EDUCATION

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is a "religion of the book"—a religion, that is, which derives its authority from a revealed scripture. The Qur?an does not stand alone, however; it is supplemented by a wide array of other texts of a religious nature, such as collections of hadith (stories about the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad and his companions), commentaries on the Qur?an and hadith, and books from a variety of different fields of intellectual endeavor. The Islamic tradition is thus very much a textual one. That fact has helped to make learning and education a central pillar of the religion, in virtually all times and places.

Islamic Education in the Premodern Period

Like most things in the Islamic tradition, the centrality of learning finds expression in sayings (ahadith, sing. hadith) attributed to Muhammad, such as one that quotes him as instructing his followers: "Seek knowledge, even in China." That injunction applies with special force, of course, to scholars, but it is directed in a more general way at all Muslims, who need at least rudimentary instruction in those demands which the shari?a, Islamic law, placed upon their lives. Moreover, Muslims typically viewed the process of transmitting knowledge and texts—or at least knowledge and texts of a religious nature—as itself a form of worship. And so, for example, one was not supposed to commence reading the Qur?an, or participating in a class on a religious topic, without performing ritual ablutions similar to those which are to precede prayer.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that an important thirteenth-century treatise on instruction and study by Burhan al-Din al-Zarnuji would stress the importance of education to a pious Muslim life, and conclude that "learning is prescribed for us all." It is of course impossible to estimate with any degree of certainty the number of individuals in premodern Islamic societies who were educated or literate, and it may even be difficult to be precise about what it meant to be "educated" or "literate." Nonetheless, it is almost certain that premodern Islamic societies achieved (at least in comparison to premodern European societies) relatively high levels of literacy and of familiarity with the texts in which knowledge was embedded. Inevitably education was largely a concern of men, but the biographical sources available for the reconstruction of the social history of many premodern Islamic societies demonstrate that girls often received some level of education and religious training, and that many became recognized scholars in their own right.

The "knowledge" that Muslims are to seek is known in Arabic as ?ilm (pl. ?ulum). The word can mean knowledge of almost any sort. In more traditional contexts, however, it refers specifically to knowledge acquired through some course of study, and especially in fields of intellectual endeavor that we would now label "religious." In this narrower sense, it constitutes the foundation of the authority of the group known by the etymologically related term ulema (sing. ?alim), literally "those who know." The ulema are those scholars who are involved in the transmission of the religious sciences. In premodern Islamic societies, they included men who functioned in those positions for which training in the religious sciences was required—the judge (qadi) who ruled according to Islamic law, the professor (mudarris) who transmitted religious learning to a rising generation of scholars, the preacher (khatib) who delivered sermons in mosques, and so on.

The ulema were not, however, a clergy (a group of people set aside by an act of consecration). Consequently, their social origins and status varied widely. Virtually anyone could be considered one of the ulema if he or she had acquired sufficient learning and the social respect that came with it. Collectively, however, they constituted perhaps the most important indigenous group in most traditional Islamic societies, and so were sometimes identified as the "heirs of the prophets"—that is, as the inheritors (in the absence of the Prophet) of religious authority, the arbiters of the religious tradition. Virtually all premodern Islamic societies have left a record of the respect in which the ulema were held. So, for example, a jurist named Ibn al-Hajj who lived in fourteenth-century Cairo commented that, when a true scholar died, the whole of creation would mourn his passing, even the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.

In many respects the distinction between that which is "secular" and that which is "sacred" is meaningless in the Islamic tradition. Nonetheless, Muslims came to distinguish broadly between those subjects and disciplines that they inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy, astronomy, medicine, and the like, and those which were more immediately connected with the Qur?anic revelation and the religious tradition that stemmed from it. The former were referred to as the "sciences of the ancients" (al-?ulum alawa?il ) or the "rational sciences" (al-?ulum al-?aqliyya). For many centuries, these sciences flourished in the Islamic world: names such as that of the great physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (d. 1037), known to the West as Avicenna, and the Spanish philosopher, theologian, and natural scientist Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), known as Averroes, are sufficient to demonstrate that. Clearly the processes by which the knowledge they had mastered was transmitted to subsequent generations formed a part of the educational world of classical and medieval Islam. In some cases, education in these sciences was supported by institutions, the most famous of which was the Bayt al-Hikma, or "House of Wisdom," established by the caliph al-Ma?mun in Baghdad in the ninth century, and devoted to the translation and transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical works, and a similar institution established by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in Cairo over a century later. More often, they were transmitted informally, directly from teacher to pupil.

It was subjects and disciplines more closely related to the religious experience, however, that formed the core of what Muslims recognized as ?ilm. The circumstances under which they were transmitted were somewhat different than for the rational sciences.

Education would begin at a young age, with instruction in Arabic and the Qur?an. This instruction might take place in the home, or alternatively in a primary school known as a maktab or kuttab, often attached to a mosque. The emphasis at this level was on the rote memorization of the Qur?an, the foundation without which more advanced education was impossible. Kuttabs developed within the first century or so of Islamic history, and have in many places continued to function down into modern times, sometimes in competition with schools offering a more modern curriculum.

Once the Qur?an was memorized, some students would proceed to more advanced training in various subjects. Those subjects included the study of hadith, tafsir (Qur?anic exegesis), and especially fiqh (jurisprudence), although the boundaries between them were not always sharp. In many ways, jurisprudence was the most important of the religious sciences, because of the centrality of Islamic law in guiding not only the worship but the social and political behavior of Muslims. Here, too, memorization was important, and the medieval sources are full of accounts of scholars who had committed to memory thousands of hadiths and other texts. But education in the advanced forms of the religious sciences involved much more. Two things in particular stand out. First, higher education trained the student to participate, as reader and as writer, in an interlocking nexus of texts and commentaries on those texts—in essence, it trained the student to engage in a "conversation" or "discourse" that constituted the essence of intellectual life for the ulema. This "conversation" was quite vigorous, and the ulema of the early and medieval periods of Islamic history have left a significant textual record of it. Second, higher education involved a process of socialization, in which the student gradually acquired status in the eyes of other scholars. In the absence of any consecrated priesthood or formal degree system, this element of the educational process was especially important. So a student might attach himself to one or more teachers, developing close personal as well as intellectual relations with them.

For the first several centuries of Islamic history, the transmission of the religious sciences at an advanced level took place in an entirely informal fashion. Scholars would offer classes in mosques, or in private homes. Such informal settings never ceased to be important to the transmission of ?ilm. Beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, rulers and other leading figures in the Muslim societies of the Near East began to establish institutions known as madrasas that were devoted specifically to advanced instruction in the religious sciences, and especially jurisprudence. As an institutional type, madrasas may have originated in Khurasan, in eastern Iran. They soon spread throughout the Near East, and became common in the cities and towns of Egypt, Syria, Iran, and later the Anatolian and Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Particularly important cities, such as Cairo, might boast dozens of madrasas of varying sizes. Each madrasa would typically consist of a building providing space for lessons as well as accommodations for one or more teachers and a certain number of pupils. The institution and its activities would be supported by an endowment (waqf ) provided by the individual who had founded the madrasa in the first place. As a result, madrasas might vary considerably in terms of their size and the value of the endowments supporting them: Some might employ several professors and provide stipends for hundreds of students, while others might support only a few.

Several aspects of the madrasa and of the educational system it supported deserve comment. In the first place, the spread of these institutions was closely linked to political structures in the medieval Islamic world. In general, political power in the medieval Near East was fairly localized. Much of the central Islamic lands were ruled by military elites of an alien, often Turkish or Mongol, and sometimes only recently and superficially Islamized nature. The rulers' decisions to establish and endow institutions for the transmission of the Islamic sciences constituted one strategy for securing the support, or at least the acquiescence, of the ulema who commanded considerable respect among the local Muslim population. So, for example, especially in the cities of Egypt and Syria, madrasas would often be associated with elaborate tombs constructed for the benefit of the schools' patrons, a linkage that had both spiritual and political advantages.

Second, for all the importance of madrasas, the system of transmitting religious knowledge and of training the next generation of ulema remained persistently informal, at least through the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval sources tell us at great length with whom an individual studied, and with which professors a student developed close relationships, but very little about where those studies took place. There was no system of institutional degrees; rather, certification of the character and quality of an individual's education was found in the ijaza. The ijaza could take different forms: It could be a formal attestation of a scholar that some individual had, in some fashion, studied a particular text with him, or it could be his statement that the student had mastered an entire field of learning. In any case, it was a personal document, which confirmed the relationship of the student to his teacher, and through him to his teacher's own instructors. Through it, the student took his place in a genealogy of authorities that constituted the only recognized hierarchy of the educational system. Under the Ottoman Empire, this loose and personalized system gave way to a more carefully defined and delineated structure. At least in the capital of Istanbul, madrasas were graded according to a hierarchy that was in turn tied closely to the career paths of the students who passed through them. In other parts of the Muslim world, however, Islamic education continued to follow informal patterns. In Indonesia, for example, education in the Islamic sciences (including Qur?anic exegesis, jurisprudence, etc.) took place in institutions known as pesantren. On the whole the pesantren were less formal institutions than Near Eastern madrasas: They might be supported by fees and alms provided by local Muslims as well as endowments, and often were established by particular scholars themselves (and might not survive their founder's death).

Third, the spread of madrasas in the Middle Ages had important social consequences, in particular a tendency to bind an increasingly diverse society together in a united cultural project. This tendency can be seen on a number of different levels. The texts and methods of instruction of Islamic legal and religious education were remarkably uniform across the Sunni Muslim world, and a student or scholar from Iran who found himself in, say, Damascus or Cairo would often be able to find a position in a madrasa there. Since these institutions provided stipends for students as well as salaries for teachers, they may have helped to broaden the social base of those able to devote themselves to the long process of becoming a recognized scholar. They also helped to spread Islamic teachings beyond the urban centers in which most of the ulema concentrated, as young men from the countryside might study for a time in a madrasa in the city, and then return home to supervise and instruct the religious lives of peasants and others in the villages.

Islamic Education in the Modern Period

In the modern period, the field of education, along with that of the family and of the social and political status of women, has been one of the principal targets of reformers, and thus also one of the major battlegrounds over the character and direction of Islamic societies. Given the traditional status and social role of the ulema, this is hardly surprising. Developments in the field of education can be grouped into three distinct areas: the establishment by Muslim governments of modern schools that have competed with traditional Islamic schools; the establishment in some places of schools sponsored by foreign groups, many of them by missionaries; and the reform of traditional schools themselves.

The establishment of a new network of schools has been one of the principal tasks of various groups of political and social reformers in the modern Muslim world. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, for example, the Ottoman government established a series of schools designed to train students in mathematics, medicine, and various other subjects. Those efforts picked up speed during the period of aggressive reforms known as the Tanzimat, from 1839 to 1876. The Ottoman viceroys of Egypt, Muhammad ?Ali and his successors, undertook a similar program over the course of the nineteenth century. In both these cases, educational reform was connected with a campaign to reform and improve the effectiveness of the military: The students, that is, were originally drawn from the ranks of army officers. In both cases, also, the social effects were profound. Very often the instructors in these schools were European, and the textbooks written in European languages. Accordingly, instruction in those languages, especially French, formed a core component of the new schools' curricula, and so they became a channel for the importation into the Muslim world, not simply of scientific knowledge in fields such as chemistry or engineering, but also of new political ideas values and new ways of thinking about social organization. There was some opposition to these new educational institutions from the ulema, many of whom looked askance at innovations, particularly those adopted in an explicitly Westernizing form, and who resented the challenge that the new schools posed to their former monopoly on education. In the long run, however, the principal consequence of the new schools was the development of a new social elite, trained in a more-or-less European fashion and attuned to the political and social values of modern Europe, a new elite that did not replace the older elite represented by the ulema, but deprived it of much of its social recognition and authority.

Over the twentieth century, a full system of governmentsponsored schools developed in most parts of the Muslim world. In many places, this task of educational reform has been linked in one fashion or another to Westernizing elites and to a conscious program of modernization. In Egypt, for example, after the military coup of 1952, the government expanded the network of primary and secondary schools as well as universities, in the process broadening considerably the social base of those with access to a modern education. A similar process took place in Turkey, where the first university was founded in the late Ottoman period, with others established after the emergence of the republic following the First World War. In Turkey, however, the process went further than in many places, because of the pronounced laicism of Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" and his republican regime. In the aftermath of the Kemalist victory, many of the madrasas were closed, along with other religious institutions. (After Ataturk's death, restrictions on religious education were loosened: A faculty of theology was established at Ankara university in 1949, for example, and instruction in religious matters was returned to the curriculum of the elementary schools.) In Iran, too, the regime of Reza Shah and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah, undertook a vigorous program to secularize and modernize the educational system; there, however, the traditional network of madrasas training Shi?ite religious scholars remained more or less intact, though it shrank in size and lost its appeal to middle-class students. The result was considerable tension between a secularizing government and the traditional ulema, a factor of enormous significance in the Islamic revolution of 1978 and 1979. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, has followed a different model, in which the traditional madrasa system has been largely replaced by state-supported schools and universities, but traditional religious subjects have remained an important part of the curriculum of the government institutions.

In many parts of the Muslim world, such as Egypt, Syria, and India, educational institutions established by Europeans (or Americans) have also played an important role during the last two centuries. Many of those responsible for establishing these schools represented religious communities or organizations. Some, such as the institutions established by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, saw their mission as the education, and often the Westernization, of students from particular communities of religious minorities. Others, however, tried to attract a more ecumenical student body, although the success of those efforts varied from place to place. Among the more notable such institutions were Robert College in Istanbul and the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University in Beirut), both founded by American Protestant missionaries. The latter in particular has had a distinguished place in the modern history of the region, as it was associated with a rebirth of Arabic literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and so contributed to the development of a modern Arab national movement. The fate of these institutions in the post-colonial world has been mixed: Robert College, for example, has been effectively integrated into the larger Turkish educational system, whereas A.U.B. and the American University in Cairo have remained independent, and have continued to offer a distinctive and distinctively Western education.

Finally, there is the question of what became of the traditional network of schools, kuttabs, madrasas, and so on in the wake of the emergence of the state-supported educational system. In most parts of the Muslim world, where kuttabs and traditional systems of education have survived, they have done so at the expense of coming to constitute a separate, "religious" educational sphere. From the perspective of the classical and medieval Islamic periods, this in itself is an odd development. Moreover, the conditions that made the ulema so important in previous historical eras have disappeared or been eroded. The religious scholars can no longer rely on the patronage of rulers or an extensive network of waqfs (religious endowments) to provide financial support. Since they have had to compete with more modern, state-supported schools, those who trained and taught in them, the ulema, have often found their social status and power significantly reduced. With a variety of educational and professional options now available, traditional schools and religious subjects have held less appeal for bright and ambitious students. In contemporary Egypt, for example, where subjects such as medicine and engineering attract the most successful pupils, those studying the religious sciences typically rank at the bottom of the academic ladder.

There have been efforts to reform the traditional schools themselves. In Egypt, for example, the organization of the ancient mosque of al-Azhar and its educational program have evolved considerably in the last century. It has expanded its mission and become a full-fledged university, adding new faculties (in medicine, engineering, etc.), instruction in a number of disciplines (English, the social sciences, etc.) which previously had no place in traditional religious education, as well as a separate college for women. At the same time, al-Azhar has come much more decisively under government supervision, with the result that its officials are sometimes perceived as lacking that independence which lent authority to the medieval ulema. The Muslim community in India under British rule also produced several distinct movements of educational reform. Chief among them was that associated with the Dar al-?Ulum ("House of Sciences") at Deoband, a school founded in the nineteenth century to provide a traditional religious education with methods and in an institutional environment of a more modern nature, and which has inspired the establishment of similar institutions throughout the subcontinent. More recently, newly established institutions known as madrasas have flourished in Pakistan and elsewhere in connection with the rise of political Islam.

See alsoAzhar, al- ; Deoband ; Knowledge ; Madrasa ; Modernization, Political: Administrative, Military, and Judicial Reform ; Science, Islam and .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berkey, Jonathan P. The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Eickelman, Dale. Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Makdisi, George. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.

Rosenthal, A. L. Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1970.

Starrett, Gregory. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Tibawi, A. L. Islamic Education: Its Traditions and Modernization into the Arab National Systems. London: Luzac, 1972.

Jonathan Berkey