Islam and Higher Education

Concepts, Challenges and Opportunities

Marodsilton Muborakshoeva

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415687508
• eBook ISBN: 9781136306334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Politics

This book is the first study to qualitatively explore the concepts of higher education in Muslim contexts. It examines the different concepts of 'a university' and the way they shape practice in Muslim contexts, with a particular focus on the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Contributing to theoretical debates and discussing practical challenges that universities in Muslim countries face, the author analyses seven higher education institutions in Pakistan. She argues that there is a need for institutions to constantly review their mission and aims and objectives in light of the wider economic, political, and socio-cultural and religious development of a society.

The book reviews the history of higher education institutions and examines opportunities for some Pakistani universities, to become centres of excellence in the future. This is subject to adequate support from the government, industries, philanthropists and the society at large. In return, these universities would have to cater to the needs of the society, from basic needs in the areas of health and education to science and technology.

Islam and Higher Education breaks new grounds in the field of higher education in Muslim contexts and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of comparative education and Islamic Studies.

1	Higher learning in Muslim contexts
	The past and present

Introduction

In the beginning of his compelling book, Jame al-hikmatayn, the eleventh-century Muslim philosopher, writer, poet and preacher, Nasir Khusraw, states:

Since the reason for writing this book was to uncover religious and philosophical dilemmas I named this book Jame al-hikmatayn (Synthesis of the Two Wisdoms). In it, I have spoken with the wise men of religion bringing proofs from the book of God [Qur’an] and the tradition of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and with the wise men of philosophy and logic bringing rational evidence.

(Khusraw, 2003b: 21)

The inseparability of the two wisdoms, the religious and the philosophical, thus is dealt with systematically by the author, explaining and solving the toughest religious and philosophical questions with reference to the Qur’anic verses and rational evidence.

This kind of epistemology dominated the Muslim intellectual milieu and institutions for higher learning of the tenth to eleventh centuries. Some later Muslim thinkers, though they were very much under the influence of philosophy and the natural sciences at that time, nevertheless argued against this notion and eventually emphasised the worth of religious knowledge over that of philosophy. Higher educational institutions were affected by these developments and organisations of knowledge took shape accordingly. From the 1500s on, especially from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, some revival of the intellectual traditions similar to those mentioned, took place, in which studies of both religious sciences and philosophy became equally important in some contexts such as Iran and the Indian subcontinent.

Today, several centuries on, the land (now Afghanistan) that once served as a refuge for the great sage, Nasir Khusraw, and where he produced all of his religious and philosophical works, is now engulfed by savage warfare that hinders the advancement of knowledge and higher learning.

What is the reason? Despite the turmoil of the Middle Ages, why would a milieu such as the eleventh or seventeenth century have been more productive of scholarly activity than contemporary contexts in some Muslim countries? Why did the medieval intellectual debates between various Muslim sects and groups stop, never really to resume again? Why, do some Muslim contexts continually experience wars and civil unrest, often not of their own making? How is it that institutions such as madrasahs, which once produced great thinkers and intellectuals, are being accused today of harbouring terrorists, preparing militants and having a narrow view of education? Some madrasahs in Pakistan are the particular target of such accusations.

Discussing the long-standing traditions of knowledge, with their fluctuating histories, this chapter argues that higher educational institutions, particularly madrasahs, were not a closed and narrow system, as they are defined and perceived today. It starts by taking a look at early educational endeavours and creativity among Muslims and the intellectual milieu that facilitated such originality. It explores some examples of intellectual debates among Muslims and will provide an explanation of the triumph and decline of these intellectual traditions. It demonstrates how institutions for higher learning accommodated these developments and evolved into much more organised and structured establishments, but at the same time became more or less standardised, leaving less room for ingenuity and intellectual freedom. Ultimately, the curriculum and the ways in which knowledge was organised reflected such changes. However, consideration of the rebirth of intellectual traditions from the 1500s onward, especially in the Indian subcontinent, reveals how institutions for higher learning were still capable of meeting the demands of their societies. In the modern age, however, the institution of the madrasah has faced numerous challenges.

Historical context and intellectual milieu

Learning and education among Muslims dates back to the time when Prophet Muhammad received his revelation and a new religion was born. The importance of acquiring knowledge has been emphasised in the holy Qur’an, especially in verses 3: 7,8,16; 6: 105,108; 9: 14; 20: 114; 21: 22; 22: 54, 68, 71; 24: 6; 28: 14; 35: 28; 39: 9, and in many more, thereby playing a tremendous role in engendering a zeal for learning among the believers. Rosenthal (1970) counts 750 occurrences of the word ‘knowledge’ (‘ilm) in the holy book. The first verse that was revealed to the Prophet, who was unacquainted with writing and reading, began with the word ‘Read’:

Read, in the name of thy Sustainer, who created – created men out of a germ-cell. Read – for thy Sustainer is the Most Bountiful One, who has taught [man] the use of pen – taught man what he did not know.

(96: 1–5)

The Prophet would pray for God to bestow knowledge upon him and his followers, to cause him ‘to grow in knowledge’ (20: 114). The holy book states: ‘of all His servants only those endowed with knowledge stand truly in awe of God’ (35: 28) and ‘Say, “can they who know and they who do not know be deemed equal?” Only they who are endowed with knowledge keep this in mind’ (39: 9).

A number of traditions (hadith) of the Prophet also emphasise the importance of acquiring knowledge. The most famous hadiths are: ‘Seek knowledge from the cradle to grave,’ ‘Seek knowledge, even if it be in China,’ ‘The pursuit of knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim, man and woman,’ ‘Wisdom is the goal of the believer and he must seek it irrespective of its source,’ ‘God eases the way to paradise for him who seeks learning,’ ‘Angels spread their wings for the seeker of learning as a mark of God’s approval of his purpose,’ ‘ I am the city of knowledge and Ali is its gate; so whoever desires knowledge, let him enter the gate.’

It is often debated what is meant by ‘knowledge’ in the Qur’an and hadith. So far a comprehensive explanation has been offered by Francis Rosenthal. According to him, ‘ilm has been translated as ‘knowledge’, but it has wider connotations than knowledge. ‘ilm is an all-embracing term, and includes facts as well as the way that they have been understood and eventually implemented in action. Therefore, Rosenthal elaborates, the concept of knowledge in the Qur’an is a complex one. It consists of human knowledge and God’s knowledge. God’s knowledge is a divine knowledge and possessed by Him only. It is knowledge of a higher order, and in principle could be bestowed upon those men who are the most pious devotees of religion. Human knowledge includes both secular and religious knowledge. All these types of knowledge are interdependent; one cannot exist without the other. Encountering Greek science in the conquered lands, however, Muslims gradually became acquainted with other notions of ‘ilm, or knowledge, as some individual item of information, or as a totality made up of a number of items of information. Thus, knowledge can be the absolute totality of all that can be known and can be done and is worth being known and being done. It can also be one of the numerous sections of total knowledge that admit systematic organisation in the form of scientific disciplines (Rosenthal, 1970).

Muslim thinkers assimilated and harmonised the Qur’anic encouragement of acquiring knowledge with other contemporary ideas of knowledge. This reconciliation formed a distinctive philosophy of knowledge that was shared by almost all Muslim thinkers, no matter what legal, theological, philosophical or mystical group they belonged to. This was the unifying force they all shared, namely that the foremost source of knowledge and above all else was the holy Qur’an and the Prophetic heritage. It was a philosophy that got its inspiration and roots from the revelation. In this sense Muslim thinkers all worked within the framework of revelation.

At the same time, this did not mean that working within that framework restricted their academic freedom, especially in scientific investigations. It also did not imply that the search for knowledge was without its challenges, since there existed different discourses on the notion of ‘true’ knowledge, the ‘right type’ of social structures, social order and institutions. Muslim thinkers belonging to different schools of thought did not, therefore, all reconcile the Prophetic tradition and the available sciences of the time in the same manner, or without debates and disputations. I will consider examples of such debates further below.

At the heart of the intellectual search were some fundamental questions concerning the legitimate leader of the community, the nature of the divine, the difference between the divine and the world he created and how to know the divine and attain salvation. The search for answers to these questions naturally gave way to the development of various sciences such as grammar and exegesis (the study and interpretation of the Qur’an), law, theology, philosophy, mysticism and other sciences.

By the early eighth century the religion of Islam had expanded and spread far beyond the Arabian Peninsula, absorbing the cultures of different nations across the Middle East, Persia, and beyond the Oxus and Indus rivers to the east, and northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to the west. Closely connected with the conquest and political development of these lands, though it was not necessarily imposed on other people, the new religion was able to inspire a great many scholars, thinkers, philosophers, poets, artists and artisans to engage with it intellectually and aesthetically and to work within its framework. Rulers within and outside Muslim contexts, even though they engaged in usurping and overthrowing one another, nevertheless were able to create an environment that enabled scholars to acquire knowledge and produce excellent scholarly work. The most notable productive periods of higher learning were the eighth to thirteenth centuries under the different caliphates and emirates (see Barthold, 1928; Watt, 1985; Lapidus, 2002).

During the reign of the Umayyads (661–750), alongside political events remarkable educational developments took place. Muslims started to learn the traditions of the Prophet from authoritative teachers, who in turn had learned them from the companions and family members of the Prophet. They, especially the new, non-Arab converts, had to study and learn the holy Qur’an, which by then had been put into written form. Thus, the science of grammar began to develop first, followed by some other practical sciences such as genealogy, history, Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), the traditions of the Prophet (hadith) etc. (Kennedy, 2000). As Islam expanded there emerged socio-cultural issues to which Muslims wanted to find answers. The caliphs and judges responded to the issues as they occurred using their own intellectual judgement (ijtihad). Some ulama, though, disagreed and claimed that the legitimate sources for resolving any issue in the community were the Qur’an and the sayings and deeds of the Prophet. This facilitated the discussions of what later became known as Shari’a and the science of jurisprudence. As Mahdi (2000) rightly concludes, the search for knowledge and rational inquiries among Muslims were closely connected with the religious and political developments during and after the Prophet’s life, especially when Muslims began to speculate on the question of the leadership of the community after the Prophet. At the origin of Islamic religious thought kalam (theology) is ‘the question of who has the right to rule the community’. These quests for knowledge were then nurtured by the rational traditions of the Syriac-speaking Christians, the Greeks, Persians, and Indians (2000: 48).

Under the Abbasids (750–1256) and the Buyids (934–1055), impressive educational developments took place. The Abbasids commissioned scholars to translate works from other local languages, especially the Greek sciences available in Syriac, into Arabic in their famous library or Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom). Prominent among the learning traditions were the diverse schools of law, the philosophico-mystical school of the Ikhwan-us-safa (Pure Brethren), the Mu’tazila and Ash’ari theology, the philosophers, the different Shi’a theosophy, and the Sufi, schools of thought.

Educational developments and institutions under the Fatimids (889–1171) in Cairo were remarkable too. Caliph al-Muiz established the al-Azhar mosque in 969 as a centre for higher learning, which, according to Khuda Bakhsh (1927), is arguably the first university in the world and remains one of the main intellectual centres in modern times. Under caliph al-Hakim in 1005 the famous Dar al-Ilm (Court of Knowledge) was established, where studies of almost every subject of the age took place.

Thus the intellectual advancements and earnest quest for knowledge among Muslims were closely connected with the religious, socio-cultural and political developments of the time. Among Muslims, intellectual and rational search was not a luxury but a necessity.

The concept of knowledge as developed by schools of thought

To explore the nature of intellectual search and debates in detail and how the sciences developed is beyond the scope of this book. I can only focus on issues more relevant to this topic, namely how, in the process of developing the sciences, whether religious or natural, the various schools of thought dealt with the concept of knowledge and epistemology. Almost all learning traditions and schools of thought contributed to the development of the concept of knowledge, as we will see, in a pluralistic manner, and yet united under the same framework. Here we discuss the general views of the schools of law, theology, philosophy and mystics. Through exploring the views of prominent individuals such as Al-Farabi, Ibn-Sina, Ibn Rushd, Nasir Khusraw and Al-Ghazzali we will demonstrate examples of debates among Muslim thinkers on God, creation, intellect and worthwhile knowledge.

With regard to the concept of knowledge, the schools of law were concerned mostly with clarification of the methods and educational procedures for studying the traditions as well as the relationship between knowledge and faith in the true religion, since knowledge is part of it. For them, knowledge was key to the theory and practice of Islam. The Shi’a school seemed to add to this a combination of revealed and acquired knowledge (Rosenthal, 1970).

The general theologians’ view of knowledge was similar to that of the legal schools. They too equated knowledge with faith, but unlike the latter they were concerned with combining religious theory with practice. The theologians were attracted to the debate over the rational and irrational modes of knowing and understanding. Rosenthal (1970) believes that, like the divine attribution of knowledge, the problem of knowledge and faith was also part of the history of the influence of Greek logic and Christian theology on Muslim thinkers, particularly the theologians and philosophers. For the Mutazila theologians, for example, knowledge was a belief. According to them, knowledge, as well as cognition (ma’rifah), is believing in a thing (to be) as it is, and certainty (tayaqqun) is the removal of any doubt about it. This idea met with the strongest opposition from some legal schools and Ash’ari theologians, who asserted that God could not be thought of as an object to believe in.

The concept of knowledge as understood and propagated by the tenth-century school of Ikhwan us-safa (Pure Brethren), a group of scholars whose identity some associate with mystics or philosophers, and yet others with Ismaili Muslims, stands out the most. As opposed to the almost universal trend in Islam identifying faith with knowledge, the Ikhwan were first to realise the difference between knowledge and faith. For them, Muhammad’s understanding of knowledge, which divided worldly and religious knowledge, was a convincing point of difference between knowledge and faith. They maintained that because many scholars are not acquainted with the difference between ‘ilm (knowledge) and iman (faith), they often mistakenly use them as synonyms. The Pure Brethren were supportive of the philosophers’ views that knowledge was the perception (tasawwur) by the soul of the distinctive characteristics of objects known in their essence. If this was knowledge, the soul would not perceive its reality whenever information about it came down by way of traditional learning. Such information was not knowledge, but faith (iman), acknowledgement (iqrar) and belief (tasdiq). That is why the prophets first asked their nations to acknowledge the oneness of God, and then challenged them to believe; after clarity had been achieved they asked them to study the true matter of knowledge (Tibawi, 1972).

According to Tibawi (1972), the Ikhwan us-safa made at least two contributions to the theory of education. The first concerns the close relationship between teacher and student, resembling the interactions of the Sufi teacher and his disciple. This is a spiritual association and is superior to the physical one. Their second contribution envisages teaching as one of the crafts. The more perfection the craftsman acquires, the nearer he comes to God.

Being influenced by Greek philosophy, the philosophers developed a distinctive concept of knowledge, to which some intellectuals such as Al-Ghazzali proposed objections. For Al-Kindi (d. 866), philosophy was the knowledge of things in their realities according to human capacities. He encouraged scholars to seek for the truth, since truth elevates human beings. His Treatise on Intellect is one of the outstanding works, in which he distinguishes four types of intellect (a reassertion and elaboration of the Aristotelian proposition). For him the truth that the philosophers sought was not different from the truth brought by the Prophet (Fakhri, 1997). Al-Farabi (870–950), the most famous philosopher to have written on philosophical issues, logic, and political thought, was influenced by Neo-Platonism. He presents an outline of the universe at large, where intellect emanates from the One, and since it emanates from the eternity, he calls it ‘The Second Intellect’. In this sense the theory of emanation is in accordance with revelation where things are created from the One, and therefore revelation and intellect do not contradict one another. The Qur’anic text, according to Al-Farabi, needs to be understood at a deeper, esoteric level, and therefore it is the function of intellect to understand revelation (Fakhri, 1997; Netton, 1992).

Other famous philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: criticisms of higher education: the literature gap and the research problem
• 1 Higher learning in Muslim contexts: the past and present
• 2 Modern developments of higher education in Muslim contexts
• 3 Ideas of ‘a university’: key conceptual issues and challenges
• 4 Concepts of ’a university’ in Pakistan
• 5 Case studies of universities visited
• 6 Challenges faced by universities in Pakistan
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index