To help deaf students, Indonesian scholar Abdul Kahfi has started an Islamic boarding school so that they can study the Qur’an in sign language.
Opened in 2019, the school has 12 teachers and 115 students between the ages of seven and 28.
Abdul Kafi says the school will make it easier for future generations to understand Islam.
“Nowadays, hearing-impaired students do not know religion deeply because they do not know it from school age,” he said.
The curriculum taught in Indonesian schools has a very limited level of religious education for special children aged eight or nine, while children younger than that cannot receive religious education.
According to UNICEF, three out of 10 children with disabilities go to school in Indonesia. It takes five years for hearing-impaired children to recite and memorize the Qur’an.
Muhammad Farhad, a 10-year-old student, says he wants to become a scholar in the future so that he can pass this knowledge on to others. “Now I can recite thirty verses of the Qur’an,” he said.
There are thousands of Islamic boarding schools in Indonesia that provide education to poor students.