Excellence in Islamic Education: Key Issues for the

Present Time
by Jeremy Henzell-Thomas

By Jeremy Henzell-Thomas
The Book Foundation

Not for publication or reproduction either in whole or in part in its present form, except
with the permission of the author.

The ideas in this paper constitute an elaboration of some of the founding principles of the
Book Foundation Education Project and will be systematically applied in the forthcoming
Book Foundation programs.

1. Islamic Education: Educating the Whole Person

What we are witnessing in the state education system in Britain, and no doubt also in
other state education systems in the Western world and in other countries which mimic
them, is the progressive destruction of the concept and practice of a holistic system of
education - that is, a broad and balanced system of education based on an understanding
of the full potential of the human being and a system of pedagogy designed to awaken
and develop that potential.

This has been a gradual process of attrition, constriction and ultimate strangulation,
culminating in a sterile, standardised, bureaucratic system which stifles creativity and
demoralises students and teachers alike. We see the triumph of quantification, league
tables, and the proliferation of an oppressive and soulless target-driven regime derived
from alien corporate models and control-obsessed managerialism. We see unremitting
assessment of uninspiring objectives and dangerously narrow prescriptive content.

What is behind this is an agenda geared almost exclusively to a utilitarian concept of

education, a reduction of truly holistic education to a narrow band of skills for the
workplace. This a concept of education geared to economic performance, competition and
efficiency above all else. The British Department for Education and Employment (DfEE)
White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success gives the game away in the first paragraph of
the Introduction: "The success of our children at school is crucial to the economic health
and social cohesion of the country, as well as to their own life chances and personal
fulfilment" (my italics). Notice the priorities which are placed first in this sentence.

It was the promise of "Education, Education, Education" as the "number one" priority
which was one of the main reasons why the New Labour Party of Tony Blair was elected to
government in the UK in 1997. Now, five years on, and with New Labour re-elected to a
second term, Tony Blair has reiterated his commitment to education. But what kind of
education? In an exclusive interview reported in the Times Educational Supplement of 5
July 2002, Blair states that "Education is and remains the absolute number one priority for
the country because without a quality education system and an educated workforce, we
cannot succeed economically" (my italics). The real priority is clear, and it is the same one
(economic power) as that which governs educational policy in the White Paper.
In his publisher's note to New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto's
challenging book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling,
David H. Albert refers to the words of the social philosopher Hannah Arendt that "The aim
of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to
form any".

Gatto's indictment of the assumptions and structures which underlie modern state
schooling in the USA exposes the same deadening utilitarian agenda which informs British
educational policy, an agenda geared to turning children into cogs in an economic
machine, children who are dependent, conforming, materialistic, and lacking in curiosity,
imagination, self-knowledge and powers of reflection. This is the modern equivalent of the
worst of Victorian education geared to the production of a regimented, empire-serving
army of uncritical ledger clerks and petty officials.

Supporting the utilitarian agenda in the UK, and also fuelled by pressure to do well in
league tables of performance, is a debilitating testing regime perhaps even more
excessive than the national obsession with standardised testing in the USA. A national UK
newspaper, reporting recent research by Cambridge University for the National Union of
Teachers, refers to a testing "insanity" which is gripping primary schools in the UK. Almost
half the weekly timetable is now taken up by mathematics and English lessons and
thousands of children as young as seven are being tested every week on their reading.
The disproportionate emphasis on the teaching and perpetual testing of a narrow band of
literacy and numeracy skills, which are deemed to be essential for economic survival, is
taking the heart and soul out of education.

The researchers conclude that "the amount of time for teaching each day does not allow
for a broad and balanced curriculum", and creative subjects such as art, drama and music
are being increasingly squeezed out of the classroom. In response to the report, John
Bangs, Head of Education of the National Union of Teachers, said: "What is shocking
about the report is the extent to which arts have been eliminated from primary schools.
Tests and targets are wiping out pupil and teacher creativity." In some schools, art is now
dropped from the curriculum in the last year of primary school (at age 10-11).

History at A-level (university entrance standard in the UK) is now regarded as such a
narrow, limited and impoverished historical education that Cambridge University no longer
requires undergraduate historians to have it. The head of history at Latymer School in
North London described the A-Level course as "history for the MTV generation - know a
little but keep on repeating it".

A joint Royal Society and Joint Mathematical Council working group reported in July 2000
that the teaching of mathematics was increasingly being reduced to nothing but numbers,
and that the death of geometry, the study of shape and space, in mathematics education
could only be to the detriment of visual and spatial intelligence. It takes little insight to
see in this entirely quantitative approach a verification of René Guénon's vision of the
"Reign of Quantity" as indicative of the profound crisis in contemporary life and thought.

A Geographical Association survey has found that "geography has been dropped as a
subject specialism by more than one quarter of initial teacher-training institutions".
Humanities simply do not have the status of core subjects such as English, mathematics
and science, so "young teachers who want promotion will probably focus on core
subjects".

As if the marginalisation and impoverishment of the arts and humanities and the death of
geometry were not enough, a survey by the Association of Language Learning suggests
that more than 1,000 schools in the UK are planning to drop foreign language lessons for
pupils over 14. In February 2002, the German, Italian and Spanish ambassadors had
spoken out in an interview with The Independent about the "sad" standard of language
teaching in the UK.

In the recent flurry of debate about the pros and cons of faith schools, Faisal Bodi has
argued a strong case for Muslim schools, but I have to question the emphasis in his
contention that two well-funded Muslim schools in London have turned out to be "factories
for university graduates and professionals".

This is of course meant to be a compliment to those schools, which are indeed models in
many ways. Now, no one would deny that there is a pressing need for Muslim graduates
and professionals, and those who have attained to this status deserve congratulation, but
I have spent most of my working life combating the idea that schools should be "factories"
geared only to examination results. We need graduates and professionals who are not
only successful in their specialized fields and able to advance their own careers, but also
creative, well-educated and well-rounded in the broadest sense, with concomitant
cultural, moral, emotional, and spiritual development.

In the face of an impoverished curriculum and its associated regime of perpetual testing,
it is hardly surprising that "growing numbers of young teachers are quitting the profession
because they think schools are becoming results factories, where heads insist targets are
met regardless of the human cost".

We need to be very clear that, as a recent MORI poll has reported, the main reasons
given for parents supporting faith schools in the UK are: a desire for their children to be
educated in the same values and beliefs as their family (35%); good discipline (28%);
and religious ethos (27%). Only 10% cited good exam results. Interestingly, and
surprisingly, this partly reflects the reasons cited by parents for sending their children to
independent schools (reasons strong enough to motivate many of them to make huge
personal sacrifices to pay high fees). In a survey carried out by IAPS (Incorporated
Association of Preparatory Schools in the UK) discipline is given as the foremost reason,
but other important reasons include small classes and a broad and balanced curriculum,
including the survival of those humanities subjects under threat in the state system,
resources and facilities for sports, a wide choice of extra-curricular activities, and
opportunities for cultural development, including music and art.

You would think that highly motivated and successful parents would place examination
results as a top priority, but they do not. In the case of independent schools in the UK, it
may be that they take high academic standards for granted. The gap in academic
standards between independent schools and state schools is very wide: in those
independent schools which take the government tests at age 11, for example, over 95%
of children reach the required level in English, mathematics and science, whereas in state
schools it is barely 70%. My own experience at a leading independent school in England
confirms that their 13 year-olds were generally two or three years ahead of children of
equivalent age in the average state school).

It is also vital to note the differences between reasons given by parents for sending their
children to faith schools or independent schools. While both groups give discipline as a
key factor, the faith school parents emphasise family values and beliefs and religious
ethos and identity, whereas the independent school parents emphasise breadth of
education, including sport, extra-curricular activities, cultural expression, and humanities.
The best Islamic education will ensure that this breadth of education is added to their
ethical and spiritual appeal. Interestingly, a recent report showed that young people who
have creative hobbies (e.g. playing a musical instrument, collecting things, model making
etc.) are happier than those who do not; they suffer from less depression and engage in
less crime than those who can only occupy themselves by watching television, playing
computer games, or "hanging around" outside with their friends, so there is a clear
connection between extra-curricular fulfilment and the maintenance of ethical values and
happy families.

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 tawhid (Divine Unity), knowledge is holistic
and there is no compartmentalisation 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 muallim, 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 recognise 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 (al-nafs al-
hayawaniyyah) is to recognise and acknowledge its subordinate position in relation to his
higher rational soul (al-nafs al-natiqah). In relation to God, mankind has made a covenant
(mithaq) and recognised and acknowledged God as his Lord (al-Rabb). His adab in
relation to his Lord is to recognise 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 "Islamisation" 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 honour 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 superordinate concept encompassing not only, 'instruction'
(ta`lim) and the idea of 'nurturing', 'rearing', 'nourishing' or 'fostering' (tarbiyah) - i.e. the
two elements idenitified 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/education 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 al-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 below ("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 organised 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 organisation 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 effect a balance between knowledge and mercy, so that neither is
emphasised 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-aggrandisement, arrogance, intolerance and high-handedness.

A holistic curriculum also aims to reconcile conventional and stereotyped oppositions such
as art and science; creativity and rigour; analytic and synthetic styles of learning; logic
and intuition; memorisation and comprehension; collaboration and competition; goal-
directed learning and exploratory, discovery or investigative learning; innovation and
tradition; teaching methods which facilitate learning and those which direct learning; and
so on.

Guided by the need for balance, moderation, and harmony, and the existence of
complementary pairs of opposites as the underlying fabric of everything in the created
universe, it seeks to avoid a vested interest in any one-sided model, paradigm, position
conceptual "package", or ephemeral fashion in educational philosophy or methodology.
Education is too important a field to be left to the adversarial politics of competing model-
builders, for all such models are limited and conditioned human constructions. An Islamic
education system must be deeply rooted in a metaphysics derived from the
comprehensive and unifying vision of the Qur'an.

It is therefore important to ensure that the sphere of religious studies is not

compartmentalised and cut off from knowledge in the humanities and in the natural and
social sciences, which are necessary for it to be a meaningful guide in contemporary life.
It is also vital that a false and misleading dichotomy is not set up between a type of
education which prepares students for "the life of this world" and that which prepares
students for the "Hereafter". This is a recipe for a deeply divided mentality and a troubled
soul. Concentration on religious studies alone leads to an imbalance and an unintegrated
educational system which does not give man the knowledge and skills necessary for
engaging in meaningful activities in this life, which, after all, must determine his station in
the Hereafter.

Furthermore, there is an underlying unity between all branches of education and all the
human faculties and activities involved in learning, and this unity needs to be reflected in
an integrated, holistic and multi-disciplinary curriculum which does not draw rigid artificial
lines between different subjects and disciplines. In practice, much of modern education is
still based on a machine-age model of separate subject areas which encourage a
fragmented view of learning. In the absence of a comprehensive and unifying spiritual
perspective, it is inevitable that little more than lip-service is paid to the desirability of
cross-curricular themes and links.

Nevertheless, al-Attas has stated that, in effect, secular Western education systems, with
their core curriculum, are more well rounded than Islamic curricula, because they have
the goal of producing an educated man or woman who is able to think and write
effectively; to have a critical appreciation of the ways in which one gains knowledge and
understands the universe, society and himself; to be informed of other cultures and other
times; to have some understanding and experience concerning ethical and moral
problems; and to have attained some depth in a particular field of knowledge.

Another imperative is to realise that we need more than a coterie of professionals and
academics in a narrow range of specialisations - 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 demoralised 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".

2. 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 programme aired on 2 December 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-emphasised. 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 mesmerises 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.

3. Memory and Memorisation

We live in an age where loud-mouthed and vacuous opinions based on no real knowledge
are increasingly shouting down the meaningful thoughts of people who actually know
something and have something of substance to say. One of the reasons for this is that
memory is no longer valued in our secular culture, so people are not taught to
substantiate their opinions by reference to the knowledge they might have stored in
memory. Instead, people have electronic access to oceans of data which they rarely know
how to turn even into useful information through selection of what is relevant, let alone
turn it into knowledge or wisdom.

Real education must foster a level of debate and discussion which draws on knowledge
and experience, which encourages students to substantiate what they are saying, and
which challenges merely vacuous opinions. If one has something stored in memory then
there is something there for the mind to process, a framework for new knowledge.
Memorisation makes complex material accessible to the brain for subsequent processing
and lifelong reflection and therefore provides a potent "database" for cognitive
development.

Muslim schools have traditionally kept alive the faculty of human memory, especially
through memorisation of sacred text. But we need to be clear about the differences
between memory and memorisation. Research shows clearly that the most effective
memory is memory for meaning. What is understood most deeply leaves the most
prominent and resilient memory traces. Deep comprehension of text, for example, is
based on an understanding of the deep structure of the text (its underlying semantic
propositions and pragmatic intentions, and the inferences we derive from them), not
simply from the surface arrangement of the words. Verbatim memorisation of the text
cannot help us to understand it, but processing the text in some other form can (e.g.
taking notes, discussing it, making a diagram out of it).

Schools need to reclaim memorisation in those areas where it enhances learning. I have
seen shy pupils and pupils with learning difficulties transformed by reciting poetry by
heart or singing songs learnt by heart in chorus in musical productions - activities which
not only foster expressive skills but also enhance the self-esteem and self-confidence with
comes from a tangible achievement attained through effort and practice. In fact, all
children, from those with learning difficulties to the bright and gifted, benefit from
learning songs and research shows there is a transferable benefit to better mathematics
and language learning.

As an amateur musician, I know that the memorisation of music for performance has
distinct transferable cognitive benefits in many areas. This personal experience confirms
the well-attested research which has found that learning to play a musical instrument can
dramatically enhance human intelligence, probably because of the patterning activity
stimulated in the brain. The mental mechanisms which process music are deeply entwined
with brain functions such as spatial relations, memory and language. Spatial intelligence is
crucial for engineering, computational abilities and technical design. Learning poetry also
has transferable benefits, because all kinds of verbatim memorisation of complex material
are using a variety of patterns and cues - not just the word order, but also the prosodic,
metrical and rhyming patterns, and various poetic devices. Some of these, after all, are
what facilitate the learning of the Qur'an.

There is an excellent section on the value of memorisation in Jean Houston's Jump Time,
which shows clearly how the genius of Shakespeare was grounded in the memorisation
culture of Elizabethan England. Imitation, too, was another formative practice in that era.
"One studies a great piece of writing by one of the acknowledged giants of the past,
enters into a process of internalisation - an alchemising through one's own life and
experience - and then creates a poem of other work that is unique to the writer yet has
similarities to the original. This practice enriches one's ways of thinking, depends one's
ability to allude to other forms, thickens the soup of one's mind…." The best schools will
use imitation of great models this way, and not only in literature, but also in art and
music. It is important to realise that this is not unthinking imitation, mere reproduction or
mechanical copying. It is using a model to catalyse a creative process which draws on a
variety of sources, both external and internal.

We need to ensure that memorisation, imitation, dictation, and factual "right-answer"

recall in answer to closed questions, are not over-extended as learning strategies to areas
where they cannot promote comprehension. Many people now have an image of madrasa
education in Pakistan as a process of sheer rote-learning, repetition and memorisation
divorced from understanding. Muslim schools, like all schools, need to show that they
have developed a methodology of teaching and learning in all subject areas (including
religious education) which sees education as an active learning process which promotes
deep comprehension through critical and creative thinking skills, discussion, collaborative
learning, dialectic, research, questioning, recourse to personal experience, reflection, and
contemplation.

4. Seeking Knowledge, Thinking and Active Learning

"Lord, increase me in knowledge." (Qur'an 20:114).

"It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray all night." (The Prophet
Muhammad).

"All men by nature desire knowledge." (Aristotle)

A blunt new report by Arab intellectuals commissioned by the United Nations warns that
Arab societies are being crippled not only by lack of political freedom and the repression
of women but also by intellectual stagnation and the stifling of creativity arising from
isolation from the world of ideas. The survey, the Arab Human Development Report 2002,
was released on 2 July 2002 in Cairo. A telling statistic, according to the report, is that
"the whole Arab world translates about 300 books annually, one-fifth the number that
Greece translates". In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, it concludes,
the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in one year.

A vision of a truly Islamic education sees the best schools as "thinking schools" and
"active learning environments" which uphold the sacred trust to seek and acquire
knowledge, and that through the quality of their education they dispense with the false
idea that "faith" is somehow in opposition to "reason", and that the knowledge attained
through divine revelation is somehow in opposition to acquired human knowledge.

The Prophet said: "God has not created anything better than Reason, or anything more
perfect, or more beautiful than Reason; the benefits which God gives are on its account;
and understanding is by it, and God's wrath is caused by disregard of it".

It is also related that a group of people once commended a certain man in the presence of
the Prophet, praising him excessively. Thereupon the Prophet said: "What kind of intellect
does he have?" But they replied, saying: "We tell you about his diligence in prayer and
about the various good works he does, and you ask about his intellect? The Prophet
answered and said: "The fool does more harm through his ignorance than do the wicked
through their wickedness."

Of course, we must not restrict the pedagogy of thinking and learning only to the skills of
logic and reasoning. These skills are, of course, fundamental and especially important in
educational environments which have over-extended the pedagogy of imitation, repetition
and verbatim memorisation, but we need to extend them beyond the conventional,
'convergent' thinking skills which have been over-emphasized in our Western machine-
age education model. Einstein said that "we can't solve problems by using the same kind
of thinking we used when we created them" and, according to J. K. Galbraith, "The
conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking". Ultimately, we
must extend thinking to encompass the more comprehensive view of the human intellect
embodied in the Islamic concept of 'aql, which has a moral and spiritual dimension as well
as a narrowly cognitive one.

'Aql is a faculty which is hard to translate into English. Its Arabic root has the sense of
'binding' and 'withholding', i.e. the faculty of judgment, discrimination and clarification
and the intellectual power of speech (nutq) which enables man, the "language animal", to
articulate words in meaningful patterns. To Adam was imparted the Names (Qur'an 2:31),
and in one sense this knowledge confers on man the faculty of logical definition and the
making of distinctions which underlies abstract, conceptual thought. But 'aql implies more
than a strictly logical ability. It is a combination of reason and intellect, and in its highest
sense, as Titus Burckhardt explains, it is "the universal principle of all intelligence, a
principle which transcends the limiting conditions of the mind". It is therefore closely
related to the Heart (qalb), the organ of spiritual cognition.

There is some convergence here with the notion of nous (intellect) in Orthodox
Christianity (Hesychasm), which defines intellect as the highest faculty in man, through
which, if purified, he knows God or the inner essence or principles (logoi) of created
things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. Again, this system equates
the higher Intellect with the Heart, a faculty which dwells in the depth of the soul and
constitutes the innermost aspect of the Heart, the organ of contemplation, even described
in very Islamic terms as the "eye of the heart" in the Makarian Homilies. As such, nous is
distinguished from dianoia, the faculty of mere discursive reason, whereas both intellect
and reason are combined in the organic unity of 'aql.

Our conception of thinking and learning must embrace not only conventional logical and
analytical skills but also skills such as those utilized by:

• Active and skilled readers who employ a range of reading strategies according to
purpose and genre, including close reading, scanning and skimming, and who
make inferences and predictions based on context and background knowledge so
as to go beyond the information given;

• Clear thinkers, able to select what is relevant and accessible and avoid
unnecessary complexity and repetition in transmitting ideas to others;

• Independent, critical thinkers and decision-makers;

• Curious, questing, adventurous thinkers (the Prophet said: "Seek knowledge, even
unto China"; "Whoever goes out in search of knowledge is on the path of God until
they return.");

• Questioning thinkers, always seeking new evidence and able to resist premature
closure and fixed conclusions. "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality,
they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality"
(Albert Einstein). The Prophet said: "Asking good questions is half of learning".

• Discriminating and discerning thinkers, able to use valid criteria (including the
criterion, or furqan, of the Qur'an itself) to sift the false from the true, identify
weak assumptions and presuppositions, expose false premises, distinguish fact
from unsubstantiated opinion, and make sound judgments. A well-attested
characteristic of bright and gifted students is that they ask awkward questions,
undermining shallow presuppositions and even questioning the hidden premises
behind other people's questions. Good teachers are never threatened by such
students.

• Focused thinkers, able to formulate clear and specific definitions and categories
and resist "woolly" thinking;

• Reflective thinkers, able to ponder deeply and resist hasty and impulsive
conclusions;

• Unitive and synthetic thinkers, able to employ dialectical thinking to resist one-
sided, polarised, paradigmatic thinking and reconcile and unify dichotomies and
oppositions; able to affirm and incorporate logical polarities rather than seek to
avoid contradiction and paradox through one-sided adherence to a single
 perspective. In the field of developmental psychology, Klaus Riegel identifies the
ability to accept contradictions, constructive confrontations and asynchronies as
the highest stage of cognitive development, and James Fowler associates
dialectical thinking with the development of faith. It goes without saying that the
dialectical process is not one either of compromise or loose relativism, but one of
creative tension which ultimately transforms contradictions into
complementarities, releasing the open-minded thinker from ingrained habits and
conditioned patterns of thought, established affiliations, fear of change and
instability, and reluctance to approach anything which may be threatening to one's
sense of "self".

• Thinkers who employ strategies for memory and verbatim memorisation including
the identification of organisational and cohesive features (propositional structure;
rhyme, rhythm, other poetic devices), finding connections with existing
knowledge, paraphrasing and summarising, visualisation, mnemonics, etc.;

• Flexible thinkers able to use a range of thinking skills and strategies appropriate to
various tasks, and able to transfer knowledge in innovative and creative ways;

• Multi-sensory learners, able to use all their senses to acquire knowledge;

• Nuanced and multi-layered thinkers, able to encompass subtle distinctions of

meaning, appreciate different levels of description, and evaluate which level is
appropriate in a particular context;

• Creative thinkers and problem solvers, able to explore and initiate alternative,
divergent and lateral approaches to the solution of problems;

• Non-literal thinkers, comfortable with symbol, metaphor, allegory and analogy;

• Fair-minded and open-minded thinkers, able to resist prejudice and bias, and able
to counterbalance culturally motivated distortions of fact;

• Cutting-edge thinkers, able to pioneer new departures and developments;

• Visionary thinkers, those who see to far horizons, reach to the heart of the matter
and penetrate to the key issues and underlying trends;

• Metacognitive thinkers, able to analyse their own thought processes;

• Self-motivated learners, who are not over-reliant on extrinsic motivation

(motivated by external factors, such as financial reward or accountability to
managers) but can call on intrinsic motivation (e.g. love of learning for its own
sake);

• Lifelong learners, who persevere in their studies and have developed effective
study habits, including organisation of time and resources, research skills, active
reading, note-taking and note-making, listening, self-evaluation.

• Learners who are able to transmit, use and apply knowledge for the benefit of
others: There are many sayings of the Prophet on the "negligent scholar": "A
pious, unlettered man is like one who travels on foot, whilst a negligent scholar is
like a sleeping rider". The Prophet also refers to the "scholar without practice" as a
"tree without fruit" and a "bee without honey".
 • Learners who embody, realise and actualise knowledge - deep learning (i.e. true
education) goes beyond theoretical knowledge or knowledge which is merely
"academic" in its pejorative sense; it must involve confirmation and realisation
(tahqiq, derived from haqq, truth, reality) of knowledge in one's own self, which
also inspires action (`amal). In Islam, knowledge and action are inextricably
intertwined, and there is no worthwhile knowledge which is not accompanied by
action, nor worthwhile action which is not guided by knowledge.

Above all we should aim to cultivate 'thinkers' who use 'aql in its sense of "mind-heart",
and tafakkur, in its sense of a cognitive-spiritual activity in which the rational mind,
emotion and spirit are combined. These faculties, in their higher sense, are, of course,
more than 'thinking' in the sense that the Western mind often understands thinking as an
exclusively mental activity distinct from the workings of the heart. Essentially, this is the
contemplative state of Islamic worship, in which the truth of revelation is verified through
the organ of spiritual cognition (ma`rifah). "Soon we will show them Our signs in the
utmost horizons of the universe and within their own souls until it becomes manifest to
them that this revelation is indeed the truth" (Qur'an 41:53). The Prophet said: "An hour's
contemplation is better than a year's (mechanical) worship".

The awakening and development of these higher contemplative faculties must be

considered within the context of a natural developmental process which governs the
gradual maturation and unfolding of human capacities. This process starts with concrete
sensory experience and observation, progresses to the use of the mind as a tool for
abstract thought, logical reasoning and analysis, and culminates in the awakening of the
Heart and the attainment of spiritual insight.

At present, the pinnacle of cognitive development in Western secular education is the

attainment of formal reasoning (Piaget's "formal operations"), hypothetico-deductive
thinking and theory construction. It is significant, however, that Albert Einstein, one of the
greatest constructers of scientific theory warned against the over-valuation of the rational
mind: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have
created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

The development of the rational mind has had obvious consequences in terms of scientific
and technological progress, but it has also inhibited man from progressing further to the
attainment of spiritual insight, and even undermined those capacities which he naturally
possessed at earlier stages of development, such as the capacity for awe and wonder in
the face of mysteries which are inaccessible to the mind.

The senior curriculum therefore needs to make students critically aware of the limitations
of formal reasoning, and the blindness of dogmatic scientism and reductionism which
teach that observable reality is the only reality and that there is only one level of
description applicable to all phenomena. Students should also be informed of the spiritual
beliefs of famous Western scientists, such as Newton, Faraday and Einstein.

The Qur'an is a "book for those who believe in the existence of that which is beyond the
reach of human perception" (Q. 2:3). Muhammad Asad comments on this verse: "Al-
ghayb, commonly, and erroneously, translated as "the Unseen" is used in the Qur'an to
denote all those sectors or phases of reality which lie beyond the reach of human
perception and cannot, therefore, be proved or disproved by scientific observation or even
adequately comprised within the accepted categories of speculative thought: as, for
instance, the existence of God and of a definite purpose underlying the universe, life after
death, the real nature of time, the existence of spiritual forces and their inter-action, and
so forth. Only a person who is convinced that the ultimate reality comprises far more than
our observable environment can attain to belief in God and, thus, to a belief that life has
meaning and purpose."

True as this is, it is important to add that we need not become disillusioned with science
because of the myopic vision of scientism. As al-Ghazali warns, laborious study of the
sciences dealing with fact and demonstration is indispensable if the soul is to avoid
imaginative delusions masquerading as spiritual enlightenment. It is also the case that
some of the best cutting-edge modern science is also providing us with persuasive and
compelling evidence, from a strictly scientific perspective, of the existence of a divine
principle of meaning, purpose and order at work behind all aspects of existence , which is
testimony to the Qur'anic statement that "Everything have We created in due measure
and proportion". (54:49) This kind of empirical verification, with its power to demonstrate
the unity of science and religion, is far more convincing and impressive to modern
students than contrived attempts to find a convergence between Qur'anic ayat and the
specific findings, for example, of physical or chemical research. The Qur'an should not be
limited to the status of a scientific text book.

Just as we need to bring to light the difference between scientism and true science, we
need to ensure that the process of education teaches students not to equate other limiting
ideologies with potentially constructive tools and concepts. For example, fine thinking
demands that we distinguish between nihilistic relativism and the valid attempt to find
relationship or use context to inform meaning. In the same way, we need to distinguish
between absolutism as an unbending frame of mind and the absolute and the immutable
truths given to us through divine revelation.

Such distinctions can be carried further to encompass the difference between

individualism and individuality, between communalism and community, between
modernism and modernity, between fundamentalism and a commitment to fundamentals,
between libertinism and liberty, and between syncretism and synthesis. Most importantly,
there is a pressing need for education in the difference between secularism as a godless
ideology and the intelligent appreciation that we live in the "present time" (Latin
saeculum) and therefore need to attune ourselves to its particular needs, conditions and
ways of thinking if we are ever going to be able communicate effectively with the
contemporary psyche.

The Islamic perspective, always seeking unity, proportion, harmony and balance, is able
to encompass many levels of description and apply each one in its appropriate domain. It
does not conceive, for example, of analysis and synthesis as conflicting styles, the former
to be superseded by the latter in the revolutionary school of tomorrow, but as
complementary capacities, each with its appropriate domain. If the left side of the brain is
overused, as it may well be in much Western education, the corrective is not to go
overboard for "right-brained" thinking and consign "left-brained" thinking to the garbage
bin but to seek a balance between the two sides. It is not a question of one mode of
thinking being "better" than another, or one mode of thinking becoming obsolete, but of
having the intelligence to realise that all modes have their place.

5. Striving
"Striving is the ordinance of God and whatever God has ordained can only be attained
through striving". (The Prophet Muhammad)
"There has never yet been a man in history who led a life of ease whose name is worth
remembering." (Theodore Roosevelt)

"Without labour, nothing prospers." (Sophocles)

"An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox." (Mexican proverb)

Since man is endowed with the special privileges corresponding to his status as khalifah
(vicegerent, trustee), he is all the more accountable. However, given the limitations of
man and the extent of God's Mercy, which "covers everything", it is the conscious
intentions of men and women which will be judged, for "nought shall be accounted unto
man but what he is striving for" (Qur'an 53.39).

An Islamic vision of education should therefore lay particular emphasis on sincere effort,
on the inevitability and value of failure as a means of learning, and on the avoidance of
excessively competitive, win-at-all-costs and achievement-driven criteria for success
which may lead to inflation, egoism, self-aggrandisement and lack of compassion. This
insatiable need to win, and the vices of character which can grow from it, is especially
apparent in contemporary sports culture, in which sport has been desacralised. There is a
pressing need to reclaim the sacred origin of sports.

Due regard for intention, effort and striving implies that the assessment system should
not be excessively focused on quantitative measures of achievement, and the proliferation
of statistics and "targets", which often merely reinforce failure, disillusionment and
disaffection. The assessment system needs to be based on the premise that every student
is worthy of respect and every pupil has something positive to offer and some
achievement to celebrate. Such a system may include self-assessment, portfolios of work,
and presentations.

The qualities of perseverance, patience and determination go hand in hand with the
quality of striving. Persistent efforts are better than erratic ones, even if the latter are
mighty ones. As the Prophet said: "…the best deed is a continuous one, even if it be but a
small one."

The greater striving (jihad) is, of course, the struggle to master one's own lower self. As
the Prophet said: "The most excellent Jihad is that for the conquest of the self". The best
schools must themselves strive to inculcate in their students the qualities of character,
including modesty, self-restraint and self-control (without repression!) which will serve as
the foundation for this lifelong struggle.

6. Talk and Play

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play
instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with objects it loves." (Carl
Jung)

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play." (Arnold
Toynbee)

We develop and refine our own models of reality by interacting with others, by checking
out our own ideas and attitudes against those of our peers and our elders. This is mainly
done through talk, conversation, discussion, and play, and the need for this is all the more
urgent now that children are increasingly mesmerised by screens and monitors which
detach them from interaction with real people in three-dimensional space with all the
extra gestural and emotional cues which real contact with people offers.

Unfortunately, the rigidly prescribed content-heavy curriculum, narrow band of skills, and
over-assessment favoured in certain Western school systems (the British National
Curriculum, for example), do not foster a "talking" culture. I also know from my
experience observing teachers that a climate of inspection and accountability leads to
over-managed lessons which deliberately leave no room for spontaneous and
unpredictable events, creative departures (including unplanned digressions) or lively
discussions, which might "get out of hand" and be construed by inspectors as a
breakdown of effective "classroom management" or loss of discipline. Again and again,
despite pleas to teachers not to produce supposedly "model" lessons but simply to show
their normal practice, I have observed lessons in which nothing is allowed to happen
except the "delivery" of a specific "objective". Questioning is geared only to test that
knowledge in conformity with the objective has been assimilated. Lateral thinking and
divergent questioning is discouraged. This is playing safe, ensuring that the lesson will be
at least satisfactory in the eyes of the inspector.

A specific example will suffice. On a training course for inspectors, one of our tasks was to
evaluate a lesson on video according to a scale of 0-7, where 0 was excellent, 4 was
satisfactory and 7 was very poor. The lesson was one on "creative writing" for a class of
Year 5 pupils (9-10 year-olds). Every moment of the lesson was managed. The topic was
chosen by the teacher. Every word the children were to use in their "creative" writing was
chosen and written on the board by the teacher. When children tried to suggest ideas
from their own personal experiences and words from their own vocabularies they were cut
short and re-focused sharply on the "objectives" set out by the teacher. The whole lesson
was entirely dominated by the teacher. There was virtually no discussion of the topic, no
allowance for the alternative ways in which the topic could be approached. I gave it a
grade of 6 ("poor") because it had manifestly failed to foster any creative activity or to
engage the children through the medium of their own knowledge or experience.

The inspector leading the session commented on my judgment by saying that we had to
give it a grade of 4 ("satisfactory") or better because it was a "well-managed lesson". We
can see what is happening here: mediocre education is being promoted by the inspection
system, because one of the criteria for success in an undisciplined learning environment is
that a teacher at least manages to keep control of the class.

This process of strictly manageable objectives reflects a trend which is now increasingly
evident even in the approach to "play" amongst very small children. This is the self-
contradictory notion of play with "predictable outcomes", a managed kind of "play" in
which the thrills of discovery and the unexpected are replaced by pre-determined
"objectives" and "targets", and in which natural and infinitely varied objects like sticks and
stones are replaced by plastic components. It is not play at all. It is a totally inappropriate
transplantation of a rigid performance management culture. In Britain, teachers are now
expected to "assess" pre-school children. Over-management is now a disease in the adult
workplace, but to impose it on children in their play is a travesty of the nature of play. I
dare to say that adults need to learn to play too.

Play relates to talk too, because playful talk is a creative activity in itself. Play can express
itself through talk in a variety of ways: in joke-telling, riddling, parody, satire, repartee,
dramatic enactment, mimicry, having fun with language - in all kinds of ways.

We need to foster high quality 'talk', including much oral interaction, questioning and
discussion in the classroom. We need to facilitate orderly discussion work, including
dialectic and debate, so as to foster confident self-expression, respect for alternative
points of view, and receptivity to new ideas. The dumbing down even of science
programmes on television (which are increasingly little more than special effects shows)
means that students are not being taught how to develop and sustain coherent and
extended explanations and logical arguments through the process of discourse
(thankfully, the quality science programme "Horizon" still does it but it may not be able to
hold out for much longer against the theatrical effects and epic music department of
dumber programmes).

An Islamic education system geared to excellence needs to show how its methodology
facilitates a vibrant culture of conversation and talk within classrooms and the wider
school community.

Such a culture is an active learning culture, not a top-down instructional regime based on
what Roland Barth calls the "Transmission of Knowledge Model" with its disproportionate
amount of didactic teacher talk. Barth reports the estimate of John Goodlad and others
that 85 percent of lesson time in American schools is taken up by a prevailing pedagogy
based on teachers talking and students listening, occasionally interspersed with teacher-
directed discussion.

As Barth points out, "one of the central reasons for the incredible persuasiveness and
pervasiveneness of the Transmission of Knowledge model is that it allows learning to be
evaluated and numbers attained" and, through these numbers students and teachers can
be held "accountable". Einstein speaks of the way in which mere cramming of content
undermined his love of science: "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the
examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me
that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of scientific
problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

A wide survey of British secondary schools has revealed that less than ten percent of
teacher talk is concerned with the development of higher order thinking skills. Most of it is
directed to mere control and management, including keeping order and giving
instructions. The rest of it (apart from the paltry amount involved in getting students to
think) is low-level transmission of facts and information.

In all of this, we must be true to our commitment to distinguish real education from mere
schooling and instruction.

7. Cross-Cultural and Inter-Faith Education

Cross-cultural and inter-faith dimensions of education and the inter-cultural and inter-faith
sensitivity they promote are of the greatest importance at this time. Despite all the talk
about globalisation, there is evidence in many quarters of entrenched parochialism,
increasing xenophobia, racial and cultural intolerance and prejudice, isolationism, cross-
cultural communication failure, profound misconceptions of other cultures (fed by flagrant
misrepresentation in the media) and outright ignorance and bigotry.

This situation is only exacerbated by allegiance to the poisonous doctrine of the Clash of
Civilisations, which is easily exploited, either by mediocre minds or by those pursuing an
agenda of political, economic, military or evangelical domination, to give credence to an
infantile us-and-them, either-you're-with-us-or-against-us, black-and-white, axis-of-evil,
good-and-bad-guys, mentality.

We must take every opportunity to enhance cross-cultural and inter-faith understanding

and respect for diversity. This is not something only done in personal and social education
or religious education lessons and school assemblies but in every subject area and in
every aspect of school life, as set out in the new Citizenship component of the British
National Curriculum. Art and music are fertile areas for cross-cultural work. It can be
promoted in every subject area, including mathematics and science, and no teacher
should be allowed to get away with the idea that their subjects are only concerned with a
set of prescribed skills or a narrow band of content which has to be "taught" so as to
"cover" the syllabus in time for the examinations.

Faith schools must also demonstrate their respect for religious and cultural diversity and
true pluralism, in the sense that openness to other faiths and traditions does not
necessitate any loss of commitment to a particular faith community. Parochial limitation,
narrow affiliation to a single community and exclusion by faith will not build the bridges
that need to be built with the wider community of communities. At the same time, we
need to understand why many parents prefer to send their children to single faith schools,
not least because of the cohesive ethos and coherent system of values they provide.

The best curriculum should aim to encompass a global dimension and extend the horizons
of students in all areas of the curriculum, so that, while having pride in their own culture,
they will have respect for cultural diversity in all its forms and understand the contribution
of all civilisations to the development of mankind.

The curriculum should therefore provide opportunities for the study of world history; world
geography, including human geography and anthropology to promote understanding and
respect for human and cultural diversity; world civilisations and their contribution to the
transmission of sacred knowledge, including the thematic study of comparative mythology
and symbolism and their significance for the psychological and spiritual development of
the student.

The curriculum should also acknowledge the contribution of Islam to the development of
Western civilisation, not in the sense of dwelling nostalgically on "past glories", but in the
deeper sense of finding common ground between Islam and the West, and in bringing to
light the unique capacity for synthesis characteristic of the Islamic perspective. Islam is,
after all, "a community of the middle way" (Qur'an 2:143). The ummatan wasatan
represents what Gai Eaton has called "a connecting link and a centre of gravity" in the
midst of a world polarized between East and West, and North and South.

As Mona Abu-Fadl has explained, this is not the Aristotelian "mean" based on the idea of
"a middle ground arrived at by the elimination of extremes or an aggregate amounting to
a moderate stance" which would, by its very nature, be "shifting and defined, moreover,
in terms of other positions, not of any intrinsic characteristics." A middle way rooted in
tawhid and "deriving its elements from transcendental sources, provides a stable integral
core which serves in itself as a point of departure and a referent for defining and
qualifying other positions, and not the reverse. In this way, it constitutes an intrinsic core
and provides a vertical axis, or a spinal component, round which the diverse elements and
modes of knowledge in the circle of consciousness cohere."

The best Islamic education will renew that essentially Islamic capacity to integrate and
accommodate diverse traditions in a spirit of pluralism, as embodied in the historical
legacy of intellectual giants such as al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Razi
and Suhrawardi.

Pluralism is itself an ideal environment in which to project not narrow formalisms but core
Islamic values, including the genuinely Islamic concept of human dignity. These core
Islamic values are the same universal values that promote unity in the secular world -
values such as seeking knowledge, equality, freedom, human rights, justice, and altruism.
The principles of a new world order are embedded in the pluralistic vision of Islam and
were embodied in the prototype of an Islamic society existing during the time of the
Prophet (peace and blessings upon him) and in al-Andalus - a vision capable of reconciling
the demands of diversity and unity in a humane framework.

But let us be clear that such a vision encompasses not only the openness that
characterises living traditions, but also a strong commitment to a particular tradition and
community. Diana Eck, Director of the Pluralism Project, argues that there is no such
thing as a generic pluralist. There are pluralists from different faith communities, and
even humanist pluralists, committed to their own tradition, but at the same time willing to
encounter one another and respect each other's particularities. The task of a pluralist
society, she says, is "to create the space and the means for the encounter of
commitments, not to neutralize all commitment," for "unless all of us can encounter one
another's conceptual, cultural, religious and spiritual expressions and understand them
through dialogue, both critically and self-critically, we cannot begin to live with maturity
and integrity in the world house".

A view of pluralism which entails commitment as well as openness and respect for
diversity seeks synthesis in relation to a stable, integral core of knowledge, but this is not
the same as a syncretic view which tries to fuse or cobble together different traditions -
including incompatible principles or beliefs - into a new system. It is not "a global
shopping mall where each individual puts together a basket of appealing religious ideas,"
flattening out differences and reducing every tradition to "the bland unity of the lowest
common denominator" or "the nicest platitudes".

Nor is it an attempt to make up an artificial language, to produce a kind of religious

Esperanto, a common language made up from words and grammatical structures selected
from some of the major world languages. Made-up languages of this kind never seem to
work. Apparently, there are more people with an interest in Klingon, the made-up
language developed from the Star Trek television series, than Esperanto, because Klingon
is a language which dynamically and organically expresses the character of a particular
group of people, even though they are completely fictional.

It might be said that a language like Esperanto is a worthy attempt to promote inter-
cultural understanding within the "greater common world" which Bacon regarded as the
domain of those who had liberated themselves from prejudice, conditioning, and those
other "idols of the human mind". But I think this is a profound misunderstanding. Unity
cannot be artificially constructed and contrived in this way, because it contradicts the
entirely natural multiplicity that is the very matrix of the entire universe. Unity is a state
of being within ourselves that enables us to live with paradox, to reconcile opposites, to
respect differences, to understand complementarity. It must be first and foremost a
spiritual condition. "Verily, never will Allah change the condition of people until they
themselves change what is in their souls" (Qur'an 13: 11). This is change based on a
spiritual perspective and the striving (mujahada) to master the lower self which must take
precedence over a merely sociological or political view, for the relationship with God is the
core of what it is to be a Muslim, and, indeed, an adherent of any religious faith.

In the wake of September 11 2001, and all the dangers which accompany a polarized us-
and-them outlook on the world, the West should never forget one of the founding
principles of its civilisation in the affirmation by Plato that philosophical dialectic, the
testing process of critical enquiry through discussion and dialogue, is utterly distinct from
and immeasurably superior to rhetoric, and this legacy has ultimately ensured that in the
contemporary usage of all modern European languages, the word rhetorical almost
invariably has negative connotations, implying the abuse of language for self-serving
ends.

At the same time, Muslims need to recall that one of the founding principles of Islamic
civilisation was a dynamic spirit of open-minded enquiry, which Muslim scholars
communicated to the Christian, Greek, and Jewish communities in their midst. As
Muhammad Asad has so eloquently written: "[The Qur'an], through its insistence on
consciousness and knowledge…engendered among its followers a spirit of intellectual
curiosity and independent inquiry, ultimately resulting in that splendid era of learning and
scientific research which distinguished the world of Islam at the height of its vigour; and
the culture thus fostered by the Qur'an penetrated in countless ways and by-ways into the
mind of medieval Europe and gave rise to that revival of Western culture which we call the
Renaissance, and thus became in the course of time largely responsible for the birth of
what is described as the 'age of science': the age in which we are now living."
And for Muslims, the Qur'an I, par excellence, that transcendental source which provides
the qibla or orienting point of reference, the vertical axis and integral core around which
all modes of knowledge and all diverse traditions revolve and cohere.

The best cross-cultural and inter-faith education therefore goes far beyond a bland and
diffuse medley or recipe of selected traditions and beliefs of different cultures, traditions
and faith communities, even though this in itself can help to cultivate the attitude of
tolerance which can be a useful starting point. We need to teach our young people more
than mere facts about the festivals held by different religious communities, or their
religious artefacts, or their rituals and practices, as if they are items of anthropological
interest.

8. Reflection
"He who knows his self, knows his Lord." (saying of the Prophet)

"One who knows much about others may be learned, but one who understands himself is
more intelligent." (Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching)

A recent survey using various test instruments showed that children are now 50% more
extraverted than they were in the 1960's. This could be good in some ways, as it suggests
greater confidence, but there are some troubling implications. High extraversion is
associated with the need for continual external sources of stimulation and the need for
external validation from friends and peers rather than through internal validation gained
through reflection and self-analysis. High extraversion is also associated with impulsive
behaviour and even with criminality. The idea that modern young people are learning
introspective skills through solitary engagement with computers is a dangerous myth,
because computer games, though often solitary, are not teaching any introspective skills
at all, but are simply external sources of high-octane stimulation.

Introspection and reflection are also essential for the development of moral and ethical
values because they teach young people to examine themselves, to understand their own
motives and the consequences of their actions. Intelligent and purposeful struggle with
the lower self is dependent on those qualities of self-awareness and self-knowledge which
arise from self-examination.

The curriculum in all its aspects, both in and outside the classroom, must give
opportunities for extended reflection. Studies have shown that a calm school environment
has a major effect on student behaviour, reducing or eliminating the incidence of bullying
and other anti-social forms of behaviour. Conscious relaxation and other calming
techniques, including meditation, have been shown to have a positive affect on student
attitude, attention and performance in the classroom.

9. Imagination and Creativity

Imagination is in peril in our culture, because little is left to the imagination any more.
Young people's minds are subject to a constant barrage of powerful and emotive images,
none of which have emerged from the fertility of their own minds but have been handed
to them ready-made with all the high-impact gloss and glitter available to the
entertainment industry.

However, we can do little to promote imagination in the young if we have none ourselves.
The attitude that we have a body of prescribed content to teach and that any excursion
outside these narrow limits is an unjustified digression is the antithesis of a broad and
balanced curriculum. It is our vision in extending students beyond these narrow limits
which goes far beyond the process of constriction which is occurring in state education
and which provides the enriched dimension of independent school education. Imagination
is not something which should be restricted to subjects conventionally associated with
"creativity", i.e. language studies, literature, art, drama. The way we can foster it is first
and foremost to increase it in ourselves through the richness of our own interests and
aspirations.

I believe that one of the features of the very best schools is their resistance to the erosion
of the humanities and the arts. In the case of Muslim schools, I believe this can be a weak
area of the curriculum. According to Jean Houston, "arts kindle the imagination, stimulate
the brain's connectivity". The arts "make us human". We know from research that only
15% of learners are auditory learners (i.e. absorb information through hearing it). 40% of
students are visual learners (i.e. they process information primarily through seeing
pictures) and fully 45% are kinaesthetic learners (i.e. they learn best through the
immediate sensory stimulation of hands-on experience and action).

The implications of this are very clear. The best schools do not rely on predominantly
verbal instruction, which is one of the main sources of the pervasive boredom which
inhibits learning. To do so would not only ignore the learning styles of the majority of
people, but also fail to make use of the full potential of the individual human brain.
The best schools will always balance the seduction of hi-tech by providing highly
stimulating visual and tactile environments, and use multi-sensory teaching techniques.
An Islamic education system in tune with the findings of contemporary research needs to
re-evaluate the place not only of music in the school curriculum, but also the educative
potential of movement activities such as dance, which energizes and stimulates the entire
mind-body system. Research has shown that test scores in language arts rise in
correlation to the amount of time spent in movement activities. I have already referred to
the transferable benefits of music education and the well-attested research which has
found that learning to play a musical instrument can dramatically enhance human
intelligence.

The best schools will also use the power of drama to enrich the learning experience.
Through dramatic enactment in theatre, the student explores the many guises of what it
is to be a human being, using a rich array of skills - music, movement, rhetoric,
expression and feeling - to tour the landscape of human experience. What is more, what
is enacted is more readily remembered.

10. Communication and Design Skills

One of the outcomes of an impoverished arts and humanities curriculum can be a failure
to develop effective communication skills. In the 1980's, when I was a lecturer at
Edinburgh University, I assisted in the training of new faculty members in lecturing skills.
Each course member began the course by giving a short mini-lecture which was then
evaluated by the rest of the group. It was striking how bad the medical doctors often were
in communicating their ideas. Weighed down with factual knowledge, and steeped in
cluttered medical terminology, they had little idea how to organise it or to make it
accessible, and even less idea how to use visual aids, interpersonal skills or variety in
their approach (e.g. using anecdote, story, analogy) to engage the interest of an
audience.

My experience of presentations by many Muslim speakers at conferences is that their

mode of delivery can also lack expressiveness, modulation, nuance, subtlety, colour,
dramatic variety, visual support, and awareness of audience. Even "questions" asked from
the conference floor can be lengthy, dry, inaudible monologues which show a peculiar lack
of sensitivity to the needs and interests of the audience as a whole. Perhaps this can also
be attributed to a lack of development in the arts and humanities. Such skills are
developed as much through music, art and aesthetics as through literary studies.
Understanding of human psychology (e.g. perception) also plays a part in refining these
skills.

The same can be said about design skills. Many Muslim publications are crudely
presented, with a poor appreciation of the use of visual elements and design subtleties
(including colour, layout and fonts) and how such visual elements engage interest and
attention.

The best Islamic education needs to ensure that the curriculum gives opportunities for
development of spoken communication and design skills. Students should be taught how
to give spoken presentations within clear time limits and with visual support, and
expressive speech can be developed through drama, reading aloud and poetry
composition and recitation (The Prophet said: "God has treasuries beneath the Throne,
the keys to which are the tongues of poets.") Story telling should be cultivated.

Students should also be taught how to chair meetings and conferences, how to elicit the
opinions of others, how to motivate, encourage and support others through praise, how to
resolve conflicts and arguments, and other interpersonal skills which enhance
communication and harmony.

It is vital too that students are taught how to use language as an instrument for building
bridges rather than as a means of erecting walls. Many Muslims who have spoken publicly
since the events of 11 September have come across as harsh, dogmatic, ranting and
uncompromising, and have unwittingly reinforced the Islamophobic stereotypes of
Muslims which they seek to overturn. They fail to modulate their language according to
the needs of their audience.

I am not suggesting that Islamic education should teach students to value the container
over the contents, the jug over the water, and to value spin, presentation and production
values over substance and truth. I do not hold with the advice given by an eminent
publicity consultant on one of television programmes in the BBC Islam UK series screened
in 2001 that Muslims should try to improve their image by getting more "celebrities" to
represent Islam in the media. Muslims do not have to sell out to the celebrity culture.
What I am saying is that people often cannot hear the truth if it is communicated in such
a bald way that it arouses no sense of beauty; if it makes no allowance for the
contemporary mindset; if it is conveyed only in granite - in heavily formulaic utterances
and foreign terms which make no connection with our life experience; if it cannot recast
ideas in fresh, modern language; and if it can only brow-beat and harangue rather than
persuade. The Prophet said: "He dies not who gives life to learning".

The curriculum needs to ensure that students learn how to use language to win friends
through the Truth rather than make enemies; to persuade rather than repel; and to warm
the heart.

There is also a pressing need to enhance communicative competence in written language,

especially in the field of creative writing. Methods need to include the practice of non-
literal and non-expository forms of conveying meaning, such as poetry, analogy, allegory,
metaphor, illustrative story-telling, and personal reflections. Expository writing could be
improved through the practice of summarising and paraphrasing skills, and the use of
drafting and revising to elaborate and refine ideas and enhance structural coherence.

11. Character and Ethical Values

The Prophet said: "The Qur'an was revealed for the acquisition of good character, not for
chanting written chapters".

It is not difficult to find examples of increasingly materialistic, grasping, self-obsessed and

self-serving behaviour in our society, in which there are many signs of regression by
adults into infantile behaviour. Such signs include the very obvious expressions of rage
and insatiable greed which are a disfigurement and debasement of the true nature of the
human being.

In this climate, students need, above all, role models of adult behaviour who actively
embody in their lives a conception of what a true human being is, in its totality. For
people of faith, this is a spiritual matter, but for others who may not hold any spiritual
beliefs it still operates at the level of an ethical or moral vision, a belief in standards of
conduct which are not abandoned because of the effort or will needed to uphold them, nor
for the sake of pandering to lower standards because that is what everybody else does in
today's world.

In a climate of self-interest, it is schools which are increasingly going to have to counter

the negative trends in society, and schools which promote the highest standards of
conduct and character, which demand the best of what a human being can be, and at the
same time engage in a process of education which makes students think and feel why
such conduct is better - these are the schools which responsible parents are going to want
to send their children to, not the ones which merely promise advantage, achievement and
success above all other things. But policies cannot ultimately achieve this; it is only a
common vision, shared values and consistent application of principles and policies by
every member of staff which creates and sustains these standards.

I would emphasise also that the introduction of Citizenship into the curriculum, while a
step in the right direction, may not go far enough. The objective of Islamic education,
and, indeed, all systems of education which are based on an understanding of the full
potential of the human being, is to produce a good and complete man or woman (in the
sense of balanced intellectual, moral and spiritual excellence, with refinement of culture
and character), not merely a compliant citizen of a secular state.

The notion of "citizen" here reflects the British government White Paper, Schools:
Achieving Success, which, as I have already pointed out, regards "the success of children
at school" as being "crucial to the economic health and social cohesion of the country".
Social cohesion is undoubtedly important, as long as it is not founded on mono-cultural
conformity, but rests on the respect for diversity, inter-faith tolerance and inter-cultural
sensitivity which is an element of the Citizenship programme. Faith schools, whether
single-faith or inter-faith, as well as secular schools which teach religious education,
contribute to this process by showing how the development of character and ethical
values also goes beyond utilitarian citizenship and is based ultimately on our correct
spiritual relationship to God (adab), not merely on a functional relationship to the state.

It is vital, however, that faith schools show how this concept of the precedence of God
does not have to be associated with a severe clash of loyalty between the secular state
and religious beliefs. This is especially important in the context of the current fears about
a "segregated" mentality, disaffected youth (wrongly associated with faith schools) and
extremists engaged in a war against the West (whose anti-secularism is seen to emanate
from religious instruction).

I would offer one caveat: I doubt if there are any "secular" schools which have a mission
which does not include a moral dimension, if not a spiritual one. Phillips Exeter Academy
in the USA, for example, has a mission founded on the idea that Knowledge Without
Goodness is Dangerous. John Phillips wrote this in his original deed of gift in 1781: "But
above all, it is expected that the attention of instructors to the disposition of the minds
and morals of the youth under their charge will exceed every other care; well considering
that though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without
goodness is dangerous, and that both united form the noblest character; and lay the
surest foundation of usefulness to mankind."

This academy is founded on "humanist", "utilitarian" philosophy, and has no explicit

religious orientation, but it cannot be denied that the above statement accords with one
level of Islamic values, even if it does not encompass the ultimate source of knowledge
and goodness. The transmission or possession of knowledge without the appropriate
moral and spiritual qualities is considered dangerous in Islam too, and Sana'i, the Persian
poet, describes a person having knowledge without virtue as a "thief". The Prophet said:
"The worst of men is a bad learned man, and a good learned man is the best".

The emphasis on the "usefulness to mankind" of knowledge is also wholly consonant with
the supplication of the Prophet that God protect him from "useless knowledge". The
Prophet also said: "The knowledge from which no benefit is derived is like a treasure from
which no charity is bestowed in the way of the Lord".

Faith schools should not believe that they have a monopoly on moral and spiritual values.
The most coveted student prize at the school where for many years I served as Director of
Studies was not an academic, cultural or sports trophy but the one that was presented
last as the climax of the day: it was for the three C's, Courtesy, Consideration and
Community Spirit, and the school prided itself on the way it fostered these virtues in all
areas of school life.

I wrote the Mission Statement for the same school and it went like this:

"Our mission is to educate the whole child by providing unparalleled opportunities in

breadth and depth for the concurrent development of academic, cultural, spiritual, moral,
sporting and practical dimensions of school life."

The statement goes on to set out the principles underlying this mission, which include
"the discovery and development of the unique talents and abilities of each individual" and
"a forward-looking and innovative approach which reflects our awareness and anticipation
of current and future trends but does not sacrifice traditional strengths."

It concludes by saying that the school aims to accomplish its mission "within the
framework of a secure and caring community based on:

1. A code of conduct which encourages co-operation, courtesy and common sense,

promotes mutual trust and respect, and rewards responsible behaviour.

2. A common purpose which actively promotes the importance of personal, social,

moral and spiritual values.

3. A climate of open, friendly communication which creates a vibrant and happy

atmosphere.

4. An awareness of the wider community and the value and uniqueness of the school
environment."

I once gave a paper on Islamic education at a conference on Islam and Social

Responsibility and began by displaying this mission statement. No one in my largely
Muslim audience dissented from my point that this statement, though not explicitly
Islamic, was fully in accord with Islamic principles. We might object, of course, that this is
the statement of an essentially secular school paying lip-service to spiritual values, and
that there is no over-arching, spiritual dynamic, no vertical axis which should inform and
permeate all the horizontal dimensions of human development the school claims to
encompass. This is a valid objection, and essential to an Islamic perspective.

Nevertheless, we need to consider very seriously al-Attas's point (to which I have already
referred) that, in effect, secular Western education systems, with their core curriculum,
are more well-rounded than Islamic curricula. I would actually contest this generalisation
at this time in the light of the progressive narrowing of the curriculum to serve utilitarian
ends which is constricting state education in many of those Western education systems
and in other countries which have adopted them or been heavily influenced by them. The
best of secular Western education has been, and still is, well-rounded and has sustained
its commitment to a broad and balanced curriculum and to the development of character,
but in Britain at least this kind of education is often only provided by independent schools
which have been able to preserve relative freedom from the statutory obligations imposed
by the National Curriculum on state schools. Parents are aware of this, and it is well
known that if independent school fees were more affordable, their children would be taken
out of the state education system in droves.

My point here is that faith schools can learn from the best of secular schools, as well as
from each other, in the way that a well-rounded education, which encompasses good
behaviour and refinement of character, is nurtured in the school community. Credibility
for faith schools is enhanced when religious values are not merely intoned but actively
expressed in the way people treat each other. That necessarily implies courtesy and
consideration to all people, of all cultures and faiths, and all occupations. The prophet
said: "Kindness is a mark of faith; and whoever has not kindness has not faith" and "All
God's creatures are His family; and he is the most beloved of God who does most good to
God's creatures."

12. High Expectations

I find it astonishing what low expectations can be held of young people. In a way this is
symptomatic of a culture which itself has dismally low expectations of what a human
being is, and projects this onto the young because the adults themselves are incapable of
rising to higher expectations of themselves. Young people are never to blame because of
the poor standards they are expected to reach. The idea that students can only learn if
they are being subjected to trivial entertainment is a denial of human capacities and an
impoverishment of their learning experience.

Young people have a fierce hunger for the truth and all of them respond to the message
which is pitched at the highest level if it is delivered with sincerity and passion as well as
obvious depth of knowledge and understanding. They home in immediately on second-
class goods, they see through those who try to patronise them, and they are not truly
inspired by styles of delivery which dilute, sanitise or prettify the message in order to
make it apparently more palatable.

I believe that young people are often grossly underestimated in our educational systems,
and that their hunger is not being fed because of a failure to speak directly to their hearts,
which is actually a failure to speak the truth. Leaders in so many areas (politics and
education included) have lost the will and the courage to engage directly with the truth,
and in so doing to speak directly to the core of human beings. The worst of our education
systems is in essence a ministry of disinformation, a covering-up and denial of the truth.
Young people can respond directly to the strength and clarity of the unadorned message.
 13. Charity: Values and Ethics in Action
I strongly believe that the most effective way to engage the whole being of anyone is to
involve them in service to others. We live at a time when self-interest increasingly
demands that a tangible reward is given for every supposedly "good" act, but what this
does is actually to destroy the goodness of the act by turning it into a manifestation of
greed. Everything becomes reduced to a profit and loss account, in which nothing is ever
done for reasons other than self-gratification or personal gain and advancement.

Involvement in active charitable work or community service which brings together

different communities, both the haves and have-nots, is immensely enriching to all. The
poor, deprived or needy may be materially enriched, but the givers also benefit
immeasurably because of what they learn about the human spirit, the joy of selfless
giving without hope of reward, the development of compassion and empathy, direct
insight into the way of life of others, and an understanding of the roots of true happiness.
My experience is that young people are hungering for involvement of this kind, because it
is part of their innate humanity, and it is an obligation on us to provide them with a
context for its expression.

It is important to understand the Islamic concept of charity has a wider application than
that of charitable "work" and "service" in the conventional sense: The Prophet said:
"Doing justice between two people is charity; assisting a man upon his beast and lifting
his baggage is charity; and pure, comforting words are charity; and answering a
questioner with mildness is charity; and removing that which is inconvenience to
wayfarers, such as thorns and stones, is a charity". The simple act of "smiling in your
brother's face" is also charity.

The best Islamic education will cultivate leadership in the area of active charitable work
and in the many expressions of a charitable heart. For Muslims, according to sayings of
the Prophet, "Charity is proof of Iman (faith)" and is "a duty unto every Muslim".

14. Contemporary Issues

I have reiterated in the above some concerns about the state of the contemporary world,
and I believe we must give our young people opportunities to develop discernment and
insight into what is happening around them. However, this should not be a pessimistic
litany of everything that is wrong with the modern world, as if we are all hurtling towards
the Last Days. Such a view is hardly likely to win the hearts and minds of young people,
who are more likely to respond to a hopeful and merciful evaluation of the society in
which they live, even if, at the same time, we want them to develop critical insight about
it.

Students are naturally interested in topical issues, but what usually goes on in so-called
"current affairs" discussions is the airing of typical clichés and conventional, unimaginative
"issues" like the pros and cons of fox hunting or school uniform. A set "current affairs" slot
for contrived discussions hardly ever works. We have to get away from this idea that only
a current affairs teacher can teach this "subject". Discernment about the modern world
can and should be developed in all subjects, but it only happens if we can rid ourselves of
the idea that we teach a "subject" and a subject alone, and that subject has no connection
with any other subject or any other educational purpose apart from covering a "syllabus"
in time. Students are likely to be far more responsive if they feel that an "issue" has
emerged from a real context.

The same applies to aspects of Islamic Studies, which need to connect with the personal
lives of young people and how they live their lives in the modern world. This connection
needs to be made through establishing a methodology which engages and motivates
through fostering personal reflection and open discussion instead of exclusively didactic
teacher-centred instruction.

One of the programs being developed by the Book Foundation is the Book of
Contemporary Issues. The broad themes we have identified include:

1. Islam and Spirituality (there is often over-emphasis on social and political issues
amongst Muslims as a means of addressing contemporary problems)

2. Islam And Peace

3. Islam and Pluralism (multiculturalism, diversity, intercultural sensitivity, inter-faith

dialogue, engagement and participation, etc.)

4. Islam and Gender (embracing issues for both men and women)

5. Islam and the West (including issues of identity, assimilation, and integration for
Muslims living in the West)

6. Islam and Modernity (including secularism, relativism, individualism)

7. Islam and the Environment

8. Islam and Education (including the purposes of education)

9. Islam and Science and Technology (including issues of ethics and social
responsibility and the use of Information and Communications Technology)

10. Islam and Creativity (including issues around divergent and lateral thinking,
cognitive flexibility, open-mindedness, spirit of enquiry, risk-taking, enterprise)

11. Islam and the Creative Arts

12. Islam and Family Values

13. Islam and Leadership

14. Islam and Human Rights

15. Islam and the Shari`ah (including issues of interpretation, context etc.)

16. Islam and Personal Freedom

17. Islam and the Media (including advertising)

18. Islam and Mass Entertainment

 19. Islam and Globalisation

20. Islam and Sport

21. Islam and Health (including mental health, drug addiction, eating disorders etc.)

22. Miscellaneous aspects of contemporary life for critiquing and discussion: e.g. the
'celebrity' culture; the 'style' culture; the 'blame' culture; the 'quantification'
culture; the 'control' culture; the 'safety' culture; the 'thrills' culture; the 'theme
park culture'; the new 'rages', etc. Opportunities present themselves here for
updating material by creating a portfolio of newspaper and magazine cuttings,
audio material and video clips which show awareness of current socio-cultural
trends and developments.

15. The Spiritual Life

A recent survey of spiritual beliefs in the countries of the world revealed that the UK is the
most secular society in the world. It is not clear whether this conclusion is based on
affiliation to institutionalised forms of religion, or on the incidence of spiritual beliefs. The
distinction is crucial, as I suspect that there are a great many people in Britain who hold
personal spiritual beliefs but who may not count themselves as affiliated to any faith
community. Whatever the case, it is still clear that the students British teachers are trying
to educate are living in one of the most materialistic cultures in human history, and the
challenge is not so very different in many other Western secular societies.

I believe that, in spite of the deeply impoverished culture of empty consumerism and
hedonism we see all around us, people are actually desperately hungry to discover deeper
purpose and meaning in their lives and to have a reference point which is greater than
themselves and their own selfish interests. It is also axiomatic for Muslims that such a
hunger is innate in all human beings, young people included. I have always been deeply
moved by the natural inclination (fitra) young people have to help others, if only they are
given the opportunity. More often than not, we, as adults, fail to give a means of
realization or a domain of positive action for this natural altruism, which if not nourished
and channelled in the right direction, can easily turn to anger and be captured by violent
causes, especially in young men.

I believe that the size of people's hearts is directly related to the breadth of their
horizons. The most constricted and stony heart is the one whose horizons extend no
further than himself and the satisfaction of his own needs and desires. As the human
being develops, his horizons progressively extend from self to family, from family to social
circle, from social circle to class to tribe, and from tribe to nation state.

Other people define themselves according to their occupations, or sometimes, in today's

world, according to their designer labels. Most people find it difficult to progress further,
and are forever confined by their tribal, nationalistic, occupational or "life-style"
perception of themselves. I saw a programme recently about a couple on holiday who
decided who was worthy of getting to know by the shopping bag they carried. Someone
with a Marks and Spencer bag was avoided, but someone who carried a Gucci bag was
cultivated as a social contact. This is the ultimate reduction of the human being, defined
no longer by the old questions ("Where do you come from and what do you do?) but by
the pressing modern question: "Which shopping bag do you carry?"

The development of mankind has always been in the progressive expansion of boundaries,
such that more and more people see themselves today as members of a global
community rather than citizens of a nation state. It is therefore logical to suppose that the
destiny of man is to inhabit the larger universe, to find his relationship with the whole of
creation and ultimately with the origin of that creation. Some people think that this
connection with the universe (if not with its origin) will eventually be literally
accomplished through space travel, but the deeper reality is to find that relationship
within ourselves.

"The truth is out there" says the X-Files, and as educators we certainly want to encourage
human curiosity and wonder about the world in which we live, and other worlds too, but
the deepest, the most essential Truth is not out there at all, but within ourselves. "He who
knows his own self", said the Prophet, "knows his Lord", confirming the ancient Greek
injunction to "Know thyself" and the saying of Jesus that "The Kingdom of Heaven is
within you". No matter how far man actually travels in his physical engines, if he has not
developed in himself the higher faculties which make him truly human, if he has not made
that inner journey, his outer journey will lead only to further technological advancement
which, as always, can be used either for good or evil.

The trajectory of the person of goodwill is the widening of his horizons to fellow human
beings, first to his family, then his friends, and ultimately to all human beings and all life
on earth, no matter where they come from; but, for people of faith and spiritual insight,
there is a further horizon, beyond that of the earth, which takes in the whole universe,
and which all young people, if given the opportunity, always respond to instinctively with
wonder. Direct observation of the night sky ought to be on every science curriculum, not
simply to satisfy curiosity about the workings of the universe (as if the universe can be
reduced to self-sufficient laws and mechanisms) or bizarre and inexplicable phenomena,
but as a means to evoke wonder and holy awe.

It is that sense of wonder and unfathomable mystery, and the humility which goes with it,
which is a vital dimension of spirituality. As well as the night sky, it could be the morning
mist hanging on the meadows, or that sense of limitless multiplicity which anyone who
looks at nature can perceive in every shifting scene, but whatever it is, it is a point of
reference with something infinite, unfathomable and limitless, which is far beyond the
practical, and even the moral, dimension of human affairs.

Albert Einstein said: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can
no longer pause to wonder a stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: he eyes are closed."

We need to evoke this sense in our students, as well as expound the tenets of the faith.
To do so we need to awaken in them their inner spiritual capacities and help them to
embody and express the divine qualities or attributes as well as instruct the mind and
plant the garden of virtues. The Prophet said: "Be ye imbued with divine qualities". This
will depend on an educational process which encompasses an experiential dimension, a
process of applied spirituality which gives opportunities for inner work and training. This
alone can bypass the over-emphasis on "personality" and the forms of conditioning and
ingrained habits and patterns of thought that obscure the human soul or essential Self,
and this alone can turn latent (often atrophied) faculties into functioning ones. Such
obstructive forms of conditioning may be psychological, social, cultural, intellectual, or,
indeed, religious, and we need to realise that academic and religious institutions can also
compound the effects of conditioning through conventional intellectuality and religiosity.

Unlike the best faith schools which have never divorced the training of the mind from that
of the soul, Western secular education, despite its undoubted strengths, has neglected the
human soul, and little knowledge remains of how to nourish it.

The highest level of education requires a psycho-spiritual approach which is based on a

clear understanding of the nature of the human being, including the hierarchical structure
and dynamics of the human psyche and its key elements - spirit (ruh), heart (qalb),
intellect (`aql), and the self or soul (nafs) ranging from its lowest level (ego; the
"commanding self", an-nafs al-`ammara, totally under the control of the passions and
therefore blind to any higher reality), through intermediate stages of struggle, to its
highest state (the "self at peace", an-nafs al-mutma'inna.) This depends on a consistent
language, a carefully defined spiritual vocabulary in English, informed by the essential,
objective Arabic vocabulary of the Qur'an.

Elements of spiritual practice to be explored in such a program of applied spirituality will

include: intention, attention, presence, self -awareness, mindfulness, will (irada),
reflection and contemplation (tafakkur), spiritual insight (basirah, albab, ma`rifah),
remembrance (dhikr) of God (the Prophet said: "There is a polish for everything, and the
polish for the heart is the remembrance of God"), prayer, worship, and the attainment of
certainty (yaqin). Al-Ghazali says that the only way to approach the Islamic sciences is to
be fortified with yaqin, and that the way to yaqin is through "tasting" or "spiritual
savouring"(dhawq). This is the activation of the primordial capacity to perceive the truth
intuitively and the internalisation of the forms of religion as direct spiritual experience.
The same connection between wisdom and direct experience is preserved in the origin of
the English word "sapience" (wisdom) which is derived from Latin sapere, to taste.

The importance of dhawq is recognised at an earlier stage in the curriculum through an

emphasis on concrete sensory experience rather than arid repetition and imitation. This
was precisely what was behind the reform of educational practice in the 17th century in
England - the realization that medieval scholasticism had given rise to a completely arid
process of abstract logical reasoning. This was the time of the scientific revolution - the
realization that truth could be found out through actual observation rather than recourse
to authority. What went wrong was that the notion of "experience" as the ground of truth
was narrowly applied only as "experimentation", which gave rise to the fallacy that the
only reality was the observable world.

It is important to reiterate that the ultimate precedence of spiritual insight as a means of

acquiring knowledge does not imply the under-valuation of reasoning and thinking in the
curriculum, because reasoning and thinking are an obligation for the believer; but this
reasoning should serve the quality of understanding and knowledge which is able to verify
universal truths through proof and evidence (the "signs" within ourselves and in Creation)
rather than through idle speculation, conjecture and the superficial chattering of the
rational mind. "Leave them to play at their vain talk." (Qur'an 6: 91)

I recently heard a discussion in the BBC radio 4 "Moral Maze" series about the advantages
and disadvantages of faith schools in which a well-known atheist "thinker" said that he
thought teaching religion in schools was "intellectual abuse". I would say that the real
abuse is to deny to young people the spiritual dimension in their lives, to give them no
means of expressing the natural wonder they have in their souls and no means of
activating and developing their highest spiritual capacities. We only have to look around
ourselves to see the consequences of this deprivation in our contemporary culture.

The assertion of the atheist is also contradicted by new research by the Professional
Council for Religious Education published in September 2001. This showed that among
secondary school students aged 11 to 18, those who enjoy religious education (RE) and
see positive benefits for their own lives from studying religion outnumber those who are
negative about RE by four to one.

The report also gives examples of statements by students which show that many students
also like RE because of the opportunities it gives for expressing opinions, improving
communication skills, acquiring knowledge of other faiths, developing inter-cultural
awareness and sensitivity, developing the skills of philosophical enquiry and reflection,
and pondering the meaning and purpose of life.

From this, it appears that is it generally the adults in our society who openly mock and
vilify religion, or equate religion with indoctrination, not the young.

16. The Outcome

There is no "final" outcome from a system of education, because if we have accomplished
our goal of creating lifelong learners then our students will continue to learn throughout
their lives. By definition, a Muslim is always a learner.

The cumulative effect of an integrated system of Islamic education should, however,

prepare young people to become:

• True Muslims, who act in accordance with the innate disposition of the human
being (fitra) and strive to embody the divine attributes in the conduct of their
lives;

• Thinking and thoughtful people who embody, as far as their capacity allows, the
qualities of reason, intellect, intelligence and understanding identified in section 4
above;

• People of insight, discrimination and psychological awareness, able to resist

unconscious and conditioned impulses and responses and assume conscious
control of their own development;

• Well-rounded individuals who show balanced development of spiritual, moral,

academic, cultural, physical and practical capacities and abilities;

• Kind, compassionate and tolerant individuals able to build bridges of mutual

understanding and goodwill between people of different cultures and traditions;

• Responsible and exemplary citizens of the world;

• Self-motivated, lifelong learners, who actively seek, transmit, and apply

knowledge, and are responsive to changing conditions;

• Self-directed and inspiring leaders;

 • Effective communicators with good interpersonal skills;

• Well-informed individuals with an understanding of pressing contemporary issues.

Jeremy Henzell-Thomas
Bath
July 2002