Selasa, 10 November 2009

Placing Arabic as Medium of Instruction at Islamic School
in Mandailing Natal

Abdul Rozak Tanjung
Siala Sampagul Agricultural Group

Arabic has been a main language yet has not been medium of instruction within a lot of Islamic Schools in Mandailing Natal,--a regency in North Sumatra Province, Indonesia which is the region always associated and called as little Mecca. All literatures as well as its scripts are in Arabic, except for some subjects at the first year where were written in Malay Arabic meaning that the scripts is Arabic and the sentences is in Malay. It is quite interesting that there are plenty Islamic scholars within the region who master Arabic grammatically much better than Arabian themselves.

However, most of them failure in practicing daily conversation in Arabic since the medium instruction is bilingual that are Mandailing language and Malay. Mustafawiyah Islamic school for instance has produced a lot of Islamic clerics who master Arabic pretty well. It has been the biggest Islamic school within the region or even one of the biggest Islamic schools in the country. The foundation of the school was also based on Islamic school curricula from Saudi which was brought by its founding father Mustafa Husein before 1912.

Mustafawiyah Islamic school has been the main school and educational institution within the region for about one hundred years. Most of local folks in the very beginning spent their time to take up Islamic courses in the school and this situation is kept maintained nowadays. It is quite common that most of Islamic clerics in villages within the region graduated from the school and they are always the Islamic law counselors in their own village. Since most of their theoretical books written and passed in Arabic, They are master the language grammatically and are able to translate word-by-word of Koran as the holy book and main reference for Islamic law.

Does the use of Arabic within Islamic schools in Mandailing Natal work effectively? It is an interesting question to be answered. It is for some extends very effective where they can catch up all subjects in its original language. However, the failure of placing Arabic as the medium of instruction made them impossible to be part of such bigger seminaries conducted overseas. As I said earlier, they obviously master Arabic grammatically but being a speaker in a seminar overseas particularly in Arabic speaking countries requires them to master Arabic conversation.


What is else the missing opportunity of them by this situation?. It is like most of Indonesians knowing English grammatically yet failure to communicate with the language. The most important part which is missing is their chance to start making and building networks which enable them to join into bigger international communities. They will not be part of international seminars conducted in Arabic though they must be able to be speakers or at least be participants.

To prepare the school's disciples to be able to be part of such academic and counseling forums in the future, the school management along with the government permission must start placing Arabic as medium of instruction in the school though must be firstly implemented in the second or third year of their course in the school. This is the idea of this article writer to make much profits can be gained by the school disciples in the future.