So many times my parents would ask me, ‘How did you get here?’ They meant how did I mess up and become irreligious. So now I am asking myself the same question.
When I was a child I attended madrasa both in the morning and in the evening because papa wanted me to learn Qaidah recitation. He also sent me to Ansar Ud Deen because the teaching there was in Arabic and the girls wore the hijab. Sometimes, instead of attending the madrasa, we would go and play games. When the mallams caught us they would beat us and make us cry. Papa also punished me when I failed to attend the madrasa.
Each day the madrasa mallam gave me a new line of the Quran to read and, if I didn’t read it correctly, he would simply give me another line the next day. Not surprisingly, at the age of twelve I wasn’t fluent in Qaidah recitation but I still graduated with the other students and papa was very proud. He slaughtered a goat in celebration and bought me expensive clothes to wear.
Papa made me continue at the madrasa, but I was now becoming a teenager and I was losing interest. When walking to the madrasa I often made a detour to my friend’s house and we would talk about boys for a while before going on to the madrasa. Sometimes papa would send my siblings to check if I was at the madrasa and on one occasion when I was absent the mallam told them that he had sent me out on an errand.
I thought this meant the mallam had my best interests at heart, but he started to arrange for the two of us to be alone together and then he would lay hands on me. The first time this happened I thought it was a mistake, but it happened again and again. Then one day I opened his Quran and found a love letter that he had written to me.
I was 14 at the time and I became scared that he would do something that would mean I had to marry him. I was so afraid that I stopped going to the madrasa and this time papa couldn’t make me go. I was through with Qaidah recitation.
This behaviour by my mallam was one of the reasons I started having doubts about religion. I wondered why he would touch me like that when we were told to be pious and pure, that God rewards virginity, and we should keep ourselves for our husbands.
A few years later the mallam did actually impregnate one of his students. He was arrested but, since the student was no longer a minor, they eventually married and she never returned to education. He is now in his 60s, she is in her late 20s, and they have three children. As for me, I thank my stars that I left the madrasa and didn’t go back because it could have been me he took advantage of.
By Salimat Zakariyah