By Towseef Hassan
It is often a topic of debate found in media outlets ,think tanks ,intellectual circles ,and other political activism bodies as part of a wider discourse depicting the current state of education in the Muslim world as products of pre- modern Muslim culture frozen in time and at times in conflict with the modern world. Looking from this lens, the inability of educational institutions in many parts of the Muslim world to meet the challenges of their populace is credited to their incompetence to evolve into modernity.
This narrative is supported by various historians and philosophers alike who hold the view that Islamic educational institutes have a very insignificant role in the intellectual development in Muslim civilization. However, some historians and academics have put forth a more nuanced view of Islamic educational institutes in Muslim civilization state that the current education system in the Muslim world far from being a remainder of ancient Muslim civilization , is rather a by-product of the developments which began during the colonial onslaught on Muslim civilization.
Predicting long before European colonialism, Ibn Khaldun(Ibn Khaldun ,The Muqaddimah) wrote that it in the very essence of oppression that the oppressed imitate those who oppress them. This is because the oppressed erroneously attribute their own servility to the perfection of the oppressor. This diagnosis precisely describes the defeated mindset that has evolved over time in the Muslim world due to colonialism and continues on with the blind emulation of the western powers that has deteriorated much development in the Muslim world in the post-colonial period. The adoption of School Systems coming from the west was a result of obsession and fascination with the political and economic powers of the West and it was believed that importing secular schools would bring economic prosperity and political strength in Muslim lands. Not only did it fail miserably ,but this secular education has put the local communities on the disintegration, loss of culture and destruction of traditional learning and knowledge systems. According to Al Zeera (Wholeness and Holiness in Education,139-140) , “The present Muslim world is bearing the brunt of the imported secular education systems which had been planted in the soul of Islamic traditional societies.” This secular education system has not only undermined the understanding of knowledge from an Islamic point of view but at worst put religion as a separate entity within school curricula, isolating its role and relationship to science, mathematics, economics ,culture, and other fields. Allama Iqbal describes the religion from the Islamic point of view as : “Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought ,nor mere feeling , nor mere action ; it is an expression of the whole man.”
In this regard, the idea of re-Islamization of knowledge transcends beyond the process of reclaiming the heritage of the great Muslim thinkers to the development of an Islamic epistemology creating a unity of knowledge, thereby uniting all branches of learning and knowledge . While prolific intellectuals such as Syed Hussain Nasr, Al-Attas, and Ismail al-Farouqi have written extensively on this subject about the need for this process of re-Islamization of education systems, we are not yet at par with the challenges posed by this secular system of education. Much awaited milestones must be achieved by establishing leading and robust educational institutes that have the potential to bring relevant and far reaching change to the Muslim world. It will take many generations to understand and assess the impact of knowledge accumulated within the context of colonization.
- The author is a Lecturer with the School Education Department, J&K. Views expressed are the author’s own
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