Philosophies of Islamic Education

Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses

Mujadad Zaman, Nadeem Memon, Mujadad Zaman, Nadeem A. Memon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317657637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

The study of Islamic education has hitherto remained a tangential inquiry in the broader focus of Islamic Studies. In the wake of this neglect, a renaissance of sorts has occurred in recent years, reconfiguring the importance of Islam's attitudes to knowledge, learning and education as paramount in the study and appreciation of Islamic civilization. Philosophies of Islamic Education, stands in tandem to this call and takes a pioneering step in establishing the importance of its study for the educationalist, academic and student alike. Broken into four sections, it deals with theological, pedagogic, institutional and contemporary issues reflecting the diverse and often competing notions and practices of Islamic education. As a unique international collaboration bringing into conversation theologians, historians, philosophers, teachers and sociologists of education Philosophies of Islamic Education intends to provide fresh means for conversing with contemporary debates in ethics, secularization theory, child psychology, multiculturalism, interfaith dialogue and moral education. In doing so, it hopes to offer an important and timely contribution to educational studies as well as give new insight for academia in terms of conceiving learning and education.

Part I

Theology and the Idea of Islamic Education

1 Philosophical Considerations of Islamic Education—Past and Future

Interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

This chapter is a transcript of an interview with Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr conducted in January 2014 (The George Washington University, USA) for the purpose of this volume. Professor Nasr is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of Islamic Studies and has written extensively on the philosophy of Islamic education and the ‘Islamization of Knowledge.’ In order to draw out further reflections from his extensive work, this interview centers upon his educational reflections and thoughts for the field. The following transcript is an edited version of the interview conducted by Omar Qargha, a contributor to this volume.

Principles of Islamic Education

1) Considering your research and experiences in Islamic education over the past half century, academically and as a practitioner, could you comment initially on whether there are motivating principles (or a logos) which one may identify signifying Islamic education?

If you mean rethinking this question in light of the principles of education, then a caveat should be asserted concerning the fact that there exists (by the principle of necessity and not accidentally) divergent ways through which one can understand Islamic education. This is manifest, for example, in the ways curricula, disciplines, and academic structures are apparently different from one another in Persia, Turkey, or Malaysia, etc. However, there are also, and often more importantly, convergent ways in which these ostensible differences become secondary to what may be thought of as a continuing theme or ‘pattern’ to Islamic education. This is essential to remember considering the manner in which the destructive influences of modern life have ruptured and often destroyed premodern Islamic ideas of knowledge, the sacred, identity, and life. That we can still speak of a functioning and vibrant idea of Islamic education in the 21st century is itself remarkable. Whatever may be said of the differences in the practice of Islamic education in various countries, there is a unifying inheritance, which remains consistently ‘Islamic.’

Islam has never encouraged nor itself created a monoculture as well as no formal magisterium or religious councils controlling religious learning. The history of the madrasa system seems emblematic of this process of decentralization, wherein the principles of learning and teaching remained decidedly universal despite local differences. When it comes to studying the details of Islamic educational systems, one discovers that learning, while being based on universal Islamic principles, was tailored to the particular culture and social conditions of that part of the Islamic world in which an educational institution functioned. This diversity was not an historical peculiarity but something encouraged by Muslim societies, a fact that is often forgotten today. Subsequently, when we think about Islamic education, we must think of ‘diversity within unity.’

There are local differences in various aspects of Islamic civilization, for example, between a Moroccan mosque and one in Lahore or somewhere farther east. However, there are also certain principles and forms that are universal and shared between them from vegetal designs, arabesques, vaulting, and geometric patterns, etc., to their shared concepts of space. There were also local conditions, be they related to climate or culture, that though these mosques do not look identical they bear close family resemblance to one another. The result of this is that someone from Scandinavia, for example, who has had no previous contact with the Islamic world, seeing a Moroccan mosque and then a Persian or Indian one, would notice that they are from the same civilization; he could discern the unity and certain profound similarities but at the same time their local differences. Although these examples demonstrate ‘unity in diversity’ within Islamic architecture, for Islamic education, the same can be said in that it follows a similar historical and cultural trajectory. It would be useful for the emerging academic field of comparative Islamic educational studies to be perceptive of this way of looking at things. Returning to your question, one may say that this is how we might understand the logos for Islamic education, with the logos referring to the principles that created so many Islamic educational institutions under very diverse conditions.

As for the madrasa system, certain disciplines and subjects were taught universally in them, such as the Quran, the Arabic language, Ḥadīth (Prophetic sayings and teachings), fiqh (law), kalām (theology), historical aspects of the sīrah (Prophetic biography), etc. Other aspects of the curricula were not uniform, as we see, for example, by taking the curriculum of al-Azhar University in the Fāṭimid period and comparing it to the Niẓāmiyya schools in the Seljuq era. It is very interesting to note that there are many common elements between them, but they also had a number of differing features as well. In general, one can observe, despite some local differences, the universal presence of a distinct philosophy of education related to the principles of Islamic learning (underpinned by knowing God) and subsequently a system for the transmission of knowledge and teacher-student relations, all of which have held remarkably intact as a living tradition till today, at least in certain places in the Islamic world.

Reviving ‘Authentic’ Islamic Education

2) With the associated problems of colonization and secular modernity still prominent within Muslim-majority countries, could you comment on how specifically these countries (as well as elsewhere in the world) one may begin to revive authentic conceptions of Islamic education rooted in historical and spiritual traditions.

It is accurate to say that in the Islamic world, Western influences have come to dominate more and more of the educational and intellectual landscape in nearly every sphere since the 19th century, except for some of the madrasas. It is for this reason that the madrasa is a good starting point for our discussion. Their exemptions from the modernizing processes in the Islamic world were perhaps due in some places to geographical isolation or the fact that they were excluded from modernized segments of society. However, as they exist today, they do not provide (on the whole) sustainable models of retaining institutional identities for Islamic education. As a consequence of historical processes, the subjects taught there, by which I mean their formal curriculum, have become increasingly limited. This fact is also true, as far as Islamic subjects are concerned, of those madrasas that were more openly influenced by modernistic ideas. In a madrasa in Egypt a thousand years ago, for example, you would have studied mathematics, but even as recently as three centuries ago such subjects began to be excluded from the curricula. There was a shriveling in many areas of the curriculum even before the advent of European modernism and colonial contact. Yet, this process was not uniform throughout the Islamic world. There are of course variations and in some places, such as the Indian subcontinent, ‘traditional’ education, which was of course religious, survived in more recognizable ways as related to traditional scholarly models, for example, the Farangi Mahal with its intellectual heritage going back to 11th-century Baghdad and the Niẓāmiyya Schools.

With the arrival of modernizing trends, however, and the colonial context, many of the academic ‘Islamic’ disciplines were either neglected or recast in terms often alien to their origins. The problem was further exacerbated by the elite education of indigenous colonized classes along Western models, which further marginalized classical pedagogic models. The stark difference between religious and nonreligious secular learning remains evident till this day in such countries as Iran, Pakistan and Egypt, wherein almost 90% of the children of the elite classes attend Western schools. The significance of these trends, amidst the preponderance of secular thinking based on secular rationalism, which can be observed around the Islamic world, is problematic to the extent that they restrict or reject other ‘forms of knowing’ and ‘ways of being’ in the world and cause an indoctrination of the Muslim intelligentsia.

To help create more balance in Islamic educational institutions and provide alternatives to these often globalizing and monopolistic modernist tendencies, we must revisit the idea of the classical madrasa and what it has stood for traditionally, namely, as an institution standing at the apotheosis of authentic Islamic intellectual inquiry in the Islamic world. Yes, we are facing a major crisis. Within the context of existing conditions, I believe that there are some practical steps that can be taken. Firstly, to strengthen the madrasa system wherever it continues to exist, which does not simply mean to start merely teaching physics or other natural sciences in them i.e., to turn them into modern secular universities where one can gain a degree in dentistry with a faculty of religious studies on the side, as we see, for example, as what happened to al-Azhar (Egypt) during the past half century. The madrasa presents an exciting meeting point between different worlds of understanding/knowing and has a reality far from the negative clichés that many are ascribed to it today. However, any revivification of the madrasa system must be authentic and faithful to Islamic traditions of learning and the sanctity of the process of Islamic education itself.

There are examples in the modern Islamic world of such attempts but with varying degrees of success. For example, the Qarawiyyin in Morocco, among the Islamic world’s oldest and most prominent centers of learning, has been co-opted into the theological faculty of the University of Rabat and has become a Divinity School in the modern sense. At the al-Azhar, there have been attempts, unsuccessful for the most part, from the point of view of Islamic education, to modernize the curriculum by adding new faculties such as engineering. Such piecemeal attempts are not what I am alluding to, for they only demonstrate further an incapacity to think imaginatively about the ways Muslims can educate and nurture minds holistically and in conformity with an Islamic perspective.

There is a very important point to add here. There has been a movement in some Islamic countries to extend the madrasa system, especially, for example, in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion ended. Saudi Arabia established new madrasas there and also in Pakistan with far-reaching political consequences. Some of these efforts have proven to be very problematic with the creation of institutions that are not traditional Islamic madrasas but represent an extremist understanding of Islam and are closed to intellectual and spiritual dimensions of the religion. They are creating a kind of narrow exclusivism at best and hatred and violence at worst, both of which have not solved the deep-rooted educational problems of those respective countries. The result has been the rise of the Taliban, which colloquially in Persian means students of a madrasa. We need something more profound than what has occurred in recent years there.

There is another important factor involved in order to revive these traditional systems of learning namely, political will. In Turkey, under Kamal Ataturk, political will existed but for other purposes when after 1924 modern madrasas were created under government supervision so that they could be controlled by the state. However, these efforts failed to a large extent to create well-rounded inclusive individuals able to engage their faith with consideration of the challenges of the modern world (although there have been some exceptions). Let us also consider other Muslim countries such as Iran, Egypt, parts of Muslim India, Pakistan and Tunisia, for example, where the demand for a revival of an authentic madrasa system can be carried out in authentic ways if there is the political will combined with a cultural wisdom ensuring that institutions created do not become insular and irrelevant to the contemporary world.

Secondly, and in parallel with this effort, there is the possibility to create from scratch small centers of learning, not of the size of a large madrasa with ten thousand students, but small units of Islamic education operating at an intellectually advanced level and incorporating some nontraditional subjects that could be integrated into an Islamic system through the so-called ‘Islamization’ of knowledge. The concept of Islamization of knowledge is something that many, including myself, have been speaking about for fifty years and has involved so far mostly rhetoric with little actually being done as far as creating integrated Islamic educational systems are concerned. However, there are now attempts to implement here and there such ideas including in the US and in Iran; for example, where there is a major movement to Islamize the humanities taught in universities; yet even there one does not, as yet, see many concrete results on a large scale. When we organized the 1977 World Congress on Muslim Education in Makkah, the goal was to create an Islamic integrated system of knowledge of academic disciplines. Thereafter, some Islamic universities were created which have become ‘Islamic’ only in name. Their features resemble Islamic education in the sense that they have law and theological faculties based on Islamic ideas and models, but you can also study in these institutions mathematics, physics, engineering, etc., that are not at all integrated into an Islamic philosophy of science and learning and are completely secular. These universities do provide an Islamic ambience for learning but in terms of intellectually integrating and providing new ways to conceive knowledge Islamically, l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Theology and the Idea of Islamic Education
• Part II Positioning Knowledge between the Student and Teacher
• Part III Schools, Universities, and Pedagogies
• Part IV Contemporary Debates
• Contributors
• Index