ISLAMIC EDUCATIONAL REFORM

ISLAMIC EDUCATIONAL REFORM

The challenge for educational reform in the Muslim world is steep. By the turn of the twentieth century, Islam has become a globalizing force and demands for reinstituting religio-moral education have produced tensions between Muslims and the dominant capitalist Western globalization forces. In the five hundred years since the Spanish inquisition, which dismantled the last intellectual and cultural stronghold of Islam in Europe, Western forces had failed in their goal of “modernizing” the Muslim world, mainly because of their double-standard policies. Focusing on modern skills and vocations as the only means to reform made existing Western-imposed educational reform paradigms almost obsolete. In Barazangi 's opinion, Muslim educators need to understand issues of pluralism, secularism, and the individual belief system. The problem lies mainly in confusing these issues as well as in applying the ethnic-religious divides when addressing the public-private domains within the Islamic belief system (Barazangi, 2004). Barazangi warns against the “addition of contents, concept, themes, and perspectives to the curriculum without changing its basic structure, purpose, and characteristics,” stating that it is twice as important in the context of the current political climate. That is, she explains, “the universal beliefs of Islam that [are] rooted in the Qur῾ān are often confused with the… individual cultural and ethnic interpretations of these beliefs, especially because these interpretations are predominantly exercised by males.”
Understanding the dynamic relationship between the universal belief system and the individual views of Islam was central to the determination of the nature of educational reform in Muslim societies and minority communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it has become more central in the twenty-first century. This centrality, represented in the five major challenges that are addressed in the five sections of this article (preservation verses revival of Islamic culture, changing functions of education,…) is essential for discussing changes in curricular and instructional policies and their implications for attitudinal change.
The Muslim world initially rejected as irrelevant changes introduced from Europe in the early nineteenth century. Changes in technical, military, and vocational training dictated by local rulers and elites did not conform to the traditional educational practices that were the remnants of Islamic education. Comparing these practices with recent changes runs the risk of overstating where and how educational reform has taken place, particularly so when outside systems have been imposed. Zia 's (2006) claim that, contrary to modernity, globalization is not an outgrowth of a Western worldview is not credible because neither indigenous ideas and ideals, nor norms and attitudes form the basis of the process of reform. Consequently, transformation of these ideas and attitudes has not occurred.
Literature from the early twenty-first century indicates that old practices have not been reformed and that changes have resulted in no significant attitudinal or cultural development (UNDP, 2002–2005). Changes introduced by colonials and missionaries resulted in setting the European utilitarian mode—training for jobs and services—and the Muslim altruistic mode—developing
the Islamic character—modes against each other. This tension has resulted in centralized state-controlled educational institutions and a complete departure from Islamic education. Postmodern attempts to privatize seminaries (ma῾āhid) of secondary and higher religious or secular education have created business opportunities for 
investors instead of producing changes in the old stagnant systems.
The intellectual stagnation that has characterized the Muslim world since the early fourteenth century has remained despite mass and compulsory schooling in the postcolonial era. The political upheaval found in many Muslim societies in the early twenty-first century has furthered governments ’ resistance to new ideas, particularly those related to female higher Islamic learning, instilling a fear of being stamped by the natives as agents of the Western hegemonic globalization process, or accused by Westerners as “Islamists.” It is also probable that governments ’ resistance has been the result of their own acceptance of the “Islamists” views or in order to appease Western governments that support their hold on power.

Preservation versus Revival of Islamic Culture.

The Islamic world 's reaction to Western-introduced changes in education has lacked the intellectual dynamics that once marked its educational system, in which formal and informal teaching and learning were founded on the accomplishments and needs of teachers and pupils. Nasr (1987) discusses the oral transmission that produced some highly knowledgeable, though illiterate, Muslims. Western educational practices in the Muslim lands did not produce the same economic, intellectual, and social development that they did in Western Europe and North America. Educational objectives outlined by Muslim educators have remained ambiguous; although their philosophy claims to be rooted in the ideals of Islam, their pedagogical strategies contain both modern methodologies and political, nationalistic rhetoric. The present inconclusive, fragmented, and contradictory literature on Muslim educational reform, in both English and Arabic, indicates that educational transformation is an unstable process, one that has been made more uneven because societal fabrics in Muslim societies have been dismantled as a result of contemporary military and cultural wars, in the name of democracy and women 's emancipation.
No full account of curricular reform is available, despite the many reports on changes in the instructional process and the increased number of schools, universities, and student enrollment. Reports by Albert Hourani (1981 and 1983), UNESCO (1995), and others largely praise the progress of the “reformed and modernized” education system. However, Nasr (1987) and Barazangi (2004) question such conclusions, which they argue confuse traditional Islamic reform with fundamentalism and modernity with nationalism. Recently, tensions between Muslim apologists who claim moderation and Muslims who use extreme means and interpretations to reinstate Islam created further confusion between the objectives of preserving the Islamic culture and the imposed norms of reformation coming from outside the Muslim world.
These changes were and are still being rejected by local peoples and religious leaders in majority Muslim societies and minority Muslim communities in different parts of the world who traditionally have been suspicious of any new type of formal education, although foreign cultural practices had been integrated into local systems during the eighth and ninth centuries. Local peoples and religious leaders have considered European and American educational changes irrelevant, alien, and expressions of colonial exploitation and missionary attempts to Christianize the population. These views are not baseless, as missionary education systems, foreign private-school systems, and colonial government–supported school systems attest (British Parliamentary Records vol. 137 [1905]) and as neocolonial strategies, mainly by the United States, that exploit the radical response of some Muslim groups, demonstrate. The idea of special girls ’ schools was introduced by Catholic missionaries in the Indian Subcontinent and the Levant during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In these schools, girls were taught embroidery, home economics, domestic skills, and nursing; they were also taught the Bible. Boys were taught office skills; agricultural, military, and vocational trades; and some fiqh (jurisprudence) to serve government needs. The rising tension between the so-called secularists and Islamists became more polarized with the American neocolonial ambitions in the Middle East and Central Asia during the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Though these ambitions are especially pronounced in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, and Pakistan, they have affected all Muslim societies.
Educational objectives in the colonial and postcolonial periods shifted from an emphasis on discipline for both children and adults during the pre-modern era to a formalization of the relationship of citizens to the state to meet its economic and political interests or the recent demands of globalization (Eickelman, 1985). Local governors ’ policies weakened the katātīb (plural of kuttāb) and madāris (plural of madrasah), often distributing the schools’ waqf (endowment) among the ruling class and missionary societies to establish private schools. Heyworth-Dunne (1968) suggests that system imposed by the Egyptian ruler Muhammad ῾Alī (r. 1805–1849) is the key to understanding why Egypt 's present system is so defective and poorly adapted to the country. Although he established a military school (1816), technical and engineering schools and colleges, and a medical school (1827), these schools were for men only and were staffed by European Christians. This instructional system also neglected women 's education, particularly at the secondary level, and training of teachers for the elementary and the preparatory schools. But most of all, the system was not coordinated with traditional practices and appeared to operate as a rival or even as a substitute for them. New subject matters were divorced from Qur῾ānic study and the sciences of antiquity such as biography, astronomy, geography, and medicine. In addition, the system had little or no direct intellectual purpose; it existed primarily to train the local people to serve colonial and local government interests. Despite many recent changes, the Egyptian system is still affected by the tension and confusion between the secular and religious, the national and global (Daun and Walford, 2004).

Changing Function of Education.

Sanderson (1975) points out that Islamic education achieved its goals in colonial Sudan and Northern Nigeria to pass on the customs of the adult community, to teach children the cultural knowledge and skills they needed to function effectively in society, and to instill in them beliefs about the relationship between the seen and the unseen in the universe. In the twenty-first century, however, these skills are seen as “taboo” in response to the Western onslaught against “religious” teaching, as both Westerners and Muslims confuse religious education with Islamic higher learning (Barazangi, 2004).
What remained of the Islamic education system became peripheral during the colonial period, reserved for underprivileged students such as those from poor rural and urban areas. Primary Islamic education, for example, came to a standstill in the Ottoman Empire when Turkish replaced its main language, Arabic, as the medium of instruction in most government schools. This occurred also in the colonial period when colonial languages replaced local languages in occupied Muslim lands. These changes in instructional practices transformed people 's ideas about religion and its importance to community development by removing the teaching of Islam as the basis of character formation and making it a new subject called “religion,” without primary status in the curriculum (Starrett, 1998). Government schools became agents of colonial policy, used to control Muslim rulers, administrative management, and agricultural productivity. As described by Leila Ahmad, when enrollments grew, girls were denied places in classrooms and tuition was instituted in secondary schools, making girls ’ education a low priority (Ahmed, 1992).
The English colonial system penetrated the Indian subcontinent, the majority of the Middle East, and many African nations, even though it claimed that it did not interfere in internal affairs (Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1986). The French colonial system in North and West Africa and in Syria and Lebanon assimilated the existing system to the point of annihilating it (W. Bryant Mumford, Africans Learn to Be French, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970). It contributed further to diverting the rural system from traditional Islamic education to superstitious social customs, dogmatic and nationalistic creeds, and passive Ṣūfī orders. And instead of strengthening institutions of higher learning, such as the oldest, the 1,110-year-old al-Qarawīyīn in Fez, Morocco, the colonial government dismantled many old centers. The recent revival of such centers as cultural landmarks has not restored their intellectual value. Thus, attempts to reverse the dismantling process with the hope that this process will lure Muslim immigrants to go back to their Muslim lands have also failed as European and North American societies attempt to assimilate instead of integrate the new waves of Muslim immigrants (Barbieri, 1999).

Comparing the Three Schemes of Education.

A comparison of teaching in the katātīb and madāris to the colonizers ’ technical, military, and vocational training or the missionaries ’ book knowledge is not an accurate indicator of educational reform. Neither do the mushrooming Muslim schools in the West represent a reform (Barazangi, 2004). What is obvious, however, is that educational practices have changed from informal family-based, formal teacher-centered, and informal decentralized tarbiyah (character and intellectual development) to either formal missionary-controlled, state-centralized schooling, or privately funded institutions that are attempting to integrate modernized teaching tools and material within the same social norms of the decentralized extended-family and tribal system. These new schemata have added to the debate about reform but have not effected a major shift in the educational process. Inserting tarbiyah within “secular” education does not address the fundamental need to replace the existing bureaucratic system (Barazangi, 2004). The concept of tarbiyah has been reduced to passing on the skills and information needed to qualify for a job.
Classically, the function of teaching was primarily Qur῾ānic talqīn (acquisition and dissemination of meaning and spirit): essentially, instilling community values while combating illiteracy. Other types of kuttāb taught some knowledge of akhbār (history), ḥisāb (simple arithmetic and reckoning), and elementary Arabic naḥw (grammar), reading, and writing. The function of the madrasah was to complement the objectives of both kuttābs, as well as the halqah's advanced ῾ulūm al-Qur῾ān (Qur῾ānic sciences), ῾ulūm al-ḥadīth (sciences of the Prophetic tradition), and their ancillary sciences of Arabic naḥw and ādāb (literature). Thus, ḥikmah (wisdom), kalām (philosophy/theology), manṭiq (logic), ῾ilm al-nujūm (astronomy), music, and ῾ilm al-ṭibb (medicine) were part of the curriculum even early in the nineteenth century (Ali, 1983). Government and missionary schools, meanwhile, sought to implant European secular and Christian values of agrarian, office, and class bureaucracy (Bennabi, 1969). In the twenty-first century, governments are still struggling to squeeze specialized courses of study into the old curricular structure instead of dismantling the obsolete systems. Emphasis on computerized instruction and online resources has not changed the dynamics of learning, nor the learner-teacher relations (Barazangi, 2007).
Traditional and colonial modes of instruction represent a departure from the Islamic perspective that was instrumental in the evolution of the Islamic civilization. Rahman (1982) notes that intellectual stagnation occurred during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when manuals and commentaries dominated, and suggests that the educational process had virtually ceased to function by the late 1500s when the Andalusian Islamic community in Spain was dismantled. Eickelman, however, sees the mnemonic devices of Islamic education as a continuation of the socialization process even during and after the colonial period, when systems of mass and compulsory schooling were legislated. Barazangi (2004, 2007) asserts that despite the many efforts to integrate these two modes into a third schema, the basic dynamics of seeing the learner, particularly the female, as a preserver of culture instead as a generator of new knowledge still dominate.
The Islamic educational system was abandoned when state and colonial governments made decisions for local people and Muslims lost their scholarly and intellectual initiative. With the exception of scattered scholars and artisans during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries that Nasr points out, Islamic educational practices fell into abeyance. Attempts to expound the positive attitude of Islam toward science by those Rahman calls “pre-modernist reformers” resulted instead in a complete separation of “Islamic” and “non-Islamic” knowledge. The strategies of nationalist elites such as Ma῾rūf al-Raṣāfī (1877–1945) of Iraq attest to differences in attitude, especially toward the implications of modern science for the traditional Muslims ’ worldview and faith. These different attitudes and strategies created further confusion about how to reintroduce science and technology in the culture. As Bennabi notes, the aspirations of some elites and rulers were not those of the community or the masses, but those of the colonials, missionaries, and romantic Orientalists. Recent new visions—be they the “Islamization of Knowledge” as envisioned by Ismā῾īl Rājī al-Fārūqī (Islamization of Knowledge: The Problem, Principles, and the Workplan, Islamabad, 1982), or its misapplication in a separatist, radical mode—have further isolated the masses of Muslims from the decision-making process (Barazangi, 2004).The practical implications of these differences in attitude and of alienated aspirations may be seen in the varied and conflicting responses to modernization and in the present disparity between the ideal and the reality of the Muslim world, particularly in educating women. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan 's call in 1860 for the reinterpretation of the Qur῾ān in light of modern experience, for example, failed because his views were not based on the Islamic perspective. He was not able to implement them in the Aligarh Muslim University of India, which he created to integrate religious beliefs with a modern scientific outlook. Other reform ideas put forth by rulers and elites who had studied in Europe had similar negative results.

Community Development and Educational Progress.

The rival Muslim and European education plans were in place until the second quarter of the twentieth century, when turmoil was the common factor in the social, political, and educational systems of occupied Muslim lands until military and political independence was achieved in the 1950s and 1960s. Elites, Bennabi adds, contributed further to this turmoil by adopting Western ideas of change as the only means for reform without considering the actual needs and sociopsychological factors of the community. Impositions and assessments of Muslim education through biased reporting by Western media during the first decade of the twenty-first century have added to the turmoil and the misunderstanding of Muslim educational systems globally. Reports by some journalists and politicians have infringed on the education profession and misled the general public, and some have contradicted their own “vision” in using a double standard when comparing the value of education in America with that of Muslim societies, or when making sweeping statements about textbooks as inciters of violence. Such claims are refuted by the empirical findings in Doumato and Starrett (2007).
Postcolonial changes, which almost uniformly in-
volved modern educational instructional schemes, also resulted in confusing outcomes. Education authorities lost their enthusiasm, lacked planning and balance in educational development, and have been pressured from outside to change, but without being given the tools or the skills to do so (Barazangi, 2007).
The general uncertainty of objectives of educational reform has prevailed with some exceptions. For example, the goal of returning to regional languages (European languages became secondary to Arabic, Persian, or Urdu as the means of instruction in public schools) has been achieved on a limited basis. This uncertainty is evident in African countries, especially those in North Africa (Abdelhamid Mansouri, “Algeria between tradition and modernity: the question of language.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Albany, 1991), and in Asian countries, particularly in Pakistan, where a full transition could not be effected because of misleading popular media accounts about madrasah enrollment (Tahir Andrabi, 
et al., “Religious School Enrolment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data,” Comparative Education Review 50, no. 3 [2006]: 446–477). With the emphasis on nationalistic sentiments, the restoration of Arabic—the language of the Qur῾ān—for instruction became an ideal. Meanwhile, those using regional languages for instruction expended energy on the translation of European textbooks instead of writing new, native textbooks. Twenty-first-century calls for ethnic minority human rights and the need to recognize minority vernacular languages have diverted educational reform foci and exhausted existing resources instead of solving issues of inequality in instruction.
The rapid increase in the number of schools in Muslim societies in the post-modern era has not kept up with population growth or with the demand for education. High levels of illiteracy persist (UNESCO, 1995; Zia, 2006) and, notwithstanding arguments concerning the definition of literacy and the value of oral transmission, the levels and types of education available to women are still inferior to those available to men (Barazangi, 2004). Educational quality is sacrificed inadvertently in pursuit of universal schooling and mandatory elementary education because of the lack of human and other resources and of coherent regional planning and technical competency (UNDP 2000–2005). Intellectual production, as Bennabi lamented earlier, is still hindered because Muslims value Western products (such as modern technical tools, and, more recently, audiovisual equipment and computer programs) and wish to acquire them, without researching the ideas behind these products.
The nature of educational transformation has varied among Muslim countries, reflecting the development model adopted, the post-1969 Muslim world 's economic and political polarization, and the role played by oil-rich countries and their international benefactors. For example, the relation between tradition and change in the Malaysian context did not arise from the question of cultural change, in which women 's place is used as the central discourse, as in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. Instead, Muslim religious groups have used a new discourse to defend against the encroachment of Western ideas. However, by emphasizing the question of morality, epitomized in attire and sex segregation, particularly in higher education institutions, Malaysian reformers have indirectly restricted the intellectual role of women in the development process. Malaysian educational reform has not changed the intellectual, attitudinal, and cultural development of the Muslim masses. As similar movements of reform are spreading in other Muslim communities from Indonesia to North America, it sometimes seems questionable whether there ever was an educational reform.

Educating Muslim Minorities in the West and the Globalization Process.

Economic openness, particularly in the oil-rich Gulf societies, has not always been accompanied by political, cultural, and educational openness. There are still generational and regional variations in accepting Western standards of globalization (Daun and Walford, 2004). In addition, “Islamists,” in response to globalization, have politicized Islam; but, more importantly, they have made Islam surface again as a globalizing force. Whether by imposing their own interpretation of Islam or by awakening the masses to their Islamic identity, these movements have created a new dilemma for reform: “Who has the authority to 
reinterpret Islamic primary sources, education, and knowledge, and how?” This has become a dominant question as intellectual Muslim women, mainly in the West, such as Barazangi and others, begin to reinterpret religious texts as well as the international civil laws (Barazangi, 2004). It is unknown who may advance the new paradigm in educational reform, and what this new paradigm might be.
See also Education subentry on Religious Education.

Bibliography

• Barazangi, Nimat Hafez. Woman’ s Identity and the Qur῾ān: A New Reading. Gainesville, Florida, 2006. Theoretical and practical synthesis of Muslims ’ education, particularly women's education in Islam. Offers a bold call for women 's higher Islamic learning and participation in the interpretation of the Qur῾ān and Western human rights documents as the means for attitudinal transformation toward women and by women concerning their education and emancipation from within.
• Barbieri, William. “Group Rights and the Muslim Diaspora.” Human Rights Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1999): 907–926.
• Bennabi, Malek. Mushkilat al-thaqāfah (The Problem of Educating). Translated from the French by ῾Abd al-Sabūr Shāhīn. Beirut, 1969. Originally published as Le problème des etude.
• Bennabi, Malek. Islam in History and Society. Translated from the French by Asma Rashid. Islamabad, 1988. Originally published as Vocation de I’Islam (Cairo, 1959). Realistic analysis of the relationship between education and cultural development in the contemporary Muslim world by a native Algerian Muslim scholar.
• Daun, Holger, and Geoffrey Walford, eds. Educational Strategies among Muslims in the Context of Globalization: Some 
National Case Studies. Leiden and Boston, 2004. A rich collection of case studies on Muslims ’ education in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, Somalia, West Africa, Sweden, England, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Greece.
• Eickelman, Dale F. Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable. Princeton, 1985. Unprecedented anthropological analysis of the power of knowledge in a Muslim society. Chapter 3, which deals with the Qur῾ānic presence in Muslim intellectual and social development, deserves particular attention.
• Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. Cambridge, 1983. This volume and the title that follows are considered by Western and Arabic Middle Eastern scholars as classical works on reform and modernization in the region.
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• Rahman, Fazlur. Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago and London, 1982. Definitive work for understanding contemporary Islamic intellectualism as the essence of higher Islamic education, and the implications of the method of Qur῾ānic interpretation to the development of the intellectual Muslim.
• Sanderson, Lillian. “Education and Administrative Control in Colonial Sudan and Northern Nigeria.” African Affairs 74 (October 1975): 427–441.
• Starrett, Gregory. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
• United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Field Mission Reports on Muslim Countries. Compiled by Mumtaz Al Anwar. Delhi, India: UNESCO, 1995.
• Ayyub Ali, A. K. M. History of Traditional Islamic Education in Bangladesh: Down to A.D. 1980. Dhaka: Islamic Foundation of Bangladesh, 1983. Though reporting mainly on Bangladesh, the author presents the development of Muslim education from Islam to 1980 that prevailed throughout the Indian Subcontinent.
• Barazangi, Nimat Hafez. “Action Research Pedagogy in a New Cultural Setting: The Syrian Experience.” Action Research 5, no. 3 (2007): 307–318.
• Doumato, Eleanor Abdella, and Gregory Starrett, eds. Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East. Boulder, Colo., 2006. Insightful empirical studies on the realities of religious education vis-à-vis the United States ’ reaction and proposed educational reform in the Muslim world.
• Heyworth-Dunne, J. An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt. London, 1968.
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Arab 
Human Development Reports, 2002–2005. New York: UNDP, 2002–2005.
• Zia, Rukhsana, ed. Globalization, Modernization, and Education in Muslim Countries. Hauppauge, New York, 2006. A different perspective on Islamic education and Muslims ’ education in Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Tanzania, Northern Nigeria, and Turkey.