Back in 1994 I was teaching RE in a Bradford middle School, Pollard Park, which closed with the reorganisation in the year 2000. The intake of the school was overwhelmingly Asian with the pupils of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin.
As an RE teacher,Pakistan and Islam were daily aspects of my professional life and I was immersed constantly in both. I had come from knowing absolutely nothing about Islam in 1980 to actually knowing about quite a bit by 1994. I had been to Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt in order to see something of Islamic countries at first hand. Later would come Israel and Turkey. However I knew that, in order to really understand my students, I would have to go to Pakistan.
That year I recall a young Muslim student who had come to Pollard Park. He had just returned from an extended visit to Pakistan himself. It was from listening to his tales that the idea of going there myself began to take shape.
Now, it so happened that I had already done some work on the Islamic community in Bradford when I won a fellowship for a term at Bradford College. I used the time to produce two studies about Muslims in the city. During that study period I first began to learn about some of the divisions and sects that existed within Sunni Islam.
Prior to this I had not actually known that there were divisions within Sunni Islam. I had been ignorant in thinking that the world's Sunnis were all one and the same. This is essentially because standard text books rarely mention sects other than the major Sunni/ Shia split. I knew about the four madhabs or legal schools within Sunni Islam but once out in the community I began to discover far more.
I discovered that there were Sunni Muslims who take their philosophy from two major Madrassahs in India, one at Deoband, the other at Barelvi. I also heard the term 'Wahabi' being bandied about frequently too. I was also to find out about Tablighis, Ahl-e-Hadith .
As an RE teacher,Pakistan and Islam were daily aspects of my professional life and I was immersed constantly in both. I had come from knowing absolutely nothing about Islam in 1980 to actually knowing about quite a bit by 1994. I had been to Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt in order to see something of Islamic countries at first hand. Later would come Israel and Turkey. However I knew that, in order to really understand my students, I would have to go to Pakistan.
That year I recall a young Muslim student who had come to Pollard Park. He had just returned from an extended visit to Pakistan himself. It was from listening to his tales that the idea of going there myself began to take shape.
Now, it so happened that I had already done some work on the Islamic community in Bradford when I won a fellowship for a term at Bradford College. I used the time to produce two studies about Muslims in the city. During that study period I first began to learn about some of the divisions and sects that existed within Sunni Islam.
Prior to this I had not actually known that there were divisions within Sunni Islam. I had been ignorant in thinking that the world's Sunnis were all one and the same. This is essentially because standard text books rarely mention sects other than the major Sunni/ Shia split. I knew about the four madhabs or legal schools within Sunni Islam but once out in the community I began to discover far more.
I discovered that there were Sunni Muslims who take their philosophy from two major Madrassahs in India, one at Deoband, the other at Barelvi. I also heard the term 'Wahabi' being bandied about frequently too. I was also to find out about Tablighis, Ahl-e-Hadith .
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