New Directions in Islamic Education - Abdullah Sahin - Sample

abdullah sahin

New Directions in Islamic Education explores the relationship between pedagogy and the formation of religious identities within Islamic education settings that are based in minority and majority Muslim contexts. Based on empirical research, the book engages critically with the philosophical, theological and cultural dynamics that inform Muslim educational thought and practice. The book offers an integrated model of Islamic education that identifies the heart of the Islamic educational imagination as tarbiyah, a transformative process of becoming. Overall, this book seeks to ground the theory and practice of Islamic education within the experience of the educator and the learner, and it synthesises the spiritual foundations of Islam with the tradition of critical reflection to be found within the classical Muslim educational heritage.

Education | Religious Education | Islamic Studies

Advance Praise for New Directions in Islamic Education: This ground-breaking book is one of the most significant contributions made in recent years to Islamic education. Abdullah Sahin offers an educational way into the renewal of Islamic faith and the restoration of young people’s confidence in the Islamic tradition. It is an essential read for secular policymakers as well as teachers of religion.

John m. Hull Emeritus Professor of Religious Education in The University of Birmingham, UK What makes New Directions in Islamic Education inspiring to practitioners in the field is its combination of empirical analysis of our current malaise, its authentic and intellectually provocative theological grounding, and its practical solutions. Abdullah Sahin’s seminal work has the potential to set the pace in Islamic education in the coming decades. edris Khamissa Director of Al-Falah Islamic College, Durban, South Africa

New Directions in islamic education

Dr Abdullah Sahin is a Muslim educator who has researched the learning and teaching of Islam within Muslim majority and minority contexts in the modern world. He directs the Centre for Muslim Educational Thought and Practice and is the course leader for the MEd programme in Islamic Education at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, which is validated by the University of Gloucestershire.

He has taught at the universities of Birmingham, Aberdeen and Kuwait.

N ew D i r e c t i o N s

in

islamic eDucatioN

 Pedagogy & Identity Formation

abdullah sahin

978-1-84774-058-8 | UK £22.99 | US $34.95

K KUBE PUBLISHING

KuBePuBlisHiNG.com

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Ee contents

List of Tables and Figures

vii

Transliteration Table

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Rethinking Islamic Education in the Modern World

1

Part I Context and Methodological Orientations 1.

2.

3.

British Muslim Youth: Between Secular Exclusion and Religious Extremism The Empirical Study of Religious Experience: A Phenomenological Critique of Modernist and Postmodernist Paradigms Studying Muslim Religiosity Empirically: The Muslim Subjectivity Interview Schedule

33

52 69

Part II Empirical Studies 4.

5.

6.

Attitudes towards Islam among British Muslim Youth Modes of Islamic Subjectivity among British Muslim Youth Attitudes towards Islam and Islamic Subjectivity among Kuwaiti Youth

v

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97 119 149

new directions in islamic education

Part III Theology, Philosophy and Pedagogy 7.

8.

9.

New Perspectives on Islamic Educational Theology and Philosophy: Tarbiyah as the Critical-Dialogical Process of Becoming Reflections on Teaching the MEd in Islamic Education Conclusion: Future Directions in Islamic Education

167 211 237

Appendices

245

Bibliography

260

Index of Qur’anic Verses

283

General Index

287

vi

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Ee Introduction Rethinking Islamic Education in the Modern World

This book began as a doctoral dissertation that explored the construction of religious identity among British Muslim youth. As a Muslim educator, my main motive behind conducting this case study was to ground my process of rethinking the theory and practice of Islamic education within the actual experiences of the learners. I have taught the subject within the minority Muslim context of Britain as well as in diverse majority Muslim contexts, including countries such as Turkey and Kuwait. As a practitioner in the field, I can observe that empirical research is equally crucial in both contexts when examining the complex challenges that inform the teaching and learning of Islam. There is a lack of rigorous empirical examination of what types of Islamic identities and Muslim religiosities are nurtured by this pedagogic process. This lack constitutes the heart of the challenges facing contemporary practice in Muslim education.

This book proposes a psychosocial model to investigate the formation of Muslim religiosity and faith development in the modern world. The model has a strong theological dimension. It was originally developed within the context of British Muslim communities, but has subsequently been applied in Kuwait; this application demonstrates the model’s applicability within majority-Muslim societies. Without grounding their research in such a model, Muslim educators cannot assess the impact of their teaching on the religious agency of the learners. Policymakers and frontline practitioners need practical models to better understand religious extremism, assess vulnerability to radicalisation within the context of contemporary Muslim culture and develop ‘intervention strategies’ to address the problem. Therefore, while this book primarily aims to offer theoretical and practical resources to make the practice of Muslim educators transformative in both minority- and majority-Muslim settings, it also aims to 1

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new directions in islamic education

contribute to the work of a broader community of practitioners, such as religious educators, youth workers, chaplains and policymakers.

In order to become a truly transformative process, any theological reflection on Islamic education must include this empirical dimension. With empirical knowledge, a theologically-informed critical engagement with Muslim educational practice that I endeavour to develop in this book has the potential to facilitate intelligent and meaningful perspectives among practitioners. This book is based on a deeper conviction that the presence of a critical, dialogical and transformative educational self-understanding is the key to facilitating the emergence of a balanced and mature Islamic sense of belonging in the modern world. The lack of such an educational competence severely hinders contemporary Muslim efforts to engage meaningfully with their religious heritage and the challenging conditions of a rapidly-changing world.

The central aim of this book is to engage seriously with the following fundamental question: what does it mean to be educated Islamically in the modern world? This question requires a readiness to explore critically the theology as well as the pedagogy of educational practices in the Muslim educational institutions set up within the European Muslim diaspora and wider Muslim world. Such institutions appear to be no longer capable of producing creative minds or nurturing the skills necessary to solve the complex problems facing the worldwide Muslim community (also known as the ummah). Considering the highly charged political context in Europe and the West, Muslims as minority communities face dramatic challenges. Islamic religious and educational institutions are frequently accused of nurturing extremist religious identities.

Therefore, it is urgent that we attend to this question within the context of European Islam. However, the majority of Muslim educators whose professional competence and sense of religious duty ought to make them engage critically with their own tarbiyah models of Islamic education have shown no serious interest in this question. In fact, they frequently dismiss the issue’s worthiness for consideration.

Historically, Muslim responses that have emerged out of the highly politically charged context of the last two centuries have been shaped by a defensive legal-political hermeneutics. As a result, renewal and reform attempts have failed to bring about a proper understanding of the Muslim faith and its complex historical legacy; they have not managed to create a dignified Muslim presence in the modern world. This book is an invitation to Muslim educators and anyone with an interest in Islamic education to think educationally about Islam. It proposes an Islamic educational hermeneutics within which to ground social, 2

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introduction

political, legal, spiritual and devotional interpretative acts that are necessary to articulate Islam meaningfully within our contemporary context.

Educational hermeneutics is essential because it can reveal the pedagogic vision that defines the prophetic mission of the Qur’an, which is the sacred heart of Islamic imagination. The Qur’anic perception of humanity is framed within this wider transformative pedagogic ethos, which aims to facilitate the actualisation of human potential and growth towards psychosocial and spiritual maturation. The transformative character of this pedagogic articulation of the human condition helps to guide and fulfil the art of being human. Inspired by this educational vision of the Qur’an, Chapter Seven develops a critical, dialogic and transformative perspective on theology and pedagogy in Islamic education.

The book argues that the transformative educational vision that defines the Muslim religious imagination nurtured a critical and open attitude during the formative period of Islam, which, in turn, acted as a catalyst for the emergence of classical Muslim civilisation. The decline of this civilisation, on the other hand, can largely be attributed to the gradual loss of this dynamic Divine pedagogic vision and the stagnation of the educational institutions that were responsible for keeping it alive.

Today, it is unfortunate that the conception of ‘education’ within contemporary Muslim culture has become largely equated with an authoritarian process of knowledge transmission that is geared towards shaping the identity of the learner in a process akin to indoctrination. This rigid perception of Islamic education is not confined to some extreme examples, such as the recent and increasingly violent Boko Haram movement in north-eastern Nigeria, which declares all forms of Western education to be sacrilegious. The perception of Islamic education displayed within the traditional forms of Islamic schooling across the Muslim world, such as the madrasah of South Asia, the Pesantren system of Indonesia and the hawza of Shia Islam indicate features of an instruction-centred and rigid inculcation process that largely ignores the personal agency of the learner. Despite many decades of investment and the building of universities, explicit reform initiatives like the Islamization of Knowledge project have, by the admission of their own proponents, largely failed to bring about the desired change. It should be stressed, however, that the introduction of Western secular education in the Muslim world over many decades does not appear to have actually facilitated economic transformation or social mobility, even in the cases of oil-rich Arab countries. Instead, the two contrasting educational systems continue to run parallel to one another, and to produce 3

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conflicting ideological mindsets that deepen the crisis within contemporary Muslim societies.

Within the European Muslim diaspora, Islamic education and Muslim faith are assumed to be mechanisms that ensure that certain identity narratives, borrowed from the different parts of the Muslim world, are retained and presented in the lives of those Muslims who now call Europe home. Religion and education do have an important function of conserving values and cultural heritage within upcoming generations. Considering the serious intergenerational differences to be observed within the European Muslim communities, which are largely due to Muslim migration and settlement history, religious nurture and education have become essential processes of passing the community’s core values to its children. Within a democratic social context, it is of course a fundamental parental right to educate, as well as the child’s right to learn about her cultural and religious heritage.

However, this enculturation process cannot ignore the wider social reality that has become an integral part of a child’s upbringing and wider life experience. While connecting with their cultural heritage, young people should be enabled to interpret this legacy within the reality of their everyday lives. Just as with mainstream education, Islamic education needs to provide young people with the resources and skills to successfully interpret their cultural heritage in a modern context. The degree to which Muslim faith leaders, educators and parents are actually aware of this responsibility and possess the skills to nurture the interpretation process is still an open question. Moreover, if Islamic education is reduced to a technology that replicates certain identity categories among young people, this denies young people their rights to personal agency and faith development. The outcome of such denial can hardly be reconciled with the values of democratic education or the educational ethics of Islam, which emphasizes the importance of maintaining the dignity of all.

As a Muslim educator, I started to realize the limitations of the teacherand-text centred, transmission-orientated Islamic education taking place in the mosques, madrasahs and Muslim schools when I began to listen to the life stories of British Muslim youth in the late 1990s. The life-worlds of these young people were informed by a multiplicity of cultures: at home they were socialized into traditional Islamic values interpreted within parental cultural backgrounds and at school they were exposed to a wider secular culture. They used many mechanisms to manage the presence of cultural multiplicity around them in order to develop their senses of loyalty and senses of self in the face of demands made by different authorities in their lives.

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introduction

The literature on minority youth studies, reviewed in detail in Chapter One, was largely confined to visible marks of identity, such as race, ethnicity and language. The possibility of religiosity as an important factor in the lives of Asian children and young people was rarely given consideration. The literature indicated the presence of ‘hybrid, hyphenated’ identities among black people in particular, and pointed to the curious phenomenon of ‘living between two cultures’. However, the specific role of faith appears to have been grossly overlooked. The overall anticipation in this literature was that, as new generations gained better educations and better jobs, they would move up the social ladder and gradually become secularized or assimilated into the norms of wider society.

This focus indicates clear signs of secular bias within the social science research community, as well as in the discourse of educational and social policymakers.

However, the transnational identities observed among migrant Muslim communities contained a strong faith presence that was linked to political developments in the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. This reality of being part of a worldwide Muslim community has a tremendous impact on the identity formation of Muslim youth. A cursory look at the larger scene would have shown researchers that faith has been emerging as a dominant factor in the lives of these individuals. However, the real question for me was how, and in what direction, faith was channelling these young people. I became interested in exploring the construction of their religious subjectivities, where their loyalties to authority and desires for autonomy are negotiated.

I used a psychosocial identity research model that is based on a semistructured interview schedule to explore religious identity. This was developed from Erik H. Erikson’s theoretical insights and James Marcia’s empirical research on identity statuses. The model assumes that identity is constructed within a commitment–exploration continuum. As such, there are several possible identity resolutions or modes: a diffused mode, where neither commitment nor exploration is present; a foreclosed mode, where there is a strong commitment that is not informed by the exploration process; an achieved mode, when commitment has undergone a process of exploration; and an exploratory mode, if there is strong exploration but no real commitment. The model is not fixed; while an individual’s personality could exhibit several aspects of these modes, it is possible that she could regress and progress along the continuum. As will be discussed in Chapter Three, in order to overcome the limitations of the structural–developmental approach that have strongly informed this description of identity, the model is contextualised within a wider phenomenological framework.

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new directions in islamic education

The empirical Muslim religiosity research model that I developed is called the Muslim Subjectivity Interview Schedule (MSIS) and includes a standardised and now widely-used scale that measures an individual’s attitude towards Islam (the Sahin–Francis Scale of Attitudes towards Islam) as well as a selfcharacterisation sketch based on personal construct psychology. Chapters Two and Three discuss key theoretical and methodological issues concerning the MSIS. The application of the model in both minority and majority Muslim contexts (Britain and Kuwait, respectively), is presented in Chapter Four to Six. The findings of the original case study, carried out in the UK, showed the continuing relevance of Islam to the lives of many young British Muslims.

However, male participants reflected a predominantly foreclosed mode of religious subjectivity, while female participants fell largely under the exploratory mode. There were also a significant number of young people in the diffused mode, who were losing interest in religious issues. On the whole, while Islam was perceived as a source of inspiration, a rigid appropriation of faith was also increasingly emerging. Most of the participants raised the concern that the Islam presented to them at home and in the mosque was mixed with the culture of their parents’ country of origin. They wanted ‘pure Islam’ instead.

Male participants often mentioned that they wanted to take a year off to study Arabic in an Arab country. It was becoming clear that, as these young people grappled with a sense of whom they were (which is a process triggered most intensely in multicultural societies), faith was becoming an important centre of authority in their lives.

However, close investigation of the dominant characteristics of the religious authority acknowledged by the youths indicated a strong literal perception of Islamic sources: the Qur’an and the Sunnah. A key source for this literalist religiosity has been the increasing impact of Muslim transnational revivalist movements that originated in different parts of the Muslim world. Most of the young people preferred to identify with the radical discourse of transnational Muslim movements than with the traditional religious discourses they found in their homes and mosques. I found that Muslim young people were also concerned about the danger of being assimilated into wider secular society and were seeking distinctive ways of expressing their identity. Playing upon this concern, radical groups were providing them with a sense of difference and confidence. As a result, a large intra-faith conversion was taking place towards the foreclosed end of the identity continuum. This is one of the least desirable modes of religiosity in a multicultural society, as it may include a strong vulnerability to extremism. It is significant that the empirical case study was 6

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introduction

originally undertaken before 9/11, when policymakers were showing no serious interest in the growing ‘Muslim question’ in multicultural British society. In fact, multiculturalism was an inclusive policy principle that had largely become an uncritical toleration of difference that simply ignored the ‘sensitive’ faith-related issues. Until recently, therefore, policymakers have been largely uninterested in finding out how diverse Muslim groups have been using the educational space created by wider secular democracy to re-inscribe Islamic identities within the context of Western Europe.

More recently, when I explored religious subjectivity and perceptions of loyalty among young people in Kuwait, the results showed more or less the same pattern: youth increasingly mistrusted official religious authorities and traditional revivalist Muslim groups had a growing impact on their understanding of Islam. In the Kuwaiti context, where society is based on broadly shared Arab and Islamic values, sources of religious authority showed much more diversity: family and lay preachers were taken to be much more authoritative within the religious subgroup relative to the UK context. However, even in such a traditional Arab and Muslim society, young people increasingly felt that they were being invaded by Western values in many ways and that their identities were under threat, due mainly to the impacts of economic globalization and modernization. More importantly, Kuwaiti young people agreed with the overall opinion of British Muslim youth that the strict instructional manner that characterized the provision of Islamic education in schools was simply boring. Most of the young people interviewed expressed a desire to turn to radical religious groups for guidance, as these groups represented a more authentic understanding and dedication to the cause of Islamic revival in the modern world.

It is important to note that the challenges facing the British and European Muslim diaspora largely reflect crises that have defined much older Muslim communities worldwide. In recent decades, a plethora of literature has been produced by both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars on the broad theme of the existence of an ‘identity crisis’ within contemporary Muslim communities across the globe. Most of the studies suggest that this identity crisis is an inevitable expression of a painful historical transition experienced globally

by Muslim societies over the last two centuries. This historical process has largely been triggered by the encounter of enforced Western colonisation and modernisation projects that pushed the ummah (or global Muslim society) to define itself in the face of categorically opposing forces: an already-stagnant tradition and a rapidly-engulfing secular institution of Western modernity.

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Most of these rigorous studies have adopted a broad historical and political analysis while engaging with aspects of this tragic story, which has unfolded in different parts of the Muslim world. The responses offered by Muslim intellectuals and activists to the crisis have mostly been reactionary and defensive.

These responses have rarely employed an empirical research framework, although such a framework is invaluable to study the crisis contextually and provides an understanding of the dynamics that inform the construction of modern Muslim identities at both individual and collective levels. It appears that the energy of Muslim scholars has rather been devoted to criticising the positivist and reductionist Western social science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Western science’s wider philosophical framework of secular modernity.

This preoccupation appears to have diverted attention from the difficult task of developing a proper epistemological framework for an Islamic social science, a central focus within the above-mentioned Islamization of Knowledge project. The idea of Islamization of knowledge, like the conception of Islamic education itself, was formed within the volatile context of post-colonialism and reflected wider reactionary efforts against the Western secular educational system, particularly the Orientalist approach to the study of Islam. Therefore, researchers hold an implicit assumption that all understand what is meant by ‘Islamic’ in expressions like ‘Islamic social science’ and ‘Islamic education’.

Engagement with the tradition itself was deemed unnecessary.

These similarly reactionary Muslim responses appear to have shown no serious interest in understanding the philosophical values underpinning Western social science and education. As a result, they have paid little attention to the internal critique that has already taken place within the Western social sciences.

These disciplines have largely grown out of the Eurocentric and positivist intellectual legacy of modernity, especially those that have gradually adopted broadly reflexive methodologies that are more concerned with rigorous epistemology than simplistic observations about the ontology of an investigated phenomenon. Given this, one wonders whether it is still relevant or necessary to approach the social sciences or education within the reactionary mindset that was formed during the political context of the last two centuries.

Contemporary social science shows a strong awareness of the contextual character of human reality and its value-laden cultural dimension. Describing and understanding the different aspects of our complex human experience, including the religious experience that is culturally embedded and individually lived, can only be enriched by an empirical research design that is rigorous, methodical, evidence-based and aware of the ethical and political dimensions 8

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introduction

that inform the process of inquiry. A survey of the methodological thinking exhibited within the Qur’an and classical Muslim scholarship, such as in the works of usul (the systematic study of the foundational premises that underpin the Islamic intellectual disciplines), would be enough to find broad agreement on the necessity of observing these procedural features in order to ensure the production of evidence-based, reliable knowledge and understanding on a given topic. Unless one can operationally define religious identity and identity crisis by following a rigorous empirical design to investigate these as they are experienced by social actors, discussion on these topics will remain nothing more than an interesting intellectual abstraction. This abstraction will not help to properly identify relevant issues, let alone to devise a systematic intervention to address these challenges. Due to the empirical character of pedagogic research, these methodological issues will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two. Upon embarking on my study, I carefully considered my main research problem: that of rethinking the theory and practice of Islamic education by exploring the formation of religious identity within the secular and plural context of British society. I focused on the case of British Muslim youth because their identities and religious agency appear to be formed through several dynamics that are not necessarily complementary. It seemed to me that they were structuring their sense of identity through the conflicting demands and expectations of the traditional culture of home, mosque, madrasah, secular multicultural life and peer group pressure. I realized the importance of conducting my inquiry through the actual experiences of Muslim youth by investigating their ways of interpreting, finding meaning in, and living out their religion within such a challenging social context.

Any attempt to rethink Islamic education needs to be grounded within the experience of young people who are the integral part of this pedagogic process; thus, the formation of their religious agency is the main task of this educational dynamic. The original empirical case may well be limited, but nevertheless it provides a systemic way of understanding complex aspects of religious identity; it also allows the creation of a proper educational response. My inquiry into religious subjectivity has gradually led me to re-examine the theological heart of religious identity and the role of pedagogy in bringing about a mature Muslim expression of faith in the modern world. Most significantly, engaging with the Qur’an as an educator has helped me to discover the educational character and the pedagogic style that defines sacred discourse.

I experienced several set-backs and disappointments while trying to extend the scope of my empirical study and to integrate Islamic education within the British higher education system. I realized the seriousness of the challenges 9

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associated with community-level politics and vested interests. Most importantly, I, and several colleagues, were disappointed to discover the deep secular bias within the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, where this project was initially launched. Despite the growing relevance of the initiative within the post-9/11 context, the head of the school unilaterally decided to end the project.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to develop a practical model of Islamic education in light of my original study findings. The MEd in Islamic Education has become the first postgraduate-level course on the subject to be offered within British academia. The course has a strong community base, as it is housed within one of the first Muslim higher education institutions established in the UK. The programme aims to help Muslim educators become reflective practitioners, so that they can develop intelligent perspectives in their field of practice by assessing the impact of their teaching on the learners’ religious identities and development of faith. As such, the course contributes to the professional development of Muslim educators and creates a scholarly and academic space to address the issues essential to the emergence of Muslim teacher training, Muslim theological education and the training of faith leaders within the British and European context.

Without rethinking the meaning of education in Islam, we will not be able to revive classical Islamic sciences or improve the pedagogic method of the traditional teaching of Islam. Similarly, we will not be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses informing modern Western approaches to the teaching of religion in History of Religions, Religious Studies, Islamic Studies, and multi-faith Religious Education within British mainstream schooling.

The learner-centred approach to teaching Islam – an approach that seriously considers the need to teach Islam critically by enabling students to engage with the tradition and its civilizational legacy with an open mind – will not emerge. By addressing these issues, the MEd course has attracted the interest of a substantial number of diverse groups of young male and female Muslim educators and religious leaders. With over 15 students in each academic year, the course is now entering its fourth year at the time of writing. Chapter Eight offers a critical reflection on this recent practical implementation of the critical and dialogic perspective on Islamic education within the academic framework of an MEd course designed to offer professional development pathways for a diverse group of Muslim educators from the mosques, community centres, schools and the dar al-[ulum.

Throughout the development and implementation of the course, I have managed to complete the last stage of my research, which has gradually turned 10

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introduction

into a longitudinal Action Research project. The project contains evidencebased identification and description of the set of problems facing contemporary Muslim educators, the development of an intervention strategy in the form of a new perspective on theological principles and pedagogic strategies of Muslim education and the implementation and assessment of this intervention, which aims to bring about a transformative Muslim educational culture. This book tells the story of this journey and this educational experiment.

There has been a worldwide renewed interest in the study of Islam and Muslims during the last decade, largely triggered by several unfortunate watershed events such as 9/11 and 7/7. These tragic events have reshaped the politics informing the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. From the perspective of the Western Muslim diaspora, these events have acted as catalysts that reinforced the distrust concerning their integration within wider society and, most crucially, raised concerns about the compatibility of Islam with the values of Western secular democracy.

These developments have also clearly indicated the continuing relevance of Muslim faith in the lives of many second and third generations of European Muslims, most of whose parents originally worked in manufacturing to help rebuild the ruined economies of Europe after the Second World War. Although social policymakers widely predicted that European Muslims would undergo gradual secularisation, or integration into secular society, Islam has continued to be a strong dynamic informing the personal and collective identities of European Muslims. Most of the Muslim immigrants came from the rural areas of their home countries and did not exhibit high levels of religiosity or religious literacy. However, they were part of the wider, conflict-ridden narrative that has been unfolding in different parts of the Muslim world. This metanarrative, largely constructed around the strong attitudes of either defence or rejection of Islam, has increasingly been forging oppositional identities that are expressed as ‘reactionary–authoritarian traditionalism’ or ‘authoritarian–militarist imitations of the Western secular modernity’. The historical antagonism between the Muslim world and the medieval Christian West and the traumatic experiences of more recent Western colonialism are among the other obvious, religion-based factors informing the politics of a new Muslim presence in the modern world. Despite this alarming picture, European social policy models (e.g. British multiculturalism or French assimilation) have failed to recognise the significance of how faith informs the way in which ethnically and culturallydiverse Muslim communities position themselves within secular polities.

In liberal secular democracies, the principle of equality aims to preserve individual rights, promote the agency of diverse communities, and facilitate 11

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social integration within the wider society. These diverse communities’ capacities for exercising strong agency remain a crucial factor in the achievement of social cohesion. However, the interests of diverse communities can be reconciled to foster the well-being of all. Facilitating active civic participation can further enable citizens to respect each other’s rights and show a deep awareness that they have to be responsible and accountable to one another. More crucially, individual communities should be able offer a rationale for living together by drawing upon their distinct cultural heritage, so that integration does not become a deceptive language of political correctness. A logic of togetherness that finds meaning within a community’s distinct value system both transforms the agency of the community and the identity category shared by the wider society. Facilitating this social reciprocity will allow communities to engage with the process of both defining and being defined by wider society, and to nurture a genuine sense of belonging without fear of assimilation or isolation.

In Muslim communities, religion constitutes an important element of their individual, collective agency and cultural heritage. Unfortunately, it has taken a long time for the secular character of modern European social policy systems to recognize this crucial faith element within the ethnically and culturally diverse European Muslim diaspora.

Therefore, it is not surprising in the post-9/11 context that the central issues regarding the role of religion within the overall management of Muslim minorities in Europe and the West have been addressed within the framework of national security and the war on terror. The discourse of policymakers, social scientists and legislators is largely informed by political concerns, and has devised a rich repertoire of expressions like extremism, radicalisation, terrorism, jihadism and Islamism to navigate those complex issues that have serious implications for Muslim communities and faith. Politicians have been quick to note that the violent extremism of some individuals or groups should not be generalised to the community and its faith. However, it appears that the European secular imagination has found it difficult to appreciate how strongly Islamic institutions guide the private and public aspects of their adherents’ lives.

The challenges regarding the meaningful accommodation of a Muslim public presence within a secular polity have not been thoroughly recognised, and have therefore been addressed ineffectively.

The absence of clarity regarding the discourse on religious extremism within the Muslim community, as well as among the secular policymakers, primarily reflects failure and, to some extent, reluctance to make an important demarcation between religion, the totality of a received faith tradition and its diverse human articulations, and religiosity, the religious life-world expressed as 12

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introduction

the personal, cultural and political appropriations, interpretations and practices of a faith tradition. The criteria for determining mature and immature Muslim religiosity should be sought within the framework of Islamic theological selfunderstandings that are constructed out of the foundational sources of Islam and its collective expressions within the Muslim community. There will always be competing sectarian interpretations regarding what constitutes the correct theological criteria. However, in the Muslim tradition, the central salvific criterion is that one’s conduct observes the ethical values and teachings of the faith. The central issue facing Muslims here is not to determine orthodoxy or heterodoxy as such, but to facilitate an orthopraxy that embodies the devotional–spiritual and critical–reflective dimensions of the human condition.

The wider Qur’anic educational and pedagogic hermeneutics aims to bring about the mature formation and articulation of this balanced orthopraxy within the individual and collective lives of diverse historical communities.

This religious commitment should exhibit a strong awareness of how personal context informs one’s sense of religious belonging and the theological, cultural and political dimensions of this belonging. In other words, the maturity of one’s religious identity primarily hinges on how individual and collective identities re-enact, handle, interpret and express a received faith tradition and its culturally-embedded emotional and behavioural patterns. This process requires hermeneutic competence to facilitate engagement with the theological content (the cognitive domain) as well as the mental and emotional maturity to recognise the inevitable presence of intersubjectivity in the emergence of one’s sense of self. The capacity for self-contextualisation, or putting one’s identity in its immediate personal and cultural context, strongly indicates the need for one to be open and tolerant to the diversity within her faith community, and within wider religious and cultural contexts. Given this, extremist attitudes or behaviours are located within the levels of human psychosocial development (religious personality) and socio-political and economic contexts (culture), rather than directly associated with the faith itself.

There are some who consider religion as an illusion that arises out of the complex deceptive processes of psychological projection. According to this view, religion is responsible for many human pathologies, including fanaticism, extremism and authoritarianism. In fact, some will go so far as to equate particular religious traditions with evil. Although some of these perspectives on religion are labelled as ‘scientific’, they remain short-sighted, reductionist essentialisms that fail to note the humanising and civilising power of religion.

Human fanaticism and extremism cannot be confined to the religious content.

In fact, the scientific attitude itself can easily nurture closed-mindedness and 13

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give rise to a rigid mindset. In evolutionary terms, the power of religion to make meaning and its social function of influencing ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse human groups to cohere around a shared system of values and conduct have contributed to human survival. However, religion, like any other aspect of human experience, presents a degree of ambivalence and has negative effects as well. It can nurture healthy human development, but it can also severely hinder its natural growth. It can create standards by which people can live peaceably together, and can also be used as a justification for all kinds of wrongdoing. Religious commitments that reflect deeper human qualities of spirituality and devotion must be accompanied by critical reflection in order to ensure that they function as forces for moderation and maturation. It is very poignant that the Qur’an explicitly warns about the dangers of going to extremes in one’s religious observance. Thus, the Qur’an locates faith within human experience and stresses that the presence of a strong commitment in and of itself cannot guarantee the healthy personality that Revelation calls us to embody.

It is generally understood that religious agency is formed within a particular cultural and political context, but it is less known that this agency is ultimately shaped and expressed through a theological core that reflects a person’s overall religious personality in its cognitive, emotional and behavioural dynamics. Thus, although the socio-political analysis suggesting that contemporary Islamic extremism can simply be explained away as an overreaction to Western modernity is broadly accurate, it retains limited explanative power. As discussed earlier, the radical discourse of contemporary Islamic renewal movements is a reaction to enforced Western secular modernity in diverse parts of the Muslim world.

The experience of secular modernity in a colonial mode appears to have radically shaped these movements’ perceptions of Islam and its complex historical heritage. This painful encounter with Western modernity has created one of the most dramatic ruptures within traditional Muslim self-understanding. Instead of creating a culture of engagement to deal with pressing issues, the challenges define Muslim responses to cultural and political change. Perhaps the most significant and devastating aspect of these processes has been the emergence of new Islamic self-understandings that are constructed in what is either an explicit or implicit imitation of Western secular modernity and its institutions.

For those Muslims who saw the end of historical development in the social, cultural and scientific achievements of Western modernity, this imitation was, to some extent, a conscious choice. However, the ostensible Islamic emphasis within the discourse of revivalist movements that promised to recover the dignity and confidence of Muslims has obscured the fact that Muslims’ perceptions 14

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of Islam have largely been defined by the wider political and intellectual categories of Western modernity to which they are radically opposed. With hindsight, it appears that Islam has been turned into a closed political ideology that serves as an alternative to the governance systems of Western nation-states.

It should be acknowledged that the experience of such a dramatic encounter has also presented an opportunity for all those concerned with Islamic education to engage with a critical rethinking process on Islam and its rich heritage. This process could have offered organic pathways for renewal and reform by allowing the emergence of a meaningful reinterpretation of Islam. Unfortunately, a rigid Islamic identity has come to engulf the worldwide Muslim society (ummah); this identity is incapable of conducting proper dialogue either with its past or its surrounding reality.

It is crucial to remember that while this rigid identity can easily be attributed to Western colonisation and enforced modernisation, it is now widely recognised that stagnation and rigidity characterised Muslim culture for centuries before its modern encounter with the West. The rise of the historic Muslim civilisation can largely be attributed to the faith dynamic, which acted as a transformative pedagogy and a civilising, humanising force. In the foundational source of Islam, the Qur’an, faith signifies the human ability to make meaning that centres human cognitive, psychosocial and spiritual powers around expressing gratitude towards the life-giving God by recognising His Oneness. Faith that defines the meaning of being human in turn nurtures human psychosocial and spiritual maturity by bringing about a holistic personality that shows signs of contentment, balance and creativity (nafs mutma’innah). At the sociopolitical level, faith acts as a civilising force, as expressed within the context of diverse historical and cultural conditions; it brings about a just, balanced and open social polity (ummah wasat). Therefore, the Qur’anic conception of humanity and faith are deeply educational and pedagogic in nature. What makes the human species distinct is the pure, neutral character of its nature (fitrah), which opens up limitless possibilities for growth. However, without adopting a critical and reflective educational attitude, the Qur’an warns that humans face the possibility of regression and even pathology in their lives.

Therefore, the Qur’an self-consciously presents itself as a Divine educational intervention programme. By using various challenging pedagogic strategies, it prepares us to be self-reflective so that we can engage with a long process of self-transformation. This participatory pedagogy does not simply attempt to inform, but also aims to help us articulate and express our potential.

The pedagogic features of the Qur’an are reflected in the oral character of its overall composition and delivery structure. The use of repetitions, which is 15

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an essential aspect of any oral performance, has a strong pedagogic function of ensuring comprehension among a listening live audience. The Qur’an articulates its central message as several key narratives that are formed out of the myriad of dialogues that exhibit distinct literary formats and contents. Therefore, the Qur’an’s discourse can only be fully appreciated by one who seriously considers the pedagogic character of its oral articulation. This further points to the Qur’anic collaborative educational vision, which aims to bring Divinity and humanity in a close dialogue that nurtures human spiritual development.

This book argues that the teacher, text and instruction-centred Islamic education that is frequently observed in supplementary mosque schools, in Muslim higher education institutions and in both minority and majority Muslim contexts is inadequate to communicate Islam effectively to Muslim young people. It is a rigidified, static and top-down learning experience. In response to this, this book proposes a critical and dialogical model of Islamic pedagogy that works at multiple levels, both for basic Islamic education and the training of faith leaders; this pedagogy should account for the rapidly changing life-world of Muslim young people. The empirical religiosity research model employed to investigate the processes of value discernment among young Muslims constitutes an educational platform that enables them to come to terms with the cultural transitions in their lives. The book argues that an empirically-based pedagogic strategy encourages young Muslims to voice their issues concerning the change in their self-understanding; it can initiate a process of maturation and growth into their faith. It discusses an Islamic theological rationale in support of a critical and dialogical approach to Islamic education through a critical re-reading of the fundamental educational principles of Islam.

The book argues that a critical and dialogical approach to the Islamic educational process constitutes an essential part of Islamic faith and is also a crucial method of addressing the needs of young Muslims. By attempting to offer practical strategies to enable Muslim educators to be self-reflective of their pedagogic discourses, the book contributes to wider efforts to bring about a transformation in Muslim communities. The challenges of this process, which include the continuing threat of extremism, are not simply confined to a few isolated sections of the community. In many ways, mainstream communities in both majority and minority Muslim contexts exhibit complex challenges that hinder their integration into an increasingly globalised democratic world.

Islamic education remains a crucial area for long-term investment in the creation of competence and resources within the community to address the issues of globalisation and to engage with a process of social transformation.

The final chapter of the book presents the study’s conclusions, implications and 16

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recommendations for improving the quality of teaching and learning about Islam in the modern world.

Finally, I would like to provide some further background on what initially led me to focus on the theory and practice of contemporary Islamic education in order to show the wider context of the book. I come from Turkey and, while embarking on the original project, I was excited about the fact that the research experience would require me to position myself as both an insider and outsider within the emerging complex narratives of British Islam. However, with hindsight, I can see now that I was not quite fully aware that the research journey would bring such profound changes to my personal and professional life.

I studied Islamic Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Ankara, where I graduated with a specialisation in the philosophy of Islamic law. My religious training goes back to the informal Islamic education that I received from my grandfather. He was the imam of our village, which was located on the banks of the River Euphrates in south-eastern Turkey. The traditional Islamic education system in the madrasah that once trained religious leaders like my grandfather was outlawed in the Turkish republic. However, in peripheral areas, madrasahs were still maintained, albeit partially.

Eventually, religious education was introduced within the secular curriculum of the newly-founded Turkish republic. It was not called Islamic education, as anything to do with Islam was deliberately suppressed. While the subject contains basic religious instructions, it has largely remained an ideological tool for transmitting a strictly-defined body of knowledge and ethical and cultural values to young generations, thus ensuring the inculcation of strong Turkish nationalism. In order to train young generations of religious leaders, the state created specialist religious schools (imam hatip). At the higher education level, with the help of Western educationalists and Orientalists, the state established the first modern, university-level provision for the study of Islam and Islamic theology.

My parents, like many others, preferred the specialist religious schools that combined secular with religious subjects. They did not expect that their children would necessarily become imams, but that they would at least receive a general Islamic education, which they felt was lacking within the mainstream secular schooling programme. However, my religiously-minded parents and grandfather remained sceptical of the state-sponsored religious education.

From the outset, the specialist religious schools combined the religious and secular subjects that were considered to be similar to the original madrasah practice, which integrated the naqliyat (the transmitted knowledge of the classical Islamic sciences), the [aqliyat (the rational sciences i.e. maths, physical 17

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sciences, medicine, and astronomy) and the [aliyat (the auxiliary sciences centred around the study of Arabic, poetry and logic, which subsequently included other principal languages of Muslim civilisation, like Persian).

Early attempts to systematise Arabic grammar created an epistemic framework that greatly influenced the emergence of rigorous methodologies for engaging with the essential components of Muslim faith, the Qur’an, the Prophetic tradition and law, among others. There were external factors behind the efforts to systematise the study of Islam, like the early and rapid spread of Islam. These factors resulted in the creation of distinct disciplines. Most of the early scholarly communities that undertook this process were almost entirely made up of new converts who, by making use of their linguistic and cultural heritage, helped to indigenise Islam within its new cultural context. This early epistemological preoccupation appears to be a rather distinct feature of Muslim civilisation.

However, there were also significant internal motives behind this indigenisation.

In order to understand the Qur’an, the Arabic grammar had to be systematised for those who had recently adopted the language. With the passing away of the Prophet, his living memory and tradition had also to be rigorously collected and classified so that his authentic Prophetic authority could be confidently emulated by successive generations of Muslims. Above all, this inquiry-based educational attitude was identified as a central religious duty to be fulfilled by the Prophet’s followers, as the Qur’an and the Prophetic teachings strongly emphasise that practitioners must constantly reflect on their faith by engaging with the process of increasing their knowledge ([ilm) and understanding (fiqh) of faith itself. It is significant that knowledge was not valued for its own sake but because it facilitated understanding, insight and self-awareness. Thus, the Qur’an emphasises that reflection and openness to learn are essential elements of the self-purification (tazkiyah) process and social reform (islah), which aim to develop mature personal religiosities and collective religious identities.

My grandfather was deeply concerned that the core curriculum and the modern textbooks in the specialist religious school I was attending remained simplistic in that they did not enable students to master the above-mentioned basic auxiliary sciences, such as Arabic, nor did they allow students to acquire adequate knowledge or understanding of the essential classical Islamic sciences.

The system also did not nurture the moral spiritual piety necessary to become a well-rounded imam.

However, he had to reluctantly agree that it was best for me to attend the specialist religious schools so long as I continued studying with him the essential textbooks that made up the traditional madrasah curriculum. This largely meant that I had to give up my long summer holidays to grapple with the 18

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complex religious texts he selected for me to study. Of course, it was impossible to completely replicate the madrasah experience. However, this experience provided me with an invaluable opportunity to compare the two distinct styles of studying Islam: the one of studying with my grandfather and the other of studying in the modern specialist religious school.

By and large, the parents who required their children to attend the religious schools were conservative, religiously-minded people who felt that their children could not get basic Islamic literacy and moral behaviour by attending mainstream schools. My own experience in the imam hatip school confirmed my grandfather’s concerns about the quality of Islamic educational provision.

The schools were not meant to be theological seminaries to train the clergy, of course. They created an Islamic atmosphere preoccupied with the moral conduct and character of the pupils. Although the schools were based on a secular educational system that adopted Western teaching methods, the actual teaching and learning was no different from the style of teaching associated with madrasah education; it thus included memorisation and repetition, and was text-and-teacher centred. The only difference between these schools and madrasah was that the madrasah system was organised as an organic extension of the mosque and its religious culture. Therefore, it had a real experiential dimension that created intimacy and trust between the teacher and the student.

The gradual decline of this broad religious culture meant that the madrasah style was increasingly replaced by individual study circles that took place in the home or the mosque. However, some ultra-conservative religious groups, like Süleymancı, disagreed with the implicitly secular character of the imam hatip system and opted for a schooling that purely focused on the recitation and memorisation of the Qur’an; Thus, the Süleymancı school is recognised as simply the Qur’an School, or Kuran kursu. Other religious groups, like the Nurcu,1 used the private study system, called the halaqah, to convey their particular model of religious instruction through the daily ritual study of works created by the movement’s inspirational figurehead, the famous Kurdish religious reformer Said Nursi (d. 1960), who lived in the most difficult context of a collapsing empire and the birth of a new secular republic. Incidentally, Nursi’s Islamic renewal project was centred in his creative vision that an integrated model of Islamic education that combined religious and modern sciences could improve the lives of people in his native Kurdistan and offer hope of reforming the Islamic fabric of Turkish society. He spent the latter part of his life in an 1 A large revivalist spiritual movement that has many sub-branches, the largest of which is the well-known Gülen movement.

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exile imposed by the founders of the new, secular state. However, he managed to turn these difficult circumstances into an educational opportunity. He started an Islamic education programme to present Islam to young generations of Muslims growing up in Turkey’s new socio-political reality. The impact of his transformative educational vision is still strongly felt in Turkey and beyond.

From my experience, I could see the vast gap between what I was studying at the imam hatip and the selected texts that I was studying with my grandfather. It was clear that, despite the fact that we spent seven years studying at the school, most students could barely read a classical text in Arabic. I appreciated my grandfather’s traditional method of teaching me Arabic by carefully guiding me through a range of selected texts across the core Islamic intellectual disciplines.

For university studies, I chose to attend the Divinity School in Ankara because I was dissatisfied with the Islamic education I received from the specialist schools. Ankara had a well-known reputation for teaching Islam and Muslim theology in a historical and critical manner. For some, this was precisely the reason to avoid attending the school, as its ‘Orientalist’ approach to studying Islam would most certainly undermine one’s faith. However, since the dismantling of the madrasah, even the traditional divinity schools had to follow a highly Westernised educational framework of studying Islam. Therefore, it was logical that I select Ankara, as it was openly trying to follow a critical approach to study Islam rather than having one forced upon it.

Unfortunately, I found that most students at the Divinity School in Ankara could not read classical texts in Arabic either. I also thought the quality of overall Islamic studies at the Divinity School was poor. While the school abandoned the memorisation and rote learning methods of the madrasah, it did not use a distinct approach to define the new system of study. Furthermore, one could immediately observe the intense struggle between the traditionally-minded lecturers and those who were keen on the ‘Western Orientalist’ approach to Islam.

The traditionalists had a strong support base among the religious networks and groups that provided accommodations for students. Almost all of the students who came from rural areas had to stay in the accommodations provided by these religious networks and groups, as they were the most affordable option and we could hardly commute. These religious groups were particularly keen on protecting the students from what they perceived to be the negative impacts of the theological education offered at the Divinity School.

Although the school did establish a critical textual study in several classical Islamic sciences, chiefly in Hadith and Kalam, it had not established a distinct intellectual tradition. The scholars trying to develop a new approach to the modern study of Islam at least presented students with a strong case for the 20

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need to adopt a critical manner when studying Muslim tradition. Furthermore, they managed to articulate the fact that, long before its encounter with secular modernity, the traditional Islamic education system showed strong features of stagnation and decline. They showed that there was a clear need to rethink Muslim tradition and examine its educational culture.

The five-year experience at the Ankara Divinity School enabled those who were interested with a method of questioning to both contextualise the tradition and critically engage with it. In addition, the system also made me realise that my country had undergone a strong Westernisation experience, and that I needed to know Western social science and philosophy in order to participate in the wider intellectual debates that were taking place in the country.

Some of the graduates had a chance to complete their graduate education in the West and study with international figures who endeavoured to create a meaningful Islamic self-expression through a critical engagement with tradition and Western modernity. Naturally, followers of the neo-traditionalist school were more concerned with perennial philosophy, Gnosticism and abstract Neoplatonic ideas (for example N. Al-Attas, S.H. Nasr etc.) than actually offering an honest debate about understanding the Muslim tradition and its contemporary interaction with the West. We were also introduced to the works of classical reformist figures such as J. Al-Afghani, R. Rida and M. [Abduh, who had dominated the religious, political and educational reform and renewal (islah, tajdid) initiatives during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Muslim world. This included the works of key Subcontinent reformist figures such as Shah Wali Allah and, most importantly, Muhammad Iqbal, whose powerful poetic imagination tried to bring about a new synthetic reading of the religious, mystical and philosophical dimensions of Muslim thought. The theologically rich intellectual legacies of these early creative figures were gradually replaced by reactionary forces of traditionalism and nationalistic secular modernism.

I began to realise that, within both Sunni and Shia expressions, the emerging post-colonial Muslim world had been less able to produce intellectuals capable of critical engagement with the Muslim tradition and the West.

However, there were notable exceptions to this rule. For example, Ali Shariati synthesised his study of Islam with the Western sociology and philosophy in order to provide an existential and political re-reading of core Islamic teachings (particularly those within the particular historical and cultural context of Shia religious imagination) that was capable of mobilising the masses to transform traditional Muslim society. Fazlur Rahman’s impressive critical scholarship, deep understanding of the Muslim intellectual tradition, and his personal devotion to helping the ummah to own its responsibility to transform itself had the most 21

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lasting legacy in the Divinity School. When I was an undergraduate student, several of Rahman’s students came to teach at the school; by then, almost all of his works had been translated into Turkish. His works sparked debates on historicity, modernity and how to transform a stagnant Islamic intellectual tradition. Through the wisdom of intellectuals such as these, Ankara provided a rich and exciting intellectual atmosphere that proved to be informative and motivating as it gradually developed a new model of modern Islamic theology.

Initially, I was attracted to the study of Islamic law and particularly to the methodology of Islamic law. The nature of Shari[ah and how it could be applied under modern conditions were hotly debated. I was particularly interested in the debates regarding the traditional hermeneutics that governed the formulation of rules out of the original sources of Islam and to what extent this interpretive strategy recognised social context and changing life circumstances. I confined myself to the study of usul al-fiqh books and realised that the classical scholars had a distinct approach to the issue that framed the debates on determining the raison d’être of rulings by attending to the discernible reasons behind the rulings and, if discernible reasons were absent, to look at the broad occasions of Revelation and, most crucially, at the wider ethical value system and intentions of the Divine will, which deeply cared about human dignity, justice and the welfare of people. Apart from the fact that there was a clear dynamic core in Islamic law, I was most impressed with the methodical, critical thinking that guided the entire hermeneutic process.

This further suggested to me that Muslim scholars, even within the pure religious disciplines, have developed epistemological perspectives in which faith and reason are brought into a complementary interdependence and a synthetic unity, which reflects the deeper Qur’anic holistic vision of the human condition. The experience of engaging with the classical texts moved me to go beyond their subject matter and to focus more on their educational structures and pedagogic styles of framing, discussing and communicating knowledge, understanding and insight on different aspects of Muslim faith. I was interested in learning more about the scholars who produced these texts, as well as the wider educational culture and institutions that nurtured the emergence of these creative minds.

The Muslim tradition has many great scholars and personalities who have acted as catalysts for the development of classical Muslim civilisation. However, I was most influenced by the critical imagination of the thirteenth-century reformist thinker Ibn Taymiyyah, which informed his impressive scholarship and his social ethics and activism. He is a model Muslim intellectual and activist not because of his controversial conclusions on certain theological and legal 22

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issues, but because of his willingness to engage critically with the tradition he had inherited while responding to the daunting challenges faced by his society. He was one of the first scholars who seriously considered the changing contextual reality of his time.

A cursory look at Taymiyyah’s fatwa collections will reveal his effort to provide a broad hermeneutic framework by which to understand the Muslim faith and rethink its complex historical legacy, in order that Muslims could continue to be inspired and guided by its message in a changing context. It should be noted that two core theological concepts that summarise his vision of Islam are essentially educational in nature. These are tawhid al-ilahiyyah, which conveys that only God reserves the right to Divinity, and thence is the only entity with the right to require worship, and tawhid al-rububiyyah, which stresses that the Divine loves and serves humanity. The lordship (rububiyyah) of the Divine has inclusive educational qualities and indicates that He acts as the caring, Divine Educator Who is in a dynamic process of guiding, looking after, listening and responding to the needs of humanity and creation as a whole.

My engagement with the educational aspects of the classic Islamic texts has gradually led me to focus on the educational and pedagogic character of the Qur’an.

Upon my graduation, I had the opportunity to work as a school teacher for several years. The experience of teaching Islam in a secular context pushed me to seriously consider the challenges facing the teaching of Islam to a highly secularised generation. It was a challenge to help students develop a mature faith commitment. I began to realise the lack of proper educational and pedagogic thinking and resources needed to facilitate the proper study of Islam in a modern context. When I received the opportunity to complete my graduate work in the UK, I did not hesitate to choose a pedagogy-focused empirical study over a theoretical work in Islamic law.

The highly modernised urban, secular context of Ankara was vastly different from the British Muslim communities, which had originated from different parts of the Subcontinent. It was truly a revelatory experience for me. While interacting with communities that had many commonalities in terms of religious observance of the broad features of Sunni Islam, I immediately felt that I was an outsider.

Most of these communities appeared to have been taken out of a premodern rural context and put into the midst of a highly modernised, secular, multicultural urban context. The first generation, who came as migrant workers, originally hoped to return to their countries of origin. Therefore, the radical relocation did not appear to create serious problems for their cultural 23

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identities. Once the return to homeland had become a myth and these migrants were reunited with their families in the UK, it was naturally impossible to keep the boundaries of identity firm, as the second and third generations were born and raised in Britain. In order to keep alive the narrative of home culture in the lives of the younger generations, mosques were established. The mosques were run by imams who were brought over from the Subcontinent. This period also saw the establishment of the first religious seminaries, which were modelled on their mother institutions in the Subcontinent. Thus, the educational culture at mosques and the seminaries was largely conducted in a non-English medium and reflected traditional methods of knowledge transmission. I began to visit the mosques and madrasahs to meet young people, whose lives indicated strong features of divergence from the one-dimensional narrative put forward at the mosque, madrasah and seminary. I was fascinated to find out how young people made sense of themselves while living in different cultural worlds and negotiating conflicting expectations.

Broad multicultural educational polices have allowed the establishment of distinct Islamic schooling, as well as Islamic higher education institutions such as the dar al-[ulum. The more I understood the religious structure of the community and its cultural and educational institutions of reproduction within the wider secular context, the more I felt the community was going through a challenging process similar to what Muslims in Turkey have gone through.

The Muslim community in Britain, and in the rest of Europe, did not possess the resources to understand the process, let alone to generate an intelligent strategy of responding effectively to the changes of globalisation. The politically charged context and the interest of the transnational religious movements to capitalise on the identity politics within the community appear to have further complicated the process. Successive governments, by naively expecting a gradual assimilation to occur, had not even noticed the complex, faith-based identity politics within the community and the growing consequences of these identity politics for wider society. It appeared that most of the difficulties were going to be experienced by the second and third generations, who had to make sense of themselves as being both British and Muslim. Therefore, I focused on the religious life-worlds of Muslim youths, so that I could explore the possibility of constructing an Islamic education strategy that would enable a connection with Islamic traditions in an open, critical manner and also help British Muslims to engage with the wider society of which they were a part.

I was fortunate enough to work with Professor John Hull, a leading Religious Education (RE) specialist based at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education. His work played a crucial role in strengthening the non-confessional 24

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and inclusive educational character of RE. The subject has come out of an explicit Christian nurture and catechism to embrace the teaching and learning of the other faiths that are part of the contemporary British society. Considering the fact that most European models of RE are still confessional, and children are segregated into separate classes to learn their faiths, the multi-faith RE, with all its shortcomings, exhibited a unique model of teaching RE within the modern secular schooling system. John Hull not only contributed to the pedagogy of the multi-faith RE, but also offered a theological rationale from his own Christian faith in favour of the use of non-confessional RE in the mainstream schooling system. A vivid critical educational theology informed his inspirational, prophetic voice, which has emphasised openness and warned against the increasing danger of ‘religionism’, the term he uses to describe an ideological and tribalistic perception of religion that is incapable of nurturing human growth.

John encouraged me to train myself in the applied social sciences essential to understanding faith development and the broad function of religion within the concrete context of human life. Moreover, he advised me that without empirical research methodologies, I could not properly explore the complex processes involved in the teaching and learning of religion and its impact on the religious identity of the learner. I discovered that the diverse traditions of empirical research used to assess the psychology and sociology of religion could be applied to the field of religious education in general and in Islamic education in particular.

I enjoyed participating in John Hull’s research group, which was comprised of many national and international RE practitioners who came from diverse Christian backgrounds. I became the first Muslim member of the group, although it later included many more Muslim educators. The discussions, which facilitated the emergence of a rich interfaith dialogue, revealed that many common challenges inform the religious education taking place within both Muslim and Christian faith contexts. I was most interested in discovering different empirical models on understanding religiosity and faith development.

Eventually, I decided to write my MEd dissertation as an exploration of whether the idea of faith development is compatible with Islamic educational theology.

The dissertation drew on the traditional Islamic models of psycho-spiritual development offered by the well-established classical Sufi orders of Islam that aimed to realize the Qur’anic approach to perfecting the art of being human through a specific set of experiential education practices, called tarbiyah. The study critically compared the Sufi models of spiritual development to several contemporary approaches to faith development, primarily the theory offered

by J. Fowler.

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By the time I completed my doctoral study, the School of Education recognised the implications of my work for developing much needed inclusive educational policies regarding the complex issues informing the integration of Muslim communities within wider British society. The study findings indicated the vulnerability of young British Muslims to religious extremism, which is an important observation that policymakers failed to note, as they were working within a naïve framework of uncritical multiculturism. These findings did attract special attention. The initial indications were so positive that the University agreed to establish a specialist research and training centre on Islamic education to be housed in the School of Education. The aim was to offer training opportunities for Muslim educators to gain the pedagogic skills necessary to help young Muslims develop a sound knowledge and understanding of Islam and an intelligent Muslim faith. This exercise was not meant to privilege one faith or community over another. The country’s growing concern over the challenges facing the Muslim community and, most crucially, the long-term implications of these challenges for the welfare of society at large, justified the inclusion of this project within the University. After all, universities are charged with the civic duty of widening educational participation within the wider society. Even so, this development was a pioneer program – truly ahead of its time.

The project initially suffered from political divisions within the Muslim community. I could see that the community was not ready to allow selfcritical Islamic educational perspectives to emerge, even though these would help to deal with the complex challenges facing the community’s youngsters.

Most significantly, the project faced an irrational secular bias by the new head of the school, who claimed expertise in international education and, without specifying any grounds, simply stopped the project. The project director and my mentor officially noted his deep disappointment with this unjust decision, stating that the school’s failure to accommodate forces of moderation within the Muslim community to exist in the school was a clear case of discrimination and an ethically and professionally irresponsible act. Unfortunately for the RE program, the head’s secular bias was not confined to Islamophobia. Gradually, the new school management severely weakened the entire academic infrastructure of the Religious Education department and put an end to the much-needed collaboration between Muslim educators and general RE practitioners.

The broad educational rationale of mainstream RE in England and Wales in many ways represents a unique model of teaching religion in secular multicultural societies. RE treats faith traditions as well as other value systems as educational resources to facilitate ‘learning about and learning from religion’, in the hope that this learning leads to the growth of the learner’s personal, social 26

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and faith development. This book argues that this broad, ‘secular’ educational rationale should not be thought incompatible with the core educational values of Islam. Muslim educational thought contains a strong tradition of critical education based on the central Qur’anic educational concepts of ta[aruf, or ‘knowing and learning from one another’, which certainly supports this broad educational vision.

Most educators in the West think that the educational legacy of Islam and Western modernity remain inherently oppositional, as Islamic education aims to inculcate specific, faith-based values while Western education aims to contribute to the overall development of an autonomous subject. Thus, multi-faith RE has been perceived by Muslims with suspicion, as they assume such courses promote secular values that are deemed to be contradictory to Islam. Perhaps this depiction has some truth in it, but it fails to engage with the broad educational rationale underpinning the non-confessional RE and, most importantly, ignores the plurality within the Muslim educational legacy and the possibility that both paradigms can share some central educational ideals. Secularity, unlike the narrower and more ideological concept of secularism, can be interpreted as a crucial inclusive principle that informs modern democratic political order; it should not be seen as inherently in conflict with or a threat to religion.

My exposure to the culture of multidisciplinary research that informs Religious Education has led me to realise that the traditional study of Islam and Islam’s theological training, including Islamic education, lacks an empirical component. As a result, the field is dominated by a descriptive, historical approach. The crisis facing classical Islamic disciplines could be traced to two clear factors: a lack of empirical research and a lack of critical and comparative historical and textual study. It should be stressed that the study of Islam and Muslims that takes place within the diverse models of Western academia have their own limitations. Classical Orientalists adopt a narrow ideological approach. Furthermore, the purely empirical research produced about Muslims stem mostly from theologically illiterate academics within the fields of sociology, religious studies and political science; these studies actually cause misunderstanding about the Muslim context.

As a result of questioning and subsequent abandonment of the medieval Church-centred socio-political order, Western modernity has a strong emphasis on progress, development and constant change. The progressive aspect of modernity has achieved many gains throughout Europe, including respect for human rights and the rule of law. Unfortunately, some extreme interpretations of modernity pushed forward its secular character in an attempt to impose Western modernity on other cultures. This imposition denied other cultures the 27

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new directions in islamic education

opportunity to produce their own readings and appropriations of modernity. For more than a century, the destructive and negative impulses of modernity have been criticised to the point that it has heralded the dawn of a new intellectual framework loosely termed ‘postmodernism’. While it is difficult to define this new intellectual trend, some of its features can be identified. These features include an emphasis on the contextual character of human experience, which is articulated through language and culture. Postmodernism has contributed towards an epistemic openness and humility, which are very positive features of its critique of modernity. However, to push the idea of a context-relative reality so far as to declare that it is impossible to be certain of any truth-claim is simply naïve and almost always results in nihilism. This strong philosophical relativism, however, is not a new phenomenon. The fate of the Sophists of ancient Greece is a good illustration of the end that awaits a nihilist perspective: it is reduced to seeking narcissistic pleasure out of endless polemic.

Postmodern thinking has undermined modernity’s universalistic, objectivist and essentialist understanding of reality. It has developed thoroughly contextualised readings of humanity by emphasising the cultural, historical and linguistic assemblages and power relations that define the birth of human selfhood. Such a strong stress on decentring and deconstructing the human subject has been interpreted as an anti-humanist tendency of postmodern thinking: if the death of God was the motto of modernity, the death of humanity (or the unified human person) is purported to have been announced by postmodernism.

It is true that an anti-humanist inclination is present in the writings of some postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, but the ultimate ethos of postmodern philosophy seems to be neither nihilistic nor relativistic. Instead, postmodern philosophy tries to suggest new liberation and resistance strategies by insisting on a continual meta-critical alertness in its assessment of assumptions and attitudes that have been formed within the horizon of modernity. For example, postmodern thinkers engage in such key critical processes as the deconstruction of the power relations that govern cultural practices and discourses of subjectivity. Such a meta-critical awareness emerged among influential nineteenth-century philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who identified the nihilist tendencies and destructive elements within the project of modernity itself. It is not unrealistic to suggest that Eurocentric definitions of human rationality, and the subsequent rise of nationalistic ideologies and colonialisms, are linked with the central universalist ideas of modernity.

This broad philosophical debate between modernism and postmodernism is reflected within methodological discussions in the social sciences. I was drawn 28

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introduction

to these debates, as the empirical design for exploring the nature of identity or religiosity required clarity about these theoretical and methodological concepts.

I have realised that the key theoretical models within the developmental psychology and psychology of religion are formed around the philosophical ideas of modernity. For example, the structural theories of human development that are also widely applied to understanding faith and moral development reflect the linguistic theory of structuralism that predicts universal, invariant stages of human development. I quickly realised that not only is there scarce empirical evidence corroborating this claim, but also that it received serious criticism from thinkers in post-structuralism. Largely due to my encounter with phenomenology, I managed to become more sceptical of the uncritical adoption of modernist ideas in the social sciences. As educational research ultimately aims to improve aspects of educational practice, then it should be progressive and critical, thereby reflecting elements of the modernist project. Critical Theory, for example, illustrates one such reformed approach to modernity. However, I began to ground my inquiry within the broad methodology of phenomenology that accommodated descriptive and critical aspects of social scientific inquiry.

This was in part because phenomenological inquiry enables the researcher to integrate the conventional qualitative and quantitative paradigms of social science research.

This study uses the phenomenological perspective in social and educational research as its meta-theoretical framework. This perspective has taught me the value of being aware of the inalienable subjective presence when constructing the gaze of investigation. Strictly speaking, phenomenology is a comprehensive strategy for methodical thinking that enables us to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Phenomenology reminds us that human understanding is always realized from a particular standpoint, even though it is interpersonal in nature. The specialness of this standpoint, or singularity, is not overshadowed by the presence of the constant multiplicity of elements that make up its overall character. Life stories are told and improvised from an irreducible angle of a particular singularity.

Thus, phenomenological investigation consists of a thorough description of researched phenomena as they are revealed to us through several structured observational strategies. Researching psychosocial phenomena is ultimately an intersubjective experience. However, it is always told from a particular singularity that signifies whom the researcher is, where he or she comes from, and for whom this particular story is told.

One of the reasons that I have tried to interpret the overall research process from a phenomenological perspective is due to its emphasis on making 29

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new directions in islamic education

the researcher aware of his or her singularity and, at the same time, inspiring the researcher to understand sympathetically the particular lived reality of the study participants. I know that this sounds rather strange, as the popular understanding of phenomenology asserts that phenomenological analysis is mainly about grasping or describing ahistorical essences in human consciousness and thus requires the adoption of hermeneutical strategies. I will come back to this important point in Chapter Two. At this stage, it is enough to say that the idea of grasping essences in the consciousness of participants is not meant to reduce dynamic human subjectivity into ahistorical structures but to argue that, despite the interpersonal and contextual character of human experience, we can intersubjectively access a reliable knowledge about ourselves and others.

Thus, description and critical awareness characterise the nature of a phenomenological inquiry suitable to investigating the formation and re-inscription of an Islamic sense of belonging and a religious identity that is already informed by an undeniable cultural multiplicity.

Muslims who adopt a critical attitude think that the real cause of stagnation and crisis in the Muslim psyche should be sought in a long-overdue, internal self-examination. Moreover, the core of the problem is the inability to take seriously the process of socio-cultural and historical changes that define the very fabric of human existence. As a result, instead of developing internal strategies for engaging with the process of change and offering meaningful Islamic responses to the challenges of modern life, Muslims have become preoccupied with the unrealistic task of trying to replicate certain historical constructions of Islam without giving any consideration to the radically different conditions of contemporary life. It is my belief that exploring the religious subjectivity of the Muslim community (perception and interpretation of Islam by Muslims) is of central importance in grasping the complexity informing the socio-cultural crisis facing the contemporary worldwide Muslim society, or ummah. I am convinced that the emergence of effective Muslim responses to these challenges and the presence of contemporary, mature Islamic self-understandings depend on appropriating the critical, dialogical and transformative educational vision articulated within the core Muslim sources: the Qur’an and Sunnah. This study offers a model of reconnecting with this prophetic educational vision in the hope that it will guide contemporary Muslim educational practice.

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