1.1
- Excellence
in Islamic Education
1.2
- Defining Islamic Education
The
best Islamic education must encompass the two traditional categories of
knowledge, and the hierarchical relationship between them: revealed knowledge,
attained through the religious sciences; and acquired knowledge, attained
through the rational, intellectual, and philosophical sciences. In the
worldview of tawheed (divine unity), knowledge is holistic and there is
no compartmentalization of knowledge into religious and secular spheres. Both
types of knowledge contribute to the strengthening of faith, the former
through a careful study of the revealed word of God and the latter through a
meticulous, systematic study of the world of man and nature.
The
perfection of the Islamic revelation embraces all the diverse aspects of the
life of man and roots all of them in the Unity and Comprehensiveness of God.
As Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains
Islamic
education is concerned not only with the instruction and training of the
mind and the transmission of knowledge (ta`lim) but also with the
education of the whole being of men and women (tarbiyah). The teacher
is therefore not only a mu`alim, a ‘transmitter of knowledge’ but
also a murabbi, a ‘trainer of souls and personalities’. The
Islamic educational system never divorced the training of the mind from that
of the soul.
Islamic
education ideally aims to provide a milieu for the total and balanced
development of every student in every sphere of learning—spiritual, moral,
imaginative, intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, emotional, and
physical—directing all these aspects towards the attainment of a conscious
relationship with God, the ultimate purpose of man’s life on earth.
Syed
Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas prefers to regard Islamic education as ta’dib,
a word related to adab. He defines this term in its true sense (before
its restriction and debasement of meaning to “a context revolving around
cultural refinement and social etiquette”) as “discipline of body, mind
and soul” which enables man to recognize and acknowledge “his proper place
in the human order” in relation to his self, his family, and his community.
This order is “arranged hierarchically in degrees (darajat) of
excellence based on Qur’anic criteria of intelligence, knowledge, and virtue
(ihsan).” In this sense, adab is “the reflection of wisdom (hikmah)”
and “the spectacle (mashhad) of justice (`adl).”
Within
the dual nature of man’s own self, the adab of his lower animal soul
(an-nafs al-hayawaniyyah) is to recognize and acknowledge its
subordinate position in relation to his higher rational soul (an-nafs
an-natiqah). In relation to God, mankind has made a covenant (mithaq)
and recognized and acknowledged God as his Lord (Ar-Rabb). His adab in
relation to his Lord is to recognize and acknowledge that lordship and to
behave in such a way as to be worthy of approaching nearer to Him. He is
motivated by taqwa (consciousness and awe of God) and ihsan,
defined by the Prophet as “… to adore God as though you see Him, and if
you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you.” This spiritual dimension of adab
is an “Islamization” of the original meaning, “an invitation to a
banquet,” where the host would be a man of distinction and standing and the
guests would be worthy of the honor of invitation by virtue of their refined
character and upbringing, expressed in their speech, conduct, and manners.
Al-Attas
claims that ta’dib is a super ordinate concept encompassing not only,
“instruction” (ta`lim) and the idea of “nurturing,”
“rearing,” “nourishing,” or “fostering” (tarbiyah)—i.e.,
the two elements identified by Nasr above—but also “knowledge” (`ilm).
Al-Attas maintains that the coining of the word tarbiyah (which is
actually not found in any of the great Arabic lexicons) reflected the Western
concept of “education,” which is derived from Latin educare
(educate) and connected to educere (English “educe,” “draw out or
develop from a latent or potential state”). Such education, in Al-Attas’s
view, is “intellectual and moral training geared to physical and material
ends pertaining to secular man in his society and state” and cannot
therefore describe Islamic education.
The
semantic field of tarbiyah also includes minerals, plants, and animals
(animal husbandry, for example, could be a form of tarbiyah); whereas
education in an Islamic sense can only apply to man, who alone of all species
is endowed with ‘aql. Al-Attas also points out that the concept of
“possession” is implied by tarbiyah in the sense that parents
exercise tarbiyah on their offspring and in the sense of “borrowed
possession” in the term rabba applied to men. Only God is Ar-Rabb,
Lord, and, as the Prophet said, “My Lord educated (addaba) me, and so
made my education most excellent.”
Although
Al-Attas claims that tarbiyah is subsumed under the over-arching
concept of ta’dib, it seems to me important not to marginalize tarbiyah
as a fundamental principle of Islamic education. Where Al-Attas sees Western
contamination in its convergence with the Latin sense of educere
(“drawing out or developing from a latent or potential state”), this sense
is central to the spiritual dimension of the concept of education developed by
the Book Foundation and is elaborated in section 15, “The Spiritual
Life”).
There
is also an inherent contradiction in including tarbiyah within the
greater explanatory power of ta’dib and yet, at the same time,
regarding it as a defective concept “tinged with modernism.” Defining
Islamic education so strictly in terms of ta’dib and its imperative
to “know one’s proper place” in the hierarchical order could lead to an
under-valuation of two vital aspects of education which are enshrined in the
concept of tarbiyah: its “nurturing” function and its role in
“drawing out” latent potential.
In
a recent paper on the application of religious models to educational
administration, Aref Atari has shown how the implementation of both the
Christian model of “Service-Stewardship” and the Islamic “Khalifah”
model “entails a radical transformation in management, thought and
practice” away from a hierarchically organized bureaucratic Western model to
a what he calls a “caring and sharing spirit.” In this climate, trust,
love, sympathy, mercy, cooperation, tolerance, and altruism are at least as
important as efficiency, effectiveness, competition, professional ambition,
and achievement. The outcome is an organization which is both “virtue-based
and excellence-oriented.” Shurah-based management, empowering and
working with others, replaces a top-down approach which manipulates, controls,
and works through others.
Al-Attas
himself points out that the “qualitative emphasis of tarbiyah is
mercy (rahmah) rather than knowledge (`ilm), whereas the
emphasis of ta’dib is knowledge, rather than mercy. We prefer to
affect a balance between knowledge and mercy, so that neither is emphasized
over the other, for just as mercy without knowledge can foster weakness,
delusion, ineffectiveness and foolishness, so knowledge without mercy can lead
to egotism, self-aggrandizement, arrogance, intolerance and
high-handedness.”
*
Republished with the kind permission of the author from Excellence
in Islamic Education: Key Issues for the Present Times.
**
Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, a curriculum development specialist, is the coordinator
of the Curriculum Project, formerly director of studies at a leading
independent school in England. He holds degrees in English and applied
linguistics, and a PhD in the psychology of learning. He has served as an
executive committee member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (UK)
and the Chairman of the Board of FAIR, the UK Forum Against Islamophobia and
Racism.
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Week – The Holistic Approach
