Protik Prakash Banerjee, J. - (1.) If there is a legislation governing a field, how far can an order made by the executive, even under the provisions of the legislation, alter the benefit given by the statute or override the legislative provision? This is the main question among the other issues which arise for consideration before me in these writ petitions. Since they raise common questions of fact and law in case of Assistant Teachers of Arabic, duly recruited in the pass-graduate category of such teachers in West Bengal, with the consent of the parties I heard the matters analogously.The records were produced and arguments were advanced on all issues discussed herein, and written notes of argument filed, regardless of whether they had been pleaded by the petitioners or expressly prayed in all the writ petitions. Therefore, the State had sufficient notice of even those issues which were not expressly pleaded in the writ petition and have addressed them, and cannot be said to have been taken by surprise.
(2.) The Petitioners before this Court have all passed their Mumtazul Muhaddethin (in short "M.M.") examination on diverse dates between 1998 and 2008. This is a degree conferred by Madrasahs in West Bengal. Whether it is equivalent to a graduate degree or a post-graduate degree appeared to the writ petitioners to be material - because they say that due to orders passed by the government, it had become a post graduate qualification, entitling them to a higher scale of pay, without their having to do anything.The State on the other hand, has opposed the entitlement not on the ground that the said qualification is less than that of a post-graduate but because the post to which the writ petitioners were appointed, was not one, which would allow them to get a higher scale of pay if they could show that they possessed a qualification which was higher than that of a pass graduate.
(3.) Perhaps I should begin slightly earlier, with Islamic education in general. Since the goal of Islamic education was never mere memorization, but understanding and applying God's word and submitting to His Will, its pedagogy never placed as much emphasis on formal degrees, as on actual understanding and application of what was taught. Who taught was as important as what he taught, because it was thought that only a person who lived a righteous life could teach properly, not just by his words but by example. However, with the modernization of the world and its education, it became important to teach secular subjects as well as theology and throughout the world, Islamic pedagogy was modified to achieve these goals. Studies show, this pedagogy came to consist of a level of schooling roughly corresponding to the secondary level, and then to a higher secondary level, and except in India, in most other jurisdictions including in Egypt and Pakistan, to what is there the highest level - that of the "Kamil", which in Pakistan has the same status as a post-graduate degree, and incorporates the graduate level. Strangely enough, in traditional Islamic pedagogy, before modernization, the person who could teach a student, was someone who had been given that "Authority", and he was generally known as an "Aalim", which in the modern sense means having qualified at the secondary level.;