Islamic knowledge and education in the modern age

ROBERT W. HEFNER

The transmission of religious knowledge ('ilm) has always been at the heart of Islamic tradition. The Qur'an and IHadith abound with general references to the importance of learning, as well as the specific injunction that believers study and follow the ethical path God has provided. Since earliest times, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student has also had a vital social function, creating scholarly networks which, in the absence of a clerical hierarchy or an established church, came to exercise authority in the religious community. Muslim notables also regarded religious education as critical to the formation of the shared ethical sensibilities that underlay the public good. In these and other ways, religious learning lay at the heart ofMuslim societies, and its promotion was incumbent on all who aspired to social or political prominence.

Because of the centrality of religious knowledge in Muslim societies, constructing institutions for its transmission has also been considered socially imperative. During the Muslim world’s Middle Ages (1000 1500 CE), the madrasa emerged as the dominant institution for the transmission of inter mediate and advanced religious knowledge. A residential college for the study of the religious sciences, the madrasa played a key role in the great recentring of religious knowledge and authority that took place in the Middle Ages, bringing popular religious culture into closer alignment with scholarly know ledge.1 When, in the early modern era, Islam pressed deeper into sub Saharan Africa and South and South East Asia, the madrasa, or a like minded institution of a different name, played a role in the new Muslim lands similar to that seen centuries earlier in the medieval Middle East. The institution created cadres of religious scholars committed to the ideals of revealed knowledge; provided

I Jonathan Berkey, The formation of Islam: Religion and society in the Near East, 600 1800 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 189.

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A mooring for popular worship, piety and law; and became the object of largesse by leaders intent on demonstrating their piety and social distinction. Notwithstanding their great variety, Islamic schools continue to play these roles today.

Contrary to recent stereotypes, from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century, Islamic education was not unchanging. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, movements of educational reform arose in Central Asia, Sumatra and, most significantly, northern India. The reforms imple mented in this period were still modest by comparison with those Islamic education was to experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In all eras reformists emphasised the importance of returning to the Qur'an and IHad'ith and a more vigorous exercise of ijtihad (independent religious reason ing, as opposed to taqlid, 'imitation’ or conformity to the achievements of established Islamic scholarship). But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries educational reformists went beyond these tried and true methods in an effort to respond to four new challenges: the political ascendance of the West; the emergence of a centralised and developmental state; the expansion of global economic markets, including labour markets that placed a greater premium on educational skills; and the appearance of new instruments for storing and disseminating information. These challenges were to leave a deep imprint on modern Islamic education.

This chapter examines the impact of modern developments on the trans mission of Islamic knowledge and the forms of Islamic education. To assess the scale of modern changes, the chapter looks first at the varieties of Islamic education in earlier times. It then examines the changes that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their implications for modern Muslim culture and politics. Two conclusions stand out from this survey. First, in the modern period Islamic education has been neither institutio nally monolithic nor pedagogically conservative, but characterised by a dizzying plurality of actors engaged in continuous educational experimen tation. Second, and more generally, the central issue with which Muslim educational reformists have been preoccupied has been the question of just what is required for an authentic profession of Islam in the modern world. What distinguishes educators’ answers today from those of earlier gener ations is that modern religious schooling is no longer primarily dedicated to training scholarly elites, but to creating a self aware and pious public. In the face of political, economic and cultural forces of un Islamic provenance, Muslim educators have come to see a fellowship of the pious as the most essential condition for the promotion of the faith.