Religion and Change
Religion and Change
Oxford and the Madrasas of South Asia
This chapter opens the debate on the religious actor by questioning whether religion, like other institutions, is open to change. It explores the relative strength of strategic versus evolutionary theories of institutional change in explaining the reversal in the fortunes of South Asian madrasas. Once responsible for grooming the elite in Muslim India, in recent decades they have primarily come to be viewed as a refuge for the poor. To further enrich the analysis, the experience of South Asian madrasas is compared with that of the University of Oxford—an institution that also has its origin in religious education. These two traditions started out in the twelfth century with a similar initial resource endowment and comparable supply and demand pressures, and followed a similar pace of consolidation over several centuries. Yet from the seventeenth century on their paths diverged: Oxford (with its Christian underpinnings) engaged with modernity, while madrasas (and Islam) opted for disengagement.
Keywords: religion, institutional change, South Asian madrasas, Islamic schools, Muslims, Universitoy of Oxford, Christianity, Islam
Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
