Why Present Muslims Are Lagging Behind in Education

delegated the task of tutoring to polytheist teachers who were stringent in their opposition to Islam. The teachers of the first school in Islam were pagan non-Muslims, while the followers of Islam in the later period have lagged behind in education solely because they didn’t allow their youth to go to schools that employed the services of teachers from among Christians, Hindus, the British and other non-Muslim communities. It was extremely imprudent on the part of Muslims to hamper their children’s educational progress and leave them intellectually unenlightened owing the presence of non-Muslim teachers in educational institutes. These are stark realities of history. The first school of Islam, established after the Battle of Badr, consisted of teachers who were prisoners of war and hostile to Islam. Regardless of the precariousness of the situation and the high risks involved, the Prophet entered into an agreement with these men according to which they could obtain their freedom in return for educating ten Muslim children. It is ironical that while the first school in Islam set up by the Prophet had opponents of Islam as teachers, Muslims of the later period prevented their children from receiving education because the tutors and lecturers at schools were Hindu, Christian or British. I wonder how this absurd notion came into existence. We can only