by
Nimat Hafez Barazangi, Visiting Fellow
Women's Studies Program, 391 Uris Hall
Cornell University; Ithaca, NY 14853
December, 1992
Prepared for the forthcoming
Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World
(During the Nineteenth and Twenteith Centuries)
Oxford University Press
1995
"Religious Education" in (1995) Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. John Esposito, Ed.
Oxford University Press, New York, Volume I: pp. 406-411.
2
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Nimat Hafez Barazangi, Visiting Fellow
Women's Studies Program, 391 Uris Hall
Cornell University; Ithaca, NY 14853
Internal political and social movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries neglected Islamic education within the Muslim world and allowed external
secular and missionary ideas to turn it into "religious" education. Variations in worldview
and interpretation of Qur´anic principles of education resulted in emphasis on form over
essence in educating Muslims.
Historical accounts of Islamic/Muslim education provide a variety of perspectives on
its nature and the function of its traditional institutions. Cultural and political restraints
ended Islamic education as a functional system aimed at understanding and
appropriating Qur´anic pedagogical principles and limited it to "religious" knowledge
confined to selected males. Islamic education has recently been confused with a
subject matter, "religion," or a moral, social codes, akhlaq. The primacy of formalized
and juridical education over the informal development of Islamic character resulted in
curricular and instructional differentiation between class and gender, a separation of
"Islamic" and "non-Islamic" knowledge, and a dichotomy between ideal and practice in
Muslim education.
Islamic Education and Religious Education
Islamic education--the process of shaping character within the Islamic worldview
(Qur´an 3:110)--requires the Muslim family to expose its children and adults to all
knowledge as a means of understanding the parameters set in the Qur´an for a
3
constructive relationship with God, other humans, and nature. Based on the Qur´anic
dictum, "Read in the name of the Creator...who taught human by the pen" (96:1-4)--
meaning that to read is to learn and to act as guided by the Book--Islamic education
evolved from comprehensive training in the first Islamic community in Medina (ca. 623)
to a course of study on religion or its inculcation in social mores. What is called
"religious education" or "Muslim education" does not reflect the historical process of
educating in Islam. This process, in Waqar Husaini's (in al-Faruqi and Naseeef,1981)
estimate, began to disintegrate from the end of the eleventh century, when science, the
humanities, and social sciences were excluded from the curricula. Fazlur Rahman
(1982) suggests that it remained functional into the fifteenth century, whereas Dale
Eickelman (1985) asserts that it socialized Muslims well into the latter half of the
twentieth century.*
Religious education differs from Islamic education even though it maintains remnants
of the Islamic educational institutions. By separating "revealed" and "human"
knowledge, it transformed Qur´anic principles into formalized legal and moral codes and
rituals and created a dichotomy in Islamic thinking. It also transformed the meaning of
the Prophetic dictum "Faqihu fi al-din" (Sahih Muslim) from teaching within the Islamic
worldview to teaching Islam as interpreted by the different fiqh (jurisprudence) schools.
The salient features of Islamic education, such as tahfiz (oral/aural transmission), are
often confused with talqin (the acquisition and dissemination of Qur´anic principles and
spirit) that, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1982) asserts, led this field to produce
"philosopher-scientists" in various intellectual disciplines. Islamic education's intimate
relation to the Qur´anic revelation and hadith (Prophetic tradition) does not make it
purely religious, nor does it render its other elements exclusively Islamic or absolute.
Earlier Muslim intellectuals transformed the form, content, and intent of sciences,
4
education, and arts into Islamic disciplines by integrating intellectual and cultural
development within the Islamic worldview. Most contemporary Muslim educators
assume Islamic education to be religious indoctrination.
The traditional recitation method of teaching the Qur´an comes to mind when one
thinks about Islamic education, but neither was ever restricted to this method and Islamic
education is not limited to the study of the Qur´an. The Qur´an as the foundation of all
knowledge guides behavior.
Islamic education has been decentralized and its practice has varied. It was reduced
to religious education in different regions at different times. This transformation occurred
when Islamic philosophy and pedagogy were separated and when strict public moral
codes were imposed on females, rendering their public appearance taboo.
Concurrently, generations of male religious leaders or jurists emphasized Qur´an as
either an absolute moral code or a legal law instead of a universal guide for the whole of
the community. The principles of Islamic philosophy were idealized and knowledge was
classified by sources and by methods that enhanced the discrepancy between goals and
means and the dichotomy between teaching males and females and moral
(religious/private/informal) and rational (juridical/public/formal).
Separation of Philosophy and Pedagogy
Nasr criticizes Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and other "modernist" Islamists for
understanding "Greek philosophy through the eyes of its modern Western interpreters"
and, hence, separating Islam from philosophy. Fazlur Rahman (Islamic "Modernism" in
the Encyclopedia of Religion, New York,1987: 318-22) describes Iqbal's accusing "the
West of cheating humanity of its basic values with the glittering mirage of its technology"
and his strong critique of world Muslim society. For Rahman, Iqbal was a
5
"neofundamentalist" who was reacting to modernism but also "importantly influenced by
modernism." Iqbal's (1962) own assertion that the Qur´an is a book that emphasizes
'deed' rather than 'idea' is significant to the understanding of the Islamic educational
process and its transformation.
To educate in Islam, Iqbal states, means to create a living experience on which
religious faith ultimately rests. For Rahman (1982), it means Islamic intellectualism.
Though Nasr believes that the Islamic theory of education can be reconstructed within
the Qur´anic philosophy Iqbal emphasizes that the birth of Islam is the birth of inductive
intellect, wherein "to achieve full self-consciousness, Man must finally be thrown back on
his own resources."
These diverse views suggest that Muslims, particularly in the past two centuries, not
only neglected philosophy, as Nasr suggests, but, as Ismaç
il R. al-Faruqi (1981) points out, also lost
Islam's connection to its pedagogical function and its methods of observation and experimentation. As centers of higher religious learning
began formally to transmit "book knowledge" and inculcation with particular interpretations, a dichotomy arose between philosophy or the
ideal and pedagogy or the practice. Encouraged by skepticism in modern Western philosophy, this dichotomy was widened.
Western-educated Muslim modernists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not
aware that the underlying philosophy of Western education differed from that of Islam,
were satisfied with teaching courses on religion in the traditional style, while neglecting
to restructure the traditional system. Meanwhile, "traditionalists" emphasized the
primacy of Islamic doctrine over falsafah (philosophy), creating, in Husaini's words, a
schism between them and the modernists and destroying the integrated educational
system. Western-educated who reaffirm the validity of traditional practices--I call
"Neotraditionalists"--interpret the philosophy of Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) as
the "finally established" Islamic educational theory (Syed Ali Ashraf,1985), and hold an
absolutist perspective of Islamic education. This perspective, discussed elsewhere by
6
this author (1990 and 1991), results, unknowingly, in a dichotomy between the Islamic
worldview and its pedagogical process.
Perspective on Islamic Education and its Institutions
Diverse perspectives of Islamic/Muslim education also result in diverse and at times
contradictory accounts of its transformation. Kuttab (for primary and Qur´anic education)
and madrasah (for secondary and higher learning) are the most frequent contexts in
which Islamic education is discussed. Other institutions, such as the halaqah (study
circle in a mosque), dar al-kutub (library/bookshop) and private homes play important
roles but are rarely recognized, as Munir D. Ahmad (" Muslim Education Prior to the
Establishment of Madrasah," Islamic Studies [Islamabad], 26:4 ,1987: 321-48 ) and
Salah Hussein Al-Abidi ("The Mosque: Adult Education and Uninterrupted Learning," al-
Islam al-Yawm [Islam Today--al-Rabat], 7:7,1989: 68-77) indicate, particularly in rural
areas that constitute more than 70 percent of the Muslim world and where they might be
the only educational institution.
No systematic study of the evolution of the educational process in these institutions
has been done. There are scattered reports in biographies, books of history and Islamic
thought, and encyclopedias, but they typically leave a gap between Ibn Khaldun's (1332-
1406) Muqqadimmah and the nineteenth-century sources in which Western perspectives
dominate. Recent accounts of Islamic education are almost always presented in the
contexts of modernization or Muslim revival movements that, Nasr (1987)*
asserts, Western
scholarship overemphasizes even though they weakened traditional Islam. Fazlur Rahman (1987) was more concerned that these
"reformers" integrated science and technology with the "Qur´anic requirement that man studies the universe" than with the transformation
from Islamic education into religious education.
Teaching reading and writing in kuttab, according to Ahmad Shalaby (1979),
preceded the rise of Islam, but existed on a limited scale. In distinguishing this type from
7
Qur´anic kuttab, Shalaby notes that several authors have confused the different varieties
of this institution and cites Philip Hitti (The Arabs:A Short History, Chicago, 1956),
Ahmad Amin (Dhuha al-Islam, Cairo, 1941), and Ignes Goldziher. He states that
Goldziher ("Education [Muslim]" in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,1960, Vol. 5:
199-207), in his attempt to trace Qur´anic kuttab back to the early time of Islam, did not
separate the varieties of kuttab. That Shalaby's account differs from Goldziher's on
other matters related to teaching young Muslims suggests differences not only in their
perspectives of Islamic education and its institutions but of the problems it has
encountered. Though Goldziher relies largely on the same primary sources used by
Shalaby, when he says that "modern movements towards reform" (p. 206) were
unaffected by Western influence, he does not seem to distinguish between the Islam
taught in kuttabs and madrasahs and that taught by informal socialization. Thus, he
states, "the instruction of the young proceeded mainly on the lines laid down in the older
theological writings," suggesting that the problem lies in Muslims' inability to adopt
modern technologies. This assessment prevents him from realizing why 'religious'
content constituted the central curriculum, and in some localities was the only function
left for the kuttab, when government schools--the Ottomans' Rushdiyya schools--took
over the teaching of reading, writing, and other subjects, or why natives resisted
modernity (Akbar S. Ahmed, 1988) and gave up even Qur´anic schools in response to
colonial policies (G. W. Leitner, "Indigenous Oriental Education, with Special Reference
to India, and, in Particular, to the Panjab," Asiatic Quarterly Review. 2nd Series, 8 , nos.
15 & 16, 1894: 421-38) and to exploitation of Islam by both colonial and local
governments (Harrison, 1990). Similarly, when Rahman (1982) reports on educational
reform in the nineteenth century, he confuses the varieties of kuttabs and their
relationship to the madrasah, stating that in general, primary education (given in the
8
maktabs or kuttabs) was a self-contained unit that did not feed into the higher
educational system. Rahman thus contradicts reports by Mohammad Akhlaq Ahmad
(1985) and others that kuttabs and mosques played an important role for those
continuing their Islamic higher education.
Contradictory accounts also surround the madrasah. Shalaby gives a detailed
account of the first established madrasah in the eleventh century by Nizam al-Mulk in
Baghdad and classifies these schools by location, founders and their positions, and the
primary sources that cite them. A. L. Tibawi ("Origin and Character of Al-Madrasah,"
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 25, 2 ,1962: 225-38) concurs with
primary Muslim sources such as Ibn Khaldun's in concluding that the main
characteristics of this institution may vary by region and time, but all are formal
residential institutes of secondary and higher learning, with Arabic as the basic medium
of instruction. They rely mainly on oral and aural dialogue between teacher and
disciples. Their curricula consist, in addition to Qur´anic talqin and Arabic grammar, of
tafsir (exegesis), fiqh (jurisprudence), hadith, usul al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence),
usul al-hadith (principles of narration), and biography of the Prophet and al-Sahabah (the
Prophet companions). Classical sciences (astronomy, geography, and medicine) and
Arabic adab (literature) were also taught, their intensity and depth depending on
students' mastery of particular subjects and teachers' strengths. M. A. Ahmad (1985)
and other Muslim authors suggest that a similar though less vital educational process
still exists in such institutions. Goldziher, however, does not recognize that what he
describes as a "primitive and patriarchal form of instruction still hold [ing] its place" in
these institutions is a result of the takeover by technical and military high schools, in
which only Islamic subjects were left to traditionally trained teachers.
9
In response to colonial policies, these institutions took on one of three forms:
traditional, private-sponsored religious with some Western orientation, and governmentsponsored
secular with added religion courses. The 'traditional' form is represented in
the remnants of kuttab and madrasah. Famous among them are Deobond in India, al-
Nidhamiyah in Iran, al-Mustansiriyah in Baghdad, al-Sulaymaniyah in Istanbul, a-
Nuriyyah in Damascus, al-Azhar in Cairo, al-Qayrawan in Tunis, al-Qurawyun in Fez,
and Cordova in Spain. Some of these institutions, such as Al-Azhar and Deobond, still
grant 'Islamic' higher degrees but are weakened because they consider religious
knowledge separate from other knowledge.
When modernist elites of the early twentieth century sought reform from outside their
society, they created private religious schools (e.g, Yadigar-i Hurriyet established in
1908 in Basrah city of Iraq). Their indiscriminate adoption of Western systems,
combined with nationalistic and politicized Islam, emphasized a secular morality in
teaching natural and social sciences that gradually separated Islam from its Qur´anic
base, favoring secondary literary and historical sources of religion.
When the mid-twentieth-century "revivalists" assumed the preservation of Islamic
principles by teaching ç
ibadat (rituals) and moral codes, courses on religion (al-daynah)
were added in the secular government-sponsored system, taking a secondary place in
the curriculum. At present, these courses range in their proportion to the overall
teaching time from 32 percent in Saudi elementary schools to 3 percent in Syrian high
schools, and their content varies from a watered-down version of tafsir, fiqh, hadith, and
Islamic history to hifz (memorization of Qur´an) and rituals. In addition, very few secular
universities in the Muslim world offer any such courses on Islam.
Curricular and Instructional Differentiation
10
The imposition of strict public moral codes on females is another indicator of the
transformation of Islamic education into religious education, when women were
prohibited from institutions such as madrasahs and mosques, even though women were
formally and informally transmitting the culture to their offspring as well as to other
children, males and females, inside and outside the homes in early and Medieval Muslim
communities (Goldziher). Muslim boys and girls were taught at home and attended
formal kuttab and, according to Nasr (1987), girls even studied in madrasahs when it
was first established. No historical accounts mention females as ç
Alimahs (Islamic
scholars), knowledgeable in branches of Qur´anic sciences such as tafsir, kalam
(Islamic philosophy/theology), and fiqh, particularly after the formalized higher learning in
madrasah, although Shalaby reported that many females had established or endowed
such institutions. Also, many primary Muslim sources (such as al-Suyuti [d.1505] and
others listed by Goldziher, Nasr, and Shalaby) report that up to the fifteenth century
there were outstanding women who memorized and narrated hadith to earn them the
title of Muhaddithat (female narrators) among their disciples, and some who were wellknown
in Sufi orders
The assaults on Islamic culture by European crusaders, orientalists, and colonial
governments, combined with their differentiation of private vs. public domains, caused
Muslim leaders to lose sight of the essence of Islamic education, particularly its informal
sector, and to take extreme attitudes at the expense of a revival of traditional Islam.
These predominantly male leaders, beginning with the eighteenth-century Wahhabis
puritan movement, propagated the view that women's primary concern is their home and
thus they need a different type of education. "Reformists" such as
Muhammad ç
Abdu (1845-1905) emphasized Islamic ideals concerning women's higher status in Islam and the obligation of both
11
males and females to seek knowledge; yet in practice, they did not recognize women's access to a thorough knowledge of the Qur´an as a
key to intellectual development.
Revivalists, such as Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) and Abul ç
Ala al-Maududi (1903- 1979), though
attempting to restore Islamic education in post-World War II nation-states, used the traditional rationale about women's education and
asserted that their "natural" disposition is to transmit culture to the next generation (both boys and girls). Yet they did not restructure the
traditional practices of teaching Islam to allow for this transmission. The primary objectives of women's education in Muhammad Qutb's
(1961 and 1981) curriculum were to prepare them for the biological and emotional roles of mothers and housewives. Such objectives
further confused and marginalized women's education in Islam.
The post-1969 "Islamization" movements leaned toward politicized Islam but created
another meaning of Islamic/religious education for women. Contrary to their intellectual
base that culminated in Ismaç
il al Faruqi's (1921-1986) Islamization of Knowledge (1982),
proponents of these movements emphasized morality, which overshadowed their
presumed goal--restructuring the secular system of higher learning to address religious
and cultural needs of Muslim societies as part of newly adopted development strategies.
The Indonesian and Malay development policies of involving all segments of the
population in education and training, reported in Sharom Ahmat and Sharon Siddique
(1987), seem to be a first step toward recognizing women's role in social development.
Emphasis on morality, however, particularly when women became part of the Malay
Madrasahs (an outgrowth of the Podock religious training with worldly affairs in sight) of
the 1960s and the Dakwa (call for Islamic orientation) of the 1970s and 1980s, led
religious education to take the form of moral dogma. The Indonesian Pesentran system
(established in rural areas in the early nineteenth century and spread to urban
development in the 1970s and 1980s), maintained an integrated system, and Indonesian
women, unlike those in any other Muslim country, occupy a full range of religious
leadership roles.
12
Neotraditionalists, like Anis Ahmad (1984), attempted to "liberate Islam from Western
cultural colonialism" in the 1980s, giving women's education the form I call "reversed
feminism," emphasizing segregated education for different but unequal roles. This trend
is flourishing in North American and West European countries, where Muslim males are
demanding single-sex schools and, in their private "Islamic/Muslim" schools, are
segregating children beginning with first grade. Curricula in these schools are the same
as in public schools with courses on religion and Arabic language.
The Dichotomy of Ideals and Practice
The Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) established in 1973 held five world
conferences on Muslim education in Mecca 1977, Islamabad 1980, Dacca 1981, Jakarta
1982, and Cairo 1987. Their recommendations, Ashraf reports, were to "re-classify
knowledge into 'revealed' (given to man by God and contained mainly in the Qur´an and
the tradition of the Prophet) and 'acquired' (by man's efforts)," and that "acquired"'
knowledge should be taught from the "Islamic point of view," the process of which is
referred to as "Islamization of knowledge." The goals, similar to those outlined by al-
Faruqi (1982)--to integrate modern sciences and branches of knowledge within the
Islamic philosophy--are stated in the Islamic Education Series' seven monographs of
which Ashraf is general editor.
A core curriculum (Muhammad Hamid al-Afendi and Nabi Ahmed Baloch, 1980) with
Syed Muhammad al-Naquib al-Attas's (ed.) Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education
(Jeddah, 1979) and other "blueprints" for groundwork and strategies were published in
this series, the basic premise of which is that the only way to develop an Islamic
curriculum that will alleviate the crisis in Muslim education caused by the dual traditional
and secular systems, is to "reinterpret all branches of knowledge, particularly social
13
sciences, within the Islamic perspective." Yet, because the emphasis was on "revealed"
vs. "human-acquired" knowledge, no action plan was devised to reconstruct a fresh base
for Islamic thought and educational practice in the light of new discoveries and
contemporary needs or to alleviate the dichotomy in Muslim thinking that resulted from
separating "religious" and "secular" knowledge. Also, despite its urgency in light of new
economic developments and the women's emancipation movement, no action plan was
chartered for women's education. Instead, the emphasis on different and segregated
education resulted only in prescriptive statements, reiterating a perspective on girls'
education that has been evolving since the introduction of Western secular education
practices (although one of the fourteen committees of the World Conferences on Islamic
Education was charged with the "teaching of women," no female educator was involved,
and the topic was discussed in less than five pages of the seven volumes.
This perspective of female education in Islam is almost uniform in countries that
adopted segregated education after encountering European and American systems. In
the Indian subcontinent, for example, most females attending Qur´anic kuttab not only
are denied the opportunity to continue their religious education once they reach puberty
but rarely are instructed by their families, as was the practice among learned Muslim
families before the British colonization. Similar practice is found in other Muslim
countries after interacting with Western educational practices, at which the emphasis is
placed on wanting girls to maintain religious knowledge and character in sexually
segregated schools (El-Sanabary, 1973) while allowing no female teachers' education in
religion. Despite their enrollment in kuttabs at prior eras, Saudi girls, as an example,
were not allowed to enroll in religious institutions of higher learning such as ´Um al-Qura
in Mecca until 1970-71, when, according to Mohammed Saad al-Salem "The Interplay of
Tradition and Modernity: A Field Study of Saudi Policy and Educational Development,"
14
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981), only 80 girls versus 2,210
males were admitted. Thus, these girls and young mothers receive their religious
knowledge mainly by observing their elders' practice of local, regional tribal, or ethnic
customary interpretations of Islam, and those who attend public and
private schools receive secular knowledge from trained, organized teachers with
structured curricula.
In summary, Muslim male educators continue to overlook the dynamics of the role of
women as the transmitters, preservers, and transformers of the culture in Muslim
societies into the 1980s and 1990s. These educators kept female religious education
peripheral, relegating it to the home. Such a discrepancy in female education is only
one of many other disparities that transformed Islamic education, resulting in fragmanted
educational planning and imbalanced emphasis between religious and secular
objectives. This imbalance is mostly the remnant of the colonial and missionary legacies
that left the Muslim world in a turmoil even after independence.
---------------------
* See the author's article "Educational Reform" and its Bibliography.
15
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Religious Education)
General Works:
-Ahmed, Akbar S. Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society.
London and New York, 1988. A unique history of Muslim societies' response to world
events by a native Muslim. Chapter seven gives special perspective on the colonial
impact on Muslims' rejection of any form of modernity. Chapter ten on the
reconstruction of Muslim thought is illuminating. The Appendix, "Muslim Chronology" up
to 1986, is particularly helpful.
-Ashraf, Syed Ali. New Horizons in Muslim Education. Cambridge, 1985.
See also Islamic Education Series, some volumes of which are cited below.
A representative of Neotradtionalists' views on Muslim education. The Appendices
summarize the recommendations of the four World Conferences on Islamic Education.
-Al-Faruqi, Ismaç
il R. Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Workplan.
Washington, D.C. ,1982. An essential introduction to the understanding of
contemporary trends in Islamic education and thought by an American Muslim scholar.
-Iqbal, Sir Mohammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Lahore,
reprinted 1962. A landmark of the Pakistani poet and scholar's vision in reforming
Islamic education through the reconstruction of Islamic thought.
16
-Qutb, Muhammad. Al-Tarbiyah al-Islamiyah (Curriculum of Islamic Education). al-juz´al-
Thani: fi al-Tatbiq (Second Volume: Application). Second printing, Beirut, 1981. A good
representation of revivalists', particularly the Muslim Brothers,' view of Islamic education.
-Shalaby, Ahmad. History of Muslim Education. Karachi, 1979. Though it deals with the
subject from the beginning of Islam till the fall of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt (1250), it
covers important issues in the evolution of Muslim education. The bibliography is rich
with primary sources in Arabic and English.
Regional Accounts:
-Ahmad, Mohammad Akhlaq. Traditional Education Among Muslims (A Study of Some
Aspects of Modern India). Delhi, 1985.
-Ahmat, Sharom, and Sharon Siddique, eds., Muslim Society, Higher Education and
Development in Southeast Asia. Singapore, 1987. A collection of essays surveying
historical and contemporary educational issues in Muslim societies of Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
-Barazangi, Nimat Hafez. "The Education of North American Muslim Parents and
Children: Conceptual Changes as a Contribution to Islamization of Education." The
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 7, 3, 1990: 385-402; and "Islamic
Education in the United States and Canada: Conception and Practice of the Islamic
Belief System," in Yvonne Haddad, ed. The Muslims of America. New York, 1991.
17
-El-Sanabary, Nagat Morsi. "A Comparative Study of the Disparities of Educational
Opportunities for Girls in the Arab States." Ph. D. dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, 1973. Rich in data on girls' education.
-Harrison, Christopher. France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960. Cambridge,
reprinted 1990. Chapters nine and ten, "The French stake in Islam" and "The
'rediscovery of Islam'," are particularly intriguing.
Topical Studies:
-Al-Afendi, Muhammad Hamid, and Nabi Ahmed Baloch, eds., Curriculum and Teacher
Education. Islamic Education Series, Jeddah, 1980.
-Ahmad, Anis. Muslim Women and Higher Education: A Case for Separate Institutions
for Women. Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, Second and Revised Edition, 1984.
Provides insights into the neotraditionalists' biased views of women's education.
-Al-Faruqi, Ismaç
il R. "Islamizing the Social Sciences" (pp. 8-20), and Sayyid Waqqar Ahmed Husaini, "Humanistic-Social
Sciences Studies in Higher Education: Islamic and International Perspectives" (pp. 148-66) in
al-Faruqi, Ismaç
il R. and Abdullah Omar Nasseef, eds., Social and Natural Sciences: The Islamic
Perspectives. Islamic Education Series, Jeddah, 1981.
-Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. "The Teaching of Philosophy," (pp. 3-21) in S.H. Nasr, ed.,Philosophy, Literature and Fine Arts. Islamic Education Series, Jeddah, 1982. A
blueprint for the role of philosophy, arts and literature in Islamic education.
Nimat Hafez Barazangi
http://scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=philosophy+education+in+islam&t=all&sort=0&g=s
»» baca selengkapnya...
Nimat Hafez Barazangi, Visiting Fellow
Women's Studies Program, 391 Uris Hall
Cornell University; Ithaca, NY 14853
December, 1992
Prepared for the forthcoming
Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World
(During the Nineteenth and Twenteith Centuries)
Oxford University Press
1995
"Religious Education" in (1995) Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. John Esposito, Ed.
Oxford University Press, New York, Volume I: pp. 406-411.
2
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Nimat Hafez Barazangi, Visiting Fellow
Women's Studies Program, 391 Uris Hall
Cornell University; Ithaca, NY 14853
Internal political and social movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries neglected Islamic education within the Muslim world and allowed external
secular and missionary ideas to turn it into "religious" education. Variations in worldview
and interpretation of Qur´anic principles of education resulted in emphasis on form over
essence in educating Muslims.
Historical accounts of Islamic/Muslim education provide a variety of perspectives on
its nature and the function of its traditional institutions. Cultural and political restraints
ended Islamic education as a functional system aimed at understanding and
appropriating Qur´anic pedagogical principles and limited it to "religious" knowledge
confined to selected males. Islamic education has recently been confused with a
subject matter, "religion," or a moral, social codes, akhlaq. The primacy of formalized
and juridical education over the informal development of Islamic character resulted in
curricular and instructional differentiation between class and gender, a separation of
"Islamic" and "non-Islamic" knowledge, and a dichotomy between ideal and practice in
Muslim education.
Islamic Education and Religious Education
Islamic education--the process of shaping character within the Islamic worldview
(Qur´an 3:110)--requires the Muslim family to expose its children and adults to all
knowledge as a means of understanding the parameters set in the Qur´an for a
3
constructive relationship with God, other humans, and nature. Based on the Qur´anic
dictum, "Read in the name of the Creator...who taught human by the pen" (96:1-4)--
meaning that to read is to learn and to act as guided by the Book--Islamic education
evolved from comprehensive training in the first Islamic community in Medina (ca. 623)
to a course of study on religion or its inculcation in social mores. What is called
"religious education" or "Muslim education" does not reflect the historical process of
educating in Islam. This process, in Waqar Husaini's (in al-Faruqi and Naseeef,1981)
estimate, began to disintegrate from the end of the eleventh century, when science, the
humanities, and social sciences were excluded from the curricula. Fazlur Rahman
(1982) suggests that it remained functional into the fifteenth century, whereas Dale
Eickelman (1985) asserts that it socialized Muslims well into the latter half of the
twentieth century.*
Religious education differs from Islamic education even though it maintains remnants
of the Islamic educational institutions. By separating "revealed" and "human"
knowledge, it transformed Qur´anic principles into formalized legal and moral codes and
rituals and created a dichotomy in Islamic thinking. It also transformed the meaning of
the Prophetic dictum "Faqihu fi al-din" (Sahih Muslim) from teaching within the Islamic
worldview to teaching Islam as interpreted by the different fiqh (jurisprudence) schools.
The salient features of Islamic education, such as tahfiz (oral/aural transmission), are
often confused with talqin (the acquisition and dissemination of Qur´anic principles and
spirit) that, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1982) asserts, led this field to produce
"philosopher-scientists" in various intellectual disciplines. Islamic education's intimate
relation to the Qur´anic revelation and hadith (Prophetic tradition) does not make it
purely religious, nor does it render its other elements exclusively Islamic or absolute.
Earlier Muslim intellectuals transformed the form, content, and intent of sciences,
4
education, and arts into Islamic disciplines by integrating intellectual and cultural
development within the Islamic worldview. Most contemporary Muslim educators
assume Islamic education to be religious indoctrination.
The traditional recitation method of teaching the Qur´an comes to mind when one
thinks about Islamic education, but neither was ever restricted to this method and Islamic
education is not limited to the study of the Qur´an. The Qur´an as the foundation of all
knowledge guides behavior.
Islamic education has been decentralized and its practice has varied. It was reduced
to religious education in different regions at different times. This transformation occurred
when Islamic philosophy and pedagogy were separated and when strict public moral
codes were imposed on females, rendering their public appearance taboo.
Concurrently, generations of male religious leaders or jurists emphasized Qur´an as
either an absolute moral code or a legal law instead of a universal guide for the whole of
the community. The principles of Islamic philosophy were idealized and knowledge was
classified by sources and by methods that enhanced the discrepancy between goals and
means and the dichotomy between teaching males and females and moral
(religious/private/informal) and rational (juridical/public/formal).
Separation of Philosophy and Pedagogy
Nasr criticizes Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and other "modernist" Islamists for
understanding "Greek philosophy through the eyes of its modern Western interpreters"
and, hence, separating Islam from philosophy. Fazlur Rahman (Islamic "Modernism" in
the Encyclopedia of Religion, New York,1987: 318-22) describes Iqbal's accusing "the
West of cheating humanity of its basic values with the glittering mirage of its technology"
and his strong critique of world Muslim society. For Rahman, Iqbal was a
5
"neofundamentalist" who was reacting to modernism but also "importantly influenced by
modernism." Iqbal's (1962) own assertion that the Qur´an is a book that emphasizes
'deed' rather than 'idea' is significant to the understanding of the Islamic educational
process and its transformation.
To educate in Islam, Iqbal states, means to create a living experience on which
religious faith ultimately rests. For Rahman (1982), it means Islamic intellectualism.
Though Nasr believes that the Islamic theory of education can be reconstructed within
the Qur´anic philosophy Iqbal emphasizes that the birth of Islam is the birth of inductive
intellect, wherein "to achieve full self-consciousness, Man must finally be thrown back on
his own resources."
These diverse views suggest that Muslims, particularly in the past two centuries, not
only neglected philosophy, as Nasr suggests, but, as Ismaç
il R. al-Faruqi (1981) points out, also lost
Islam's connection to its pedagogical function and its methods of observation and experimentation. As centers of higher religious learning
began formally to transmit "book knowledge" and inculcation with particular interpretations, a dichotomy arose between philosophy or the
ideal and pedagogy or the practice. Encouraged by skepticism in modern Western philosophy, this dichotomy was widened.
Western-educated Muslim modernists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not
aware that the underlying philosophy of Western education differed from that of Islam,
were satisfied with teaching courses on religion in the traditional style, while neglecting
to restructure the traditional system. Meanwhile, "traditionalists" emphasized the
primacy of Islamic doctrine over falsafah (philosophy), creating, in Husaini's words, a
schism between them and the modernists and destroying the integrated educational
system. Western-educated who reaffirm the validity of traditional practices--I call
"Neotraditionalists"--interpret the philosophy of Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) as
the "finally established" Islamic educational theory (Syed Ali Ashraf,1985), and hold an
absolutist perspective of Islamic education. This perspective, discussed elsewhere by
6
this author (1990 and 1991), results, unknowingly, in a dichotomy between the Islamic
worldview and its pedagogical process.
Perspective on Islamic Education and its Institutions
Diverse perspectives of Islamic/Muslim education also result in diverse and at times
contradictory accounts of its transformation. Kuttab (for primary and Qur´anic education)
and madrasah (for secondary and higher learning) are the most frequent contexts in
which Islamic education is discussed. Other institutions, such as the halaqah (study
circle in a mosque), dar al-kutub (library/bookshop) and private homes play important
roles but are rarely recognized, as Munir D. Ahmad (" Muslim Education Prior to the
Establishment of Madrasah," Islamic Studies [Islamabad], 26:4 ,1987: 321-48 ) and
Salah Hussein Al-Abidi ("The Mosque: Adult Education and Uninterrupted Learning," al-
Islam al-Yawm [Islam Today--al-Rabat], 7:7,1989: 68-77) indicate, particularly in rural
areas that constitute more than 70 percent of the Muslim world and where they might be
the only educational institution.
No systematic study of the evolution of the educational process in these institutions
has been done. There are scattered reports in biographies, books of history and Islamic
thought, and encyclopedias, but they typically leave a gap between Ibn Khaldun's (1332-
1406) Muqqadimmah and the nineteenth-century sources in which Western perspectives
dominate. Recent accounts of Islamic education are almost always presented in the
contexts of modernization or Muslim revival movements that, Nasr (1987)*
asserts, Western
scholarship overemphasizes even though they weakened traditional Islam. Fazlur Rahman (1987) was more concerned that these
"reformers" integrated science and technology with the "Qur´anic requirement that man studies the universe" than with the transformation
from Islamic education into religious education.
Teaching reading and writing in kuttab, according to Ahmad Shalaby (1979),
preceded the rise of Islam, but existed on a limited scale. In distinguishing this type from
7
Qur´anic kuttab, Shalaby notes that several authors have confused the different varieties
of this institution and cites Philip Hitti (The Arabs:A Short History, Chicago, 1956),
Ahmad Amin (Dhuha al-Islam, Cairo, 1941), and Ignes Goldziher. He states that
Goldziher ("Education [Muslim]" in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,1960, Vol. 5:
199-207), in his attempt to trace Qur´anic kuttab back to the early time of Islam, did not
separate the varieties of kuttab. That Shalaby's account differs from Goldziher's on
other matters related to teaching young Muslims suggests differences not only in their
perspectives of Islamic education and its institutions but of the problems it has
encountered. Though Goldziher relies largely on the same primary sources used by
Shalaby, when he says that "modern movements towards reform" (p. 206) were
unaffected by Western influence, he does not seem to distinguish between the Islam
taught in kuttabs and madrasahs and that taught by informal socialization. Thus, he
states, "the instruction of the young proceeded mainly on the lines laid down in the older
theological writings," suggesting that the problem lies in Muslims' inability to adopt
modern technologies. This assessment prevents him from realizing why 'religious'
content constituted the central curriculum, and in some localities was the only function
left for the kuttab, when government schools--the Ottomans' Rushdiyya schools--took
over the teaching of reading, writing, and other subjects, or why natives resisted
modernity (Akbar S. Ahmed, 1988) and gave up even Qur´anic schools in response to
colonial policies (G. W. Leitner, "Indigenous Oriental Education, with Special Reference
to India, and, in Particular, to the Panjab," Asiatic Quarterly Review. 2nd Series, 8 , nos.
15 & 16, 1894: 421-38) and to exploitation of Islam by both colonial and local
governments (Harrison, 1990). Similarly, when Rahman (1982) reports on educational
reform in the nineteenth century, he confuses the varieties of kuttabs and their
relationship to the madrasah, stating that in general, primary education (given in the
8
maktabs or kuttabs) was a self-contained unit that did not feed into the higher
educational system. Rahman thus contradicts reports by Mohammad Akhlaq Ahmad
(1985) and others that kuttabs and mosques played an important role for those
continuing their Islamic higher education.
Contradictory accounts also surround the madrasah. Shalaby gives a detailed
account of the first established madrasah in the eleventh century by Nizam al-Mulk in
Baghdad and classifies these schools by location, founders and their positions, and the
primary sources that cite them. A. L. Tibawi ("Origin and Character of Al-Madrasah,"
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 25, 2 ,1962: 225-38) concurs with
primary Muslim sources such as Ibn Khaldun's in concluding that the main
characteristics of this institution may vary by region and time, but all are formal
residential institutes of secondary and higher learning, with Arabic as the basic medium
of instruction. They rely mainly on oral and aural dialogue between teacher and
disciples. Their curricula consist, in addition to Qur´anic talqin and Arabic grammar, of
tafsir (exegesis), fiqh (jurisprudence), hadith, usul al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence),
usul al-hadith (principles of narration), and biography of the Prophet and al-Sahabah (the
Prophet companions). Classical sciences (astronomy, geography, and medicine) and
Arabic adab (literature) were also taught, their intensity and depth depending on
students' mastery of particular subjects and teachers' strengths. M. A. Ahmad (1985)
and other Muslim authors suggest that a similar though less vital educational process
still exists in such institutions. Goldziher, however, does not recognize that what he
describes as a "primitive and patriarchal form of instruction still hold [ing] its place" in
these institutions is a result of the takeover by technical and military high schools, in
which only Islamic subjects were left to traditionally trained teachers.
9
In response to colonial policies, these institutions took on one of three forms:
traditional, private-sponsored religious with some Western orientation, and governmentsponsored
secular with added religion courses. The 'traditional' form is represented in
the remnants of kuttab and madrasah. Famous among them are Deobond in India, al-
Nidhamiyah in Iran, al-Mustansiriyah in Baghdad, al-Sulaymaniyah in Istanbul, a-
Nuriyyah in Damascus, al-Azhar in Cairo, al-Qayrawan in Tunis, al-Qurawyun in Fez,
and Cordova in Spain. Some of these institutions, such as Al-Azhar and Deobond, still
grant 'Islamic' higher degrees but are weakened because they consider religious
knowledge separate from other knowledge.
When modernist elites of the early twentieth century sought reform from outside their
society, they created private religious schools (e.g, Yadigar-i Hurriyet established in
1908 in Basrah city of Iraq). Their indiscriminate adoption of Western systems,
combined with nationalistic and politicized Islam, emphasized a secular morality in
teaching natural and social sciences that gradually separated Islam from its Qur´anic
base, favoring secondary literary and historical sources of religion.
When the mid-twentieth-century "revivalists" assumed the preservation of Islamic
principles by teaching ç
ibadat (rituals) and moral codes, courses on religion (al-daynah)
were added in the secular government-sponsored system, taking a secondary place in
the curriculum. At present, these courses range in their proportion to the overall
teaching time from 32 percent in Saudi elementary schools to 3 percent in Syrian high
schools, and their content varies from a watered-down version of tafsir, fiqh, hadith, and
Islamic history to hifz (memorization of Qur´an) and rituals. In addition, very few secular
universities in the Muslim world offer any such courses on Islam.
Curricular and Instructional Differentiation
10
The imposition of strict public moral codes on females is another indicator of the
transformation of Islamic education into religious education, when women were
prohibited from institutions such as madrasahs and mosques, even though women were
formally and informally transmitting the culture to their offspring as well as to other
children, males and females, inside and outside the homes in early and Medieval Muslim
communities (Goldziher). Muslim boys and girls were taught at home and attended
formal kuttab and, according to Nasr (1987), girls even studied in madrasahs when it
was first established. No historical accounts mention females as ç
Alimahs (Islamic
scholars), knowledgeable in branches of Qur´anic sciences such as tafsir, kalam
(Islamic philosophy/theology), and fiqh, particularly after the formalized higher learning in
madrasah, although Shalaby reported that many females had established or endowed
such institutions. Also, many primary Muslim sources (such as al-Suyuti [d.1505] and
others listed by Goldziher, Nasr, and Shalaby) report that up to the fifteenth century
there were outstanding women who memorized and narrated hadith to earn them the
title of Muhaddithat (female narrators) among their disciples, and some who were wellknown
in Sufi orders
The assaults on Islamic culture by European crusaders, orientalists, and colonial
governments, combined with their differentiation of private vs. public domains, caused
Muslim leaders to lose sight of the essence of Islamic education, particularly its informal
sector, and to take extreme attitudes at the expense of a revival of traditional Islam.
These predominantly male leaders, beginning with the eighteenth-century Wahhabis
puritan movement, propagated the view that women's primary concern is their home and
thus they need a different type of education. "Reformists" such as
Muhammad ç
Abdu (1845-1905) emphasized Islamic ideals concerning women's higher status in Islam and the obligation of both
11
males and females to seek knowledge; yet in practice, they did not recognize women's access to a thorough knowledge of the Qur´an as a
key to intellectual development.
Revivalists, such as Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) and Abul ç
Ala al-Maududi (1903- 1979), though
attempting to restore Islamic education in post-World War II nation-states, used the traditional rationale about women's education and
asserted that their "natural" disposition is to transmit culture to the next generation (both boys and girls). Yet they did not restructure the
traditional practices of teaching Islam to allow for this transmission. The primary objectives of women's education in Muhammad Qutb's
(1961 and 1981) curriculum were to prepare them for the biological and emotional roles of mothers and housewives. Such objectives
further confused and marginalized women's education in Islam.
The post-1969 "Islamization" movements leaned toward politicized Islam but created
another meaning of Islamic/religious education for women. Contrary to their intellectual
base that culminated in Ismaç
il al Faruqi's (1921-1986) Islamization of Knowledge (1982),
proponents of these movements emphasized morality, which overshadowed their
presumed goal--restructuring the secular system of higher learning to address religious
and cultural needs of Muslim societies as part of newly adopted development strategies.
The Indonesian and Malay development policies of involving all segments of the
population in education and training, reported in Sharom Ahmat and Sharon Siddique
(1987), seem to be a first step toward recognizing women's role in social development.
Emphasis on morality, however, particularly when women became part of the Malay
Madrasahs (an outgrowth of the Podock religious training with worldly affairs in sight) of
the 1960s and the Dakwa (call for Islamic orientation) of the 1970s and 1980s, led
religious education to take the form of moral dogma. The Indonesian Pesentran system
(established in rural areas in the early nineteenth century and spread to urban
development in the 1970s and 1980s), maintained an integrated system, and Indonesian
women, unlike those in any other Muslim country, occupy a full range of religious
leadership roles.
12
Neotraditionalists, like Anis Ahmad (1984), attempted to "liberate Islam from Western
cultural colonialism" in the 1980s, giving women's education the form I call "reversed
feminism," emphasizing segregated education for different but unequal roles. This trend
is flourishing in North American and West European countries, where Muslim males are
demanding single-sex schools and, in their private "Islamic/Muslim" schools, are
segregating children beginning with first grade. Curricula in these schools are the same
as in public schools with courses on religion and Arabic language.
The Dichotomy of Ideals and Practice
The Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) established in 1973 held five world
conferences on Muslim education in Mecca 1977, Islamabad 1980, Dacca 1981, Jakarta
1982, and Cairo 1987. Their recommendations, Ashraf reports, were to "re-classify
knowledge into 'revealed' (given to man by God and contained mainly in the Qur´an and
the tradition of the Prophet) and 'acquired' (by man's efforts)," and that "acquired"'
knowledge should be taught from the "Islamic point of view," the process of which is
referred to as "Islamization of knowledge." The goals, similar to those outlined by al-
Faruqi (1982)--to integrate modern sciences and branches of knowledge within the
Islamic philosophy--are stated in the Islamic Education Series' seven monographs of
which Ashraf is general editor.
A core curriculum (Muhammad Hamid al-Afendi and Nabi Ahmed Baloch, 1980) with
Syed Muhammad al-Naquib al-Attas's (ed.) Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education
(Jeddah, 1979) and other "blueprints" for groundwork and strategies were published in
this series, the basic premise of which is that the only way to develop an Islamic
curriculum that will alleviate the crisis in Muslim education caused by the dual traditional
and secular systems, is to "reinterpret all branches of knowledge, particularly social
13
sciences, within the Islamic perspective." Yet, because the emphasis was on "revealed"
vs. "human-acquired" knowledge, no action plan was devised to reconstruct a fresh base
for Islamic thought and educational practice in the light of new discoveries and
contemporary needs or to alleviate the dichotomy in Muslim thinking that resulted from
separating "religious" and "secular" knowledge. Also, despite its urgency in light of new
economic developments and the women's emancipation movement, no action plan was
chartered for women's education. Instead, the emphasis on different and segregated
education resulted only in prescriptive statements, reiterating a perspective on girls'
education that has been evolving since the introduction of Western secular education
practices (although one of the fourteen committees of the World Conferences on Islamic
Education was charged with the "teaching of women," no female educator was involved,
and the topic was discussed in less than five pages of the seven volumes.
This perspective of female education in Islam is almost uniform in countries that
adopted segregated education after encountering European and American systems. In
the Indian subcontinent, for example, most females attending Qur´anic kuttab not only
are denied the opportunity to continue their religious education once they reach puberty
but rarely are instructed by their families, as was the practice among learned Muslim
families before the British colonization. Similar practice is found in other Muslim
countries after interacting with Western educational practices, at which the emphasis is
placed on wanting girls to maintain religious knowledge and character in sexually
segregated schools (El-Sanabary, 1973) while allowing no female teachers' education in
religion. Despite their enrollment in kuttabs at prior eras, Saudi girls, as an example,
were not allowed to enroll in religious institutions of higher learning such as ´Um al-Qura
in Mecca until 1970-71, when, according to Mohammed Saad al-Salem "The Interplay of
Tradition and Modernity: A Field Study of Saudi Policy and Educational Development,"
14
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1981), only 80 girls versus 2,210
males were admitted. Thus, these girls and young mothers receive their religious
knowledge mainly by observing their elders' practice of local, regional tribal, or ethnic
customary interpretations of Islam, and those who attend public and
private schools receive secular knowledge from trained, organized teachers with
structured curricula.
In summary, Muslim male educators continue to overlook the dynamics of the role of
women as the transmitters, preservers, and transformers of the culture in Muslim
societies into the 1980s and 1990s. These educators kept female religious education
peripheral, relegating it to the home. Such a discrepancy in female education is only
one of many other disparities that transformed Islamic education, resulting in fragmanted
educational planning and imbalanced emphasis between religious and secular
objectives. This imbalance is mostly the remnant of the colonial and missionary legacies
that left the Muslim world in a turmoil even after independence.
---------------------
* See the author's article "Educational Reform" and its Bibliography.
15
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Religious Education)
General Works:
-Ahmed, Akbar S. Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society.
London and New York, 1988. A unique history of Muslim societies' response to world
events by a native Muslim. Chapter seven gives special perspective on the colonial
impact on Muslims' rejection of any form of modernity. Chapter ten on the
reconstruction of Muslim thought is illuminating. The Appendix, "Muslim Chronology" up
to 1986, is particularly helpful.
-Ashraf, Syed Ali. New Horizons in Muslim Education. Cambridge, 1985.
See also Islamic Education Series, some volumes of which are cited below.
A representative of Neotradtionalists' views on Muslim education. The Appendices
summarize the recommendations of the four World Conferences on Islamic Education.
-Al-Faruqi, Ismaç
il R. Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Workplan.
Washington, D.C. ,1982. An essential introduction to the understanding of
contemporary trends in Islamic education and thought by an American Muslim scholar.
-Iqbal, Sir Mohammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Lahore,
reprinted 1962. A landmark of the Pakistani poet and scholar's vision in reforming
Islamic education through the reconstruction of Islamic thought.
16
-Qutb, Muhammad. Al-Tarbiyah al-Islamiyah (Curriculum of Islamic Education). al-juz´al-
Thani: fi al-Tatbiq (Second Volume: Application). Second printing, Beirut, 1981. A good
representation of revivalists', particularly the Muslim Brothers,' view of Islamic education.
-Shalaby, Ahmad. History of Muslim Education. Karachi, 1979. Though it deals with the
subject from the beginning of Islam till the fall of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt (1250), it
covers important issues in the evolution of Muslim education. The bibliography is rich
with primary sources in Arabic and English.
Regional Accounts:
-Ahmad, Mohammad Akhlaq. Traditional Education Among Muslims (A Study of Some
Aspects of Modern India). Delhi, 1985.
-Ahmat, Sharom, and Sharon Siddique, eds., Muslim Society, Higher Education and
Development in Southeast Asia. Singapore, 1987. A collection of essays surveying
historical and contemporary educational issues in Muslim societies of Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
-Barazangi, Nimat Hafez. "The Education of North American Muslim Parents and
Children: Conceptual Changes as a Contribution to Islamization of Education." The
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 7, 3, 1990: 385-402; and "Islamic
Education in the United States and Canada: Conception and Practice of the Islamic
Belief System," in Yvonne Haddad, ed. The Muslims of America. New York, 1991.
17
-El-Sanabary, Nagat Morsi. "A Comparative Study of the Disparities of Educational
Opportunities for Girls in the Arab States." Ph. D. dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, 1973. Rich in data on girls' education.
-Harrison, Christopher. France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960. Cambridge,
reprinted 1990. Chapters nine and ten, "The French stake in Islam" and "The
'rediscovery of Islam'," are particularly intriguing.
Topical Studies:
-Al-Afendi, Muhammad Hamid, and Nabi Ahmed Baloch, eds., Curriculum and Teacher
Education. Islamic Education Series, Jeddah, 1980.
-Ahmad, Anis. Muslim Women and Higher Education: A Case for Separate Institutions
for Women. Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, Second and Revised Edition, 1984.
Provides insights into the neotraditionalists' biased views of women's education.
-Al-Faruqi, Ismaç
il R. "Islamizing the Social Sciences" (pp. 8-20), and Sayyid Waqqar Ahmed Husaini, "Humanistic-Social
Sciences Studies in Higher Education: Islamic and International Perspectives" (pp. 148-66) in
al-Faruqi, Ismaç
il R. and Abdullah Omar Nasseef, eds., Social and Natural Sciences: The Islamic
Perspectives. Islamic Education Series, Jeddah, 1981.
-Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. "The Teaching of Philosophy," (pp. 3-21) in S.H. Nasr, ed.,Philosophy, Literature and Fine Arts. Islamic Education Series, Jeddah, 1982. A
blueprint for the role of philosophy, arts and literature in Islamic education.
Nimat Hafez Barazangi
http://scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=philosophy+education+in+islam&t=all&sort=0&g=s
