Mikdat Yalçın's Views on Religious Education

Abstract

Muslim thinkers, benefiting from the knowledge and experience of previous thinkers, have offered solutions to the problems of the age through education. One of these thinkers was Mikdat Yalçın, whose views on education are the subject of our study. Yalçın, an educator of Turkish origin, spent most of his life in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia since his childhood. He was busy with science from the first period of his life, and he completed almost all stages of his education life in Arab countries. For many years, he worked as an academician in different countries, especially in Saudi Arabia, and trained many students. He was awarded the King Faisal Award, which has an important prestige in the Arab world. His educational views have been the subject of theses and articles, and in time, his works have become a reference in the Arab world in the field of Islamic education. Yalçın who produced many works in the field of Islamic education, employed education and morality as the dominant themes in his works. Especially in his studies on Muslim countries, he compared the education systems of developed and underdeveloped countries and offered solutions to the problems experienced. In this context, Yalçın pointed at the incompatibility in purpose, method, and practice as the biggest problem in the education systems of Muslim societies. Yalçın emphasized the need to raise a faithful and self-sacrificing generation, arguing that educational institutions, administrators, teachers, students, and families, which are the basic elements of education, should play a role in the development of their own country. In most of his works, Yalçın touched on subjects such as ideal society, ideal generation, and ideal family, and made suggestions by giving detailed information about them. Yalçın, while criticizing the educational understanding of Western countries, stated that positive practices should be benefited from. He emphasized the inadequacy of the Western education approach to understand human beings. In this study, subjects such as Mikdat Yalçın's life and works, his views on education, teacher and student characteristics, and educational institutions are discussed. The reason for limiting the study to these subjects is that Yalçın focused on these subjects in most of his books. In the study, firstly, very short information about Yalçın's life is given. Afterwards, general information about his works is presented and the names of Yalçın's books are mentioned. Turkish translations of Arabic book titles are given in parentheses. Under the title of "Education Opinions", in which Yalçın's general views on education are discussed, the characteristics of a qualified and ideal education system, and the general problems in the education systems of Muslim countries are examined. Under the title of "Teacher and Student", the characteristics that a teacher and student should have according to Yalçın are mentioned. Yalçın examined these features in detail in his books. However, it was deemed appropriate to give it as a summary in this study. Under the title of "Educational Institutions", where Mikdat Yalçın's views on educational institutions are discussed, issues such as the importance of educational institutions in raising the ideal generation, their basic elements, and characteristics are examined. Under the title of "Family and Education", the importance of the family according to Yalçın, its basic duties and characteristics were included, and a general evaluation was made. In the study, many of Mikdat Yalçın's books were examined, and the ones directly related to the subject were consulted. Turkish translations of some of these books, most of which are originally written in Arabic, were also provided, and both the Arabic originals and the translated books into Turkish were used as the primary source in the study. These books were examined by content analysis techniques within the scope of the document analysis method. In the modern era, there has been no study in Turkey about Mikdat Yalçın, who is known in the field of Islamic education, especially in the Arab world, and his views on education. In this sense, it is thought that the study will contribute to the literature.

Keywords

• religious education
• mikdat yalçın
• education
• student
• teacher