Philosophies of Islamic Education: Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses, Nadeem A. Memon and Mujadad Zaman, Eds, Routledge, 2016

Abstract

PhilosophiesofIslamicEducation:HistoricalPerspectivesandEmergingDiscourses · Memon & Zaman113 Philosophies of Islamic Education: Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses Nadeem A. Memon and Mujadad Zaman, Eds. Routledge, 2019, 270 pages. Unlike many edited volumes, this one is not a hodgepodge of case studies and tenuously related research papers but a carefully curated and thought-out volume. However, like all edited volumes it can he hard to realize how it all links together. The editors have given obvious thought to how this book should and does offer a valuable intervention on current work on Islamic education, and not just an opportunity for showcasing current scholars’ reflections. The book is divided into four parts, with sixteen chapters, so it is not a short foray into the field. The contributing authors are a mix of academics in history, education studies, philosophy, and theology , many of who are practitioners in the field of Muslim education. This adds a refreshing reality check to what would otherwise be a very abstract philosophical collection. Coeditor Mujadad Zaman starts the volume off with a scholarly and expansive introduction on the nature of Islamic education and what this collection can add to the field. Zaman argues, as is increasingly the case among specialists, that Islamic education be treated as its own subfield rather than an outgrowth of other disciplines such as history and theology. Zaman posits that the field is loosely divided into “a number of ‘research streams’ . . . that suggest, albeit imperfectly, trajectories for the study of Islamic education including but not limited to, ‘classical’ orientalist scholarship, ‘historical’ case studies, and ‘contemporary-social’ approaches” (p. 6). The book “attempts to position itself both ‘within’ and ‘outside’ the literature. With regard to the former, it sits well within present literature and is, for example, ‘orientalist’ in the manner that it appreciates the importance of classical works/ideas on theology and pedagogy as enunciating values motivating Islamic learning, ‘historical’ with reference to accumulated practices of education and seeking their relevancy today, whereas it is ‘contemporary’ in that it engages with the unique challenges (both social and ‘philosophical’) facing Islamic education” (p. 6). Despite the nod to the contemporary, the book self-consciously avoids the social scientific literature on Muslim education that over the last two decades has produced plenty of valuable sociological and ethnographic case studies of Muslims 114 JournalofEducationinMuslimSocieties · Vol. 2, No. 2 in education on the ground, and what this could add to a conception of an Islamic philosophy of education. Zaman works with a refreshingly pragmatic, rather than idealistic, understanding of what “Islamic education” could be, thus opening up a varied horizon, delivered to the reader as the book unfolds. “Though not promulgating any one form of Islamic education, it [the book] is also ‘outside’ of these debates seeing itself as part of an evolving discourse of practice that cannot be limited to academic debates alone” (p. 6). He offers up the collection as not providing “definitive statements regarding the unresolved intellectual inquires” in the field but rather “a propaedeutic text on Islamic educational thought . . . as a means for further investigative work appealing to educational theorists, academics, and practitioners alike” (p. 8). Part 1 of the volume, entitled “Theology and the Idea of Islamic Education ,” is concerned far more with theological origins of Islamic thought, educational or otherwise. The first chapter is a wide-ranging interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on a variety of historic, philosophical, and social trends that effect the matter of education in the Muslim psyche and the reality of Muslim modern life. The second chapter, “Education as ‘Drawing-Out’: The Forms of Islamic Reason,” by Tim Winter, is erudite in depth and almost poetic in style. It reads more as theological inquiry into the state of Muslim thought past and present than educational analysis as such. Winter is a theologian, but also comes into this debate as a visionary practitioner who has established an Islamic seminary in Cambridge, England. As many a Muslim educationalist before him, he focuses on the emphasis on aql and reason in Islamic tradition, but his conclusions on what this means for Islamic education are far-reaching. The third chapter, “Islamic Philosophical Traditions: Knowledge and Man’s Path to a Creator,” by David Burrell, another philosopher...