa in Muslim society is implicit in the very name itself. The word ‘madrasa’ is an Arabic-loanword utilized in many Arabic-influenced languages such as Kurdish, Persian, Urdu and Turkish. In accordance with the patterns of the Arabic language, the term madrasa is derived from the infinitive D-R-S, or dars, a word that carries multiple meanings. Among these meanings, one is ‘to read a book repeatedly in order to master and memorize it’; another is ‘teaching and learning’. The letters of this infinitive are then fitted into a particular pattern, represented by the paradigm maf’ala, (therefore: madrasa), a morphological structure that signifies a noun of place or time. Madrasa is thus the place or time of learning and teaching, of mastering and memorizing inherited wisdoms.
More specifically, the term madrasa as used in the Kurdish region refers to civil, non-profit and non-governmental Islamic boarding schools or institutions that specialize in the traditional sciences. Alternatively, until quite recently, and in certain circles even until today, those madrasas have been called in Kurdish a ‘hojra’, which means a chamber, where the traditional Islamic sciences are taught.
The educational system of the madrasas is unique. A student is not expected to graduate within a predetermined and limited number of years; rather, graduation from a madrasa is based on the capability and effort that students show throughout their years of study. Graduation is subject to satisfactory completion of the training curriculum. It currently takes around six to eight years of continuous study to complete.
Although the madrasas of Kurdistan do not have written rules or a specific mechanism or institutional body by which they organize and govern themselves, they follow a well-organized curriculum that has been established through generations of oral tradition. This curriculum has allowed the madrasas of Kurdistan to develop an educational system unparalleled in today’s Islamic world.
These Kurdish madrasas continue to possess an unsurpassed curriculum consisting of three main parts:
The first major part of the curriculum is a study of the classical Arabic language and literature, consisting of Morphology (sarf), Syntax (nahw), Philosophy of Language (‘ilm al-wad’) and Rhetoric (balagah), which is in turn composed of Word Order (‘ilm al- mā’āni), Figures of Speech (‘ilm al-bayān) and Embellishments (‘ilm al-badi’). The second part of the curriculum is composed of the rational sciences, such as Formal Logic and the Ethics of Disputation and Dialectic (ādāb al-bahth wal-munādharah). Together, these two major parts constitute the Instrumental Sciences, the ‘tools of learning’ (‘ulum al-alah). The last part of the curriculum encompasses the more explicitly Islamic sciences, such as Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), traditions of the Prophet (hadith), Islamic Law (fiqh), Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (usūl al-fiqh), and Theology (kalām).
There are a number of important pedagogical differences that mark Kurdish madrasas and other traditional Islamic schools. Firstly, madrasa education is based on the mutual volition of teacher and student. The teacher chooses the student and vice versa. Secondly, and most importantly, virtually all instruction is conducted one-on-one. For five and a half days each week, from Friday evening to Thursday afternoon, students dedicate themselves to their studies.
A daily schedule of training in the madrasa can be divided into four sections:
The first section is intended for pre-reading of the subsequent day’s teaching and studying. Both teacher and student must prepare for the next day’s lesson through the perusal of a predetermined textbook combined with specific commentaries on the relevant topic. This preliminary study in the madrasa’s terminology is called Mutala’a, which means perusal of the textbook. In the last couple of decades, a line from the Kurdish scholar and poet Shaykh Musharaffah [1] has become the madrasa’s motto, emphasizing the significance of this pre-reading and perusal of the textbook. The maxim reads, “Bi diqqet hûn daîm bikin mûtale, mûtale malekî qet bê zewal e”(“O students! Peruse the book very attentively, because the perusal of the book is an eternal, perpetual treasury”).
The second section of the training involves direct engagement with the teacher. Throughout the day, the teacher elucidates and teaches the Arabic textbook to each student individually, word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, offering an in-depth analysis of the topic in Kurdish. In some madrasas, beginning and intermediate students repeat and review the contents of the class in the presence of the teacher right after he has finished teaching.
The third section of madrasa training consists of peer learning and group review, known as muzakara. After the student has received his day’s instruction from the teacher, in order to better understand and master the class, he has to sit, repeat and discuss the class with his peers, as well as with advanced students who have already mastered the topic.
These three sections of the typical madrasa education, namely, perusal of the textbook (mûtala), teaching, and group review (muzakara) can be regarded as a form of conceptual learning.
There is also a fourth section of the curriculum, which in a way serves as the culmination of the previous three. This is the memorization of the textbooks, which is highly significant and mandatory for mastering each of the instrumental sciences. After the three prior steps, the student is expected to memorize the topic taught in the textbook word-by-word, line-by-line, before the following day, when he must recite to the teacher, verbatim, what he has memorized. Students of the madrasas can often be heard repeating a verse of poetry from Kurdish scholar and poet Ehmedê Xanî that emphasizes the importance of repeating what has been studied and memorized:
“Heta tu dewr û dersan, nekî tekrar û mesrûf
Di dunyayê tu nabî, ne meşhûr û ne me‘rûf.”
(You will never become renowned and famous in this world
Unless you repeat and labor over your lessons.)
The memorization of the textbook is essential, but this does not mean that madrasa education is simple rote learning. Students are expected not just to repeat but to fully understand the depths of what they learn. Thus, while the repetition and recitation are performed each day of the week except Friday, every Thursday the teacher examines the student on what he has memorized— and, most importantly, what he has learned— throughout the previous week.
Finally, there are no official diplomas (comparable to the degrees granted by today’s universities) conferred upon graduation, only a license termed the ijaza in the Islamic educational tradition. Issued directly by the teacher, the ijaza attests that the student has completed the aforementioned curriculum and lists the books that the student now has authority to teach and transmit to others.
Mahsuk Yamac is a scholar of classical Islamic sciences and the Director of Graduate Studies at Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California.
[1] Seyda Shaykh Musharaffah Ozcan, Kurdish Sufi scholar and poet. (1926- 2008)