Education

To explore the dimensions of education in the modern Islamic world, this entry comprises five articles:

• Religious Education
• Educational Institutions
• Educational Methods
• Educational Reform
• The Islamization of Knowledge

The introductory article provides an overview of the role and function of religious education in Muslim community life: the four complementary articles provide details on educational practices, theories, and goals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Religious Education

Although Islam is known as a “religion of the book,” the majority of Muslims seem to rely mainly on cultural traditions of previous generations for their religious education and daily practice of “Islam.” Few Muslims, especially women, read the Qur'ān intimately, and those who rely on ḥadīth (prophetic tradition) as the main source of Islamic knowledge often narrate it without actually knowing its authenticity. This regression resulted from internal political and social movements in the Muslim world in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries that neglected Islamic education and allowed external secular and missionary ideas to turn it into religious education (Barazangi, 1998). Islamic education, Brazangi explains, is the process of shaping character within the Islamic worldview. This process requires the Muslim family to expose its children and adults to all knowledge as a means of understanding the parameters set in the Qur'ān to achieve taqwā, an equilibrated, constructive relationship with God, other human beings, and nature. Religious education, however, is a course of study that is taught in a school‐like setting that transformed Qur'ānic principles into formalized legal and moral codes and rituals.

Premodern Muslims had higher literacy and familiarity with texts than did their European counterparts; however, religious education was largely a concern of men (Berkey, 2004). Even though Berkey reiterates that “reconstruction of social history shows that girls often received some level of education,” the fact is that religious training does not and did not lead girls to Islamic education or to becoming Islamic scholars: ῾Alimat (feminine of ῾Ulamā') that are recognized, like their male counterparts, as authorities in interpreting Qur'ān and ḥadīth (Barazangi, 2004).

Historical accounts of Islamic education provide many perspectives on its nature and the function of its traditional institutions but rarely show the relationship between the different paradigms at different eras, as does Küng's account. We cannot understand the need to generate a new paradigm in the study of Islamic education without realizing that “overlaps [of early paradigms] are not only unavoidable but also illuminating” (Küng, 2007). Cultural and political restraints ended Islamic education as a functional system aimed at understanding and appropriating Qur'ānic pedagogical principles and limited it to “religious” knowledge confined to selected men. Islamic education has recently been confused with a subject of study, “religion”; with a moral social code (akhlāq); or with citizen education. 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 al‐῾ Ulūm al‐ Naqliya (Islamic) and al‐῾Ulūm al‐῾Aqliyah (non‐Islamic) knowledge, and a dichotomy between ideal and practice in Muslim education. Such differentiations added further confusion to the understanding of Qur'ānic sciences as though they were irrational, or as though individual Muslims need not understand the transcendent in order to fully practice it (Barazangi, 2004).

Islamic Education versus Religious Education

Islamic education, referred to in the Qur'ān (3:110) as the process of shaping character within the Islamic worldview, requires the Muslim family to expose its children and adults to all knowledge as a means of understanding the parameters set in the Qur'ān for taqwā (an equilibrated, constructive relationship with God, other human beings, and nature) (Barazangi, 1998). Based on the Qur'ānic dictum, “Read in the name of the Creator … who taught [the human being, ‘al Insan’] by the pen” (96.1–4), which means that to read is to learn and to act as guided by the Book, Islamic education evolved from this kind of comprehensive character building in the first Islamic community in Medina (c. 623) to a course of study on religion. What is called “religious education” or “Muslim/Islamic education” does not reflect the historical process of educating in Islam. This process, in the estimate of Husaini (1981), began to disintegrate at the end of the eleventh century, when science, the humanities, and social sciences were excluded from the curricula. Rahman (1982) suggests that this process remained functional into the fifteenth century, whereas Eickelman (1985) states that it socialized Muslims well into the latter half of the twentieth century.

But Barazangi (2004) asserts that women were rarely socialized as autonomous individuals beginning with the early Medina community; consequently, their practice of Islamic education has failed to internalize the meanings of the Qur'ān without intermediary perspectives in the majority of the following generations.

Religious education differs from Islamic education even though it retains remnants of the Islamic educational institutions from Islamic civilization's golden age in the seventh through twelfth centuries. By separating naqli (revealed; given to human beings by God, as in the Qur'ān; and transmitted, as in the prophetic tradition) and aqli (acquired by human efforts) knowledge, religious education transformed Qur'ānic principles into formalized legal and moral codes and rituals, creating a dichotomy in Islamic thinking. This dichotomy is manifested in the inability to integrate modern scientific knowledge within the Islamic worldview as early Muslims did during the first few centuries of Islam. It also transformed the meaning of the Prophetic dictum “faqqihhu fīaldīn” (Ṣahīh Muslim; instruct, or make clear from within the parameters of Islam) from teaching within the Islamic worldview to teaching Islam as interpreted by the different fiqh (jurisprudence) schools.

For centuries, early Islamic institutions such as Bayt al Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad, established in the ninth century, produced great scientists and philosophers who set the parameters for the Islamic educational system. During the premodern period, however, the salient features of Islamic education, such as taḥfīẓ (oral and aural transmission), have often become confused with talqīn (the acquisition and dissemination of Qur'ānic principles and spirit). Talqīn, as Nasr (1982) asserts, led the field of Islamic education to produce “philosopher‐scientists” in various intellectual disciplines. Islamic education's intimate relation to the Qur'ānic revelation and ḥadīth does not make it purely religious, nor does it render its other elements exclusively Islamic or absolute. Early Muslim intellectuals transformed the form, content, and intent of sciences, education, and arts into Islamic disciplines by integrating intellectual and cultural development within the Islamic worldview. Most contemporary Muslim educators, to the contrary, assume Islamic education to be religious indoctrination.

The traditional recitation method of teaching the Qur'ān comes to mind when thinking about Islamic education, but neither recitation method, nor Qur'ānic teaching was ever restricted to this method, and Islamic education is not limited to the study of the Qur'ān. The Qur'ān as the foundation of all knowledge guides behavior of the believing Muslim.

Islamic education has been decentralized, and its practice has varied. Islamic higher learning, as Barazangi (2004, 1998) calls it in order to distinguish it from either religious training or higher secular education, was mainly informal for the first several centuries of Islam (seventh to the tenth centuries); it was formalized with the founding of the madrasah in the eleventh century by Nizām al‐Mulk in Baghdad. The reduction of Islamic education to religious education also occurred when Islamic philosophy and pedagogy were separated and when strict public moral codes were imposed on women, rendering their public appearance taboo. Concurrently, generations of male religious leaders or jurists emphasized the Qur'ān as either an absolute moral code or a law instead of viewing it as a universal guide for the entire community. The principles of Islamic philosophy were idealized, and knowledge was classified by sources and methods that enhanced the discrepancy between goals and means, the dichotomies between teaching men and women, and the difference between what is moral (religious/private/informal) and what is 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. For Rahman (Rahman, Fazlur. 1987. Islam: An Overview. In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 7, ed. Mircea Eliade, 318–322. New York: Macmillan), Iqbal was a “neofundamentalist” who was reacting to modernism but also “importantly influenced by modernism.” Iqbal (1962) himself asserts that the Qur'ān is a book that emphasizes “deed” rather than “idea.” Barazangi (2004) re‐iterates that Iqbal's assertion is significant to the understanding of the Islamic educational process and its transformation. However, she warns, a Muslim's deed that is habitual without basic knowledge of the Islamic principles imposes certain cultural‐laden practice as the norm for Islamic behavior.

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 Qur'ānic philosophy, Iqbal emphasizes that the birth of Islam is the birth of inductive intellect, wherein “to achieve full self‐consciousness, [Hu]mans must finally be thrown back on their own resources.” For Barazangi, it means autonomous identification with and internalization of the Qur'an without intermediary interpretation.

These diverse views suggest that Muslims, particularly in the past two centuries, not only neglected philosophy, as Nasr suggests, but, as Ismā῾īl Rājī al‐Fārūqī (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 formal transmission of “book knowledge” and inculcation in particular interpretations, a dichotomy arose between philosophy, or the ideal, and pedagogy, or the practice. Encouraged by skepticism in modern Western philosophy, this dichotomy widened. The transformation of Islamic thought from the building of rules for public life to a distinct political or juridical affiliation, beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, has affected the nature of the Islamic education process negatively, despite many attempts to revive it.

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 and neglected to restructure the traditional system. Meanwhile, “traditionalists” emphasized the primacy of Islamic doctrine over falsafah (philosophy), creating, in Husaini's words, a schism between the traditionalists and the modernists and destroying the integrated educational system. Western‐educated thinkers who reaffirm the validity of traditional practices (also known as “neotraditionalists”) interpret the philosophy of Abū Ḥāmid al‐Ghazālī (1058–1111) as the “finally established” Islamic educational theory and hold an absolutist perspective of Islamic education. This perspective, discussed elsewhere by this author (1998, 2004), results, unknowingly, in a dichotomy between the Islamic worldview and its pedagogical process and between educating males and females.

Educating Women

The imposition of strict public moral codes on women is another indicator of the transformation of Islamic education into religious education; women were forbidden to attend places of learning such as madāris and mosques even though women formally and informally transmitted the culture to their offspring as well as to other children and to men and women inside and outside the home in early and premodern Muslim communities and they still do to a certain extent. (Goldziher, Ignaz. 1960. Education [Muslim]. In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 5, ed., 199–207.) Muslim boys and girls were taught at home and attended formal kuttāb (elementary religious schools); girls even studied in madāris when they were first established. No historical accounts mention women as ῾Alimat knowledgeable in branches of Qur'ānic sciences such as tafsīr, kalām (Islamic philosophy/theology), and fiqh, particularly after the formalized higher learning in the madrasah, although Shalaby (1979) notes that many women 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 ḥadīth, earning them the title of muhaddithāt (female narrators) among their disciples; there were others who were well known in Ṣūfī orders. But, as stated earlier, even these qualifications did not help women, including the early Medina female companions, become participants in the community decision‐making process or in the development of Islamic thought (Barazangi, 2004).

The assaults on Islamic culture as an “oppressor of women” by European Crusaders, Orientalists, and colonial governments, combined with their differentiation between private and public domains, caused premodern Muslim leaders to lose sight of the essence of Islamic education, particularly its informal sector, and take extreme attitudes at the expense of a revival of traditional Islam. In the Indian subcontinent, for example, most girls attending Qur'ānic kuttāb not only are denied the opportunity to continue their religious education once they reach puberty but are rarely instructed by their families, as was the practice among learned Muslim families before British colonization and interaction with Western educational practices. Movements to revive traditional Islam that were predominantly led by males, beginning with those of the eighteenth‐century Wahhābī puritan movement, also propagated the view that women need a different type of education because their primary concern is the home. Despite their enrollment in kuttābs in earlier times, for example, Saudi girls were not allowed to enroll in religious institutions of higher learning such as Umm al‐Qurā in Mecca until 1970 and 1971, when only eighty women as compared to more than two thousand men were admitted (Saad al‐Salem, 1981). “Reformists” such as the Egyptian Muḥammad ῾Abduh (1845–1905) emphasized Islamic ideals of women's higher status in Islam and the obligation of both men and women to seek knowledge; yet, in practice, they did not recognize women's right to access a thorough knowledge of the Qur'ān as a key to Islamic intellectual development.

Revivalists, such as Sayyid Quṭb (1906–1966) and Sayyid Abū al‐A῾lā Mawdūdī (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 women's “natural” disposition is to transmit culture to the next generation (both boys and girls); but they did not restructure the traditional practices of teaching Islam to allow for this transmission. The primary objectives of women's education in Muḥammad Quṭb's (1961–1981) curriculum were to prepare them for the biological and emotional aspects of their roles as mothers and housewives. Such objectives further confused and marginalized women's education in Islam. Neotraditionalists are reemphasizing these objectives in the face of globalization but are failing to listen to the voices of emancipated women from within Islam.

The post‐1969 “Islamization” movements have leaned toward a politicized Islam and have had implications for women's Islamic and religious education. Contrary to the Islamizationists' intellectual tradition, which culminated in Ismā῾īl Rājī al‐Fārūqī's (1921–1986) concept of the “Islamization of Knowledge,” proponents of these movements emphasized morality, which overshadowed their presumed goal: to restructure the secular system of higher learning in order to address the religious and cultural needs of Muslim societies as part of the new development strategies. The Indonesian and Malay development policies of involving all segments of the population in education and training, reported by Ahmat and 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 of the 1970s and 1980s, led religious education to take the form of moral dogma. The Indonesian pesantren system, which was 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. Armijo (2007) also suggests that in “southwest China, Muslim women generally take part in communal prayer in mosques,” while “in central China, there is a centuries‐old tradition of women having their own separate mosques.” Armijo adds, “not only is there a long history of women imams in this region … women have active involvement in both Islamic education and religious leadership.” The role of the mosque must be understood as a “multi‐purpose building: a place for worship, for political gatherings, for negotiations and judgment, for personal prayer and for religious instruction and study” (Küng, 2007), in order to appreciate its importance for women's Islamic identity development, let alone for the children's Islamic character building.

Neo‐traditionalists have attempted to “liberate Islam from Western cultural colonialism” in the 1980s and have given women's education the form sometimes called “reversed feminism,” emphasizing segregated education for different but unequal roles. This trend is flourishing in North American and Western European countries, where Muslim males are demanding single‐sex schools and, in their private “Islamic/Muslim” schools, are segregating children from the first grade onward. Curricula in these schools are the same as that in public schools except that courses on religion and Arabic language are included (Barazangi, 1998). The same movement of segregating education took strong hold in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late twentieth century to the point of barring women from any educational institution.

Institutions of Islamic Education

Diverse perspectives on Islamic education also result in diverse and at times contradictory accounts of its transformation. The premodern kuttāb (for primary and Qur'ānic education) and the madrasah (for secondary and higher learning) are the most frequent contexts in which Islamic education is discussed. Other places, such as the halaqah (study circle in a mosque), dār al‐kutub (library/bookshop), and private homes play important roles but are rarely recognized, as Munir D. Ahmad (1987) and Salah Hussein Al‐Abidi (1989. The Mosque: Adult Education and Uninterrupted Learning. Al‐Islām al‐yawm [Islam Today, Rabat], 7.7:68–77) indicate, particularly in rural areas that constitute more than 70 percent of the Muslim world and where these locations might be the only educational institutions.

There are scattered reports about the evolution of the educational process in biographies, books of history and Islamic thought, and encyclopedias, but they typically leave a gap between Ibn Khaldūn's (1332–1406) Muqaddimah 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, which Western scholarship overemphasizes, despite the fact that these movements did weaken traditional Islam. Contemporary apologetic approaches, facing the onslaught of religious teaching, created more confusion by elevating some social movements, such as the Wahhābī, as if it were a full‐fledged, systematic intellectual and judicial movement.

In distinguishing pre‐Islamic kuttāb from Qur'ānic kuttāb, Shalaby notes that several authors, such as Ignácz Goldziher, have confused the different varieties of this institution. He states that Goldziher, in his attempt to trace Qur'ānic kuttāb back to the early time of Islam, did not distinguish the varieties of kuttāb. That Shalaby's account differs from Goldziher's on other matters related to teaching young Muslims suggests differences not only in their perspectives on Islamic education and its institutions but of the problems it has encountered. Though Goldziher relies largely on the same primary sources used by Shalaby, he does not seem to distinguish between the Islam taught in katātīb (plural of kuttāb) and madāris (plural of madrasah) 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 kuttāb when government schools—the Ottomans' Rushdīyah schools—took over the teaching of reading, writing, and other subjects, or why natives resisted modernity and gave up even Qur'ānic schools in response to colonial policies (Leitner, G. W. 1894. Indigenous Oriental Education, with Special Reference to India, and, in Particular, to the Panjab. Asiatic Quarterly Review, 2d ser., 8, nos. 15 and 16: 421–438) and to exploitation of Islam by both colonial and local governments (Harrison, 1990). Recent reports, because they confuse the original nature and purpose of kuttāb and madrasah with present‐day practice in some religious schools that carry the same names, make one question the reliability of such scholarship.

Contradictory accounts also surround the madrasah. Shalaby gives a detailed account of the first madrasah, established in the eleventh century by Nizām al‐Mulk in Baghdad, and classifies these schools by location, founders and their positions, and the primary sources that cite them. A. L. Tibawi (Tibawi, A. L. 1962. Origin and character of al‐madrasah. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25, no. 2:225–238) concurs with primary Muslim sources such as Ibn Khaldūn in concluding that the main characteristics of these schools varied by region and time, but that all were formal residential places of secondary and higher learning, with Arabic as the basic medium of instruction. They relied mainly on dialogue between teacher and disciples. Their curricula covered, in addition to Qur'ānic talqīn and Arabic grammar, tafsīr (exegesis), fiqh (jurisprudence), ḥadīth, uṣūl al‐fiqh (principles of jurisprudence), uṣūl al‐ḥadīth (principles of narration), and the biography of the Prophet and al‐Ṣahābah (the Prophet's companions). Classical sciences (astronomy, geography, and medicine) and Arabic ādāb (literature) were also taught, the intensity and depth of instruction depending on the students' mastery of particular subjects and the teachers' strengths. Some Muslim authors suggest that a similar though less vital educational process still exists in such places of learning. 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, which left only Islamic subjects to traditionally trained teachers. Contemporary media and shallow scholarship speak of madāris as the culprit in the radicalizing of Islam. A similar kind of misnaming, adds Selbourne (2005), made “[Western] academia … serve its own cause ill.”

In response to colonial policies, these institutions evolved in one of two ways: into traditional, privately sponsored religious schools with some Western orientation or into government‐sponsored secular schools with added religion courses. The “traditional” form is represented in the remnants of kuttāb and madrasah. Famous among them are Deoband in India, al‐Niẓāmīyah in Iran, al‐Mustanṣirīyah in Baghdad, al‐Sulaymānīyah in Istanbul, al‐Nūrīyah in Damascus, al‐Azhar in Cairo, al‐Qayrawān in Tunis, al‐Qarawīyīn in Fez, and Córdoba in Spain. Some of these institutions, such as al‐Azhar and Deoband, still grant “Islamic” higher degrees but are weakened by their consideration of religious knowledge as separate from other knowledge.

When modernist elites of the early twentieth century sought reform from outside their society, they created private religious schools (for example, Yâdigâr‐ Hürriyet, established in 1908 in Basra, Iraq). Their indiscriminate adoption of Western systems, combined with nationalistic and politicized Islam, emphasized a secular morality in teaching natural and social sciences, which gradually separated Islam from its Qur'ānic base and favored secondary literary and historical sources of religion.

Mid‐twentieth‐century “revivalists” assumed the preservation of Islamic principles by teaching ῾ibādāt (rituals) and moral codes and adding courses on religion (al‐daynah) that took secondary place in the curriculum in the secular government‐sponsored system. Further, very few secular universities in the Muslim world offered any such courses on Islam outside the college of Islamic law (Kulliyat al‐Sharī῾ah). Muslim minorities attempted to create Islamic higher education institutions in the West, but the majority failed to replicate earlier institutions, mainly because they continued to separate “religious” from mundane subjects and still used the methods of lecturing on particular perspectives and interpretations (Barazangi, 1998).

Dichotomy of Ideals and Practice

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), established in 1973, has held five world conferences on Muslim education in Mecca (1977), Islamabad (1980), Dhaka (1981), Jakarta (1982), and Cairo (1987). Their recommendations were to “reclassify knowledge into ‘revealed’ and ‘acquired’” and to teach “acquired” knowledge from the “Islamic point of view,” the process of which is referred to as the “Islamization of knowledge.” These goals—to integrate modern sciences and branches of knowledge within Islamic philosophy— though similar to those outlined by al‐Fārūqī and stated in the Islamic Education Series' seven monographs, were not followed by an action plan. The OIC influence on Islamic education thus remains minor despite its many renewed efforts (Khan, Saad. 2001. Reassessing International Islam: A Focus on the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Other Islamic Institutions. London and New York.

A core curriculum (al‐Afendi and Baloch, 1980), along with a work edited by Syed Muhammad al‐Naquib al‐Attas (Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education, Jeddah, 1979) and other “blueprints” for groundwork and strategies, have been published in this series, the basic premise of which is that reinterpretation of “all branches of knowledge, particularly social sciences, within the Islamic perspective” is the only way to develop an Islamic curriculum that will alleviate the crisis in Muslim education caused by the dual traditional and secular systems. Yet no action plan has been devised either 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 has resulted from separating religious and secular knowledge. Non‐Muslims have attempted to raise these issues, but have been unable to include Muslim women as stakeholders in their own affairs, identity, and destiny (Barazangi, 2004).

In summary, Muslim male educators continue to overlook the dynamics of the role of women as the transmitters, preservers, and transformers of culture in Muslim societies since premodern time and into the twenty‐first century. These educators keep women's religious education peripheral, relegating it to the home. Similar marginalization, often resulting in confrontations with Muslim women scholar‐activists in the West, is also practiced by secularists (Barazangi, 2004). This attitude is only one of many other disparities that have transformed Islamic education, resulting in fragmented educational planning and a lack of balance between religious and secular objectives. Although this imbalance is primarily the remnant of the colonial and missionary legacies that left the Muslim world in turmoil even after independence, it became more pronounced in response to neo‐imperialism and, as Selbourne asserts, gained more “Islamism” because of “the responses of non‐Muslims to the Islamic revival and advance.”

See also Education, subentry on Educational Reform; and Women in the Qur'ān

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Nimat Hafez Barazangi

Educational Institutions

As the nineteenth century opened, Islamic societies had highly developed educational institutions—elementary Qur'ān schools (Ar., kuttāb or maktab) and higher religious schools called madrasahs. Less formal education was available from Ṣūfī lodges, literary circles at princely courts, private tutors, and apprenticeships in state bureaus and craftsmen's shops.

After 1800, Western‐style schools were introduced to meet new needs. Reforming Muslim rulers created new armies and schools in hopes of warding off the intrusive West and local rivals. Today's state school systems in many Muslim countries grew out of such beginnings. Missionaries and local minority communities also founded private Western‐style schools. The new schools became rivals of the Qur'ān schools and madrasahs, with a cultural divide separating graduates of the two systems. Conscious and unconscious borrowing has led to considerable convergence of the two systems, but an entirely satisfactory synthesis of Islamic and Western educational institutions remains elusive.

This article discusses five phases of the development of educational institutions in the Islamic world since 1800. In phase one, Islamic schools were unaffected by the West. In phase two, reforming Muslim rulers—and, for different reasons, Western missionaries—set up Western‐style schools. In phase three, colonial rulers subordinated schools to their own imperial interests. In phase four, newly independent states unified their school systems and rapidly expanded all levels of schooling. In phase five, Islamists campaigned to islamize education, along with the rest of state and society.

The chronology of these phases varied from place to place, and some countries bypassed a phase or two. The Ottomans entered phase two as early as 1773 by opening a naval engineering school; isolated North Yemen and Saudi Arabia had not yet entered it in 1950. The colonial rule of phase three began before 1800 in the Dutch East Indies and India, but reached Syria and Iraq only after World War I. North Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan skipped the colonial phase. Turkey and Iran won the independence of phase four in the 1920s without having been fully colonized, while the emirates of the lower Gulf did not begin phase four until the British left in 1971.

Phase One: Before Western Intrusion.

Qur'ān schools stressed memorization of the Qur'ān, reading, and writing. Often the initial memorization did not mean comprehension, particularly where Arabic was not spoken at home. Teachers taught in homes, mosques, or shops, receiving their pay from pupils' fees or waqfs (pious endowments). Although conservative ʿulamā' might disapprove, girls sometimes attended Qur'ān schools, and a few became Qur'ān reciters or teachers.

Advanced schooling in mosques went back to the seventh century, but the formal madrasah—an endowed residential college stressing the sharī῾ah—took shape only in the eleventh century. The Niẓāmīyah in Baghdad was a renowned prototype. In common usage, distinctions between mosque schools and madrasahs disappeared. Subjects seen as closely related to religion were stressed: Qur'ānic exegesis, ḥadīth, jurisprudence, theology, Arabic grammar, and logic. There were no formal admissions or graduation ceremonies, no grade levels, written examinations, grades, classrooms, desks, or school diplomas. Barred from the madrasah, only a few women pursued higher studies with private tutors.

Al‐Azhar in Cairo, the Süleymaniye in Istanbul, Qarawīyīn in Fez, the Zaytūnah in Tunis, and various mosque‐madrasahs in Mecca, Medina, and Damascus stood out in the Sunnī world of 1800. For Shīʿīs, the madrasahs of Najaf (Iraq) were foremost, with others in Isfahan and other Iranian cities.

Phase Two: Western‐Style State and Missionary Schools.

Defeat in wars with Russia and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798) helped persuade Muslim rulers to reform their armies and military support services along Western lines. This called for a new type of school, and it was easier to bypass the conservative religious schools than to reform them. Phase two thus began a secularizing trend that prevailed until the Islamist challenge of phase five.

Enlisting Europeans as instructors, the Ottomans opened naval engineering and army engineering academies in 1773 and 1793. In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II destroyed the obsolete Janissary corps, a major obstacle to reform. He and his successors opened a bureau to train translators (1821) and schools of medicine (1827), military science (1834), civil administration (1859), and law (1878).

In 1811, Muḥammad (or Mehmed) ῾Alī, the sultan's ambitious vassal in Cairo, destroyed Egypt's obsolete Mamlūk cavalry. Thereafter he rivaled or led Istanbul in military and educational innovations, following his first Western‐influenced military school (1816) with schools of engineering (1820), veterinary science (1827), medicine (1827), civil administration (1829), and translation (1836). The school of administration and languages (1868) became a law school. In Tunisia, Aḥmad Bey opened his Bardo military school in 1840.

Three related phenomena (which persist today) accompanied the new schools: importing Western educators, dispatching students to study in the West (small missions first left Egypt in 1809, Iran in 1811, and Istanbul in 1827), and putting new printing presses to work publishing translated Western textbooks.

Recruits from the Qur'ān schools and madrasahs proved ill‐prepared for higher professional education, so Cairo and Istanbul next began turning Qur'ān schools into state primary schools. Al‐Azhar and many other religious schools, however, long eluded serious reform and state control. In the 1860s, ministries of education in Cairo and Istanbul, patterned on the highly centralized French model, laid out blueprints for full state school systems. The Ottomans planned for lower and higher primary, middle, and high schools (lycées), capped by higher schools and a university. The French‐inspired Galatasary Lycée stood out among eleven Ottoman lycées (one of which was for girls) in 1918. Teacher's colleges, founded in Istanbul (1846) and Cairo (1872, Dār al‐῾Ulūm), included both Western and Islamic subjects in their curricula.

More isolated from the West and with a weaker state, Iran trailed Egypt and the central Ottoman Empire in military and educational reform. Dār al‐Funūn (1851) taught military science, engineering, medicine, and Western languages, but it lacked firm support from the shah. Without an official ministry of education until 1925, other ministries set up their own schools: political science (1899/1900), agriculture (1900/01), arts (1910), and law (1921).

Phase Three: Under Colonial Rule.

Colonial rule lasted anywhere from a few years to a century or more, and several Muslim countries escaped it altogether. There were three types of educational institutions under colonial rule: Western‐style, unreformed Islamic, and hybrids of the two.

As colonies for European settlement, Algeria, Libya, and Palestine suffered most under colonial rule. In Algeria, over 132 years, the French established primary, secondary, and higher schools (medicine in 1859; law, sciences, and letters in 1879) for the settlers. The University of Algiers brought the higher schools together in 1909. A handful of Muslims submitted to France's “civilizing mission” and assimilated sufficiently to enter this system, but separate “Arab‐French” schools were intended for them. Italian rule in Libya (1911–1943) was too brief to leave a comparable educational legacy. Palestine under British rule (1918–1948) was unique, for there most settlers were European Jews. With their own Zionist agenda and Hebrew‐language schools, they left state‐run schools largely to Palestinian Arabs.

Elsewhere colonial rulers ran Western‐style schools mostly for the local population. In Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, these were inherited from indigenous reformers; other colonial regimes mostly started from scratch.

Whether frankly exploitative or conscious of a “white man's burden,” colonial regimes put their own interests first. They usually intended for secondary and higher schools to turn out docile government clerks and technicians. In India the British experimented with reformed Muslim madrasahs and Hindu Sanskrit schools from the 1780s to the 1830s, when those who wanted to anglicize the courts and administration won out. English‐language schools and colleges proliferated thereafter. The universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras opened in 1857 as examining bodies on the model of the University of London.

The Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 haunted Lord Cromer, who administered Egypt for England from 1883 to 1907. He warned that “orientals” with a European education easily turned nationalist if frustrated in aspirations for official posts. He severely restricted enrollments in the elite primary‐secondary‐higher schools track, imposed school fees few could afford, and developed a curriculum as apolitical and narrowly professional as possible. He did not object to terminal “elementary” (distinguished from the elite “primary”) schools for the masses, but these were underfunded and of poor quality in any case.

Cromer squelched Egyptian demands for a university, recommending as a model instead the Muhammadan Anglo‐Oriental College (Aligarh University since 1920), founded in India in 1875 by Sayyid Aḥmad Khān. Modeled on the Oxbridge colleges, and with an English headmaster, it turned out officials, lawyers, and teachers—presumably loyal servants of the British Raj. [.]

Afraid that the ʿulamā' might lead mass protests, colonial rulers often left the madrasahs alone, starved for funds, overshadowed by state schools, and with dwindling prospects for their graduates. Cromer half‐heartedly supported Muḥammad ῾Abduh's effort to reform al‐Azhar, but abandoned him when the ʿulamā' and the palace resisted. In India, a new Azhar‐like college at Deoband, which offered a traditional religious education, received no state support.

The colonial age was golden for missionary and minority community schools. Banned from proselytizing Muslims, Catholic and Protestant missionaries either tried to convert Jews and Eastern Christians or emphasized a humanitarian mission of medicine and schools for all. The American University of Beirut (the former Syrian Protestant College), Beirut's Université Saint‐Joseph, and Boğaziçi University (formerly Robert College) of Istanbul are legacies of the missionary age. The missionaries also led the way in education for girls, with the first state girls' schools following in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran in 1858, 1873, and 1897/98, respectively.

Phase Four: Post‐Independence Educational Unification and Expansion.

Reacting against colonial policies, newly independent states moved to unify their educational systems by subordinating missionary, minority, and Islamic schools to state control. In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk forced national curricula on foreign and minority schools in the 1920s, and Reza Shah nationalized primary and secondary schools in Iran in the 1930s. Syria closed French schools in 1945 during the final struggle for independence. Egypt finally consolidated control over missionary and minority schools as the British left in the 1950s. Exceptionally, the American University in Cairo eluded nationalization (Nasser's daughter and Hosni Mubarak's wife were among its students), as did foreign and communal schools in decentralized Lebanon. Robert College was nationalized and renamed Boğaziçi University.

As for the Islamic schools, Turkey and the Soviet Union simply abolished them. The closing of Istanbul University's faculty of theology (the former Medrese Süleymaniye) in 1933 left Turkey without higher Islamic education until Ankara University added a faculty of theology in 1949. Iranian madrasahs survived the Pahlavi regime, but the Qur'ān schools did not. In 1961 Nasser forced al‐Azhar into a state university mold, adding colleges of medicine, engineering, and commerce and even a women's college. Indonesia, more diverse culturally, tolerated private Islamic schools and universities alongside its State Islamic Religious Institutes, which trained judges and teachers.

Postindependence Syria switched to Arabic as the language of its medical school, but often vested interests and the need for Western languages as a means of keeping up with world science prevailed over nationalist pressures. In linguistically fragmented India and Nigeria, the English of much advanced schooling unifies the elite but hinders mass access to higher education.

Nationalism, populism, and socialism put free, compulsory, universal schooling on every independent state's agenda, but universality is still an elusive goal. In the 1920s Turkey made all levels of education free, and Iran decreed that only the better‐off would have to pay. Egypt made primary school free in 1943—a step toward unification with the inferior “elementary” schools; secondary and higher education became free in 1950 and 1961. Even without questions of quality, the literacy and enrollment rates in Table 1 show the distance yet to be traveled. The gap between male and female enrollments is also a problem: in 1980, 76 percent of Egyptian males were enrolled compared to 63 percent of females, with 78 percent to 56 percent in Turkey, and 95 percent to 55 percent in Iraq.

As Table 1 shows, the Ottomans founded Darülfünun (Istanbul University) in 1900. British‐dominated Egypt managed only a small private university in 1908, and had to wait until 1925 for a state university. Tehran followed in 1934. Women entered state higher education in the 1910s in Turkey, 1928 in Egypt, and 1935 in Iran. The Syrian University dates from the French era, the University of Indonesia from the last years of Dutch rule. Gordon Memorial College evolved into the University of Khartoum (1956). In the rush of independence in the 1950s and 1960s, a university seemed almost as important symbolically as a flag.

An interval of some years usually followed before a second state university was founded, with rapid proliferation thereafter in the more populous countries. Ballooning primary and secondary enrollments inexorably increased demand. Quantity overwhelmed quality, financing faltered, standards plunged, and graduates scrambled for government jobs. Educational specialties bore little relation to the job market, and vocational education languished. Iran and Turkey each had twenty‐nine universities by 1992; Egypt, with a comparable but more concentrated population and fewer resources, had thirteen. Turkey pioneered adult education programs in the 1920s, and since the 1960s open universities have become popular.

Phase Five:The Challenge of Islamization.

Israel's defeat of the Arabs in 1967, the oil price boom following the 1973 War, and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1979) all contributed to the Islamist revival. Though differing widely on specifics, Islamists see current regimes as morally bankrupt and reformed schools as a means of moving toward an ideal Islamic society.

The Islamic Republic of Iran provides the fullest example of a regime's attempt to islamize its educational institutions. Although the Free Islamic University and other new institutions were founded after the revolution, the main task was the overhaul of existing institutions. With minor exceptions, the universities were closed from 1980 to 1983. Professors and school teachers presumed to be enemies of the revolution were fired, and many fled abroad. When the universities reopened, ideological tests were used to screen student applicants and professors. Several universities were renamed for religious leaders. Coeducation at all levels disappeared, and “Islamic dress” became mandatory for females. Required religious courses were emphasized, and there was an attempt to introduce Islamic perspectives into every field of study. With the ʿulamā' controlling the state, the neglected madrasahs—and especially Ayatollah Khomeini's Fayẓīyah Madrasah in Qom—took on a new prominence.

Revolutionary upheaval, war, economic crisis, and runaway population growth inevitably forced the revolutionary regime into pragmatic compromises. To some purists' dismay, English retained a strong place in the curriculum. Now the justification was not only its importance for science and technology, but also its utility in exporting the revolution and making converts to Islam. Acute shortages of teachers, funds, school buildings, and ideologically correct textbooks prompted appeals for emigrés to return, the relaxation of ideological tests, and even the reopening of private schools.

Islamists from Morocco to Indonesia are demanding educational changes similar to Iran's. Since 1980, universities with “Islamic” in their names have opened in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Niger. Very different Islamist regimes in Iran, Pakistan, the Sudan, and Saudi Arabia vie with each other for religious legitimacy. Never having experienced colonialism or coeducation, and fortified by oil wealth and Wahhābī ideology, the Saudis proclaim their brand of Islamism as a model, but their Islamist detractors are unconvinced. In educational institutions and elsewhere, regimes that inherited more complex legacies of indigenous reform, colonial rule, and postindependence nationalism and socialism balance uneasily today between cooption and repression of Islamist challengers.

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Donald Malcolm Reid

Educational Methods

Methods are a critical element in realizing the goals of any educational enterprise. They link teachers, students, and content. Curricula may be carefully designed to achieve particular ends, but unless appropriate instructional methods are utilized, the subject matter will not be communicated effectively to the students, the anticipated learning will not take place, and the educational goals will not be achieved. Like all aspects of education, methods are deeply influenced by cultural environments and traditions; thus it is appropriate to consider the educational methods used in traditional Islamic societies.

Inheritance from the Past.

Given the central role of the Qur'ān in Islamic civilization, it is natural that Islamic education revolved around the sacred book considered to be the basis of all knowledge. From the time a child began school at the age of six or seven, his major preoccupation was to memorize the Qur'ān as perfectly as possible. The main technique was repetition, in which students learned by imitating the teacher. They would repeat a section of the Qur'ān until it had been committed completely and accurately to memory and then proceed to the next section. The teacher would recite the verse and the students would chant it after him; to aid memorization students would utilize such techniques as rocking back and forth while chanting. The goal of education was to produce students who were good Muslims—that is, students who could recite the Qur'ān accurately; understanding it was not a primary goal.

At the higher levels the focus was also on rote learning, although specific texts and commentaries were studied intensively. The teacher would often dictate passages from a work and then deliver a lecture interpreting them. Students took notes, which they would seek to memorize in order to demonstrate that they had recorded the lesson accurately. Two techniques facilitated the process of committing large quantities of material to memory. First, lessons were repeated aloud until the material was memorized; silent reading was frowned on. Second, many important texts were rewritten in verse form.

The ultimate goal was not to acquire the ability to repeat a text, but to understand it. Students were expected to acquire knowledge first through rote learning but then to learn how to apply what they had memorized creatively to particular issues. Thus students were presumed to learn the argumentative techniques that the authors of the texts had employed. Such methods as discussions and disputations were used in teaching, but these followed well‐established patterns and focused on issues that had been debated for generations. At its best this approach produced sharply honed minds, but learning remained a closed process into which new ideas and concepts could not easily be introduced.

Teachers possessed great authority. The Qur'ān gave them the right to administer corporal punishment whenever necessary, and use of the rod was widely regarded as essential if children were to develop suitable character. At the more advanced levels education was highly personalized, because the system was based on the view that knowledge was acquired through contact with learned individuals. A student would select a master and develop a close personal and intellectual relationship with him. The choice of a teacher was usually the single most important decision that a student could make, for one's career was commonly determined by the mentor's reputation. The teacher was responsible for the moral as well as the intellectual development of the student. A psychological distance always remained between them, however, and teachers could and often did punish their disciples severely.

Over time education became more institutionalized, especially at the higher levels, where various kinds of colleges were established; these, however, retained the personal, informal character of earlier institutions. Egypt's famous al‐Azhar, for example, possessed no regular schedule, entrance requirements, formal standards, required courses, examinations, or sharp distinction between faculty and students—a teacher in one course could be a student in another.

Some early Arab scholars who studied educational processes advocated the use of different methods and arrangements, especially at the higher levels, but their treatises had only limited impact. The prevailing methods effectively socialized large populations into Islamic beliefs, values, and practices, and Qur'ānic schools using these methods continued to thrive and are today to be found in large numbers throughout the Islamic world.

Creation of Modern Schools.

The establishment of modern schools in the nineteenth century did not produce any dramatic change in teaching methods. Two major factors account for this continuity. First, much Western education of the time was also characterized by strict discipline and memorization. Second, the Western powers had no interest in establishing schools that would prepare students to think independently and creatively, especially in the colonies. They developed curricula that were similar to those at home and expected students to master a body of knowledge that would prepare them to be loyal, obedient administrators. The cultivation of intelligence, sensitivity, and awareness was often rigidly suppressed, in Egypt under Lord Cromer. Ministries of education permitted no deviation from strict rules and regulations. A harsh examination system that determined the student's educational position and future prospects reinforced the emphasis on rote learning; students strained to memorize every word in their notebooks in order to pass the dreaded examination that would permit them to continue their academic training.

Even in states that retained their independence, Western influences did not transform traditional patterns. At first large numbers of Europeans were hired to teach in reformist schools, but this was an inefficient arrangement because their lectures had to be translated into the local language. To meet the need for native teachers the Ottomans founded the Darülmuallim in 1848. Its graduates and those of the other teacher‐training colleges subsequently opened throughout the region replaced the Europeans, but teaching methods retained their traditional character for two reasons. First, these schools were based on nineteenth‐century European models in which lectures and memorization were the norm. Second, since most teachers and students in the new schools were graduates of the religious schools, they tended to maintain traditional patterns.

The major difference between the traditional schools such as al‐Azhar and the modern schools, therefore, lay not so much in the methods or in the behavior of teachers but in the bureaucratization and formalization of schooling and in the kinds of knowledge that the new curricula embodied. Although the methods of the latter are usually labeled “Islamic,” they were in many ways consonant with Western practices and heavily influenced by the interests and goals of the colonizing power.

Contemporary Methods.

The achievement of independence brought little change to these patterns; the character of education remained the same—highly centralized and oriented toward passing examinations—although its size expanded rapidly to meet the pent‐up demand for modern schooling. As a result, traditional patterns were reinforced as exploding enrollments at all levels created an ever greater demand for qualified, motivated teachers that could not be met.

Most emerging states had to utilize whatever teaching resources were available, regardless of their qualifications. Hence many teachers, especially at the primary level, have only a secondary education and are poorly prepared in subject matter and teaching methods. Teachers at the secondary level are better trained; most are graduates of teacher‐training institutes. They tend to be familiar with the subject matter but usually know little about how to teach effectively, because teacher training remains weak and formalistic. Curricula in the institutes stress theory and abstract subjects; there is little concern with practical preparation or with teaching general and specialized methods of instruction. Moreover, few in‐service training programs are available, and so teachers tend to stagnate and to remain at a fixed level of professional development. They remember the body of knowledge that they memorized in school and teach it in the same way until they retire. Most teachers carry out their tasks mechanically and tend to be authoritarian, formalistic, and apathetic, adhering closely to the textual materials, which they either dictate or hand out in condensed form. They have little incentive for innovation, and a national corps of inspectors ensures that the ministry's rules and regulations are scrupulously followed.

Furthermore, teachers tend to regard themselves as authority figures rather than as partners in a learning experience. Students are not expected to ask questions, and certainly not to challenge a teacher's knowledge and authority by raising different points; rather, they are expected to memorize their notes as thoroughly as possible in order to pass the all‐important examinations. Even when a teacher assigns a topic for research (a rare event), students are not expected to take the initiative but rather to work within prescribed boundaries by consulting only the sources suggested by the teacher.

When called on to recite or to answer a question, the good student does not present his own ideas but demonstrates his prowess by parroting the proper answer as it appeared, word for word, in the textbook or in the lecture. Often reciters stand at attention while the rest of the class sits quietly. Such behavior is consonant with a cultural environment that emphasizes hierarchy and conformity. Teachers are not expected to be motivators or to prepare students to be creative problem‐solvers but to maintain discipline and to socialize students into traditional values of respect for authority and obedience.

Resource constraints further limit the possibility of applying more student‐centered methods. The available textbooks are of poor quality; most are merely unadapted translations of Western texts or works produced by authors without any practical experience, and these do little to excite the imagination of the student. Audio‐visual materials and other teaching aids are rarely available. Library resources too are very limited, and what is available is usually tightly controlled by librarians who are often legally accountable for each book.

These generalizations apply not only across countries but across subject areas—even those such as science, foreign languages, and vocational training that have received special attention because of their significance for the achievement of national developmental goals. Science continues to be taught in a formalistic manner. Schools at all levels lack adequate laboratory facilities, and what is available is often not utilized properly. Equipment is expensive and scarce, and teachers are usually held personally responsible for every item, so that breakage becomes a catastrophe that the teacher seeks to avoid at any cost. Instead of allowing students to engage in practical work, to solve problems for themselves, the teacher demonstrates his ability by carrying out experiments while the students watch. Even though simple homemade devices can be very effective in science courses, few teachers possess the knowledge or motivation to develop and utilize them.

Foreign‐language instruction is another critical area where poor results are commonplace. In most countries every student is required to study at least one foreign language, but few students acquire fluency. Many of the instructors possess only an imperfect knowledge of the language they are teaching. Furthermore, important advances in instructional methods are very rarely encountered in textbooks, teacher manuals, or classrooms.

Vocational and technical education has also been emphasized everywhere, but once again poor teaching methods limit its potential contribution to national development. Vocational schools do not prepare students adequately for industrial occupations because of inadequate facilities and curricula and the difficulty of finding and retaining staff with industrial knowledge. The teaching is theoretical rather than practical, memorization is commonplace, and students spend little if any time working with machinery and tools and acquiring hands‐on experience.

Higher Education.

Although higher education has been favored by all Islamic states, in this area too the rapid expansion of enrollments has greatly outpaced the available human and physical resources. The result has been that in almost every college facilities are stretched to their utmost, many faculty members are not highly qualified, and student‐teacher ratios are too high. Education has become a mass‐production process with little interaction between student and teacher. Universities in the richer Arab countries utilize temporary faculty from other states, but this solution creates a divided faculty, many of whom have little interest in the institution or its students.

The drop in quality is evident in all fields, but some—notably the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences—have suffered more than others because enrollments there can be expanded at low cost. To increase the number of students in scientific courses entails expenditures for equipment and the employment of more specialists, whereas in the humanities and social sciences such expenditures can be neglected; the same professor is simply expected to lecture to three or four times as many students as before.

Partly because of the overcrowding that characterizes most universities, mass lectures without questions or discussion have become the common teaching method. Furthermore, these lectures may consist largely of repetitions from notes taken years earlier. Even committed scholars rely on mass lectures. They have few options when facing hundreds or even thousands of poorly prepared students who believe education is synonymous with memorization. In some cases, students come to the university without even the ability to take notes, so faculty members have been known to dictate resumes of their courses for the students to memorize. Under these circumstances there is obviously very limited opportunity for student‐faculty interaction or for research activities.

The same patterns severely limit the effectiveness of graduate training. In many countries students pursuing advanced degrees take little formal coursework. They are expected to work independently and to carry out research under the guidance of a senior faculty member. Although this method can produce fine scholars, this seldom happens because of limited student‐faculty interaction, resource limitations, and the lack of academic freedom. Thus a vicious cycle is perpetuated.

Prospects for the Future.

Throughout the Islamic world one can find exceptions to this sorry state of affairs. There are many teachers who are committed to their students and attempt to make schooling an exciting and stimulating experience. Unfortunately, they are found primarily in the elite schools of urban centers, and even there they struggle against great handicaps. The more remote the area, the worse the facilities and the more traditional the teaching styles.

The problem and its implications are widely recognized. The use of modern teaching methods is usually precluded by poor training, large classes, scarce resources, limited support, high degrees of centralization, rigid examination systems, low morale, and a traditional environment. There is little incentive or opportunity to engage in meaningful teaching or to change the pattern of teacher dominance. Even Turkey, where democratic values prevail, has found it difficult to create a different environment in its schools.

The need to change this situation is by now generally accepted. Many Muslim scholars argue that existing teaching methods are not consonant with a real Qur'ānic approach to education, and pedagogues point out that these patterns do not promote the intellectual and moral development of young people or prepare them to function in modern societies. Nonetheless, the criterion of good teaching remains the number of students who successfully pass the national examinations, the primary purpose of which is to identify those (usually of elite background) who are qualified for further schooling; the majority receive only an elementary education, and the number of functional illiterates remains high.

Many governments are seeking ways to transform these patterns. They accept the need to upgrade teaching staffs, modernize curricula, and improve facilities. Many are turning to modern technologies to improve educational practices. Turkey, for example, has created an “Open University” in which classes are conducted via television. Large numbers of teachers are receiving instruction in subject matter and pedagogical techniques, and it is hoped that thousands of students will be positively affected. Computers are also being emphasized in many countries.

It remains to be seen, however, whether these technologies will contribute to the transformation that is required, or whether they will simply be integrated into the existing educational culture and suffer the fate of other reform projects. Such technologies can play a useful role, but only if a new orientation toward education is accepted within a society. In other words, quality must replace quantity as the major criterion for educational policymakers; political elites must recognize that development requires creative, independent, resourceful citizens capable of critical reasoning and moral judgment, and they must be willing to allocate the necessary resources to create the educational systems that produce such citizens.

Joseph S. Szyliowicz

Educational Reform

The challenge for educational reform in the Muslim world is steep. In the 1990s Islam has become a globalizing force and demands for reinstituting religio‐moral education have produced tensions between Muslims and the dominating 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's warns against the addition of contents, concepts, 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. It 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 part of the 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 (training for jobs and services) and the Muslim altruistic (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῾ahid) of secondary and higher religious or secular education have created business opportunity 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 took place based 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 re‐instate 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 as 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 Levantine during the 18^th and 19^th 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 specifically 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 their waqf (endowment) among the ruling class and missionary societies to establish private schools. Heyworth‐Dunne (1968) suggests that the Egyptian ruler Muhammad ῾Alī's (r. 1805–1849) imposed system 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 same phenomenon occurred 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 (Mazrui, Ali.,1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston and Toronto: Little Brown & Co.). The French colonial system in North and West Africa and in Syria and Lebanon assimilated the existing system to the point of annihilating it (Mumford, W. Bryant. 1970. Africans Learn to Be French. New York: Negro Universities Press). 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 de‐centralized extended‐family and tribal system. These new schema 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 halaqah'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 in specialized courses of study within 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 individual 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 (al‐Fārūqī, Ismā῾īl Rājī. 1982. Islamization of knowledge: the problem, principles, and the workplan. Islamabad), 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 the sociopsychological factors of the community. Impositions and assessments of Muslim education through bias 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 involved 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 (Mansouri, Abdelhamid. 1991. Algeria between tradition and modernity: the question of language. PhD diss., State University of New York at Albany), and in Asian countries, particularly in Pakistan, where a full transition could not be effected because of misleading popular media accounts about madrasah enrollment (Andrabi, Tahir, et al. 2006. Religious School Enrolment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data. Comparative Education Review 50, no. 3:446–477). 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 within 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, audio‐visual 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 been necessarily 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 lead the new paradigm in educational reform, and what this new paradigm might be.

See also Education subentry on Religious Education; and Women in the Qur'ān

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Nimat Hafez Barazangi

The Islamization of Knowledge

Although the phrase “islamization of knowledge” is a recent one, the general impetus behind it is not new. The recurring need to view the approach to knowledge and reality within an Islamic frame is activated whenever Muslim scholars perceive a serious threat to Islam and a need to reemphasize its boundaries. In times of political uncertainty and change this need is the greatest; thus, Shāh Walī Allāh in eighteenth‐century India warned of the loss of power and called for a revival in Islamic thought and knowledge. Social and political comment and the radical, first translation of the Qur'ān from Arabic into Urdu, the more popular language, foll