From Islamization of Knowledge to Islamization of Education

Abstract

Any Muslim intellectual who has a serious concern for the relatively deteriorating condition of the Muslim Ummah with respect to the Western World would be depressed and confused. However, the recent history of the Muslim World shows how many determined reformist movements played a positive role in changing the Muslim condition. But these movements met with partial or limited success. It was in the late seventeenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, an ascendant Europe undermined and overran much of the Uthmani Duwlah (Ottoman Empire) and finally put an end to it, much to the shock and dismay of the Muslim World. The powerful European challenge and this drastic event elicited two contrasting responses from the Muslim elite and the masses. While many of them resorted to superficial imitation and initiated capricious copycat reform movements, some harnessed the rising awareness and the attendant spirit of resistance to launch more genuine efforts and reform movements. Understandably, these efforts were conflicting, emotional, and limited in their scope but they eventually helped Muslim societies to gain political independence in the post-World War II era. At the heart of these reforms and political liberation was the Muslim peoples’ desire to realize their Islamic, national, and cultural aspirations along with the hope of enjoying a standard of living comparable to that of the West. Unfortunately, these hopes were not achieved and the cultural reforms continued to be emotional, arbitrary, and patchwork (talfiq). The condition of the Muslim people continued to deteriorate and the gap between the Western world and the Muslim world continued to widen. The former continued to dominate and exploit that latter. All this proved that arbitrary, emotional, superficial, and limited patchwork reforms would not have a serious impact on the conditions of the Muslim people and will fail to realize their national or Islamic aspirations ...