ASK MAULANA — Your Questions, Answered

It has nothing to do with pride based on a misplaced sense of superiority. The Quran asks us to be sympathetic well-wishers of others. Why is it that most madrasa students tend to come from poorer families? This was not the case in the pre-colonial period. One reason is that middle class parents would prefer to send their children to ‘modern’ schools because the jobs that madrasa graduates get are not well-paid. The salaries of madrasa teachers must be increased. In that way, one may hope that more bright children might prefer to enrol in madrasas' and become ulema. In the past, madrasas' produced brilliant scholars and leaders, but this is not the case today. How do you look at the sensationalist and distorted reporting about madrasas' in large sections of the mass media? The media is impelled by profit-making motives and thrives on ‘hot’ news in order to feed the market that it caters to. It is not interested in ‘soft’ news, because it is not profitable. So, it thrives on sensational news and selective reportage. One day, I was listening to the Hindi service of a radio station, and a listener called up from Mauritius and asked why the radio station did not give much coverage to Mauritius, which also has a large Hindispeaking population. The programme presenter replied, half-jokingly, that the media is based on ‘hot’ news, and that no such ‘hot’ news ever seems to emanate from Mauritius! ‘Create some hot news there’, he told the caller, ‘and we’ll report about your country!’ So, the point is that if you want to change the way the media reports about something, you have to work at changing people’s mindsets. o