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4. Creative Engagement
Another imperative is to realize that we need more than a coterie of professionals and academics in a narrow range of specializations—i.e., law, management, finance, medicine, computers, academe—the ones that traditionally confer status or high salaries and which seem especially attractive to young Muslims keen to advance their careers. There is a pressing need for people who can engage in an open and creative way with the greater “community of communities.” We need visionary thinkers at the cutting edge of discourses which address problems and solutions of universal significance for all communities, who can shake off the yoke of academic jargon to make their ideas accessible, and who can reformulate traditional ideas in fresh, modern language; we need more teachers, writers, presenters. We need environmentalists, people concerned about the planet, not just their own back yards. We need creative artists in every discipline, people who can reclaim beauty for Islam, and express the beauty of Islam for all mankind.
If we dislike hostility to Islam in the media, then we should be working as journalists, writers, and commentators to present the best face of Islam to a public hungry for enlightenment; we need more Muslim voices who can match the quality of comment coming from many non-Muslims, or from people who have no faith at all, but may nevertheless have a profound sense of natural justice.
If we dislike the misuse of creativity in the West, as for example in the entertainment and advertising industries and in contemporary art, then we should be mastering these media so that we can produce more uplifting material to nourish the human soul. We need to foster the creative spirit in every possible way, not only in obviously creative subjects like music, drama, and art, but in every subject and in every activity.
It would be a great pity if Muslim schools, in their desire for recognition and their anxiety to be seen to subscribe to the performance culture of “success,” simply reproduce the innate flaws in the worst of the secular education system. The best schools have never succumbed to these flaws in the first place. They include the majority of independent schools which have been exempt from the statutory Key Stage testing regime and which have been able to pick and choose from the unremitting welter of government initiatives and resist the tide of bureaucracy which has engulfed and demoralized teachers. Muslim schools should not be seduced by the government conception of “excellence” which often has little to do with the conception of excellence (ihsan) as understood in the Islamic tradition.
The danger is that faith schools, including Muslim schools, will succumb to purely pragmatic and utilitarian aims in the service of national “development,” rather than base the education they offer on an integrated, Islamic vision of education, in which horizontal and vertical dimensions intersect, and in which the whole curriculum reflects an understanding of the true nature of the human being and the full extent of human capacities and faculties. We already see Islamic institutions of higher education which are overemphasizing the applied sciences over the social sciences and humanities (e.g. the call for the 60:40 ratio for natural and applied sciences to social science and humanities in Malaysian universities, as well as the establishment of specialized technology universities). Such imbalance puts national economic development goals over individual human development, and regards the educational process as a factory for producing human “products” and “resources” to drive up the pace of economic growth and national “success.”
Nature
“The book of Nature, my dear Henry, is full of holy lessons, ever new and varied; and to learn these lessons should be the work of good education.” — Mary Martha Sherwood, 1775-1851
In the present climate of distancing from nature, fear of even the slightest physical risk and declining powers of observation of the real three-dimensional world (as opposed to the increasing dominance of screens and monitors mediating and impoverishing our experience), we must nourish by every possible means the connection of our young people to the beauty of the natural world and the rich multi-sensory world of experience it opens to them.
A BBC Radio 4 program aired on December 2, 2001, described a project developed by a farmer to give children a taste of country life by actively involving them in work experience on his farm. At that time he had given over a thousand children this opportunity. He said that children love the contact with the land and the animals, and above all they thrive in an environment in which they feel useful and where there is communal effort in which everyone’s contribution is valued. He said he was saddened by how “spiritually impoverished” was the life of so many young people in Britain today, and he equated this spiritual impoverishment with their alienation from the natural world.
The importance of such projects cannot be over-emphasized. They are truly motivating to young people, who are hungry to be involved in real-world activities and have an innate love of animals. At a time when mass entertainment dazzles and mesmerizes us with computer animations of predatory prehistoric monsters and a sensationalized view of natural phenomena which paints a distorted picture of nature as threatening and dangerous, it is vital that children capture a balanced, healing, and beneficent vision of the natural world.
This must be an integral part of the best Islamic education, since faith itself is verified and strengthened by our observation of the displayed book of nature, with all its signs of beauty and majesty.
Next Week: Memory and Memorization
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