On Education

Wadad Kadi’s Periodization of Islamic Education March 17, 2008

(This is primarily a summary of Kadi’s editorial, interspersed with personal reflections and extrapolations. Original article here)

To say that Wadad Kadi, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, is an accomplished academic would be a gross understatement. A recipient of the King Faisal Prize in Arabic Literature amongst other accolades,Kadi offers an impressive resume, garnering her a worthy candidate for the job of guest editor of Comparative Education Review‘s special edition on “Islam and Education – Myths and Truths.”

For Muslim readers, Kadi’s role as an associate editor of the now infamous Encyclopedia of the Qur’an does not act in her favor. Nevertheless, her credentials as a scholar of Arabic and Islamic Studies are well known in academic circles and do not leave room to question her role as the journal’s guest editor.

Kadi’s editorial is a periodization of Islamic education – from its pre-medieval beginnings to its post-industrial, post-modern present. Periodization is a risky endeavor, Kadi admits, and “is even riskier when…dealing with an enormously large geographical area, whose peoples speak different languages, have innumerable cultures, and over the centuries have undergone varied historical experiences” (312). Yet, the trappings of such an academic exercise do not leave it without its merit, and given the relatively little historical construction done on the development of Islamic education over the centuries,Kadi’s attempt is more than welcomed.

Kadi begins her editorial with a rather obvious, yet seldom stated fact: “In a way, education could be envisioned as one of the cornerstones of Islamicate civilization and its backbone, Islam” (312). To highlight such at the beginning of a periodization of Islamic education is to emphasize the importance of works dealing with this topic; an importance that extends far beyond the redundancy of academic exercise. For those interested in Islam and its place in today’s world, coming to a full apprehension of Islamic education (past and present) is paramount.

Kadi proposes that Islamic education has evolved through three loosely defined stages in history.

The first stage occurred in near proximity to the beginning of the Prophetic career of the Messenger (saw). By far the longest of the three historical stages of Islamic education,Kadi highlights the development of this medieval stage through the development of three principal institutions — the masjid, kuttab, and madrasa. While it is evident that Kadi is aware of the fact that the masjid was the first center of learning for the early Muslim community, she begins her discussion by addressing the characteristics of the kuttab and, in doing so, emphasizes its importance in this early stage of Islamic education. According to Kadi, subjects taught in katatib varied, but generally included “memorization and recitation of the Qur’an, reading, writing, spelling, voweling letters, arithmetic, and some basic religious duties, like the rules of ablutions and prayer” (313).

A more prestigious institution of Islamic learning that obviously doubled as an “institution of worship” was the masjid, and was “the oldest and most ubiquitous institution of learning in Islam” (313). It was more likely that students would be exposed to more “foreign” sciences in a masjid-learning environment than in a kuttab – the latter generally focusing its students on the recitation and memorization of the Qur’an as well as the study of simple jurisprudence. Conversely, the masjid would reach to more involved sciences such as “the Qur’an and its ancillary disciplines, especially exegesis; hadith, with its sub disciplines; law and its sources; theology and dogma; the auxiliary disciplines connected with Arabic language, including oratory” as well as “logic and later medicine” (314).

By the fourth century of the Islamic calendar, the great empires of the Muslim world began to develop the first institutions “created expressly for the purpose of education” (315) — the madrasa. The erudite Seljuk vizier, Nizam al-Mulk was the first to establish such, with his standard-setting network of Nizamiyya madaris; madaris would then spread to the coasts of the Islamic empire. Kadi notes that while the instruction offered at a madrasa was similar to that offered in a masjid, the two institutions differed in almost every other respect, including “funding, architecture, organization, staff, faculty, students and curriculum” (315). Kadi goes as far as to say that madaris were host to a “distinct curriculum” (316).

As noted in a previous post, standardized topical language relating to modern-education is customarily co-oped when discussing Islamic education, whether its past or present forms. Kadi likens the systematic approach of the Nizamiyya to a relatively new educational medium — standardized curricula. In speaking of Islamic education, or any sort of pre-industrial education for that matter, one needs to be especially cautious of using terms such as “curriculum” or “school” because of certain industrial and post-industrial manifestations connected to these phrases (more on this in a later post addressing Guenther’s article). Nevertheless, while Kadi uses misappropriated topical language when discussing the madrasa, she is cognizant enough to point out that the masjid‘s learning environment did, in fact, have “an informal structure” — a characteristic that I would argue was commonplace in all three principal institutions of medieval Islamic learning.

Overall, the first stage of Islamic education would extend from even before the dawn of the hijri calendar (re: Dar al-Arqam being the first center of learning in Islam) to the nineteenth century, when the world of Islamic education would enter a new phase.

This new phase in Islamic education paralleled the general shift of both the religious and political orientation of the Muslim World — the rise of modernist thinkers such as Rida, Afghani, ‘Abduh and Khan would highlight this stage lasting from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. And while Kadi leaves out any mention of the crushing pressure felt by many Muslim nations (some still European colonies) to industrialize and embrace the early comings of the age of science, one is certain that it played an important catalyzing role during this stage.

It is somewhat odd that Kadi would jump from the medieval to the industrial era in her periodization — it is obvious that major intellectual undoing of ‘medieval Islamic education’ had initiated well before the dawn of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, one cannot argue with the significance of the so-called modernists in the yet-to-be industrialized Muslim world at the time. Radical changes, in the name of certain ideological standpoints propagated by the modernists, were made at all levels of Islamic education. The disintegration of the madrasa (largely at the hands of European imperialists) was well under way during this period and would persist until the final vestige of Islamic education in a medieval-madrasa setting would fall in Marrakesh in 1960.

The third stage of education in Islam would begin at the feet of the independence of Muslim countries from colonial powers and continues to the present day. Kadi reiterates that it’s difficult to provide exact dates in a periodization of Islamic education, since “clear boundaries between the colonial period and the postcolonial one are often difficult to define” (320). From the 1950s to he 1970s, Muslim nation-states would place mass-public education “at the head of their goals” (321). The quick emergence of Western-styled elementary and secondary schools would coincide with the establishment of various western-styled universities throughout the Muslim World. Despite its concerted effort to mirror the post-industrial education of the West, the Muslim heartland lags far behind the rest of the world in education reform and advancement when compared to prevailing precedents [here]. The three primary centers of learning in Islam — the kuttab, masjid, and madrasa — have either been extensively reformed (such as Egypts’s al-Azhar) or rendered defunct (such as Morocco’s Madrasa of Ali Bin Youssef).

Kadi concludes her editorial with reflections on the past and present of education in Islam — “There is no doubt,” she asserts, ” that Islamic education in premodern times was successful in transmitting knowledge, for this is the only way to explain the heights reached then by Islamicate civilisation” (323). In other words, one can say with a degree of certainty, that Islamic education remained relevant and spiritually-intact in its medieval form. Various factors, such as colonial imposition as well as the dramatic move of the world-economy from an agrarian to industrial-based setting, would lead to radical reformations in all aspects life in the Muslim World, especially so in education.

Post-colonial institutions of Islamic education have emerged, nevertheless, and Kadi notes the shift in the way secular education is viewed: “secular education is no longer viewed as an imported, foreign, and illegitimate form of schooling that must be rejected but rather as a legitimate, but deficient system that must be completed” (324). Whether or not Muslim intellectuals and educators should be praised for initiating such a trend is very much up for debate…and a good spring board for a future post.