Edition 2

In this edition Education

From Unexpected Places ... Ethics and Evolution of Divine Law . Wisdom Beyond All Words The Unusual Concept of Education in the Quran .. p.2 p.2 p.3 p.4

Hail to the customer! : The Pedagogical Leviathan and Teaching Arabic in the US ... p.5

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From Unexpected Places by Stephanie Roy Editorial Thinking of this months theme, I considered students returning to school and parents struggling to get them there. This is my first year outside of formal education systems, yet I have learned the most within this last year than any classroom have taught me. Thinking of this, I contemplate the sources of education, learning, and knowledge. While Muslims have been in the news recently for all kinds of bad reasons. No matter where you stand in the debate, it is amazing to see Muslims worldwide speaking out against violence, preaching patience, love and tolerance. Muslims have taken back the twitter hashtag #MuslimRage to show their sense of humour or bring forward bigger issues. The Muslim community world-wide along with our friends and supporters of other inclinations must learn from these events and make sure our voices louder than those of hate and intolerance. We are from a religion of peace, a peace which must be shared and taught , spread upon all. Let us all learn from unexpected places, and teach others by example. With God as our guide, we hope to become better and grow from our experiences. Parents, students and learners of the world, may God give us endless supply of knowledge and keep us on a straight path. Ethics and Evolution of the Divine laws By Junaid Jahangir The late Egyptian Professor Nasr Abu Zayd suffered persecution for his views on the Quran. He wrote that the Quran was the outcome of not only dialog and debate but also argument and rejection. He also contended that Muslims should actively pursue this process of rethinking to further develop the ethical dimension of their tradition. Similar ideas of rethinking are found amongst believers who are exploring an expansive theology in the other two Abrahamic faiths Judaism and Christianity. In the Christian Gospel of Matthew we find the incident of a Canaanite woman, who begs Jesus to heal her suffering daughter. Chapter 15, verses 21-28 describes the disciples of Jesus urging him to turn her away. Jesus himself is reported to state that his mission was exclusive to Israel and goes on to liken Canaanite people to dogs. Against all odds, she persists, stating that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters table. Traditional believers claim that Jesus was testing the faith of the Canaanite woman, whose daughter, in verse 28, is eventually healed. However, believers exploring an expansive theology interpret the story differently. According to Reverend Nancy Steeves of the Southminster-Steinhauer United Church in Edmonton, it is the Canaanite woman who teaches Jesus to make room at his table for those racially different from the Israelites. Contrast this sense that Christian mores in the Gospels were developed through interaction between humanity and the divine with the traditional conviction that the Gospels arrived via dictation from God to mankind. In Islam, Chapter 58 of the Quran is called Al-Mujadila The Pleading Woman. It mentions the incident of a Muslim woman Khawla bint Tha'laba pleading with Muhammad about an unjust 7 th century Arabian custom. Khawlas husband divorced her in a fit of rage, which according to custom, absolved him of any conjugal responsibility but did not free her to leave his home or marry another man. According to Muslim Professor Ingrid Mattson, she was disappointed by Muhammad who indicated that she was bound by custom in the absence of any divine ruling on the matter. Traditional believers claim that the incident is about placing ones trust in Allah, who, according to verses 1-4 of Chapter 58, heard Khawlas complaint and decreed against the unjust custom. However, believers exploring an expansive theology would emphasize Professor Abu Zayds observation that Muslim mores were informed through persistent interaction between humanity and the divine. Thus, both the Khawla and the Canaanite woman incidents indicate how Muslim

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and Christian mores were developed through dialog, debate, argument and rejection. In Judaism, the first openly gay Orthodox Rabbi Steven Greenberg delineates the rabbinical text on Daniel the Tailor in his aptly named book Wrestling with God and Men. Daniel interprets the word mamzer in Deuteronomy 23:3 as referring to children born of adulterous parents who cant marry into the Jewish people. According to Rabbi Greenberg, Daniel charges the rabbis with oppression for using the Deuteronomy text to forbid the mamzer, with no fault of their own, from entering the Lords congregation. Traditional believers claim that the text on Daniel is about placing ones faith in God, who, according to the text, would comfort the oppressed in the Hereafter. However, other believers like the Conservative Rabbi Harold Sculweis of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Los Angeles would state that The Torah is no cold slab of stone thrown down from heaven suggesting that Jewish mores are not developed through a dictation from God to mankind. The recurring theme of placing ones trust in God, of remaining patient, of being tested is common amongst traditional circles in the three Abrahamic faiths. However, Professor Abu Zayds perceptions of the Quran developing through dialog, debate, argument and rejection, are perhaps relevant in the context of the Torah and the Gospels as well. If this indeed is true then it would be erroneous to treat the laws of the three Abrahamic faiths as static and fixed. In Judaism, Rabbi Sculweis states that the Jewish law halachah changes with new knowledge and moral sensibilities. In Christianity, the retired Bishop Spong of the Episcopal Church states that he expresses truth for his time, while those who come after him will express truth for their time, thereby adding words to an ongoing story. In Islam, a leading Iranian Professor Abdolkarim Soroush states that Islam is nothing but a series of interpretations of Islam. Religious and sexual minorities continue to deal with issues of racial tensions, of unfair customs and of clergy-based injustice. To borrow the words of Reverend Steeves, the contemporary manifestations of the Canaanite woman, Khawla and Daniel are still shouting and we hear them. And borrowing from Professor Abu Zayd, the challenge that lies ahead for the believers of the three Abrahamic faiths might be to further develop the ethical dimension of their respective traditions.

Wisdom Beyond All Words By Jenece Selma Gerber I looked upon every cross, in every church, yet He was not thereI visited the Kabe but He was not in that tourist site amidst pilgrims young and oldI read the books of Avicenna but His wisdom went beyond all wordsThen I looked within my own heart and there I found HimHe was nowhere else. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (translated by Jonathan Star). Great teachers, of all subjects and from all different traditions, seem to have one thing in common: they reveal to us the evidence of the seeds of mastery within us while simultaneously mirroring back to us our wild, proud and self-absorbed ignorance. They awaken in us the desire to challenge our own ideas and our own selves at every level. They teach us, painfully at times, that the moment we feel satisfied and content in our knowledge is the moment in which we wallow in true ignorance. I suggest that very few teachers can teach you to hear the Truth in your heart. You can be taught the formal prayer and duas. You can be taught to recite Quran or to read and speak Arabic and other

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languages of the Islamic scholarly tradition. You can be taught hadith and learn the scholarship and history behind hadith and Sunnah and the history of Islam. There is no end to what can be learned in this lifetime on this earth. These wonderful spiritual tools, though, are not wisdom and Truth in and of themselves. While you can be taught the prayer, you cannot be taught to pray. A great teacher may unteach you to pray. What I intend to articulate in this statement is that the spiritual journey often ends up being an unlearning of the constructions that we thought were truth. Everything I ever learned was like this: it was a weeding out of ignorance more than it was a supplanting of knowledge. Sufis speak of the melting of the self in spiritual fire. There is a time for reading books, for learning languages and history and traditions: but there is also a time for feeling the breeze. As the great scholar, poet, Dervish and spiritual teacher Rumi wrote, Only the breeze knows the secret of union. Listen as it whispers a song to every heart. You have not been left on this earth without a teacher. Put the books away for a time. See what sticks. Finally, as Rumi wrote, Speak little, learn the words of eternity. Go beyond your tangled thoughts and find the splendor of Paradise. Go beyond your little world and find the grandeur of Gods world. (from The Shepherds Care as translated by Jonathan Star in Rumi: In the Arms of the Beloved. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.)

The Unusual Concept of Education in the Quran by Farouk A. Peru The Quran is meant to provide us with Allahs world-view, as it were. The way God looks at the world and the existence of humanity and its ultimate destiny. Therefore, those who trust the Quran look to it to provide the right idea about essential aspects of human life. Education is clearly a crucial concept as we can see in our societies. Education as it stands in the world is about purveyance of official knowledge. Children go to school to get an education. For those fortunate enough to have degrees, their degrees give them a better chance of finding jobs when they graduate. The system is very well arranged and society functions accordingly. Strangely enough, the Quran does not mention universities (jamia in Arabic) or even religious schools (madrassa). One could argue that this is because the Quran is archaic, having been revealed in ancient times. I personally believe that since the Quran declares itself to be the explanation of everything (The Quran, Ch 12 Vs 111), it would have mentioned everything relevant to human life. After all, it mentions the notion of societies (ummah) but

does not mention the modern nation state (dawlah). I believe this is because the societies is essential to the human condition but not the state. In the case of education, the Quran mentions what is essential for us to know. For example, it mentions words like knowledge (Ilm) and signs (ayat). Ilm appears 854 times in the Quran and Ayat appears 382 times making them both some of the most common terms in the Quran itself. Not only that, ilm is seen to be something vital to understanding revelation both in nature (20:114) and in the Quran itself (41:2-3). Ayat on the other hand seem to be about human beings assigning or achieving meaning to phenomena or events. Ayat are found in the horizons and in our souls (41:53) and these confirm the meaning of the Quran itself, making it a book firmly fixed in the field of existence. Ayat are means for us to have communications with Allah, essentially. And then there is the personality of the people of the core (ulil albab). The etymology of their name is from the word lubb which refers to the deepest part of something. I read it as the core of being itself. This term is used in several places in Quran in a wide

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variety of ways. For example, those who understand the signs in nature and society (3:190-191). The people of the core also refer to those who understand the deepest truths (12:111). The people who understand the firm signs of Allah leading to the creation of His system are also termed people of the core (3:7), as are the people who understand the value of giving due recompense in society (2:179). These are just three very summarily explained aspects of Quranic concepts related to education. From here, I infer that the Quran isnt really about formal education but rather education by going out and exploring the world for oneself. By understanding the information and signs available, we may be able to refer to the Quran itself and achieve a deep knowledge of how it views life. Formal education isnt a bad thing of course, it is still transmission of knowledge after all. However, first hand knowledge is best.

Hail to the customer! : The Pedagogical Leviathan and Teaching Arabic in the US by Dr. Abdelilah Bouasria (Adjunct Professor, American University) One can always recognize a Hobbesian Leviathan on site, but the mask becomes thicker when schools and education are involved. I have always asked myself: Do deans and presidents need to be versed in management sciences or are they rather in desperate need to excel in the art of pedagogy? My experience taught me that there is somehow a dynamic by which the professorial soul in every teacher dies when s/he takes on an executive position. Interestingly enough, the tool with which the new deans claws are honed is pedagogy itself. When a former professor becomes a dean or a president he needs to switch his mind to a completely different- if not antagonistic- logic: Utilitarian Capitalism. Since the latter is a skill that is almost innate, it is hard to develop it in one day and the result is that new executives, clinging on to their new job, try to maximize their utilitarian strategies by what they know best: Pedagogy. What we witness here, without having to use leftist paradigms, is an economization of pedagogy. For example: when a management logic dictates that the paying customer/student should be pleased at all costs, the pedagogical Machiavelli uses all the jargon of the classroom she happens to own in order to tame the teachers into submitting to the logic of the highest bidder. In fact, todays deans- yesterdays teachers-

use the teacher-student relationship to their advantage setting the latter against the former while giving unbridled privilege to students regardless of their in-class performance. The logic of the customer is king becomes the predominant mantra of the new executives, but due to the lack of their previous training in such a logic, they start finding pedagogical faults with teachers in order to please the students-customers. I have derived some lessons from my experience as a professor of Arabic in one of the most prestigious institutes of languages in the country. I refer to the professors who had no life other than second language acquisition and language teaching methods. They were suddenly ushered in a managerial or executive position in a university, as pedagogical tyrants because they worship pedagogy as a goddess-healer of all our classroom ills. I will reflect on this Leviathans behavior with respect to language teaching in light of my own experience of language teaching in both a military and a civilian setting. Teaching Arabic in the United States is not a simple task to be compared with teaching other foreign languages such as French or Spanish. First, it is a language that is harder than French or German for a Westerner starting from the alphabet to syntax and structure. Second, there are not enough programs in the United States that teach Arabic in High schools, which makes the university freshman a virgin Arabic learner. Third, most people on the

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demand side of Arabic want to learn it quickly, parachute style, to work in lucrative fields such as security and counter-terrorism. A hate relationship already sets the tone for the students to interact with this language and by consequence its teacher albeit at the subliminal level. We, as teachers of Arabic, are somehow the enemy or the terrorist that students are being trained to fight. I find myself, as a teacher, compelled to defend myself against crimes that I never committed and tell my students that I happen to be on the list of recommended teachers made by the organization Campus Watch. By saying so, I would have already lost all the left-wing planetsaver students who start seing me not a terrorist, as their counterparts do, but as an agent of imperialism. Dealing with students is part of a teachers ordeal, but when another layer of administrative magnitude is transplanted into the relationship, a bad reaction unfolds. Assuming that all the complaints of the students revolve around pedagogy classroom management is a nave behavior due to the conversion of pedagogical tyrants to cold calculating bureaucrats. Two examples will suffice to illustrate my point. First, I was explaining to a dean, after we were summoned to save our program from complaining students, how there were differences in grades of the mid-term between the high ranked student who was seriously coming to office hours and TA practicum, and the lower student who got the last grade and who missed more than half of the classes. I was told that if the lowest student had a bad grade it would be my fault because somehow I had lost him in my teaching mode. Rather than seeing the student population, a la game theory, as individuals with different motivations and strategies (such as maximizing grade by minimizing work), the dean, now forced to evolve in an economic discourse new to him, points fingers to the teacher. The second example is a classroom of twelve students that I taught. I had a book that I was following but five of these students went complaining about the curriculum and about the fact that they wanted to be challenged more. The dean communicated their grief to me, and I had to split the class and create another class just for these students, a class for which I am not paid. These students wanted to follow Al-Kitaab, a disaster but wellmarketed Arabic book, so we started doing it in that class. Instead of meeting twice a week in our regular class, the split class was just a one-time a week meeting. The fault is not that of the students but of the pedagogical Big Brother who thinks that all means justify the end of satisfying students. The split in my class was not done across pedagogical lines nor was it an answer to an educational particularity. It was merely saying to students: Thank you for your bucks, your wishes are our commands I started thinking of the reputation of my institute as a hub of international students, sadly a rhetoric we cherish only in recruiting times, only to forget by throwing these international students to the reality of our economic crisis once they have cleared all their accounts with Management.

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