Contemplating an Education System for

Decolonization and Rejuvenation

Yusuf Progler
Any meaningful program of education for decolonization and rejuvenation has to take into
account the damage already done by Western civilization, and must take steps to undo that
damage, heal the wounds, and especially avoid repeating its reprehensible and destructive
characteristics in a new guise. Such a prospectus requires a two-pronged approach, which will
simultaneously dismantle the destructive tendencies and institutions built upon them, and
assemble more constructive beliefs and practices, in light of human and ecological needs.
Western civilization has hegemonic control over three areas of existence: cosmology,
epistemology, and methodology. A meaningful program of decolonization and rejuvenation will
need to weave these three together, not compartmentalize them, into a program of study whose
goal is a sustainable, peaceful and just life for as many humans as possible.
Since western bodies of knowledge are intertwined with method, it seems necessary to come up
with new methods. Otherwise, 'non-western' systems may merely add some exotic frills to
otherwise essentially western systems. Western methodologies will probably be the most difficult
to overcome, since many people who are talking about decolonization are doing so from within
western institutions.
A necessary step away from this hegemonic system is to legitimize peoples whose cosmological,
epistemological and methodological legitimacy is not based solely on their having passed
through the hierarchical system of education in the west, whose highest award is the Ph.D.
Difficult although this may seem, the program of rejuvenation will need to start by downgrading
the Ph.D. and similar colonial certificates from their places of privilege. Even a cursory look at
the history of colonization will bear this out, as the white man worked to set up institutions of
legitimization, with their rewards and punishments, and these systems preceded their bodies and
frameworks of knowledge.
Where does this leave institutions of higher education? Clearly some will adjust, and others will
not. The ones that do adjust to the program of decolonization and rejuvenation will survive in a
world driven by peace, justice and sustainable living, and the ones that cannot do so will wither
and fade away. The danger lies in forming alliances, because of economic or political
expediencies, with existing institutions, because their colonizing habits will severely limit
progress in the kinds of projects most needed for genuine and meaningful decolonization and
rejuvenation.

From agriculture to child-rearing and medicine, and within the realms of politics, economics and
science, wide-ranging efforts need to persevere in elucidating the nature of the destructive
systems and replacing them with more sustainable systems. Much of this will entail looking at
workable models on the ground, keeping in mind that the best workable models of peaceful and
just sustainable survival are context- and bioregion-specific, worked out within the means and
locales of specific cultural and ecological settings, and being wary of universalized, standardized
and westernized systems.
The Project on Andean Technology (PRATEC) deserves such study. Its developers created a
program of decolonization and rejuvenation that evaluated western knowledges and
methodologies from a baseline Andean cosmological system. The designers and practitioners of
PRATEC speak of 'eating, digesting, and excreting' the western knowledges and methodologies,
in an interesting twist on the usual rigid dichotomy of acceptance or rejection found in
westernized oppositions to colonization, such as Marxism and liberalism.
Once the Andean cosmological system was understood, it became a matter of evaluating
knowledges and methodologies in terms of a baseline set of assumptions. In this scheme, people
with western Ph.D.'s actually played the role of mediators; they were on the front lines with the
western development 'experts', disputing their plans and projects in their own language, having
digested the western ways of seeing and being able to explain them back to their designers in
ways that could not be easily written off, before rejecting them in light of local needs and beliefs.
In this light, there is still a role for the Ph.D., though it is more of a mediating role than an
authoritative role.
Similar workable alternatives could be studied as well, for the ways in which they combine a
two-pronged approach to the decolonization and rejuvenation project, with respect to locally
relevant types of knowledge and experience. So any meaningful education in this sense will
require a field-based component, which in a sense undermines another tenet of western
education: book learning. This is not to reject books, but only to say that their knowledges need
to be worked out by people, and so studying the ways people apply and enact their knowledge
systems, for better or worse, is a necessary part of the project. With these cautionary remarks in
mind, some 'courses' in a program of decolonization and rejuvenation might include the
following:
'Civilization and Sustainability' can examine the ways in which civilizations have collapsed once
they strayed too far outside the bounds of their bioregions. This course will treat the Western
notion of civilization as problematic in light of non-Western cosmologies, and look at what might
count for a 'civilization' in an ecologically-sustainable cultural setting. Studying the relationships
between mental and environmental ecologies will be necessary to develop a conceptual
framework
for
the
course.
'Comparative Studies in Cosmology, Epistemology, and Methodology' can evaluate western and

non-western views on these topics, in light of the findings from studies of civilization and
sustainability. Cosmological studies can look at the three-part relationship between human beings
and the unseen world, human beings within and among themselves, and human beings within a
seen world or an environment. Knowledge studies can look at indigenous definitions of
knowledge, and evaluate various knowledges as an antidote to the colonial educational systems
that have insisted on a singular definition of knowledge as that which benefits the colonized way
of life and its beneficiaries. Studies in methodology can proceed from the above, by looking at
how methodologies can embody cosmologies and epistemologies.
'Explorations in Other-than-Human Sovereignty' can ask the basic question of what happens
when human beings are not the sovereign of the land. Whether it be in a deity and revealed
religion, as in for example the Islamic sense of sovereignty, or in nature being the sovereign, as
in many indigenous people's cosmologies, such a course will pose major challenges to the
humanistic western system of thought, which places the human being at the center of a rational
universe. In order to avoid reproducing past pathologies, however, this course of study will need
to look at how many belief systems, such as contemporary forms of Judaism and Christianity in
the west, have embraced humanism at the expense of their cosmological teachings; this in itself
will also complicate efforts at purely relativistic studies and conversations, such as in interfaith
dialogues.
'Psychology of Consumption' will, at the risk of being colonized by the jargon and norms of
western psychology, take to task the electronically-mediated environments of western consumer
culture, and evaluate its effects on local cultures. This will involve fieldwork and counselling,
with the intention of drawing connections between consumerism and non-sustainability, and
asking basic questions about how much is enough, and what people really need to be happy.
Many more courses of study along these lines could be proposed for a new kind of education,
perhaps involving an institution with a new name ('poliversity'?), which may not even meet the
western criteria of an educational experience, with its campuses, certificates and hierarchies. The
key issue will remain whether or not it is possible to have an educational system that, seemingly
paradoxically but perhaps only temporarily, will have as one of its goals its own demise. This
will remain a paradox for as long as the western norms of thought and action form the basis for
non-western allegiances, which can only be made clear once a program is developed with a sense
of simultaneous decolonization and rejuvenation in view.
[Dr Yusuf Progler is Assistant Professor of Education, Brooklyn College, City University of New
York, USA.]
Muslimedia: February 1-15, 2000

Decolonizing Contemporary Education

By Dr. Yusef Progler
Built on a whirlpool of theories and methods, modern education systems have
evolved to project an image of knowledge and objectivity, but how much of it is
really acknowledging the student and how much of it is simply a form of
enculturation? Acknowledged as such by Native American and African educators,
these systems of learning are now gaining momentum in Islamic schools in the
United States.
Teaching Methods
At a recent workshop for Muslim schoolteachers, a professor of education spoke at
length on the theories of learning, with particular reference to Dewey, Kohlberg,
and Vygotsky. Of Arab Muslim background, the professor received his PhD from an
American university and now teaches at a university in an Arab country, which has
begun to seek collaborations with its local public and private schools. The professor
lectured on many other topics as well:

The effective teacher

Verbal and non verbal communication

Instructional technologies

Instructional groupings

Seating arrangements

Large and small group and individual work

Teaching methods

Objectives and planning

Simulations/role playing

Problem solving

Classroom management and discipline

Testing and assessment

Performance and portfolio based assessment

Professional growth

Reflective teaching

Active research.

The teachers dutifully took notes and asked questions drawn from their own
experiences with teaching various subjects to a wide range of local school children.
A fairly representative sample of contemporary American thinking on modern
schooling, the professor's topics would typically be spread out over an entire
semester course on the foundations of education, with somewhat more depth and
several assigned readings. But the gist would be the same. Contemporary
educational theory treats most problems as either technical or personal. It borrows
from psychology"especially from Skinner, Pavlov, Piaget, and Freud"in its
tendency to objectify students in a way similar to how Western medicine treats
patients. Building on this foundation, recent educational thinking has added a host
of notions on human development drawn from humanistic philosophy. While no
doubt offered with honesty and good intentions, the good professor's presentation
contained the usual contradictions that one finds in such discussions: talking about
"critical thinking" without actually practicing it, or emphasizing "constructivist"
or "cooperative" learning in a strictly didactic format. It seems that if professors of
education want to be taken seriously with all of these theories"some of which may
at times be meaningful and useful"then they ought to use them in practice in
their own seminars and workshops.
Void of Social or Cultural Awareness
However, a more severe omission from such standardized presentations is that
they lack any social or cultural awareness and they exist in a world without
context. There seems to be a general belief that theories are not born of any
particular social setting and are applicable anywhere, or that the "objective
sciences" (i.e., the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or even the
"hard sciences" like biology and physics) are neutral, universal, and value free.
This is not the place to unpack these problems; suffice to say that there is a
growing literature clearly suggesting that the various sciences are just as socially
constructed and culture bound as anything else, and therefore learning them is a
form of socialization and enculturation. Educational theorists often ignore this, and
in a cross-cultural setting such as teaching American theories to Arab Muslim
teachers, the problems become more acute and warrant careful and extended
study.
In order to help understand how Western theories of education might or might not
be applicable to the daily practices of schools in Muslim communities, one would
have to spend considerable time working with administrators, teachers, and
students in both Western and Muslim contexts. One consistent theme that would
emerge is a growing realization that schooling is a form of (implicit or explicit)
socialization. This is observable in American schools (i.e., the phenomenon of what
Native and African American educators call "internal colonization" ), but it is
intensified by the multiple marginalities and cultural border crossings at work in
many Muslim schools, and not necessarily only those operating in non-Muslim

societies. One of the fundamental sites of socialization and enculturation is in the

meaning, role, and purpose of education itself.
In the West, and in America particularly, there is a very broad definition of
education, especially that which is undertaken in a formal, institutional setting.
Contemporary American education is rooted in Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian,
scientific, humanist norms. Originally founded to educate Protestant ministers and
the ruling elite of colonial America, the Ivy League universities of Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton emerged as the epitome institutions for a liberal education, whose
norms are embedded to this day from kindergarten to advanced graduate study. To
be considered "educated" in such a system, one is assumed to have taken an
array of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences. But American education
does not end in curriculum. There has always been tension between liberal and
vocational education, and, partly in response to this tension, vocational schools
have proliferated during the late 20th century. Some of this is also evident when
secondary schools and colleges track students into vocational courses with various
professional certificates, as is general practice in many European educational
systems. In America, the tracking is not so rigid, but the tensions are no less acute.
Some American schools expand even beyond the liberal and vocational norms,
offering instruction in athletics and health, or in something as basic as learning to
drive a car. Oddly, and despite its roots in the Protestant mission, most modern
schooling is entirely secular.
Background
The above-mentioned theories of education developed to serve this Western
educational system, and they embody all of its contradictions and assumptions. No
matter how educators fine-tune them, in the end the theories of education are
Western theories that rely on a host of Western assumptions about human nature
and how the world works. But before this corpus emerged at the end of the
Christian 19th century and into the 20th century, what guided teaching and
learning in the West? More significantly, how did non-Western peoples and
societies engage in teaching and learning before Western norms became universal
norms? Or, more fundamentally, what does it mean to be "educated" outside the
norms of the modern Western system?
Self-Assessment
It seems prudent, if not necessary, that Muslims step back and away for some time
to evaluate their own schooling and education. Such evaluation includes careful
assessment of their community needs and aspirations before adopting wholesale
an educational system from the West. At best, introducing the Western system is
like laying a thin socio-cultural membrane over indigenous society and norms,
creating a sort of cultural schizophrenia. At worst, imposing the Western system of
education builds a support mechanism for direct colonization, which has dogged
non-Western peoples for several centuries. Ignoring any serious consideration of
these issues cannot be seen as simply remaining "neutral" or "objective."
Rather, in the present aggressive climate of American triumphalism, ignorance or
passivity can amount to self-degradation and indirect colonization.
Any meaningful program of education for decolonization and rejuvenation has to
take into account the damage already done by colonialism, and must take steps to
undo that damage, heal the wounds, and especially avoid repeating its

reprehensible and destructive characteristics in a new guise. Such a prospectus

requires a two-pronged approach, which will simultaneously dismantle the
destructive tendencies and institutions built upon them, and assemble more
constructive beliefs and practices in light of human and ecological needs.
Process of Decolonization
The colonial powers gained some hegemonic control over three crucial areas:

Cosmology

Epistemology

Methodology

A successful program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to weave these

three together, not further compartmentalize them, into a program of study whose
goal is a sustainable, peaceful, and just life for as many humans as possible living
in full awareness of their role in the biotic community. In particular, since modern
bodies of knowledge are intertwined with the modern scientific method, it is
necessary to come up with new methods. Otherwise, Third World systems may
merely add some exotic frills to otherwise essentially modernist systems. Modern
methodologies will probably be the most difficult to overcome, since many people
who are talking about decolonization are doing so from within former colonial
institutions.
A necessary step away from this hegemonic system is to legitimize those peoples
whose cosmological, epistemological, and methodological lives are not based
solely on their having passed through the hierarchical system of modern schooling,
the highest award from which is the PhD. Difficult though this may seem, any
program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to start by downgrading the
PhD and similar colonial certificates from their places of highest privilege. Even a
cursory look at the history of colonialism will bear this out, as the colonialists
systematically worked to set up institutions to legitimize themselves and their own
knowledge base, along with their institutional rewards and punishments, and these
colonial systems supported their bodies and frameworks of knowledge.
Transition
Where does this leave institutions of higher education? Clearly some will adjust
and others will not. The ones that do adjust to the program of decolonization and
rejuvenation will survive in a world driven by peace, justice, and sustainable living,
and the ones that cannot do so will wither and fade away. The danger lies in
forming alliances, because of economic or political expediencies, with existing
institutions, because their colonizing habits will severely limit progress in the kinds
of projects most needed for genuine and meaningful decolonization and
rejuvenation.
From agriculture and handicrafts to child-rearing and medicine, and within the
realms of politics, economics, and science, wide-ranging efforts need to persevere
on two fronts, by revealing the nature of the destructive and violent colonial
institutions and replacing them with more sustainable and peaceful networks.
Much of this effort will entail looking at workable models already in place and
functioning on the ground, keeping in mind that the best workable models of
peaceful and just sustainable survival are context and bioregion specific, worked

out within the means and locales of specific cultural and ecological settings, while
wary of universalized, standardized and modernized systems.
As one of many workable models, the Project on Andean Technology (PRATEC)
deserves careful study. Its developers created a workable program of
decolonization and rejuvenation that evaluated modern knowledge systems and
methodologies from within a baseline Andean cosmological framework. The
designers and practitioners of PRATEC speak of "eating, digesting and excreting"
the modern knowledge systems and modern methodologies, in an interesting twist
on the usual rigid dichotomy of acceptance or rejection found in Westernized
oppositions to colonization, such as within Marxism and Liberalism. Once the
Andean cosmological system was understood, it became a matter of evaluating a
variety of knowledge and methodologies in terms of a baseline set of assumptions.
In this scheme, academics holding the Western PhD found they could best play the
role not as guides and vanguards of new knowledge, but as rear-guard mediators,
where they used their expertise to face off and challenge the modernist
development experts, disputing their plans and projects in their own language,
having digested the modern way of seeing and being able to explain them back to
their designers in ways that could not be easily written off, before rejecting them in
light of local needs and beliefs. In this light, there is still a role for the PhD, though
it is more of a mediating role than an authoritative role.
Similar workable alternatives could be found and studied as well, and especially
those noted for the ways in which they combine a two-pronged approach to the
decolonization and rejuvenation project, with respect to locally relevant knowledge
and experience. Any meaningful form of education in this sense will require a fieldbased component, which will have to undermine another tenet of modern
education: book learning. This is not to reject books, but only to say that their
knowledge needs to be worked out by people, and so studying the ways people
apply and enact their knowledge systems, for better or worse, is a necessary part
of the project. With these cautionary remarks in mind, some aspects of a program
of decolonization and rejuvenation might include the following:

Civilization and sustainability. This aspect will explore the ways in which
civilizations have collapsed once they strayed too far outside the bounds of
their bioregions. Such study will need to treat the modern notion of
civilization as problematic in light of traditional cosmologies, and look at
what might count as being a "civilization" in a more ecologically
sustainable framework. Studying the relationships between mental and
environmental ecologies is necessary to develop a conceptual framework for
this aspect, and will have to carefully consider the role of institutions in
perpetuating unsustainable thought and action.

Comparative studies in cosmology, epistemology and methodology. This

aspect can evaluate modern and traditional views in these three areas, in
light of the findings from the above-noted studies of civilization and
sustainability. Cosmological studies can look at the three-part relationship
between human beings and the unseen world, human beings within and
among themselves, and human beings within the cosmos. Knowledge
studies can look at indigenous definitions and applications of knowledge,
and evaluate various knowledge systems as an antidote to the colonialderived modern schooling that has insisted on a singular definition of

knowledge as that which benefits the colonized way of life and its
beneficiaries. Studies in comparative methodology can proceed from the
above grounding in epistemology and cosmology by looking at how viable
methodologies must embody traditional cosmologies and epistemologies.

Explorations in other-than-human sovereignty. Here the basic question must

be asked: What happens when human beings are not the sovereigns of the
land? Whether it be a sovereign deity and spiritual entity from within the
framework of religion, as in for example the Islamic sense of sovereignty, or
whether nature be the sovereign entity, as in many indigenous people's
cosmologies, this aspect will pose major challenges to the humanist and
modernist systems of thought and practice, which place the human being at
the center of a rational universe. In order to avoid reproducing past
pathologies, however, this project will need to look at how many belief
systems"such as contemporary forms of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam"have embraced humanism at the expense of their deeper
cosmological teachings. This in itself will also complicate efforts at purely
relativistic studies and conversations, such as in the fruitless interfaith
dialogues.

Psychology of consumption. This program of thinking, intertwined with a new

way of living, but perhaps at the risk of being further colonized by the jargon
and norms of modern psychology, will need to take to task the electronically
mediated environment of modern consumer culture and evaluate its effect
on local cultures. Fieldwork, internships, and counseling programs are
necessary here, with the intention of drawing connections between
consumerism and non-sustainability, and asking questions about how much
is enough and what people need to be happy.

Learning Environment
The above can provide only a beginning towards a focused attention on some
crucial and necessary aspects of decolonizing education. However, these should
not be construed or even offered as college and university courses. In fact, the
most meaningful work in these areas will likely have to be done outside the
institutions of modern schooling and higher education, and will perhaps find a
home nestled among families and communities living in specific bioregions.
At the same time, given the addiction to institutionalized schooling and higher
education that many people face, if they are truly honest, it becomes necessary to
work within some institutions that are willing to allow these perspectives and
willing to allow an activist-oriented program of study. Within such institutions,
courses can be proposed with an eye toward a new kind of education, perhaps
involving an institution with a new name, a "multiversity" of sorts, which may not
even meet the modern criteria of an educational experience with its campuses,
certificates, and hierarchies. If working in an institutional setting is the only option,
the question remains how to develop an institutional system that will have as one
of its goals its own demise, no matter how ironic or paradoxical this may seem,
because the structure of colonized knowledge is just as important to recognize and
remove as the content of colonized knowledge. In the end, this will only remain a
paradox for as long as the modern norms of thought and action form the basis for
knowledge allegiances, which can only be made clear once a program is developed
with a clear sense of simultaneous decolonization and rejuvenation in view.

Yusef Progler (yusefustad@hotmail.com) is a professor, teacher, and writer of

culture, politics, and education. He is manager of the Multiversity Group
(groups.msn.com/multiversity),
co-creator
of
the
Multi-world
Network
(www.multiworld.com), and editor of the Radical Essentials Pamphlet Series
(www.citizensint.org).

Moving beyond western theories of

education?
J A Progler
At a recent workshop for Arab Muslim school teachers, a professor of education spoke on the
theories learning with particular reference to Dewey, Kohlberg and Vygotsky. Of Arab/Muslim
background, the professor received his PhD from an American university and now teaches at a
university in an Arab country which has begun to seek collaborations with its local public and
private schools.
The professor lectured on other topics as well: the effective teacher, verbal and non verbal
communication; instructional technologies; instructional groupings, seating arrangements, large
and small group and individual work; teaching methods, objectives and planning, simulations,
role playing, problem solving; classroom management and discipline; testing and assessment,
performance and portfolio based assessment; professional growth, reflective teaching, active
research. The teachers dutifully took notes and asked questions drawn from their own
experiences teaching various subjects to a wide range of local children.
A fairly representative sample of contemporary American thinking on liberal education, these
topics would typically be spread out over an entire semester course on the foundations of
education, with a bit more depth and some assigned readings. But the gist would be the same.
Contemporary educational theory treats most problems as either technical or personal. It borrows
from psychology especially Skinner, Pavlov, Piaget, and Freud in its tendency to objectify
students in a way similar to how western medicine treats patients.
To this foundation, recent educational thinking has added a host of notions on human
development drawn from humanistic philosophy. While no doubt offered with honesty and good
intentions, the usual contradictions that one finds in such discussions were present in the
professor's presentation; e.g., talking about `critical thinking' without encouraging or practising
it, or emphasizing `constructivist learning' or `cooperative learning' in a strictly didactic format.
It seems that if professors of education want to be taken seriously with all of these theories some
of which are meaningful and useful they ought to use them in practice in their own seminars and
workshops.
However, a more severe omission from such standardized presentations is that they lack any
social or cultural awareness. There seems to be a general belief that theories are not born of any
particular social setting and are applicable to any setting, or that the `objective sciences' (i.e.,
social sciences like psychology or sociology, or even to some extent the `hard sciences' like
biology and physics) are neutral, universal, and value free

This is not the place to unpack these problems; suffice to say that there is vast literature which
clearly suggests that the various sciences are just as socially constructed and culture bound as
anything else, and therefore learning them is a form of socialization and enculturation.
Educational theorists often ignore this, and in a cross cultural setting such as teaching American
theories to Arab Muslim teachers, the problems become more acute and warrant careful and
extended study.
In order to help understand how western theories of education might or might not be applicable
to the daily workings of schools in Muslim communities, l have spent considerable time working
with administrators, teachers, and students in both American and Muslim contexts. One
consistent theme that emerges is a growing realization that schooling is a form of (implicit or
explicit) socialization. This is observable in American schools (i.e., the phenomenon of what
Native and African American educators call `internal colonization'), but it is intensified by the
multiple marginalities and cultural border crossings at work in the Muslim schools, and not
necessarily only those operating in non Muslim societies. One of the fundamental attributes of
this enculturation is in regard to the meaning, role, and purpose of education itself.
In the west, and in America particularly, there is a very broad definition of education, especially
that which is undertaken in a formal, institutional setting. Contemporary American education is
rooted in Graeco Roman, Judeo Christian, scientific humanist norms. Originally founded to
educate Protestant ministers and the ruling elite of colonial America, Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton soon emerged as the epitome institutions of a liberal education whose norms are
embedded to this day from kindergarten to advanced graduate study. To be considered `educated'
in such a system, one is assumed to have taken an array of courses in the humanities, arts, and
sciences.
But American education does not end here. There has always been tension between liberal and
vocational education, and, partly in response to this tension, vocational schools have proliferated
during the late 20th century. Some of this is also evident when secondary schools and colleges
track students into vocational courses with various. Professional certificates, as is general
practice in many European educational systems.
In America, the tracking is not so rigid, but the tensions are no less acute. Some American
schools expand even beyond the liberal and vocational norms, offering instruction in athletics or
in something as basic as learning to drive a car. Oddly, and despite its roots in the Protestant
mission, most modem schooling is almost entirely secular.
The above mentioned theories of education developed to serve this western educational system,
and they embody all of its contradictions and assumptions. No matter how educators fine tune
them, in the end the theories of education are western theories that rely on a host of western
assumptions about human nature and how the world works. But before this corpus emerged at

the end of the Christian 19th century and into the 20th century, what guided teaching and learning
in the west?
More significantly, how have non-western peoples and societies engaged in teaching and
learning before western norms became universal norms? Or, more fundamentally, what does it
mean to be `educated' outside the norms of the modern western system?
It seems prudent, if not necessary, that Muslims step back and away for some time to evaluate
their own training in education-which includes careful assessment of their community needs and
aspirations-before importing wholesale an educational system from the west. At best, introducing
the western system is like laying a thin socio-cultural membrane over indigenous society and
norms, creating a sort of cultural schizophrenia. At worst, imposing the western system of
education builds a support mechanism for direct colonization, which has dogged non-western
peoples for two centuries.
Ignoring any consideration of these issues cannot be seen as simply remaining 'neutral' or
'objective.' Rather, in the present aggressive climate of American triumphalism, ignorance or
passivity amounts to self-degradation and indirect colonization.

NORMS AND ALLEGIANCES IN MUSLIM

EDUCATION
Yusef Progler
Even the most casual observers of current events will have noticed a tension between Western
civilization and Islam. This tension is often made explicit in American public discourse about
"Islamic fundamentalism" and a "clash of civilizations." Similarly, Muslim public discourse
often focuses on the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the American occupation of Iraq. But
careful observers may also notice that this tension contains within it an odd paradox. While many
Muslims are quick to denounce instances of direct aggression and duplicitous politics, more
subtle legacies of colonialism and imperialism receive less attention. This is apparent when one
examines forms of institutionalized colonization, such as education.
While Western education is extroverted, introducing the norms of modernity to all of its subjects
and engaging the worldviews of those subjects, Muslim education is introverted, introducing
Islam and its relevance in private life but without engaging many of the normative assumptions
and associations of Western modernity. Thus, Muslims learn Islamic values in a sort of isolation,
detaching themselves in many ways from the social, political, and economic machinations of the
Western neo-colonial agenda, and yet pledging allegiance to Western science and other aspects of
modernity as universal steps forward for humankind. Any struggle within this framework
becomes more about control of the normative trappings of modernity and less about evaluating
and re-assessing any allegiances to modernity. Both educational systems are normalizing Western
modernity, while compartmentalizing Islam as a cultural and religious artifact and presuming
that it has nothing important to say about many aspects of modernity. This tendency has been
further exacerbated with recent American-led efforts to restructure curricula in Islamic schools
and universities in the Muslim world, while encouraging its own brand of Islamic studies (for
strategic purposes) in the US and Europe. In any case, each party has embraced the other's
assumptions, creating the illusion that there are dichotomous struggles between "tradition and
modernity," "Islam and the West," "belief and disbelief," and a host of other binaries and
alterities. The purpose of this essay is to engage this paradoxical tension by discussing

allegiances to the norms of Western modernity in contemporary Muslim educational settings, by

way of a case study on modern Turkey, and then considering how some often neglected aspects
of the Islamic tradition might inform a critique of Western modernity and its normative modes of
education.
Contested Education in Modern Turkey
During the past decade, the Turkish government has attempted to implement a series of new
policies and restructuring programs aimed at Muslims in Turkish schools and universities. While
Muslim women were already forbidden to wear Islamic modest dress, or hijab, in selected
Turkish universities, new policies were set to extend that ban nationwide. In addition, semiautonomous religious schools came under tighter government control, in a wide ranging program
designed to prevent practicing Muslims, women in particular, from achieving the high level of
success they are known for in Turkey's educational system. Those university administrators not
in support of the proposed measures faced termination from their positions. The new proposal
broadened an earlier policy, enforced since the 1980s, in which Muslim women were banned
from wearing hijab in Istanbul University and at Dijla University in Diyarbakir, Eastern Turkey.
In some instances, after weeks of public protest and lawsuits, a Turkish court had ruled some of
the proposals unconstitutional, but implementing the ruling is more precarious and the future of
Muslim education remains uncertain.[1]
Education has been contested territory for most of modern Turkish history. After the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, General Mustafa Kemal ("Ataturk") implemented a series of official
policies to curb Islam and steer Turkey toward Western secularism and modernity. The polices
included changing the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Roman script, thus severing the 600 year
heritage of Ottoman Islamic literary history, and banning most forms of Muslim public practice,
especially those involving dress codes and the use of Arabic. Upon Ataturk's death in 1938, the
Turkish military became the enforcer of secular modernism in Turkey. Although the Ottoman
sultans were the first to introduce Western education into the Empire during the 19th century,
under Kemalism state schools and universities were pressed into service to teach secular Western
knowledge, strictly forbidding or severely circumscribing most vestiges of Turkey's Islamic
heritage and its knowledge base. There have been several waves of Islamic resurgence since
then, most notably during the presidency of Adnan Menderes in the 1950s, when the Arabic call
to prayer and other aspects of Muslim public life were restored, but secular educational policies
have remained stringent.[2]
During the 1960s, the Turkish government attempted to monitor a growing Islamic movement by
opening a network of state sponsored Muslim schools, the Imam Hatip Lisesi system, which
would teach officially sanctioned forms of Islamic theology and jurisprudence to a new
generation of Turkish Muslims. At the height of the Cold War, and perhaps in a bid join NATO,
the government also supported Muslim schools against leftist nationalism and communism.
Since then, however, the Imam Hatip schools have expanded to provide a wide-ranging

curriculum in a seven year, post-primary program of study that includes Arabic language and
secular Western subjects. In the 1980s, Turkish Muslim scholar and author Fethullah Gulen
returned from exile abroad and established a charitable foundation. The Fethullah Gulen Hoja
Foundation soon opened a series of private Islamic schools, universities, and student hostels
which have attracted an increasing number of Muslim students away from state secular
schooling, but which have also gained a reputation for political quietism. The Fethullah Gulen
and Imam Hatip schools both provide separate facilities for male and female students, allow
Islamic ritual practice, and encourage female students to wear hijab and men to wear beards.
They provide a supportive environment in which to study toward university degrees, offering
instruction in Islamic beliefs and practices along side of a relatively standard curriculum similar
to those found in most Turkish public schools, emphasizing Western knowledges. In recent years,
graduates of Imam Hatip and Fethullah Gulen schools have become top performing candidates
competing for Turkish university degrees.
Despite the academic success of their students, Imam Hatip schools are facing some difficult
decisions as a result of new government policies that are restructuring the time frame of
compulsory schooling. In place of the usual five years of compulsory public primary schooling,
after which students could opt to attend the seven year secondary program in Imam Hatip
schools instead of public secondary schools, the government will require eight years of
compulsory primary schooling for all students in the Turkish public school system. Because the
schools are government run, and their teachers and administrators officially appointed, Muslim
parents and teachers who wish to provide any sort of an Islamic education for their children will
struggle for a say in restructuring. The lengthened time frame for compulsory primary schooling
means that Imam Hatip schools have to reduce course offerings and limit their curriculum to
three or four years, since few students are able to study for seven years in secondary school after
eight years of primary schooling. As a result, it will be virtually impossible for Imam Hatip
schools to maintain their delicate balance between Islamic studies and secular Western academic
subjects in such a short period of time. They will have to reduce the curriculum to its barest
essentials, most likely focusing on the private aspects of Islamic practice in order to maintain
their identity and credibility as Islamic schools. The policy will reduce the possibility of Muslim
students continuing on to higher education, which requires a rigorously secular secondary
preparation.
Since education is one of the few roads leading to jobs in the public sphere, where secular
modernism is also strictly enforced, the new policies may further force Islam into the private
sphere. Government supported or otherwise, there is a general tendency in Muslim education to
study Islam in what amounts to oppositional isolation, while normalizing Western knowledge
publicly. This normalization involves validating and extending the assumptions and techniques
of Western modernity, especially with respect to science, politics, and economics, but also
includes applying to Islam the secular epistemological and hermeneutic methodologies of
Western rationalism. The latter tendency is evident, for example, in a recent book comparing

Islamic and Kantian ethics, the Muslim author of which finds Kantian ethics more suitable to the
modern world, without asking how that world came about. Other books recently books published
in Turkey and elsewhere attempt to prove the veracity of the Qur'an by subjecting it to the norms
of Western scientific inquiry without situating that inquiry.[3] What these instances indicate is
that, while the struggles will likely continue for the right to obtain an education in Turkey,
whether secular or religious, these struggles appear almost as a distraction, since there is little
discussion, public or private, on the kind of knowledge people are seeking through higher
education.
Muslims in Pursuit of "Higher Colonization"
Muslim students who ponder entering Turkish universities find themselves in a double bind. If
they wish to practice their Islam, they may have to compromise their education; if they wish to
pursue an education, they may have to compromise their Islam. The right to wear hijab in a
university is certainly an important issue, and Muslim women should not be punished by the
state for practicing their religion and expressing their identities, especially in predominantly
Muslim society such as in Turkey. But even when Muslim students are successful in gaining
access to the schooling they desire, the struggle for their identity does not end once they enter the
halls of higher education. While issues of exclusion based on dress are hotly contested, issues of
curriculum and methodology are rarely discussed on any side of the cultural divide. Universities
in Turkey, as in most other Muslim locales, are generally modeled on Western institutions of
higher education, in both form and content. The tacit assumption with respect to knowledge in
the Muslim world is that the West knows best.
The curriculum for an academic major in Education at Yildiz University in Istanbul illustrates
Muslim colonization by Western education. Muslim students planning to be teachers or
administrators begin with foundational courses, reading from the Greek classics, Platonic
idealism, Aristotelian dialectics, and the Socratic method. Most courses then leap forward, past
the Church, the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance, and resume with readings from Rousseau. The
European 18th and 19th century educational thinkers occupy a major part of the semester:
Pestalozzi's humanism, Froebel's kindergarten, the British Lancaster method, and the American
common school. But at the same time, this canonical survey of the great white men of Western
education is filtered and sifted according to official political preferences, so that while students
may also read some John Dewey, his work is given nowhere near the attention it gets in America.
This could be because Dewey's often cited discussion of "democracy and education" is
dangerous in a military dictatorship, or perhaps it is due to Dewey's recommendation, which he
made when the Kemalists invited him in the 1920s, that they not abolish the Arabic alphabet. In
any case, Dewey is more or less written off as a "liberal humanist" by an otherwise West-directed
educational establishment that might be termed "conservative" in America. Similarly, Paolo
Freire, the Brazilian educator and author "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," is popularly denounced
as a "leftist" or a "communist," which is the kiss of death for any epistemological association in a

state that is still recovering from its associations with NATO in the Cold War, and earlier strained
relations with the Soviet Union and Russia.
After these selected philosophical foundations, most students will move on to studies in Child
Psychology, another core course for Education majors, which also has some overlap for first year
Psychology students. Such courses often focus heavily on the work of Sigmund Freud, typically
followed by readings from Jung and Adler. After time surveying other founding fathers, Child
Psychology majors will then dwell at length on the work of Jean Piaget. At Istanbul University,
students will take interminable courses in Child Psychology with professors who themselves
studied with Piaget. Students at Yildiz University follow a rigorous course of study in behaviorist
and cognitivist theory, reading especially the work of Benjamin Bloom. As with Piaget, Bloom
has several disciples in Turkey, most notably Veysen Sonmez, whose works are now canonical.
Sonmez's students, in turn, are fine tuning Bloom's theories in their own research. A higher
degree in Education will progress along the same general trajectory, painstakingly learning
selected theories of education as developed in the West. Graduates from such programs teach
what they have learned to their own students, and the cycle of colonization by education
continues unabated.
Such a scheme is not limited to Turkey, and there are similar relationships to Western knowledge
in other Muslim locales. For example, in Palestine prior to the recent uprising I attended a
workshop for Arab Muslim school teachers in which a presentation was made be a Professor of
Education at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank who has his Ph.D. from an American
university and is now in local teacher education. The Professor lectured on the following topics:
theories of learning (Dewey, Kohlberg, Vygotsky), the effective teacher, verbal and non-verbal
communication, instructional technologies, instructional groupings, seating arrangements, large
and small group and individual work, teaching methods, objectives and planning, simulations,
role playing, problem solving, classroom management and discipline, testing and assessment,
performance and portfolio based assessment, professional growth, reflective teaching, and active
research. The teachers dutifully took notes on this whirlwind tour of Euro-American educational
knowledge, and asked questions drawn from their own experiences in teaching various academic
subjects to a wide range of local children. Though a bit more progressive than Turkey, the
Palestinian discourse on education remains a fairly representative sample of contemporary
European and American thinking on education. I was particularly surprised by the unquestioned
reproduction of the dominant Western educational discourse, much of which is about delivery
systems and which treats problems as either technical or personal. Although most of the students
and teachers were Muslims, the focus was almost entirely on Western knowledge with no
consideration of Islamic approaches to teaching and learning. And, as in Turkey, secular
modernism defines the form and content of schooling. Such circumstances indicate that despite
the recent outrage at American meddling in Muslim education, the tendency to teach Western
knowledge at the expense of Islam was prevalent long before recent demands for reform.

One can also find evidence of this paradoxical tension between Western policies and Western
knowledge in Muslim minority situations. For instance, the Muslims of South Africa, who were
always clear in their denunciation of racism and apartheid, joined the conversation on
educational reform for a post-apartheid state. By way of participating in various national
committees, South African Muslim educationists succeeded in convincing policy makers that
economics courses for high school students ought to include the Islamic perspectives on
economics, alongside those of the West. However, the celebration of this achievement proved to
be short-lived. Soon there after, a South African gay and lesbian coalition asked the same
committee to include gay and lesbian lifestyles and families in the public school curriculum.
Appalled by what they saw as an affront to their moral norms, Muslims members considered
resigning from the committee, and began looking into private schools, ironically joining the
conservative Christian movement in South Africa. But while their resistance to personal
immorality was active, there was little discussion on more fundamental questions about the
guiding principals of Western education. Things like Western science and technology with
respect to curricular content, or "outcomes based learning" and "authentic assessment" with
respect to method, which were being introduced by the American and Australian consultants,
were left unquestioned. In the same way, Muslim schools in other minority settings, such as
those in Europe and the United States, face similar situations. In most cases, Western knowledge
and methodology are taken as the universal norm, irrespective of being in a minority or a
majority setting.[4]
Muslim Education and the Problem of "White Studies"
A course of study in virtually any academic discipline at most Muslim universities will likely
follow a trajectory similar to that identified above, by first identifying the great white men of
each field and then drilling their theories and practices as universal holy writ, while ignoring or
undermining all forms of indigenous knowledge. Thus, in Biology, genetics reigns supreme,
supplanting cell biology after Western scientists isolated the double helix, while completely
ignoring Islamic biological knowledge. Physics dwells on Isaac Newton's model, with a taste of
Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics for the adventurous, but neglecting the preNewtonian physics that enabled Muslim architects to build magnificent structures. The staple of
any Math major is calculus, but with indigenous knowledge like the Muslim roots of algebra
carefully filtered through the Cartesian worldview. Philosophy majors run the gamut of Western
thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Sartre, but with little more than a passing
wave to the great Muslim philosophers like Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Mulla Sadra. Western
Medicine is based on a mechanistic Cartesian model, with mastery of surgical and
pharmaceutical technique being the ultimate goal, while the humoral medicine practiced by
pioneering Muslim physicians such as Ibn Sina is undermined or even ridiculed. Western
Chemistry strips away the self-edifying and spiritual aspects of its Muslim forebear, alchemy.
Sociology often begins with the work of Durkheim, while Weber is seeing a revival, but Ibn
Khaldun receives little more than a historical footnote. Muslims studying Economics will learn
all about Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, and perhaps even Marx, before delving into

Milton Friedman, neo-liberalism, and the techniques of transnational capitalism, but rarely will
any course of study consider the economic implications of the Islamic ban on usury. In short,
from History and Political Science to Agriculture Health Care, Western knowledge is the only
knowledge. Native American scholar Ward Churchill aptly dubbed this complex of Western
thought and practice "White Studies."[5] Among other things, pursuing an education in White
Studies means adhering to a set of norms and practices largely developed with the emergence of
Western modernity. How this knowledge ended up being taken for granted in the Muslim world
is an interesting story that needs to be told, though that is beyond the scope of this essay.
For now, it will be instructive to look more carefully at this monolithic entity and consider the
institutional structure of White Studies, which has allowed modern higher education to normalize
Western knowledge. Higher education relies on rigid compartmentalization and
departmentalization of knowledge, developed in its present form during the 19th century and
further modified during the Cold War. Supposedly rooted in Western civilization by way of the
Seven Greek Sciences, the Roman Quadrivium, and the Enlightenment's Useful Arts, White
Studies as presently configured in most modern universities assumes that the best way to control
thought is to make sure that no one ever sees the big picture, how the Useful Arts fit together,
how the Quadrivium meshes with the Seven Sciences, and so forth. Compartmentalization was
perfected during the Manhattan Project, under the direction of General Leslie R. Groves, who
later admitted that his main achievement was to compartmentalize, and thus control, the
scientific research for the atomic bomb.[6] During the Cold War, most universities adopted his
tactic. This corresponded with the so-called "independence" of most modern nation states, many
leaders of which eagerly adopted the compartmentalized discourse of White Studies as their
normative mode of thought and action. In such a system, non-Western knowledges are
compartmentalized, and soon marginalized.
Graduates with a degree in a White Studies discipline often use their limited sense of
empowerment to reproduce Western modernity, sometimes finding solace in the pious fraud that
Western knowledge is the sum total of human knowledge. The resulting pathological condition,
often referred to as being "educated," means that one takes Western science as the arbiter of
truth, even in matters of religion. It means that unlimited technological progress and economic
growth are the keys to human happiness. It means that quantity is more important than quality
and that technique and efficiency must govern all aspects of a desacralized life. Muslims seeking
guidance and prosperity through White Studies may find that the best they can attain is to
practice Islam in private and let the West do the rest in public.
Norms and Allegiances in Islam and the West
The above discussion suggests that, despite the socio-political tensions between Islam and the
West, there is an unquestioned allegiance on the part of Muslims to the normative modes of
thought and action associated with Western modernity. Much of this is not limited to Muslim
societies, and one could likely find similar allegiances to Western norms throughout the Third

World. Since partially emerging from direct colonialism, most national discussions on education
have been concerned with gaining empowerment within the modernist world system, with a
general lack of any social or cultural awareness that modernity is peculiar, and that Western
knowledge is situated in Western culture and society.[7] But this is only part of the problem.
Along with curricular and methodological issues relating to Western modernity, significant
political implications emerge when one considers Western education as an interconnected series
of norms and allegiances. In other words, the ongoing desire of Third World students to get
educated in Western universities perpetuates colonization in several ways.
This form of colonization through education was illustrated during a period of unrest in the
Philippines in the late 1980s, when it appeared as if nationalist rebels might topple the Americanbacked regime of Corazon Aquino. American corporations and military and political officials had
a strong stake in maintaining the status quo in the Philippines, if not in the persona of Aquino,
then certainly in the socio-economic system she policed for them. The Western media focused on
then-Vice President Dan Quayle's management of the crisis (he was left in charge, as President
Bush was attending a summit meeting with Gorbachev), with most news agencies reporting his
decision to intimidate rebel-held installations with US jets. But what was not well-reported,
perhaps because it offers a rare glimpse into the role of education in Western political strategy, is
that Quayle also ordered a mobilization of university graduates. Word went out to American
institutions of higher education to provide lists of recent graduates who were Philippine
nationals. Though details were sketchy, the thinking seems to have been that someone
completing a program of higher education in an American university would have allegiance to a
system of thought and action that would not pose any real threat to Western interests. In the end,
Aquino remained in power for a few more years, but the mobilization of American university
graduates has lessons for Third World peoples, including Muslims, especially those who are
currently pursuing or considering an education in the West.[8]
The previous example highlights the question of norms and allegiances in education, and
suggests how Western education creates allegiance to the norms of modernity, but we also need
to consider how Islamic civilization establishes its own norms and allegiances. Allegiance to the
norms of Islam provides the basis for a workable social, political, and economic system.
According to the Islamic understanding of the evolution of religions, Prophet Muhammad, upon
whom be peace, re-established original monotheism, the primordial religion of humanity, after it
had been repeatedly corrupted by worldly desires and human forgetfulness in other religious
communities. The Qur'an itself challenges those people who cling to these corrupted religions
and who dispute the veracity of the renewed message: "This is the truth from your Lord, so be
not of the disputers. But whoever disputes with you in this matter after what has come to you of
knowledge, then say, Come let us call our sons and your sons and our women and your women
and our near people and your near people, then let us be earnest in prayer, and pray for the curse
of Allah on the liars" (3:61).[9] To generations of commentators, this was a test of truthfulness
after all rational arguments had been exhausted. The disputers, generally taken to be Christians,

backed out of the challenge, kept and developed their own system, and, to make a very long story
short, the resulting Western system is on the verge of ruling the world today, and it is demanding
from Muslims, and other peoples worldwide, allegiance to its system of norms, which by Islamic
standards are corrupted.[10] However, as the Qur'an reminds Muslims: "The Christians and the
Jews will not be pleased with you, until you follow their religion. So say: Surely Allah's
guidance is the true guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that has come
to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper" (2:120). Allegiance and
guardianship are key concepts for our purposes here, and their place in the Islamic tradition is
worth further consideration.
The Qur'an states that Allah is the Ultimate Guardian over Muslims, and that they are not to take
Christians, Jews or disbelievers as their guardians: "O you who believe! Do not to take the Jews
and Christians as your guardians, for some of them are guardians to others of them. And whoever
amongst you takes them as a guardian, then surely you will become one of them, for Allah surely
does not guide the unjust" (5:51), and "O you who believe! Do not take the disbelievers for
guardians instead of the believers. Do you desire that you should give to Allah a manifest proof
against yourselves?" (4:144). In the Islamic worldview, acknowledgment or denial of these basic
tenets becomes a yardstick for measuring true faith in the Divine purpose for humanity and
whether or not one is faithful to the Divine Trust. The Qur'an warns of corruption and oppression
for those who do not make allegiance to Allah as the Ultimate Guardian, and, in turn, to the
Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, and a series of "rightly guided" or "infallible"
believers as their temporal guardians. The purpose of this series of allegiances is to establish an
Islamic social and political order based on the Qur'anic normative injunction of enjoining the
good and forbidding the evil.
Acknowledging the Islamic system of norms and allegiances can create conflicts of interest for
those whose allegiances are intertwined with the currently dominant Western system. For
Muslims, knowledge and guidance derive ultimately from a Divine source, not earthly desires or
corrupted texts. To know Islam is to express allegiance to its set of norms, but this allegiance
forms a dilemma when those norms become deviant vis--vis a corrupted yet dominant set of
norms. And this is not just a theoretical presumption, because the dominating Western normative
system threatens to subvert or destroy what it sees as deviant sets of norms in order to maintain
supremacy for its own corrupted set of norms. In the Western system, which based on falsehood
and corruption as defined by the Islamic tradition, allegiance to a Divine set of norms may come
only at great sacrifice, certainly in terms of life and livelihood, but also in terms of faith and
practice of one's religion to the fullest extent of its ascribed potential.
Education is an important site for exploring the interplay between conflicting sets of norms and
allegiances. This is especially evident if one views education as a process of becoming, rather
than as a body of knowledge with certificates and degrees, or as a preparation for a profession or
livelihood. When a person seeks an education, that person is in a sense making a commitment to

become something, or someone, different than when they started. Depending upon how much the
education system differs from one's own system in terms of norms, this process of becoming can
be quite profound. Entering into such an arrangement means that the person who exits the other
end will be quite a different person, with various degrees of allegiance to the particular set of
norms adhered to and promoted by the system from which they sought an education. Education
is also a two way process. On the surface, a student seeks and obtains knowledge, training and
certification from a particular educational institution. A student also contributes to an
institutional system in obvious ways, such as through paying tuition and making donations as an
alumnus. But, more subtly, students validate an institution by seeking its form of education over
the forms offered by other institutions. Students may also contribute by way of securing awards,
patents or grants for their alma mater, thus bringing heightened prestige for the institution and
further validating its normative system. The same can be said of publishing one's works with
various Western university sponsored academic journals and publishers. This is particularly
important in cross-cultural situations, where students from one cultural background can
contribute to the intellectual validity and prestige of educational institutions in a different cultural
setting, while at the same time marginalizing those of the own cultural background.
Education, therefore, takes place within a complex system of intersecting norms and allegiances.
First, there is the education of the self. To be a Muslim means to know Islam as a normative
system (and, as suggested above, this in itself is not easy). To be considered as an educated
person in an Islamic system means first and foremost to have allegiance to its norms and to make
every effort to put them into practice. Next, there are implications for any particular local
community of Muslims, who are continuing the norms of Islam along with their own language
and cultural practices. Then there are implications for Muslims worldwide (what Muslims call
the ummah, or global Islamic nation), in terms of making cultural, political, social and economic
connections with other communities, developing over the years into a broad based Islamic
movement. Finally, there are implications for humanity in general, part of which involves
identifying its problems and hindrances to establishing an ethically just order. Unjust normative
systems and their patterns of allegiance feed back into the development of self, community,
ummah and humanity. The potential for corruption or co-optation can enter the cycle at any point
by way of education, and threaten to misguide Muslims on any or all fronts. Therefore, the
process of education itself needs careful study and deep reflection. It cannot be entered into
hastily and uncritically. What one is talking about is joining a system of norms and allegiances
that will have potentially profound repercussions for generations to come. This affects not only
the practice of one's religion, but also virtually every other aspect of life, ranging from
agriculture and architecture to medicine and child rearing. Western civilization has created a
network of allegiances to its normative system of thought and action, and this network operates
by way of education and the accompanying temporal and temporary rewards. Any true
movement toward liberation and autonomy, especially one which claims to have allegiance to
Divine norms, will have to rethink the meaning and purpose of the forms of education it values
and pursues.

An Islamic Perspective on the Quest for Knowledge

No matter how educators fine-tune theories of knowledge and education, in the end they are
Western theories that rely on a host of Western assumptions about the meaning and purpose of
education, and about human nature and how the world works. But before this corpus emerged at
the end of the 19th Christian century and into the 20th century, what guided teaching and
learning in the West? More broadly, how have non-Western peoples and societies engaged in
teaching and learning before Western norms became universal norms? Or, more fundamentally,
what does it mean to be "educated" outside the norms of the modern Western educational
system? Muslims are beginning to step back and evaluate their own training and education which includes careful assessment of community needs and aspirations - before importing part
and parcel an educational system from the West. At best, introducing the Western system is like
laying a thin socio-cultural membrane over indigenous society and norms, creating a sort of
cultural schizophrenia. At worst, imposing the Western system of education builds a support
mechanism for direct colonization, which has dogged non-Western peoples for several centuries.
Ignoring any consideration of these issues cannot be seen as simply remaining "neutral" or
"objective." Rather, in the present climate of dogmatic American triumphalism, ignorance or
passivity amounts to self-degradation and indirect colonization. It is for this reason that
alternative systems of norms and allegiance become worthy of our study, and while this has
implications for any other cultures and societies concerned with its own knowledge and learning,
for the purposes of this essay I will focus on Islam.
The Islamic tradition encourages all Muslims to seek knowledge. In a series of celebrated
sayings, or hadith, the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, is reported to have said "seek
knowledge even in China," "seek knowledge continuously," "seeking knowledge is incumbent
upon all Muslims, men and women."[11] While Muslims have heeded his call for centuries,
recent developments in Western civilization are posing new challenges to seekers of knowledge.
Western civilization is rushing headlong into a commodity driven and individualistic
"information age" with little sense of the difference between information and knowledge, and
with few criteria other than advertising and desire to help make distinctions. In order not to be
sucked into the information whirlpool, some selection criteria seem necessary. To illustrate, visit
any large on-line bookstore or search engine, and type in a key phrase, like "child rearing."
Thousands book titles and web pages will appear on the computer screen. Even though, in terms
of time and money, it would be virtually impossible for any seekers of knowledge to avail them
selves of what is contained in all of those books and web pages. But someone might try to sit
down and read as many of those books and pages as they could, if they found some way that they
didn't have to work or sleep, or do anything else, and just read them for the rest of their lives, and
they will have sought knowledge. But will they then be knowledgeable?
In answering such questions, with respect to the above hadith on seeking knowledge, one
problem arises in translation of the Arabic word 'ilm, which is rendered above as "knowledge,"
and which is also often rendered as "science." But if 'ilm is knowledge, then what is the word for

"information" in hadith? Do the hadith and other traditional sources that speak of seeking
knowledge also apply to seeking information? Does the Islamic tradition possess the resources
for making meaningful distinctions? In Muslim intellectual history, there is another hadith from
the Prophet that can shine light on such questions. Muslim scholars through the ages have
commented upon this hadith, ranging from Imam Ghazali (d. 1111 CE) to Mulla Sadra (d. 1640
CE), and, more recently, Imam Khomeini. The wisdom of this hadith has informed Muslim
seekers of knowledge for centuries, although less so among Western educated technocrats in the
colonial and post-colonial periods. In the Arabic, the hadith is quite eloquent, a sure sign of its
authenticity to historians of the Islamic tradition. In English rendition, it is as follows:
The Messenger of Allah, may Allah's benedictions be upon him, once entered the mosque where
there was a group of people surrounding a man. "Who is that?" inquired the Prophet, upon whom
be peace. He was told, "He is a very learned man." "What is a very learned man?" asked the
Prophet, upon whom be peace. They told him, "He is the most learned of men regarding Arab
genealogies, past episodes, the pre-Islamic days of ignorance, and Arabic poetry." The Prophet,
upon whom be peace, said, "That is knowledge whose ignorance does not harm nor is its
possession of any benefit to one." Then the Prophet, may Allah's benedictions be upon him,
declared, "Verily knowledge ('ilm) consists of these three: the firm sign, the just duty, and the
established practice. All else is superfluous." [12]
Scholars will produce commentaries on this hadith, and they will do speculative research to help
determine what is meant by "firm sign, just duty, and established practice." But in a general
sense, what the hadith says is that Muslims ought to classify and prioritize the knowledge they
seek. This seems to be in full recognition of the mortality of the human being, who only has a
certain amount of time in this world. One can sit an entire lifetime in front of a computer or in a
library or bookstore, reading all those books on child rearing, for example, and never do anything
else, seeking that knowledge (or is it information?). But without some criteria to classify that
knowledge, and thus give it meaning, this effort could be construed as wasting one's time. Or, at
best, the seeker of knowledge could be spending a lifetime on something that is superfluous, an
extra, a nicety, at the expense of time that could be spent on pursuits that are more important and
meaningful, as implied by the hadith. However, when modern Muslims hear this hadith for the
first time, many of them will tend to look into it in terms of what is forbidden and what is
permitted (haram and halal, in Islamic terminology). They might want the quick and easy
prescriptions, asking, "Well, does that mean that some knowledge is haram, and some knowledge
halal? Then which is which?" And they cannot get out of the dichotomy between haram and
halal. But the hadith is not really about what is halal and haram in seeking knowledge. It is about
what is in between, on a sort of sliding scale. It is about classifying and prioritizing the time and
effort spent on seeking knowledge. To put it as simply as possible, this Prophetic hadith suggests
that some knowledge is more important than other knowledge, and that there are priorities.
Knowledge, Power and Wealth

During the period of colonialism and neo-colonialism, Muslims have given over a key part of
their lives to the West: the ability to classify and prioritize the seeking of knowledge as outlined
in the above hadith, and as put into practice by Muslims prior to colonial disruption. Now, the
West decides what is important knowledge, and what is not. This is done to suit the beliefs and
goals of Western civilization. An elaborate system of certificates and degrees, which act like so
many rewards and punishments, has assured that the Western system of knowledge is taken as
the universal system. But this is a fallacy, one of the hoaxes perpetrated upon Muslims by
Western civilization, as revealed by reflection on the above hadith. There are other hadith in the
Islamic tradition that can also shine light on certain aspects of modern schooling and education,
but we need to first look a little closer at some foundational metaphors of modernity.
As Mulla Sadra was writing his commentary on the Prophetic hadith cited above, the European
philosopher and would-be statesman Francis Bacon uttered the infamous words "knowledge is
power." Bacon is often credited as the "father of modern science," yet his celebrated dictum is
rarely understood in the context he intended. Bacon believed that "human knowledge and human
power meet as one" so that nature can be "forced out of her natural state and squeezed and
molded" in order to "establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the
universe." In addition to defining it as such, Bacon insisted that this knowledge of power over
nature remain the exclusive trust of an elite corps, later to be known as "scientists," who must
"take an oath of secrecy for the concealing of that which we think fit to keep secret."[13] While
this way of thinking has inspired many in the modern West, from an Islamic perspective there are
grave errors in Bacon's thinking. Since only Allah has dominion over the universe, Muslims
ought to see the Satanic flaw in the Baconian worldview, in its insistence that human beings use
knowledge to secretly extend "dominion of the human race over the universe." Nevertheless, this
flaw has not stopped Western civilization from forging itself upon Bacon's dictum. Bacon's
paradigm of thought and action, largely protected by a conspiracy of denial and silence, has
fueled the domination of Western civilization for nearly four centuries. However, while
knowledge was indeed a form of power, it was only for those who already had access to power.
[14] The Baconian vision enabled the West to establish a stranglehold on nature, wringing from it
the minerals and other resources to fuel its civilization at the expense of the rest of the world.
Today, this legacy means that barely 20% of the world's population consumes over 80% of all
natural resources. Americans are on the vanguard of the Baconian vision, with their meager 5%
of world population consuming a full one third of all natural resources worldwide. And
compared to the world averages of consumption, Americans use over three times the arable land,
five times the energy resources, three times the fresh water, and over seven times the paper, to
name only a few areas of consumption.[15]
"Knowledge is power" has served the Western world elite over the centuries, and some of the
most brutal and protracted modern wars have been fought to protect the bitter fruits of its
exclusivity. But this just makes it all the more difficult to understand how it has come to pass that
Bacon's dictum is today splattered all over the global mental environment. From internet

commercials to school logos, in advertising and entertainment, the slogan "knowledge is power"
has now become commonplace and is repeated on the tips of people's tongues from all walks of
life. Bacon's dictum is no longer a secret. In fact, the corporate media now encourages everyone
to buy the latest computer technology or pay for high priced schooling precisely because
"knowledge is power." It is clear that Bacon and his successors knew that one of the real keys to
knowledge as power lie in the exclusivity of that knowledge. So how is it that the West now
wants everyone to know its secret? The answer may very well be that "knowledge is power" is
no longer the driving force behind Western civilization, so it is no longer necessary to keep it
secret. While the West certainly still enjoys, and jealously guards, the benefits of implementing
four centuries of the Baconian dictum, it is no longer useful or even relevant in and of itself,
because a new dictum is dethroning "knowledge is power." In Bacon's day, the Church and
feudal establishment were the benefactors and beneficiaries of the "knowledge is power"
apparatus. Today's universities and corporations have taken over that role, so one can find
evidence of the new dictum by looking into the corporate boardrooms and elite educational
establishments.
"Knowledge is wealth" is replacing "knowledge is power" as the generative force behind Western
civilization. But, somewhat ironically, the "information age" allows for clues of the new dictum
to be discovered if one knows where to look. For instance, the National Center on Education and
the Economy (NCEE), a Washington DC think-tank funded by big business and the Carnegie and
other large foundations, has taken a leading role in school reform in the US. The NCEE mission
statement reads: "Knowledge - and the capacity to put knowledge to good use - is now the only
dependable source of wealth all over the world. The people, organizations and nations that
succeed will be those that make the most of the human desire and capacity for never-ending
learning."[16] What is carried over from Bacon's day, though not as successfully, is the necessity
for secrecy, or for some other way of assuring that, just as knowledge was power only for the
powerful, knowledge will be wealth only for the wealthy. For now, what we have here is a faint
glimpse at the blueprint for the new world order of globalized corporate power emanating from
Western based institutions and fueled by Western science. Building on its exclusive domination
over the fruits of the Baconian dictum, the West is now moving into the realm of knowledge and
intellect. But think of what this means. While the results of four centuries of the Baconian order
are seen in an increasingly strained natural environment, the West's habit of consumption, its
venerated "way of life," is putting an even more terrible burden on global ecosystems, with many
now at the point of collapse. Meanwhile, the old and the new dictums of the West are intertwined
with issues of "intellectual property rights" in the context of food, botany and genetics. If the
Baconian dictum of the past means the environmental inequity and destruction of today, then it is
not too far a leap to see that the new dictum of today may be the "mental" inequity and
destruction of tomorrow.[17]
Knowledge and Wealth in the Islamic Tradition

Reconfiguring knowledge as "the only dependable source of wealth all over the world" has many
disastrous implications, among them being the specter of patenting various forms of life,
including plants and seeds, and even genes. This is especially so for people who will be subjects
of the new knowledge order. But one advantage of knowing this now is that it may enable some
kind of preemptive measures to disallow the West from making the crucial transition from
imperial control over natural resources to imperial control over natural and mental resources.
Many modern Muslims, especially those cleared by the Western political investment community
and who wield some limited power over their own peoples, have largely bought into the
normative worldview based on the Baconian dictum of knowledge as power, a tendency they
share with their nationalist and communist rivals and predecessors. This allegiance to Western
norms has produced mixed results, in terms of economic and political self-determination, but
most modern Muslims have little sense of how it contributes to environmental destruction.
Therefore, it may be all the more necessary for them to think carefully about the emerging
dictum. What does the Islamic tradition say about the relationship between knowledge and
wealth? Is it possible to develop an Islamic alternative before the new Western paradigm shift is
complete, and before its mechanisms and rewards are too hard to resist?
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, once declared to his companions: "There are two
kinds of greedy people who cannot be satisfied: the seeker of knowledge ('ilm) and the seeker of
this world (dunya). While the seeker of knowledge receives an increase in Allah's pleasures, the
seeker of this world delves deeply into tyranny."[18] If we accept, as the Qur'an suggests, that
wealth is one of the trappings of the dunya, then the wisdom of this hadith becomes more
apparent the more one spends time in reflection. In one sense, the hadith suggests that knowledge
and wealth are separate, yet subtly linked, in the Islamic worldview. But how are they linked?
Does the Islamic tradition support the emerging vision of knowledge as wealth? Aren't there any
alternative visions? While Muslims have in their intellectual tradition ways to decide upon some
set of criteria to discern knowledge from information, or to determine what is knowledge and
what is superfluous, as discussed above, their traditions also provide some criteria grounded in
Islam for making distinctions between knowledge and wealth, and the subtle interplay therein.
While it is well beyond the present scope to offer an exhaustive account of all the Islamic
traditions on these matters, it is possible to point the way in a few directions, from history and
tradition.
The Prophetic recognition cited above, that the seekers of knowledge and the dunya are
insatiable and that the latter will lead to tyranny, was born out on several notable occasions in
early Islamic history. It is widely accepted among Muslims that the heir to the Prophet's
knowledge and wisdom was Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's son-in-law and the youngest person
to accept Islam, who is also remembered as one of the "rightly guided" political successors of the
Prophet and the first imam. When Imam Ali became the leader of the Muslims, he faced a
challenge in the emergence of dynastic rule within the Umayyad family. The Imam had firsthand experience with the relationship between knowledge and wealth, and this became more

acute after his death as dynastic rule solidified under the Abbasids.[19] During that period, the
great Muslim scholars and imams, like Ja'far Sadiq, Abu Hanifah and Ibn Hanbal, languished in
prisons because they exhorted people to knowledge - as defined by the Prophet - while the
dynastic regimes exhorted people to wealth and superfluity. Imam Ali's reign lies at the
crossroads of this shift, so his deeds and sayings are quite instructive for our purposes. On one
occasion, he is recorded as having said to his companion Kumayl:
O Kumayl! Knowledge is better than wealth sevenfold. First, knowledge is the heritage of the
prophets, while wealth is the heritage of the pharaohs. Second, wealth decreases by spending,
while knowledge multiplies. Third, wealth is in need of protection, while knowledge protects
those who have it. Fourth, knowledge enters into the burial cloth, while wealth stays behind.
Fifth, wealth happens to disbelievers and believers alike, whereas knowledge does not happen
except to the believers especially. Sixth, everyone is in need of knowledge in matters of religion,
whereas no one needs the owner of wealth. Seventh, knowledge empowers humankind to pass
within the straight path, whereas wealth blocks it.[20]
This tradition makes a strong case that knowledge is not wealth. In fact, wealth is a sort of
dwindling, and even corrupting, burden, while knowledge is a growing, and at times regenerative
ease. It also suggests that knowledge and wealth be kept separate. With the Baconian dictum
increasingly exposed as the spinner of inequality, greed and destruction in terms of the
environmental health of humanity, and with "knowledge is wealth" potentially being wielded by
the same powers, the mental as well as the environmental health of the planet and its inhabitants
may depend on the abilities of Muslims and other non-Western peoples to mine their own
traditions and try to configure another way, based on deeply-rooted teachings like the ones cited
here. This alternative way would have to first problematize the relationships between knowledge,
power and wealth, by forming a grounded critique within which may lie a regenerative vision.
Avoiding a Defective Education
In the West, it is entirely possible for someone to complete a course of study in higher education,
but to graduate as an irresponsible liar and a greedy miser. Worse yet, from the Muslim
perspective, a Western graduate could receive high honors and yet be an apostate, atheist or
disbeliever, or even a Satanist. Though they might be able to function as bankers, corporate
executives, or politicians in the Western modernist system, to Muslims such educational
outcomes would indicate that either the student has failed miserably, or that the educational
system itself is dysfunctional. Along these lines, there are two other famous teachings of Imam
Ali, both of which suggest what the outcomes of education ought to look like, and what they
ought not to look like. When asked by one of his companions about how to recognize a
knowledgeable person, or what we might understand as some one who is well educated, the
Imam replied:

To those who are seekers of knowledge, knowledge has many merits. Its head is humility, its eye
is freedom from envy, its ear is understanding, its tongue is truthfulness, it memory is research,
its heart is good intention, its intellect is knowledge of things and matters, its hand is
compassion, its foot is visiting the learned, its resolution is integrity, its wisdom is piety, its
abode is salvation, its helmsman is well-being, is mount is faithfulness, its weapon is softness of
speech, its sword is satisfaction, its bow is tolerance, its army is discussion with the learned, its
wealth are refined manners, its stock is abstinence from sins, it provision for journey is virtue, its
drinking water is gentleness, its guide is Divine guidance, and its companion is the love of the
spiritual elect.[21]
Conversely, another teaching from the Imam, which also problematizes the possible outcomes of
the dictum "knowledge is wealth," provides clues as to the undesirable results for someone who
has pursued the wrong course:
The people of this world (dunya) are excessive in eating, laughing, sleeping and anger. They find
little satisfaction and do not apologize to whomever they offend, nor do they accept apologies
from whoever has offended them. They are lazy in their obedience but courageous in their
disobedience. They are not responsible for their inner wants and desires. They are of little
advantage to anyone, yet they are excessive in their speech. They have no piety or fear, and show
great enthusiasm in consuming. The people of this world are not thankful for their prosperity, nor
are they patient in distress. They praise themselves about that which they do not deserve, and
speak often about that which they desire. They expose other people's shortcomings but conceal
their positive attributes, and they are not modest to those whom they meet.[22]
Therefore, in developing criteria for an Islamic perspective on education, those who do not
exhibit the attributes of a "seeker of knowledge," as defined in Imam Ali's hadith above, or who
cannot discern knowledge from superfluity, as defined in the previously cited Prophetic hadith,
are not likely to be considered as knowledgeable or well-educated people. Similarly, those who
exhibit the attributes of "people of the dunya" can also be understood as having been miseducated. In the first instance, the problem is the absence of manners, meaning and relevance,
and in the second it is the presence of selfish and destructive behavior. To those rooted in the
worldview of Islam, there is a profound schizophrenia in the West, which promotes the highest
forms of intellectual achievement side by side with the basest and most selfish forms of frivolity,
inequity and injustice. Forming a critique of Western education on this basis also contains within
it suggestions for an alternative vision. Education in the Islamic context folds back over the
Prophetic hadith cited above, in which three forms of knowledge take precedence over others. If
one follows this reasoning, it becomes clear that Islamic education, with the Prophet's definition
of knowledge at its core, is about learning three kinds of proper relationships: between the
human being and the Divine, between different groups of human beings, and between human
beings and the universe (that is, the environment, or the rest of Allah's creation). This includes a
formative and consistent emphasis on piety, ethics, humility and responsibility, which are among

the earmarks of a truly knowledgeable person. An education that neglects this kind of knowledge
is, to the Muslim, defective.
While the Islamic tradition also has many profound things to say about specific areas of inquiry,
what most would refer to today as "disciplinary knowledge," it first and foremost prescribes a
method of inquiry. This helps explain the Muslim history of achievement in the worldly arts, like
architecture, agriculture, commerce and medicine, to name a few, in that the Islamic intellectual
traditions have not acted as barriers to pursuing wide-ranging studies in all sorts of areas. Rather,
they have simply focused attention on what one might call pre-requisites, or co-requisites, for
any other endeavors. The Islamic normative tradition encourages people to seek knowledge that
will not obstruct justice, piety and humility in the context of one's ongoing interconnected
relationships with the Divine, other humans and the universe. In order to understand the tensions
and paradoxes of modern Muslim education, one must consider that upon the normative
foundations of Islam - as embodied in the Qur'an, exemplified by way of Prophetic wisdom, and
acted upon by generations of Muslims - all other associations and allegiances are necessarily
constructed.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this study were presented in different form in a series of essays on education that
appeared in the newsmagazine Crescent Internationala and in lectures I gave internationally
during 1998-2000. Besides being thankful for feedback from its international readership, I am
indebted to its editors, Zafar Bangash and Iqbal Siddiqui, for encouraging this line of inquiry,
and for arranging a trip to South Africa, where I was able to develop in public and private some
of the ideas contained herein. While in South Africa, the Kalla family was instrumental in
making sure I got to speak to parents, teachers and administrators. In Turkey, the students,
teachers and journalists I met helped me to grasp some complexities of the tensions and
paradoxes of Muslim education. In the United States, the Imam Zaman Foundation, the Islamic
Education Center, the Muslim Community School, and the Muslim Students Association (Persian
Speaking Group) all graciously invited me to speak on various occasions, during which I had
public opportunities to develop my thoughts on education. Hanan Ramahi of the Jenan School in
Palestine inspired my incursions into Muslim education early on, and Joe Kincheloe of CUNY
encouraged me later on, especially my forays into Islamic thought as a form of indigenous
knowledge. Finally, I hqve relied on Barry Taala in more ways than I can say.

Notes
[1] For background on the hijab controversy, see the articles by Burton Bollag in the Chronicle
of Higher Education, "A ban on Islamic head scarves unsettles Turkey's universities," vol. 44, no.

33, p. A59 (24 April 1998), and "Headscarf Ban Sparks Protests in Turkey," vol. 45, no. 10, p.
A53 (30 October 1998). For a report on the new bill that will curtail religious education, see the
Agence France Presse article, "Turkish Parliament Passes Controversial Education Bill," 16
August 1997, and for general background on recent government policies toward Muslims, see
the article by Lori Montgomery, "Turkey toughens its stand on Islamic religious expression," in
The Dallas Morning News, 9 August 1998, p. 37A. While my reading of the recent aspects of
education as contested territory in modern Turkey is based in part on mainstream Western press
reports, such as those cited above, I have also supplemented those perspectives by drawing upon
a series of interviews I conducted in Summer 1998 with Turkish college students, school
teachers, and journalists in Istanbul. Some of the material from those interviews appeared in my
two articles for the Crescent International, "In Muslim Turkey, Battle Looms on Education
Front," vol. 27, no. 13, pp. 8 & 10 (16-30 Sept. 1998), and "In Education, West Seems Best for
Muslims," vol. 27, no. 14, pp. 5 & 10 (1-15 October 1998).
[2] The standard source for modern Turkish history is Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern
Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition, 1968). But his account of the
transformation of Turkey from late Ottoman times to the early 1960s seems too intertwined with
celebrations of modernity and progress for my taste, so I have also made use of other sources,
especially interviews with Turkish Muslim students, educators, and activists.
[3] See, for example, M. Amin Abdullah, The Idea of Universality of Ethical Norms in Ghazali
and Kant (Ankara: Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi, 1992), and Haluk Nurbaki, Verses from the Glorious
Koran and the Scientific Facts (Ankara: Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi, 1993). Both are published by the
Kemalist government's "ministry of religion," and belong to a broader genre of 20th century
modernist Muslim literature that scrutinizes Islam according to the norms of Western modernity,
without giving any real consideration to the validity of reverse scrutiny.
[4] The South Africa information is based on interviews with participants in the national
education discussions, which I conducted in Pretoria in Summer 1998 while working with the
Muslim community on the possibility of setting up their own autonomous private schools outside
the sway of modernist Christian and Jewish private schools. Incidentally, I've seen virtually the
same tensions and paradoxes while working with American Muslim schools.
[5] Churchill's essay, "White Studies: The Intellectual Imperialism of U.S. Higher Education,"
appears in several places. See, for example, his collection of essays, Since Predator Came: Notes
from the Struggle for American Indian Liberation (Littleton, Colorado: Aigis Publications, 1995).
[6] The views of General Groves on the compartmentalization of knowledge can be found in
Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O'Connor, Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear
Technology in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 22-26.

[7] It is important to remember that the Third World in this context suggests that there is a Third
Way outside the usual materialistic dualities of Western modernity, and that this Third Way has
potential for liberation from the normative system of Western civilization, its laws, economics,
and politics alike. Toward this end, Frederique Abffel-Marglin provides some valuable insights,
in The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development
(London: Zed Books, 1998). See also the work of Arturo Escobar, especially chapters 2, 3, and 6
in his Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton
University Press, 1995). The role of indigenous peoples in challenging Western normative modes
of thought and action, especially in the realm of international law, is nicely detailed by Franke
Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics (Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications,
1993). Muslims have also begun to question the norms of Western modernity. See, for example,
the two articles by Ghada Ramahi in the Crescent International, "Understanding the Ideology of
Western Science," vol. 27, no. 14 (October 1-15, 1998), pp. 8 & 10, and "Leadership and Science
in the Muslim Communities of the US," vol. 27, no. 20 (January 1-15, 1999), pp. 5 & 11.
[8] Part of the story on Quayle's handling of the crisis is in Bob Woodward, The Commanders
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 146-9, 150-3. However, the part about mobilizing
university graduates comes from a 1992 National Public Radio interview with a Bush-Quayle
campaign analyst, who noted the mobilization in his review of Quayle's achievements. Ghada
Ramahi, a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo at the time, heard the interview and recalls it
clearly, since it caused her to rethink her own role as a foreign national studying in an American
university.
[9] For Qur'anic citations, I use the chapter-verse convention, with the number of the former and
the latter separated by a colon, and for translations I use my own modified version of the edition
by M.H. Shakir (Elmhurst, New York: Tahrike Tarsile Qur'an, Third US Edition, 1989).
[10] My assumption that Western civilization is based in large part upon Christianity is supported
by several works: for Western science, see David F. Noble, A World Without Women: The
Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); for
Western law, see Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The
Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and for Western economic
institutions, see Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli, Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular
Empire (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994).
[11] Muslims see the Qur'an as the word of Allah transmitted through the Prophet Muhammad,
upon whom be peace. The second most relevant corpus of literature, kept strictly separate from
the Qur'an, is what is known as the hadith literature (pr. hadeeth), which encompasses the
sayings and deeds of the Prophet as recalled by his family and friends and transmitted orally for
several generations before being written down. The earliest Muslim forms of what we might call
epistemology and hermeneutics were dedicated to sifting and sorting the hadith literature. Even

though hadith are written down, there has always been a strong tendency to transmit them as part
of the oral tradition. The short hadith on seeking knowledge cited here are quite well known and
commonly appear in many popular sources. The versions I used can be found, in their Arabic
originals, in Muhammadi Ray Shahri, Mizan al-Hikmah, vol. 6, p. 463 (Qum, Iran: Maktab alA'lam al-Islami, 1404 AH).
[12] This hadith is from a translation of Imam Khomeini's book, Forty Hadith, serialized in an
Iranian academic journal. The relevant part, from which I drew the citation and upon which I
base parts of my discussion of the hadith, is in "Forty Hadith: An Exposition (Part 25)," AlTawhid: A Quarterly Journal of Islamic Thought and Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 37-50.
[13] My reading and citation of Bacon is based on Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature:
Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 1983).
[14] R. C. Lewontin makes this point nicely in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New
York: Harper Collins, 1991).
[15] The statistics here are based on those used by the Media Foundation of Vancouver BC, as
part of its "Buy Nothing Day" annual campaign (see the website at www.adbusters.org), and on
the research of Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, in Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing
Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Press, 1996).
[16] The quotation is from the National Center on Education and the Economy website
(www.ncee.org).
[17] "Mental" here is not limited to an individual understand of mind. Gregory Bateson's concept
of mind and mental ecology is more useful in this context. See his Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(New York: Ballantine Book, 1972) for an exposition. In working out some of these ideas, I have
also found C.A. Bowers to be useful, especially Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable
Culture: Rethinking Moral Education, Creativity, Intelligence, and Other Modern Orthodoxies
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
[18] This is my translation, with the assistance of Ghada Ramahi, of the Arabic original as
recorded in Ray Shahri, op.cit., p. 464.
[19] For background on this period, and for a well-balanced presentation on the sweep of Islamic
history, see Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1971).
[20] The Arabic original is in Ray Shahri, op. cit., p. 454.
[21] As cited in Khomeini, op. cit., pp. 46-7.

[22] My authority for this hadith is Shaykh Muhammad Kazem Sadiqi, resident scholar of the
Islamic Guidance Center at the Brooklyn Mosque. He cited it in a lecture before Friday
community prayers in October, 1998. At the time, I was in the midst of researching this article,
attending his lectures over the course of several weeks, and had been asking him each week to
provide me with written references for any hadith he cited. He always politely complied with the
information I needed. However, this particular time, before I could ask him for the written
reference, he noted in his lecture that, while Muslims can find hadith in books, a more lasting
lesson could be learned by listening, reciting, memorizing, and teaching some of the hadith that
are relevant to our lives, as was the way in the Islamic educational tradition, where thought is
never separated from action, and in which orality can reside quite comfortably side by side with
print-based literacy. I didn't ask the Shaykh for any references that week. Instead, I decided to
reproduce the hadith from memory, and thought it apt to close my notes with this anecdote.

Preparing Parents as Educators: The Role of

Learning Gatherings
By Professor Yusef Progler
While there are growing global discussions about the role of education in peoples lives, most
ongoing discussions focus on children and schools. In many cases, the role of adults and the
family in education is neglected or marginalized in these discussions. Part of this problem,
perhaps, stems from a general misunderstanding of education, which is most often equated
with merely going to school. An important first step, therefore, is to make clearer distinctions
between education and schooling.
Parentless Education
Education can occur in many forms and at many times. It can be understood as the making of a
whole person, which includes learning life skills, learning a vocation, learning cultural values,
and learning to care for the self and others. Education occurs in many contextssocial and
individualand it can be a lifelong process of becoming that is closely related to family and
community activities. Schooling is but a small part of education and is primarily an
institutional experience with a set of standards and assumptions that are applied to the majority
and in which families and communities usual play a lesser part. Schooling occurs indoors,
according to set times and sequences, and is often geared toward narrow economic and
political goals.

Education has been a human activity for millennia, while schooling was primarily developed
over the past 150 years. Schooling is directed by others, while education is often self-directed.
In terms of methods, schooling often relies on principles of psychology, rooted in behaviorism
and, more recently, cognitive psychology; while education has a broader variety of methods,
including experience and self-reflection. Education is organic, but schooling is mechanical.
While there is clearly some overlap between schooling and education, to have a constructive
conversation about parents as educators, it is important to recognize and maintain the above
kinds of distinctions.
Schooling, as presently conceived and practiced in most places around the globe today,
emerged in Europe during the 19th century and arose with the development of the nation state,
industrialization, and the training of a modern army. America and Japan soon adopted this
system, which, through colonialism, spread to the rest of the globe so that today we find a
virtually uniform system of schooling anywhere we care to look, with only very superficial
distinctions in different locations.
The prime function of modern schooling was to create a managed society under the eye of the
national government, to provide workers for the industrial system and soldiers for the national
army. The methods and assumptions of modern schooling are similar to those of factory labor
and military service. All rely on ranking people according to some externally imposed
standard, all involve inculcating obedience to a system of authority, and all involve subsuming
the individual to an overarching institution, either the state or the corporation.
In other words, schooling emerged as a tool for social control: its intention was to create the
national subject, which includes the national language, allegiance to the national flag, and
developing some narrow, predetermined set of skills deemed useful for the national
development. Parents and communities were not consulted at all in the development of modern
schooling; indeed, in many cases they resisted sending their children to schools. In the end,
modern schooling prevailed, so most parents and communities today comply.
Breaking Down Barriers

This is not to say that there are no variants on this model and that there are no alternative
perspectives, but to understand the variants and alternatives, one needs to see them, for the
most part, as a response to the institution of modern schooling. Homeschooling is a good
example, which largely arose as a movement in those places where schooling had begun and
which was largely a response to the social experiences that children would have in schools. But
home schooling is still schooling, with the parents playing the same sorts of roles that the state
plays in schooling and in which the same values and standards are implied.

In many places, the state board of education requires that parents either utilize the state
curriculum or periodically report to state officials. This is because in its ascendancy, schooling
became compulsory, and in some times and places it could even be considered a crime or a
form of child abuse to remove ones children from school. Alternatives to schooling include the
growing walkout movement, which is gaining in popularity, particularly in the Third World
where schools are often bleak and abysmal places or where communities have taken education
into their own hands after realizing that the benefits of schooling were accrued only to a select
few in the society.
School officials have sometimes responded to these movements away from school by trying to
dress up schools with the latest educational fads and fashions in order to keep children
confined within their walls, voluntarily rather than by force. Part of this voluntary complicity
also comes from the assumption that the best way to get ahead in society is through school, that
the best way to ascend within the class structure is through school.
So where does this leave parents as educators? With many parents occupying themselves with
economic activities, themselves trying to ascend within the class system of most modern
societies, they have little or no time to spend with their children and they most often welcome
those institutions that are willing to take children off their hands for several hours a day as they
themselves try to get ahead. Some parents, women in particular, have gotten involved with
schools as teachers, monitors, assistants, and babysitters. This volunteerism is often welcomed
by schools, since it is a financially viable way to maintain the structure of schooling.
In general, then, we can say that modern schooling is a function of modern society, and that as
long as the convolution between schooling and education remains, the structure of schooling
will prevail and it will absorb most of these volunteer efforts. In a very few cases, with heavy
parental and community involvement, some schools have become more akin to community
centers that provide a range of services for both children and adults, which are open all year
round, and which host a variety of social activities. This is a positive development within the
system of modern schooling, since it puts parents and communities more in control of the vast
public financial resources often relegated to schooling. However, such schools are only
exceptions to the general rule of schools as places detached from community life.
But if for a moment we move our questions away from the issue of how to make schools better
or more responsive places, we can begin to raise more fundamental questions that are often
neglected in school-dominated discussions. The technocrats who designed and implemented
modern schooling had their own fundamental questions, and they designed the system to serve
their goals, mainly emanating from needs for social control. However, there are many other
questions that can be asked about learning, and these can proceed from the basic realization
that schooling and education are two distinctly different activities.

Accepting that distinction for a moment, and holding onto the meaning of education as outlined
above, one can ask a variety of questions. What does it mean to be educated? What is the
purpose of seeking knowledge? What kinds of knowledge do people need to lead meaningful
lives? How do I know that I am intelligent or successful? What are my duties to my community
and to the biosphere in which I reside? Schools dont really ask these questions, since they
assume the answers will be the same: schools are places where we learn skills necessary to
survive in modern society, which most often translates into the singular goal of finding a job.
But the standardized goals of modern schooling should not prohibit us from asking these sorts
of searching questions, since such questions are at the core of understanding the relationship
between life and learning. A first step, then, toward preparing parents as educators is to take the
time and make the effort to have these kinds of conversations and discussions, not only within
the family, but also between families on the community level. Schooling survives on the
inactivity or inability of parents and communities to imagine or conceive of anything other
than what school has to offer. If parents and communities see things the same way as schools,
then they will not see the reason for questioning the system, and they will simply accede to it.
Learning Together
Beyond asking questions and discussing the meaning and purpose of education, parents can
take the time and make the effort to interact with other families in what may be called
learning gatherings. Such gatherings can be a good opportunity for families to share what
they may know with each other and to spend time together doing, singing, dancing, creating,
cooking, playing, digging, hiking, building, exploring, telling stories, and any one of a number
of activities that they find provide meaning in their lives.
Learning gatherings can also be places for discussing issues that are important to families and
communities but which are often neglected by schools, governments, and businesses. Learning
gatherings can be places to build solidarity for those who are questioning the system and to
build support networks for those who choose to walk out of the institutionalized structure of
modern society. They can provide a space for people to conceive of and enact their own stories
about what is meaningful in life; to create their own directions for learning and living and to
expand the many learning possibilities for children and adults alike.
Outside the confines of schooling, families and communities can share their stories and
experiences about what has inspired them and what resources may be available for learning.
Learning gatherings can be places to share and explore ways to self-create life experiences,
rather than consuming the readymade experiences as offered by schools and other institutions
such as hospitals or the food and entertainment industries.

What kinds of resources already exist in communities that can provide learning opportunities
for families? How are families and communities creating their own learning experiences? How
are families and communities finding and nurturing their own passions and strengths? Learning
gatherings can foster communication and dialogue among families and between generations
within immediate and extended families. They can also be places to share experiences and
ideas with other families who are embarking on their own learning journeys. They can provide
opportunities to share all of our anxieties and difficulties, especially those that may arise from
taking the first steps away from schooling and toward deeper and more diverse forms of
learning. Learning gatherings can be a way to find meaning in life, and are a necessary first
step toward preparing parents as educators.

Schooling for Failure!

Professor Yusuf Progler, islamOonline.net
Measure of Failure
Before we can speak about the failures of modern schooling, in the West or anywhere else, we
should consider what it is that schooling has set out to do. This will help us to consider whether
or not schooling has failed at anything, or if it has actually succeeded in accomplishing
something. Without a clear idea of what schools are for, in other words, we have no real basis for
evaluating if schooling has failed or succeeded. This question also needs to be considered in
historical context, because what may have been seen as the successes of school at one time may
have come to be seen as its failures, while what may have been perceived as failures in one time
may have later come be seen as its successes. Therefore, the question of success and failure of
schooling is bound up with expectations of a given time and place, although those expectations
have been remarkably consistent.
Labeled and Categorized
Despite superficial differences in language and culture, what we are calling modern schooling is
for the most part global in its uniformity. A visitor to a school in most any place in recent years
will find the same type of facility, a box-shaped concrete building resembling a factory (or prison
or hospital), divided into smaller boxes called classrooms, in which there are a number of desks
and chairs facing forward towards a larger teachers desk, behind which is a blackboard and
above that a clock. The placing of these items might differ slightly, but the items are all there,
from Tokyo to Istanbul , New York to London , Karachi to Rio de Janeiro . A flag or some other
symbol of the nation, such as a picture of the current head, is often present and may even be
ritually saluted in some way, while a national anthem is often played or sung at the beginning of
each school day.
Students move among these boxes according to strict timings, often announced by bells or
alarms, and the school day is divided into several periods approximately 50 minutes apiece,
beginning at around 8 a .m. and ending around 3 p.m., with a lunch break in the middle of the
day. School meets five days a week for ten months of the year, and this usually lasts for 12 years.
Students are classified and graded in many ways, most often ordered according to age-based

classes and categorized according to academic grades. This grading and classifying gets ever
more precise as students approach their graduation, when each is then given a sheet of paper that
certifies his or her experience and performance.
Schools were structured in this way for a reason. During the 19th century, beginning in Europe
but soon spreading globally, it became necessary to acclimate the masses of people to large-scale
emergent social realities: industrialization and nationalism. The routines of factory work required
that young people be taught the necessary skills and valuesincluding uniformity, punctuality,
and efficiencyas well as gain the ability to withstand long hours of repetitive labor. The
industrial economy offered employment for those who succeeded in this system. Similarly, the
gathering of people into nation states required that they see themselves as part of a single nation
and that they learn respect for the national symbols, such as the flag and the nations head, and be
willing to die fighting for those symbols, although often being contented with fighting other
nations in sporting events. Modern schooling has been remarkably successful at achieving these
goals, in a relatively short period of time, to the point that most of us cannot imagine life without
it.
Globalizing of Modern Education
With the phenomenal rise of Europe as an industrial and military power, schooling came to be
seen as the key to that success, so the European model of schooling was eagerly sought by those
desiring industrial and symbolic power in other parts of the world. The Americans and the
Japanese were among the first to adopt this new system of schooling, although one can also find
early adoptions of it in other places, such as the Russian and Ottoman empires. Soon, it came to
be seen as mandatory by the colonial powers, namely Britain and France, who spread this system
throughout their domains. By the early 20th century, a global system of modern schooling was in
place and it remains to this day.
While the structure of schooling taught its lessons of industrial standardization and national
adulation, there were of course various academic subjects taught as well, mainly language and
math skills. The modern nation state also required the teaching of history and civics, to further
the feeling that each nation was somehow special and unique among others, and that its head
men and political systems were the best over the rest. Schools also began teaching the sciences
and humanities, though at first these subjects were reserved for the elite private schools, where

the rich and famous could sequester their children to learn the higher values of science and
literature and to maintain a feeling of superiority and separation from the seething masses. But
by the mid 20th century, most of the academic subjects that we see in most schools anywhere
today were being taught.
The benefits and successes of the new system were not shared by all, in particular the benefits of
an industrial economy, because the Americans, Europeans and Japanese greedily guarded their
competitive edge in these areas, while the rest of the world became the suppliers of their
resources and consumers of their industrial products. It is an irony that while most nations of the
world adopted the factory model of schooling, very few were actually able to develop industrial
economies. This could be seen as a failure of modern schooling, but it would depend on which
time or place one is examining. The success of modern schooling in building a sense of
nationalism has been more evident. In both cases, either in building an industrial economy or
national identity, schooling was a process directed by those with a vested interest in one or
another of those new realities.
Becoming Obsolete
By the late 20th century, the recognition emerged that this system had largely run its course or
that it was becoming obsolete and in need of some sort of reform. The main benefactors of this
aging systemAmerica, Europe, and Japanfought each other in horrifically violent wars,
which were called world wars because they involved the colonial spheres of influence of those
powers, and which spanned the entire planet. In addition, the Third World began to realize the
ruse of the system, that they were playing by the rules but still largely unable to reap any of the
benefits of the game. The global economy, in the meantime, had passed from national planners in
the dominant colonial powers into the hands of global corporations, and now all nation states are
coming under the sway of global rules of economic development, including the once great state
powers. Meanwhile, media have become the new teachers of identity, though decidedly diffuse.
As this new system changed, and in the wake of the World Wars, the industrial powers began to
quibble among themselves, at once envying and mimicking each others national educational
systems, in the hope of gaining a fleeting edge in economic development. For example, in the
1980s, it was faddish for American technocrats to bemoan the failure of the American
educational system, in the face of Japanese economic ascendancy, which was seen as due to its

superior educational system that created true adulation not only for the state but for the corporate
order. But that was put to rest a decade later with the virtual collapse of the Japanese economy,
and the rise of despair, depravity, and suicide among Japanese youth. Meanwhile, a never ending
stream of reforms plagued the educational systems of the developed nations, with the
developing world waiting to see what their colonial masters would come up with next.
Faddishness continued to be the order of the day for an educational system seeking a new sense
of meaning and a new purpose for its existence, not to mention a justification for the tremendous
amount of money it cost.
It is at this point that one can detect more clearly the failures of modern schooling. After a
century and a half of development, there is not really much to show for this system. The socalled advanced democracies are mired in political nihilism and cultural frivolity, at times
rivaling that of the decaying Roman Empire . Gangsters, murderers, liars, fascists, and bigots are
elected to public office with impunity. Meanwhile, most people are utterly unable to see beyond
the promises of unlimited economic growth, instead living blindly a consumerist lifestyle that
has time and again been denounced as unsustainable over the long term. Ecological systems are
in collapse, species are becoming extinct, and humans have become one of the few organisms
(other than pigs) that consistently foul their own habitats. People still fight each other over
trivialities, with armies marching to murderous ends to defend lines on a map, madly cheering
the latest movie stars and football heroes.
Perhaps it is too much to lay the blame for all this at the doorstep of school, to say that the mess
the world is in today is due to schooling. But it is equally unrealistic to expect schools to fix
these problems. Yet most efforts at educational reform are still dancing to the same old tunes of
economic growth and national pride, with the few exceptions to this uniform pattern, such as
those feeble efforts at environmental education and global awareness, merely serving to
prove the rule. Once a problem is identified, people turn to schools to solve that problem, if they
have not already blamed the problem on schools.
In those nation states with expendable wealth, technocrats can continue to pour it into their
national educational systems. In such places, flashy consumerism is replacing stodgy
industrialism, spearheaded by the fun-loving Americans. Now one can find the utter absurdity of
schools in the rich nation states exchanging the drab decor of factory schools for colorful Disney
characters. Even where there is not as much disposable wealth, one can find a Disneyfication

of schools, testimony perhaps to recognition that schools are indeed drab and boring places, but
also a testament of the failure to imagine any alternatives other those images produced for the
global entertainment markets. In the impoverished nations, neither of these games is played.
They never benefited from the industrial system and dont have the money to apply the latest
educational fad, so what one finds is a simple decay of colonial schooling. While this is often
decried by the United Nations and the NGOs of the wealthy nations, it may also be a cracked
mirror for the rest of the world to view the decay of the industrial way of life and the nation
states of modernity.
For many people, this is too bleak to accept. They would rather devote themselves to making
schools better places. The argument is that as long as schools exist, we should at least try to
make them habitable and tolerable places. Others will argue that schools are still one of the few
places where people can get together for some sort of intellectual activity, although this is usually
reserved for universities (equally in decay, but beyond the scope of this article). When asked
what they like most about school, many children, and those adults recalling their childhood, will
list the social aspects more than that the academic aspects. Indeed, it is perhaps a success of
schools that they have become places for mass socialization, but at times this socialization has
gone against the grain of what parents and societies desire, at which point this success can then
become a failure.
In fact, framing the problem of modern schooling in terms of success and failure is in many ways
a futile exercise. Nationalistic zealots and greedy corporate leaders, particularly in the
developed nation states like America , have consistently used a rhetoric of school failure to
justify the imposition of austerity and intolerance on diverse populations. The corporate chiefs
and their cheerleaders among the political elite in particular, eagerly applaud any claims that
schools have failed because it gives them another shot at raiding the public coffers, since money
spent on failed schools is surely money wasted and it would be better spent lining their pockets
and those of their cronies. It is for this reason that one finds a spiteful impulse to maintain
schools the way they are, and not complain too much about their failures, in the hopes of
protecting one of the few public spaces left in the industrialized world today. While this may be a
valid argument in some places, in particular where there is wealth to contest, for most of the
world it is seen as an irrelevant luxury of the privileged nations in search of meaning.

Whatever the reason, when increasing numbers of people the world over have come to see
schools as failures, then this is an indication that there needs to be serious discussions about what
to do with them. This cannot be left to politicians and corporate executives, nor can the problems
(or solutions) of the wealthiest countries be superimposed upon the rest of the world. It is in
those places where the vast majority of humanity resides that the most rigorous discussions have
to take place, where there is little to gain or lose. Before bulldozing all the schools, or dressing
them up like shopping malls, a concerted effort needs to be made to truly assess what we expect
of them, and this has to be a collective endeavor. This must also include looking honestly at
alternatives, ranging from efforts at de-schooling and walking out to developing vocational
institutes and home education. Above all, the limitations of schooling have to be recognized. As
long as we aspire to gain wealth and status through schooling, in a game that demands there be
winners and losers, then the failed system of modern schooling is unlikely to change very
much, since the foundations of the system are built on economic growth and social ascendancy.

The Westernization of Islamic Education

By Yusef Progler
With the increasing American colonial presence in the Muslim world, beginning with the 1991 war
against Iraq and gaining momentum on the heels of 9/11 with recent invasions and occupations of
Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been numerous efforts aimed at reforming school curricula and
revising textbooks. From Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, American officials have been pressuring local
governments to eliminate anything that the Americans say promotes violence and terrorism.
At a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in 1993, opposition members of the Kuwaiti parliament framed
this in terms of teaching a new American religion. In Afghanistan, Kabul is crawling with American
and European consultants, many of whom are involved in reforming schools according to the latest
educational fads. Several efforts have been made along the same lines in Iraq, though the efforts are
slowed by the war of resistance and corruption among the Western consultants themselves.
The same types of pressures are mounting all over the Muslim world, coupled with American military
threats. These efforts at reform are seen as Westernization of Islamic education. While that might be
true, it is certainly not new. In fact, if we are serious about understanding this issue, we will need to
look back to earlier instances of Western colonialism in the Muslim world, which has had a profound
impact on education, and which involved local players as much as foreign invaders.

Islamic Education Prior to Colonialism

Mamluk Formalization

Laying the Groundwork

`Urabi Nationalist Revolt

French Influence

School in the Modern Social Order

The Challenge

Islamic Education Prior to Colonialism

To fully grasp the impact of Westernization, it is necessary to briefly survey how Islamic education
worked prior to colonialism. An important factor in traditional Islamic education was its informality, in
both form and content. Even within a single locale, there was a wide variety of schools, institutions,
and other opportunities to learn. In Egypt, for example, where the great Islamic university of Al-Azhar
was established, the wide variety of sultans, scholars, bureaucrats, and Muslim community leaders
involved with constructing and maintaining institutions of learning, ensured that there would be
diversity among those institutions and that no single structure would dominate the others. While some
of the later rulers attempted to institutionalize schooling and bring it under control of the state, those
efforts did not take root until after the colonial incursions of the early 19th century.
An important feature of informality in education was the student-teacher relationship. Before
institutionalization, teachers were not salaried by the state; they made or inherited their livelihoods
independently of their academic activities. There were also no diplomas or degrees; instead, students
received an

ijazah,

an informal recommendation from a leading scholar to teach the knowledge he or

she had learned. Only in an institutional setting, either when introduced in Egypt partially under the
Mamluks, or, more broadly during the colonial period, were these informal and personal authorities
replaced by a system of formal and hierarchical qualifications and certificates.
The Islamic approach to educating religious scholars, though utilizing books, primarily emphasized oral
sources and transmissions. In such a system, a book is only a valid medium of study in so far as it has
been learned by way of a living authority. This learning involved, among other things, students
essentially writing their own books based on recitations by the teacher and developed through
discussions with the teacher. This oral mode of learning and inquiry is embedded in Arabic, the
language of Islam, with its tri-consonantal root system brought to life by what is literally called the
movement ( harakat ) of vowels. The precise meaning of words in such a language can only be
ascertained by listening to them being spoken. Written texts, therefore, are secondary. In fact, some
medieval Muslim scholars considered it scandalous to base one's education solely on books. This is
illustrated by the informal study sessions that students engaged in when the teacher left, which
involved reading out loud, for, as one scholar put it, what the ear hears becomes firmly established in
the heart.
This points to another key component of precolonial education: the primacy of memorization. After a
core of fundamental materials was memorized and could be easily reproduced, students would then be
encouraged to develop their ability to critically apply the memorized materials to specific academic and
legal problems. This method of training enabled Muslim scholars to produce rigorous critical responses
to both ancient and contemporary texts, and it was common to organize academic exchanges around
the criticism and disputation of controversial questions.

Mamluk Formalization
However, even with this strong and vibrant legacy of informality in Islamic education, it would be
unfair to say that institutionalized formal education came only with Western colonization. The Mamluks
had already begun some formalization of religious education in Cairo by creating a network of
institutions, many of which were endowed by the government. This was partly in the name of
ideological hegemony, since Al-Azhar was established as a Shiite center of learning, and the Mamluks
sought to bring it more into the Sunni ideological sphere.
In the form of stipends and other payments, the government endowments were distributed primarily
to the educated classes and the urban elite, who began to slowly take over the responsibility of
passing on the corpus of Islamic learning. At the same time, this creeping institutionalization never led
to complete formalization of the educational process, and a strong legacy of informality guaranteed a
vigor and an openness that was missing from Western institutions throughout the same period.
Despite the early attempts at institutionalization, Muslim centers of learning did not cater only to an
elite class of intellectuals. Many local people worked as functionaries in the madrasahs, as muezzins,
assistants to Friday Prayer leaders, readers of poetry in praise of the Prophet, or as language
teachers, writing teachers, and scribes. These services also entitled them to study with some of the
most prominent scholars of the day. Even so, there was some tension, highlighted in a treatise by Ibn
Al-Hajj (d. 1336), who chastised the learned elite of the day for dressing ostentatiously and alienating
ordinary people from higher learning.
Most schools also kept numerous people on staff who recited Qur'an, and, during certain times of the
year, recited hadith from a number of well-known compilations. As one recent scholar has noted, The
prominence of organized groups of Qur'an readers at virtually every school may suggest that one of
the principle reasons why the academic and nonacademic spheres mixed so harmoniously was that
these were more than mere institutions of education. They were also centers of public worship. The
recitation of hadith was a widely acceptable community activity involving both men and women from
all walks of life, and the teaching of this crucial branch of Islamic knowledge resided in a very open
world that drew no rigid boundaries between academic instruction and religious devotion in which
large and diverse groups of Muslims could participate.

Laying the Groundwork

To summarize Islamic learning in Egypt up until the colonial period, one could outline several
components of traditional education, which was relatively consistent from Al-Azhar University in urban
Cairo to small rural mosques and other places of village learning, although similar patterns could be
found throughout the Islamic world. Muslim learning of the period most often occurred as part of the
practice of a particular trade, profession, or craft and was not distinctly separate as institutionalized
schooling.
The legal profession, for example, was centered on the local masjid, while other professions and
trades were studied within their own contexts. Professional learning was not distinctly separated into
rigid categories of students and teachers. Various relationships between teachers and students existed
between many members of the vocational or professional group. As a recent historian has noted,
Muslim learning at the time did not require overt acts of organization, but found its sequence in the
logic of the practices themselves.
It is into this dynamic milieu of knowledge, production, and transmission that the Western colonial
powers stepped with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. In the ensuing chaos, including rivalry
between the French and English colonial powers, a local ruler emerged in the form of Muhammad Ali
Pasha, who was originally sent by the Ottomans to fight the colonial incursion, but who soon became
the sole ruler of Egypt and who eagerly sought Western advice, especially in the field of education.
Among the first educational institutions that Muhammad Ali established were military schools, which
confined and restrained students and which were administered by both French and Egyptian military
officers and academics, many of whom had been trained at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. The new
school system quickly supplanted many of the traditional centers of learning, causing the British
Orientalist E. W. Lane to remark in the 1830s that, Learning was in a much more flourishing state in
Cairo before the entrance of the French army than it has been of late years. It suffered severely from
this invasion; not through direct oppression, but in consequence of the panic which this event
occasioned, and the troubles by which it was followed. (Heyworth-Dunne). As one of the first modern
autocratic rulers of the Muslim world, Muhammad Ali was concerned with training a technocratic elite
that would help shore up his power and establish order; there was no room for debate or consultation.
By the 1840s, Muhammad Ali seemed to have realized that traditional village learning and Islamic
education constituted a threat to this power. Faced with local rebellion, and since the specialized
French technical schooling could not be extended to everyone, the newly Westernized ruling elite of
Cairo became interested in British factory schooling to use as a tool for controlling the masses. By the
1840s, Muhammad Ali's sons and successors had further entrenched modern schooling, but, while the
early technical schools were first intended to build an army and experts in the military sciences, the
new factory schools were geared toward producing national subjects of the newly emerging state.
Muhammad Ali had begun sending students to England to study the Lancaster factory school method,
and these students were instrumental in bringing the Lancaster system to Egypt in the 1840s,
coinciding with an increasing British hegemony in the region in the 19th century.
A primary component of the Lancaster method was to redistribute authority by a system of monitors,
thus diffusing disciplinary power throughout the school and integrating each student into the
institutionally ordered system. By 1847, Western-trained local school supervisors had laid plans to
establish the new schools throughout the country, forming a network of national schools, which was
the sign of the times, as national schools had become the order of day to the north, throughout
Europe.
In Egypt, the new style of teaching was based on instilling obedience and discipline to students and
the memorizing of centrally designed and distributed textbooks and curricula. The British and their
local proxies demanded this new regime of obedience and discipline, primarily to build a servile class
of local clerks and administrators for the growing arm of the British empire in the region. Even the
very few Egyptians who were rewarded with any positions of authority could only do so as proxies, but
without any sense of initiative or leadership.
While the Lancaster schools were attempting to train obedient citizens for the emerging Egyptian
state, the ruling elite came to be dominated by graduates of the military school in Paris run by the

French Ministry of War, from where a large number of the school administrators were also drawn. One
of the first things this newly trained local elite did was to legislate a three-tier school system. The
primary level was intended to provide literacy, and the secondary level, in the words of European
trained administrator Rifa'a Al-Tahtawi, it is intended to civilize the community, (Timothy Mitchell)
while higher education continued to be reserved for the specialized subjects of the ruling class. The
newly Westernized school system in Egypt, as throughout most of the Arab and Muslim worlds, served
two basic functions:

1. To provide well-trained armies for policing Western financial investments, which also

entailed training a servile ruling class and an obedient populace

2. To systematically undermine and replace local culture with a Western-derived system of

political and economic order

In both cases, successful colonization depended on a local ruling class who directed the process and
provided a semblance of native legitimacy, who at the same time were true believers in the supremacy
of Western science and technology.

`Urabi Nationalist Revolt

By the time of the `Urabi nationalist revolt in 1881, even local resistance to the colonial order had
come to be expressed within the framework of Western terms. One of the demands of the revolt was
to provide schoolingBritish and French stylefor all members of Egyptian society, not just the
technocrats who were running the country and policing foreign investments. The new nationalists
seized power partly in the name of national education, and one of the first official acts of the new
leader, Ahmed `Urabi, was to lay the foundation stone for a new Western-style school, after giving a
speech asserting the necessity of a good education, which by this time was almost entirely according
to Westernized definitions.
The revolt, however, was short lived. Alarmed at the danger to their resources and investments in the
region, European commercial interests agreed to let the British navy move into Egypt and restore
order.
British warships destroyed Alexandria in 1882; the British then occupied the country and installed a
more compliant ruler. More importantly, national aspirations would continue to be framed almost
entirely in terms of Western assumptions, demonstrating that the methods employed by the
colonialists had been adopted at every level of the society, even by the anti-imperialist national
liberation movement, as well as by the Islamic reformists.
Eventually, the highest religious authority of Egypt at the time, Muhammad Abduh, would seek the
wisdom of the French Orientalist, Gustav Le Bon. As several historians have pointed out, the
reformed Islam envisioned by Abduh was to be a formal system of social discipline through which
the ruling elite would inculcate a new style of political education, which was intended to insure the
stability and development of the modern state. This function of national schooling and university
education was based on Abduh's reading of the French social scientists, especially Le Bon, whom
Abduh admired.
In his position of the highest ranking religious scholar at Al-Azhar, Abduh called for a new restructuring
of the famed center of Islamic learning. Abduh also worked toward the revision of Islamic law to
conform with the new technical knowledge coming from Europe, which he, along with his mentor
Jamaluddin Al-Afghani, mistakenly saw as the sum total of all human knowledge. By the mid-20th
century, the colonization of Al-Azhar had been completed to the point that the newly appointed rector
was himself a student of another French social scientist, Emile Durkheim of the Sorbonne.
As canons replaced cannons in the Western drive for world domination, redirecting Islamic law for
political and economic expediency became a technique that was used throughout the 19th and into the
20th centuries. Western colonizers utilized this technique with great effect on Muslim peoples, and

with full complicity of many local leaders. This colonial order was implemented in the guise of modern
schooling, and its legacy remains today.
The basic infrastructure for a Westernized social order in many parts of the Muslim world was already
in place by the end of the 19th century. Scholars have elaborated upon the details of interminable
education reforms since then, but most are basically adjusting a system that, at its foundation, is a
colonizing order. The impact of this order is felt to this day throughout the Muslim world, though the
intellectual and economic entanglements have shifted away from Europe and closer to the United
States, especially since the Second World War.
This problem is found throughout the Muslim world where schools and universities generally run on a
pattern imposed by or inherited from a formal colonial power. And adding insult to injury, the
Westernized system in many places has become decrepit, plagued by overstuffed classes, poorly
trained and underpaid faculty, favoritism, nepotism, and ineffective research institutions. Those
students who make it through this system with any semblance of distinction are almost immediately
siphoned off by recruiters from the former colonial powers, where they are given prestigious
scholarships and appointments in Western universities. In such a system, the Islamic world has given
up its intellectual and moral leadership of the world, which has been given to or taken by the Western
powers, led by the re-configured global imperialism of the United States.

French Influence
Although American hegemony pervaded the Muslim world in the post-war period, French intellectual
sway also continued throughout the 20th century; in the mid-20th century, Sayyid Qutb and other
modern Muslim intellectuals turned to the work of French philosophers like Alexis Carrel. However,
during the 20th century, there was a radical shift in the use of Western thinking: Rather than
accepting it as a total system of thought to be implemented, modern Islamic thinkers and activists like
Sayyid Qutb in Egypt or Ali Shariati in Iran (who met Franz Fanon while studying in France) had begun
to use Western discourse against itself, in some cases as part of a larger project of rediscovering and
implementing a framework of thought and life grounded in Islam, while simultaneously dismantling
the colonial derived system.
It is these Westernized Islamic movements that are under attack now, with Qutb's work the guiding
force behind Islamic revivalism in the Sunni world, and Shariati's among the Shias, especially in Iran.
And it is also this strand of thinking that has had some success in more fully throwing off the shackles
of colonialism, the Islamic revolution in Iran being the most obvious case. Yet, even there, one can
find an educational system that is basically still structured according to the way it had been built by
the Pahlavi dynasty, albeit with a fair amount of Islamization since the revolution. But even the fiercely
independent hawzah system of higher Islamic learning in Iran has given in to the pressures of
modernity by offering equivalencies in modern university degrees.

School in the Modern Social Order

The same story could be told elsewhere, and the unavoidable conclusion is that school and education
have become part of the modern social order, to the extent that this modern social order reflects the
norms and structures of the modern world, which itself has emanated from the Western experience
and spread through colonialism to globalization. School can do nothing but serve that system.
After independence from the colonial powers, the basic colonial infrastructure of schooling and
universities remained. Although in places it has been, to one degree or another, Islamized, the basic
structure was not questioned: the system of certificates, the age-graded sequence, the length of the
school day and class periods, and the calendar of five days a week, ten months a year, for twelve
years. This has remained unchanged. What we see today, even in the guise of Islamic education, is
basically the same old drab and dull colonialist-derived and Western-imposed system of schooling,
with a few new local colors added.
While there is a great deal of intellectual activity around defining Islamic education, there has been
much less demonstrated in practice. This is not due to a failure of ideas, but rather, it is testimony to
the pervasiveness of the modern Western way of viewing the world. This view of the world is an

economist view of the world, where the purpose of education is to achieve financial security; and it is
a nationalist view of the world, where the purpose of education is to ensure national security.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that the Western system itself has become impoverished
and its chief proponents are now desperate. With problems in the global economy and ecological
breakdown abroad, not to mention the increasing move by the Americans toward normalizing global
warfare, and crime or social depravity at home, the Western system itself is on the verge of implosion.

The Challenge
The challenge for Muslims, and other Third World peoples is what to do in the absence of that system.
For those who are concerned, there are basically three choices:

1. Pretend that the Western system is healthy and prosperous, and continue to live under its

illusions of supremacy.
2. Wait until the Western system fully collapses and then scramble with everyone else to

figure out what to do next.

3. Walk out of that system now, in advance of its collapse, and work toward building

another more viable way of life that is not based on greed, hypocrisy, and injustice, which
have become the earmark of the Western world order today.
This new way of life, of which some different forms of education will be an essential part, will likely
take shape locally, in myriad ways and according to local cultural forms and ecological systems. It will
be a sustainable way of life that knows and respects limitations; it will be a way of life that is based on
conviviality and community; and it will be a way of life that gives meaning to existence beyond the
materialistic norms of Western modernity. It is that way of life which will give birth to its own new
education.

Sources:

Heyworth-Dunne, 'An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egyp. London:

Luzac & Company, 1938

Timothy Mitchell, 'Colonizing Egypt'. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.