In the past two months, as I have moved with my family from
Spain to Denmark, my life and work have placed me in several different
international communities. Within these communities, little capsules of
globalization, expectations are defied as cultural borders are crossed and
blurred with dizzying speed. I am teaching at the Danish Institute for Study
Abroad (DIS), whose 1,000 students come from primarily U.S. colleges and
universities to study abroad in Denmark, but whose diversity, like American
college students overall, mirrors the globe. I have met students from Hong
Kong, Pakistan, Kenya, and, Ghana, already “international students” in the
U.S., now studying abroad again. “My parents didn’t really understand it,” a
young woman from Pakistan told me about her decision to come to Denmark, after
already being settled in a prestigious private college in Massachusetts. “I
said, ‘Why not? It’s another experience. I want to learn all I can before I go
back to Pakistan and try to improve education there.” More on her later.
At my daughter’s international school across town, a small
English-speaking school that attracts families who are either turned off by or
excluded from the pricier Copenhagen International School, her classmates are
from Zimbabwe, Italy, Greece, the U.S., India, Pakistan and Nepal. Perhaps
because of this diversity, and the fact that all the children are outsiders to
Denmark, she felt at home there from day one. A new form of community based on
difference and un-belonging was born. That might be the subject of another blog
post.
But yesterday I visited yet another international community
within Copenhagen: a Muslim independent school founded by Pakistani Muslims 25
years ago. There are some 20 Muslim independent schools in Denmark, private
schools subsidized by the state. I went on this school visit with a group of
students from DIS studying child diversity and development and our Iraqi-Danish
host. Fortunately, the student from Pakistan, who I’ll call Sara, was on this
visit. As we walked to the school from the train station, Sara asked if the
school, Iqbal International School, was named after Allama Iqbal, the famous
Pakistani poet. Our host did not know, but once at the school, we confirmed
that it was. Delighted, Sara explained to us that Iqbal was a Pakistani hero because he
had dreamed of independence when Pakistan was still part of British India, and
worked closely with Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This crucial piece
of the school’s history would have remained unknown to me had it not been for
Sara. Sara, twice removed from her country, found a piece of her home in global
space, and ushered us in.
What does global space look like here? It is a class of 5th
grade boys wearing Nike and Adidas athletic gear, introducing themselves to us one
by one as, “I am from Somalia, but I live in Denmark.” And girls, less numerous
and seated at the front of the room, wearing colorful headscarves and tunics.
Although the school was founded by Pakistani Muslims, in recent years its
Pakistani population has declined while the Somali population exploded. I do
not yet know this history. In this global space, their English teacher was the
daughter of Moroccan immigrants, born and raised and educated in Copenhagen. She
told us that although parents choose the school because they believe it follows
the Islamic educational tradition, it is not at all like a school in Somalia.
Last December she taught the students about Danish Christmas and received a flurry
of parent complaints. “But I think they need to learn about Christmas and the
Christian religion,” she told us, “that’s why they are here.” Her colleague,
the Arabic teacher, told us the vision of the school has always been to “teach
our religion and our mother tongue.” That means that in addition to Danish and
English, the school offers instruction in Arabic, Somali, and Urdu. Clearly
there are as many different ways of being Muslim as there are histories of
people in the school, and none of these are frozen in time. The headmaster
himself is a Danish Muslim, one of an estimated 2-5,000 Danish converts.
While many voices in the Danish media criticize the
formation of Muslim schools as separatist, saying, “They come to live in their own world, which
creates rifts between them and the Danish society and its values,” this
perspective clearly fails to capture the dynamic reality of the Muslim
independent school and the global space it represents. The space is neither
Denmark nor Somalia or Pakistan, but a new space of evolving Muslim self-determination,
where things remain by changing and change to remain. Allama Iqbal, I
later read online, had justified the foundation of a Muslim state in a letter
to Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, in 1937 by asking, “Why
should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations
entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India
are?” The school bearing his name in Copenhagen now asks, What does Muslim
self-determination mean in the global era? The answer is still being debated,
but it is clear it does not conform to what extremists on either side imagine. A Moroccan-Danish English
teacher may teach students about Danish Christmas, while Sara, a Pakistani U.S.
college student walking the streets in Copenhagen, tells me that her favorite
time of the year is Ramadan, because it is at Ramadan that she feels most
strongly a part of her community. I can’t help but think that she would make
Allama Iqbal proud.
