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Critical Issues in Islamic Education Studies: Rethinking Islamic and Western Liberal Secular Values of Education

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Critical Issues in Islamic Education Studies: Rethinking Islamic and Western Liberal Secular Values of Education religions Article Critical Issues in Islamic Education Studies: Rethinking Islamic and Western Liberal Secular Values of Education Abdullah Sahin Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; [email protected] Received: 24 September 2018; Accepted: 25 October 2018; Published: 30 October 2018 Abstract: This paper examines two sets of interrelated issues informing contemporary discussions on Islam and education that take place within both Muslim majority and minority contexts. The first set of issues concerns the academic conceptualisation of the study of education within diverse historical and contemporary Islamic cultural, intellectual, political, theological and spiritual traditions. After a critical examination of the current literature, the paper suggests that ‘Islamic Education Studies’ offers a distinctive academic framing that incorporates an interdisciplinary empirical and scholarly inquiry strategy capable of generating a body of knowledge and understanding guiding the professional practice and policy development in the field. Lack of conceptual clarity in various current depictions of the field, including ‘Muslim Education’, ‘Islamic Pedagogy’, ‘Islamic Nurture’ and ‘Islamic Religious Pedagogy’, is outlined and the frequent confusion of Islamic Education with Islamic Studies is critiqued. The field of Islamic Education Studies has theological and educational foundations and integrates interdisciplinary methodological designs in Social Sciences and Humanities. The second part of the inquiry draws attention to the lack of new theoretical insights and critical perspectives in Islamic Education. The pedagogic practice in diverse Muslim formal and informal educational settings does not show much variation and mostly is engaged with re-inscribing the existing power relations shaping the society. The juxtaposition of inherited Islamic and borrowed or enforced Western secular educational cultures appears to be largely forming mutually exclusive, antagonistic and often rigid ‘foreclosed’ minds within contemporary Muslim societies. The impact of the educational culture and educational institutions on the formation of resentful Islamic religiosities and the reproduction of authoritarian leadership within the wider mainstream Muslim communities have not been adequately explored. The study stresses the need to have a paradigm shift in addressing this widely acknowledged educational crisis. The formation of a transformative educational culture remains the key to being able to facilitate reflective and critical Muslim religiosities, and positive socio-economic and political change in Muslim majority and minority societies. This inquiry explores a significant aspect of this crisis by re-examining the degree to which Islamic and Western, liberal, secular conceptions and values of education remain irreconcilably divergent or open to a convergent dialogue of exchange, reciprocity and complementarity. The originality of the paper lies in offering a critical rethinking of Islamic Education through mapping the main relevant literature and identifying and engaging with the central theoretical issues while suggesting a new academic framing of the field and its interdisciplinary research agenda. Keywords: Islamic education; critical Islamic pedagogy; values in higher education; comparative education; Islamic higher education; educational reform; religiosities; foreclosure; transformative educational culture; European Islam Religions 2018, 9, 335; doi:10.3390/rel9110335 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2018, 9, 335 2 of 29 1. Introduction Despite a plethora of recent publications on Islamic Education, Islamic Schooling and Muslims in Education, the attempts to define the field remain unsystematic and often lack conceptual depth and clarity. This can be attributed to three fundamental methodological shortcomings: first, the inadequate theoretical reflections on the meaning of education, which gravely hinders the task of ‘thinking about Islam educationally and education Islamically’; second, the absence of a rigorous ‘educational hermeneutics’ with which to discern the central educational and pedagogic vocabulary in Muslim core sources and narratives of education embedded within the Muslim religious, spiritual and intellectual heritage; third, lack of empirical research in exploring the pedagogic practice and developing evidence-based polices in the field. There is a large gap in the existing literature addressing these crucial issues. Since the first World Conference on Muslim Education in 1977, there have been many attempts to define education in Islam. However, most of these initial efforts were conducted within a defensive attitude intending to discredit what was perceived to be an invading hegemonic Western, secular conception of education. Therefore, even the most sophisticated accounts of Islamic Education, for example, the influential approach of Al-Attas(1979) which has been adopted by many in the West, such as Halstead(2004), reflect features of a reactionary response rather than being based on critical inquiry into discerning the core meaning of education in Islam. While these early interpretations emerged out of the vulnerabilities of the postcolonial Muslim world, much contemporary writing within the emerging so-called post-Islamist political space on education and pedagogy in Islam and Islamic schooling appears to perpetuate these reactionary postcolonial perceptions. The impact of Al-Attas’ reading of Islam within a deeper framework of perennial philosophy and his ‘Islamisation of knowledge’ approach, in particular, can still be discerned in the writings of the young generation of researchers in the field who work within the context of the Western Muslim diaspora. According to this approach, Islamic Education appears to be defined as an esoteric, spiritual framework in which the educational process is mostly identified with the term adab/ta’dib, a set of coercive moral practices and training. This partial (mis)interpretation of adab continues to shape the conception of Islamic Education in the rare philosophically-inclined works where its discipline and training implying form, ta’dib, is often mistranslated as ‘goodness and good action’ (Waghid 2011, p. 3; Davids and Waghid 2016), and in the wider recent literature (Memon and Zaman 2016; Abdalla et al. 2018). The latter authors appear to be operating within a specific epistemology of ‘Islamic revival’ that is interested in the literal recovery of an imagined essence of Islamic pedagogy preserved by the past, pious ancestors, the salaf, in the Muslim tradition. In addition, these authors frequently use the word ‘pedagogy’ without much discussion. Pedagogy, mainly used to describe teaching methods in its original Greek, literally meant ‘to lead the child’. This definition is remarkably close to the meaning of upbringing, care and guidance suggested by the Arabic tarbiyah, a key inclusive educational concept that originates in the core Muslim sources (Sahin 2014). However, most of the recent discussions on Islamic pedagogy (e.g., Memon and Alhashmi 2018) erroneously equate pedagogy with the concept of adab with little evidence or nuance. Furthermore, Islamic Education has often been confused with ‘Islamic Studies’, a Western framing of the study of Islam that came out of the Eurocentric discourse of Orientalism and which is still not free from controversy (Adams and Martin 2001; Morris et al. 2013). In Islam, it is important to note that the concept of ‘tarbiyah’ does not depict education along dichotomic lines of religious or secular therefore, it cannot be limited to a form of religious education, instruction or nurture. It conveys a more comprehensive understanding of education as a holistic, embodied and reflective process that facilitates human flourishing and the transformation of the human condition in its diverse psychical, cognitive, spiritual, moral and emotional articulations. As such, tarbiyah, goes beyond the confines of a disinterested cognitive focus implied by the word ‘study’ or a mere religious/moral instruction and training. For a tarbiyah-embedded critical philosophy of Islamic Education, see Sahin (2014, pp. 167–91). Religions 2018, 9, 335 3 of 29 Most contemporary work on Islam and education in the West is produced by sociologists, historians, political scientists, and ethnographers rather than specialists in Education Studies. A special issue of Comparative Education Review claiming to distinguish the ‘truths’ from the ‘myths’ about education in Islam, edited by a celebrated historian of Islamic thought (Kadi 2006), fails to differentiate between diverse conceptualisation of education in Islam and engage with fundamental educational vocabulary used in Muslim core sources. There are few studies that, by using an educational analysis framework, attempt to discern the educational outlook of the Qur’an (Abdallah 1982), the theoretical basis of Islamic Education (Modawi 1977) and curriculum perspectives in the Qur’an (Risha 2014). The philosophically-grounded works of Modawi(1977) and Abdallah(1982) only offer a partial educational reading of the Qur’an, while the study by Risha(2014) presents a superficial interpretation of the Qur’an from the perspective of curriculum studies. Therefore, this literature, with few exceptions, often presents basic information on Islam and recycles the historical, descriptive material and country by country profiles of Islamic Education in Muslim majority and minority societies. A recent example of this approach
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