Islamic Critical Theory: A Tool for Emancipatory Education

Abstract

Traditional theories are concerned with understanding and explaining what is happening so their agenda goes no further than discussion. Critical Theory, however, is different because it not only critiques but it seeks to make changes. It is political. Critical Theory seeks to emancipate and transform those who are oppressed and marginalized through functional steps:Critical theory is politically committed in the sense that it aims to achieve emancipation and transformation of individuals and society through human action. Theory and practice form a single process and philosophy is 'put to work' to provide analysis and critique of society and leading to social change (Jessop 2010: 3).It was Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School who initially coined the term Critical Theory. The Frankfurt School which was also known as the Institute for Social Research, was originally located in Germany but then moved to New York when the Nazis forced its closure and exiled its Jewish members (McLaughlin 1999: 110). Key developers of Critical Theory include Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and later Habermas who formed the second generation. Critical Theory emerged from a group of men who saw the atrocities inflicted by humans on humans. The scholars from the Frankfurt School wanted to understand how people could act the way they did but also how such behaviour could be stopped. Although the scholars were Jewish, Kellner (n.d.) states:The Frankfurt School had a highly ambivalent relation to Judais . . . They were also, for the most part, secular Jews who did not support any organized religion, or practice religious or cultural Judaism. In this sense, they were in the tradition of Heine, Marx, and Freud for whom Judaism was neither a constitutive feature of their life or work, nor a significant aspect of their self-image and identity.Despite the Frankfurt scholars being religiously detached, their focus in developing Critical Theory was 'nothing less than the discovery of why mankind, instead of entering a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism' (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997: xi). The function of Critical Theory is empowerment, it seeks to encourage transformation for those 'whose voices are silenced or marginalised' (Bercaw & Stooksberry 2004). After critiquing society and understanding 'what is', it then asks 'what should be' to create a 'better life' (How 2003: 9). Developers of Critical Theory saw how mass media or the culture industry 'played a highly manipulative role in modern society and served to control or subvert oppositional consciousness, thus removing any threat to the dominant capitalist class' (Strauss: 2012). The demonization of the Muslim masses is a good example of subverting 'oppositional consciousness'.According to Habermas, 'critical knowledge was conceptualized as knowledge that enabled human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection and took psychoanalysis as the paradigm of critical knowledge' (Huttunen 2011). Habermas developed the theory of communicative action. This was a way that people could work together and produce positive social transformation. The theory of communicative action refers to interpersonal communication geared towards mutual understanding. Mutual understanding leads to mutual civility and this works to exclude barbarity. I will discuss the Islamic equivalent of this theoretical perspective later in my introduction to Islamic critical theory:Actors do not primarily aim at their own success but want to harmonize their action plans with the other participants. Opposite to communicative action is the concept of strategic action, which means calculative exploitation, or manipulation, of others. An actor who acts strategically seeks primarily his or her own ends and manipulates other people either openly or tacitly (Habermas 1984: 285).Critical PedagogyCritical pedagogy was initially based on Marxist theory (Lyles 2008: 38). …