Keywords

Religious education in different faith traditions combine the theoretical-moral and technical-practical sides of knowledge either in a single or a range of kindred institutions. The two sides of knowledge have seldomly been disunited as noticeably as one finds in the modern-postmodern contexts. Modern professions that dominate production and management of goods and services can easily dispense with moral-ethical skills that link a producer with co-workers as a community in the common universe of belief, belonging, and the broader collective living.

The present article focuses on Islamic education and how its tradition was able to provide vital moral resources that made material civilization possible. This chapter analyzes the tradition of Islamic education and its interconnectedness to other sites of the wider world where the symbolic resources of faith are routinely produced, circulated, and meaningfully appropriated in the making of the ideological and the material commons for collective living. For a start, one may refer to Norenzaya (2013, p. 59) quote from Jean Ensminger (1997, pp. 7–8) on how Muslim traders had a non-material interest in honoring their contracts that lowered transaction costs, boosted long distance trade, and crossed cultural barriers across the Sahara and the rest of Africa.

The moral and the technical-practical side of education resulted from a massive disjunction under colonial rule. This was the juncture where Islamic education was held to account for its relevance in the making of modern professions. At this point in the history of Muslim civilization, the tradition of education became stereotyped and demonized. This paper examines the modern popular discourse on reforming Islamic education as well as its critiques and limitations.

In considering religious education between Islamic tradition and its future, the present article seeks to unpack two contrasting scholarly imaginings of the issue: First, Islamic education has been imagined as part of the state-led discourse on curricular reform. The literature explicating this view seems to suggest that the madrasa system (an equivalent of religious seminaries in other faith traditions) through their curricula appeared to produce a mentality fostering faith-induced politics in the contemporary world. In this imagining, tradition is held to be part of the problem and modernity is where the problem is likely to be redressed.

The second imagining refers to the social and historical reality of Islamic education beyond the modern discourse reforming Islamic education. The word “beyond” here is about the realm outside the fold of the popular discourse, which is mostly in the observer immediate field of vision. It is about the institution of religious education and the kindred wider culture that exists within its social context, mostly anchored in its local constituencies.

When the two contrasting ways of being human in tradition and modernity stand face to face, an analyst is expected to resist viewing the two positions over an evolutionary or hierarchical period. To privilege modernity over tradition in matters of dealing with Islamic education is to ignore at least two aspects of the tradition of Islamic education: one is the variety of internal and external symbolic goods it produces, and the other is the equally diverse sites where these goods have been appropriated for varied outcomes. One way forward is to maintain conversation between the Islamic education and those of other religious traditions regarding their common challenges in modern times and how a conceptual engagement of Islamic education can be used to make sense of the predicaments in modern times that its graduates are likely to face.

Contemporary Discourse on Reforming Islamic Education

This paper selects the emphasis of the popular discourse on reducing the content of religious sciences and substituting these with instrumental-secular studies. This is then reflected onto the global discourse on the reform of Islamic education, in particular the madrasas as the historic institution in the transmission of valued knowledge. This reform is focused on mainstreaming the curriculum. One hallmark of mainstreaming is how it replaces religious subjects with non-religious ones. The low employability of madrasa graduates in modern professions is raised as a serious issue. The proposal for remedying this is to develop skills that are supposed to match the requirements of the modern market. The discourse on mainstreaming madrasas assumes the religious curriculum to be ill-equipped for supplying the required aptitudes and skills that would enable madrasa students to secure productive roles in the modern industrial market. The view on employment in relation to the modern state and market sector is seen in a purely instrumentalist sense. A skill is considered relevant if it can be exchanged for a wage in the modern market. The instrumentalist relationship between the skill of a worker and employment is evident in the job’s wage. Skills are supposed to be instrumental in bringing about certain productive outcomes like marketized goods or services. Does the popular discourse seeking to reform madrasas make a distinction between the process of doing work and the achievement of certain targets in the production of goods? The simple answer is that employment is strictly conceived in productive terms, namely in terms of pure outcomes without adequately recognizing the processes of skilled and spiritual engagement with the material. Philosophically speaking, the distinction between doing and making an article for exchange is predominantly ignored in the commercial-business world.

In contemporary times, the stereotyping of Islamic education is especially focused on madrasas, the way these exist as an institution, their curricular content, and the assumptions that their social relevance is questionable. The social science literature on the reform of madrasa education is limited to answering how the institution ought to become more adaptable to the urgencies and requirements of the modern society and economy. Such a modernist reading of existing madrasas is focused on identifying certain knowledge deficits in the curriculum that render them obsolete in the modern market. Following this recognition, steps are taken to overcome this deficit by bringing the institution closer to the employment market as well as to the secular mainstream of modern society. In this manner of thinking, Islamic education is regarded as a passive entity that must adapt to the wider mainstream of society.

What follows is an analysis of one epitome of Islamic education: the madrasas as viewed from afar to see how the institution has responded on its own terms to contemporary challenges.

The stereotyping of madrasas acquired a global stature after 9/11. Its echo has been heard in the policy idioms for reforming or modernizing madrasas. Like the complex imaginings of Orientalism, the stereotype about madrasas is not merely a passing idea but a pervasive discourse. These ideas have been embedded in institutional frameworks and propagated through high circulation among like-minded mutually networked scholars. Scholarly preconceptions on madrasas are produced from a distance in the local contexts where they are applied. Applying the stereotype to a concrete case of a madrasa is not for validating its representations but for exercising policy regulations. As an ideational construct, the stereotypical madrasa scarcely equates to the institutions as they actually are.

A madrasa that produces militancy in its popular discourse is not about a concrete institution of Islamic education but a consequence of others’ application of rules and sanctions to a party that is assumed to be deviant. Here, the religious institution is not what it believes, practices, or prescribes but what it has been labeled or imputed to be. The stereotype is not potent on its own, but it does acquire power to regulate, transform, and even demolish madrasas in certain contexts when factors such as state policy or the covert methods of powerful global actors come into play.

The institutions of Islamic education in the third world exist in an uncertain relationship with their governments that struggle to remain afloat in the strategic globalized mainstream. Most of these governments are caught up between compulsions of underdeveloped economies and the recurrent need to seek a popular mandate for internationally directed policies on reforming Islamic education. In contrast, the modal reality of the Islamic education is located on the margins of the state and the market. This accords a relative institutional and cultural autonomy to the Islamic education that is helpful in anchoring it into its community of beneficiaries for its legitimacy and survival. This autonomy removes the pressure from modal Islamic education to compare their courses with the national curricula or their economic status with state-maintained schools and universities. As part of the rural and tribal economies in the countries with a Muslim presence, madrasas tend to subsist on what a peasant and tribal economy offers in terms of its agricultural produce to support their students, teachers, and the larger institution.

An Islamic education that is so-called “good” from the policy lens of a secular state is one that has reformed its curriculum by teaching subjects like sciences, social sciences, mathematics, English, and computer literacy. In fact, the meaning of reform boils down to how far Islamic education has departed from the traditions of its own curriculum and allowed modern subjects into its syllabus. This argument forms the main thrust of the International Development Department Report (Nair, 2009) on the state and madrasas in India. Modernizing the madrasa curriculum is imagined in terms of having madrasas include modern courses and Islamic education being brought within the state’s regulation.

The stereotypical view of a problem-riddled Islamic education is described in terms of its curriculum’s lack of modern courses. The assumption remains that the absence of modern subjects fails to provide the required skills for its graduates in the modern labor market. The second motif is Islamic education’s institutional non-dependence on state. According to this view, this non-dependence produces a mentality that cuts off a sizeable population from the mainstream of society. Finally, the third motif is the dubious independence possessed by a madrasa whose source of funds is not channeled through the state.

Analyzing these motifs of a problem-riddled madrasa is possible in terms of at least two supportive myths. The first myth refers to the fact that a student brought up on the curriculum of modern subjects is eventually absorbed into the ranks of the supposedly universal class (i.e., the middle class) and supported by industrial-bureaucratic institutions. Contrary to this stereotypical expectation, neither the middle classes nor the modern education system have the property of universalism. The stereotypical view of Islamic education flows from the classical PygmalionFootnote 1 syndrome: the mind-set of a professor of linguistics convinced of their ability to teach people with poor dialect to talk like ladies and gentlemen. The principle of Pygmalion transposed on modern scholarship gives birth to an observer who expects a school in Islamic education to conform to the template of a modern institution. According to this expectation, Islamic education should deal with modern subjects, impart computer literacy, and allow for programs to be watched from satellite TV.

According to the myth, if madrasa graduates are unable to find a place in the modern job market, it is because they have done fiqh instead of physics. Those familiar with developing economies would know that the nature of teaching subjects on their own does not always create jobs in the market. A state policy on reforming madrasas should be informed of their varied ethnographic contexts to avoid painting a madrasa with a single brush. Talib (2018) is seen to have furthered the line of this argument. Islamic education equips its students’ lives with symbolic reserves for coping with life crises and organizing their collective lives through religious services and ceremonies. Madrasa education needs to be part of the division of labor between the sacred and secular spheres of a community. Ammar’s anthropological account of growing up in an Egyptian village describes admission to the madrasa as a rite of passage in a peasant society (1966).

One must also be critical about the idea that reforming Islamic education through modern curriculum, as it may not always have the magical outcomes as imagined in policy. Science can be taught through rote learning (e.g., memorizing the periodic table by heart). Such a science becomes even more irrelevant in informing learner’s experiences or creating skills for employment. Thus, the repeated reference to science subjects is usually not with awareness of the history of the modernization of traditional societies, where imitation rather than creative learning is what had dominated their teaching.

The second myth seems to say that Islamic education instills intolerance among its students because its traditional curriculum fails to produce the universal public sphere that respects democracy and secularism. On this point, taking the example of a typical madrasa as a category of thought seems to have been included in the latest version of Orientalist thought. In the popular discourse, Islamic education distinguishes the international “us and them” (i.e., the societies of the global powers contrasted with the communities in the Muslim world and deserving to be reformed).

The negative stereotyping of madrasas in policy discourse is neither as recent as 9/11 nor the end of the Cold War. Rather, it has a long prehistory, perhaps as old as the history of colonialism in the Muslim societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East when madrasas were questioned over the criteria of their utility of knowledge. For purposes of illustration, I will share one example from South Asia.

In 1824, the champion of the notion of useful learning, James Mill, termed learning in an Islamic seminary to be “frivolous” (as cited in Zaman, 2002, p. 64). The 1835 policy of English education under William Bentinck in British India snapped the relationship that had existed between Islamic education and jobs in the public services. This established at least two elements of the stereotype on madrasas, that they were neither producing scientific rationality nor generating employable skills for entry into the modern market.

The notion of utility comes handy in dismissing the traditional Islamic education. But rarely is utility as a cultural category recognized as not necessarily confined to its extrinsic merit alone. Utility has deeply intrinsic merits that require journeying into the madrasa narrative with its own terms. The notion of al- ilm al-nafi [useful knowledge] (Zaman, 2002, p. 65) figures in the discourses of medieval scholars, who among other things referred to knowledge that supports virtuous acts. Mufti Jamil Ahmad Thanawi, who hailed from the prominent madrasa in Lahore, Jamia Ashrafiyya, listed 30 useful purposes madrasas fulfill in society. According to Thanawi, useful knowledge is only religious knowledge to a madrasa (Zaman, 2002, p. 81).

For researchers who consider the institution’s own perceptions on Islamic education to be vital, probing into internal conversations among its stakeholders is important. One observer on the well-known historic Madrasa Darul Uloom Deoband in North India, Maulana Manazir Ahsan Gilani (1943, p. 275) commented on how one of the founders of the institution, Maulana Qasim Nanotawi, had spoken about the issue of acquiring basic skills in modern subjects while continuing to study religious sciences. One worry was about borrowing modern sciences as if it were a pewand [patch] over the manqulat [revealed Islamic sciences] and ma’qulat [rational sciences] in the madrasa curriculum. Adding books on modern sciences to the madrasa curriculum is not without its own problems. Rather than changing the madrasa curriculum, another way was suggested for allowing students to pursue modern sciences after completing their madrasa degree. Maulana Nanotwi considered different combinations of religious and modern subjects, side by side and consecutively. He clarified that the exercise must not assume the ‘ulama to be devoid of reason. Assessing the debate, Gilani indicated the issue of reform to be able to be resolved by keeping in view the knowledge outcomes expected of a curriculum. One may later investigate obstacles that prevent the achievement of the chosen goal. Reform must not be likened to someone talking about a person’s kurta [loose collarless shirt] made of coarse cotton and proposing to replace it with silk while forgetting that the purpose of wearing kurta was to cover the body. Therefore, while blending the religious sciences with the secular studies, one must not lose sight of the Islamic seminaries’ wider purposes of imparting the valued knowledge.

The narrative of the Islamic education in its own terms recognizes its institutional site to be imparting sacred knowledge while also engaging in self-interpretation of its practices and communicating them to its relevant community. For instance, a madrasa graduate taking up a job in a village mosque is routinely consulted in various matters specific to everyday life and its breakdowns. The cosmology madrasas produce extend into the social logic of living in a community.

The discourse on reforming Islamic education that steers through the proponents of modernization subsists on who has the privilege to diagnose the problem in the existing curriculum. Neither the community fostering an institution of Islamic education nor the state modernizing it should be privileged over the other. In most Muslim societies by and large, the community-based Islamic education and those under state recognition are currently separated by asymmetrical relations of power. A lasting condition for curricular reform lies in a democratic relationship between the community and the state. While the community should be able to disseminate its valued knowledge, the state’s policy should enable madrasas to educationally develop organically in continuity with its tradition and with respect to what the wider society expects of it within a democratic framework.

The Future of Islamic Education: The Relevance of Its Past

In thinking about the future of Islamic education in continuity with its past, the present analysis selects one modernist critique of Islamic education, the critique that its graduates have grim prospects of employability in the modern market. Here, modern jobs refer to the professions and occupations that are vital to the world of work, market, and trade. In the following sections, this paper argues the Islamic educational tradition to groom its graduates into an ethical self-fashioning that ensures a moral continuity between learning and work, and the construction of a wider community of common belonging. The contemporary reformist discourse proposes to inject instrumental sciences into the curriculum of Islamic education so that an individual competes with others in disaggregated tasks. In contrast, the tradition of Islamic education sought to create the necessary symbolic-moral competence in their schools or seminaries that was vital to the material basis of shared existence. In modern parlance, such a belonging is equivalent to citizenship. This moral competence formed the backbone for an individual to be useful, virtuous, and responsible toward the needs of collective living.

The universalist urges of Islamic education addressed the particularity of a given context where ethical self, moral conduct, the social role of learning, and work were seen in a continuum. This is opposite to the top-down policy universals where Islamic education is considered homogenized while remaining indifferent to the specificities of a particular context. The world-making impulse of Islamic education evokes parallels in the emerging modern critique of alternative education. The tradition of alternative education addresses the deep moral crisis of the instrumentalist and individualistic modes of modern schooling and the transmission of knowledge. Among the notable references in the wider field of education, one may invoke Georg Kerschensteiner for stating how learning and work are viewed as a source of self-fulfillment, character formation, self-discovery, and spiritual enlightenment as well as community building (Refer Winch, 2006, pp. 381–396).

In conceptualizing the universe of Islamic education, one clarification is in order: the institutional producers and disseminators of Islamic education are imagined in a maximalist sense, where maximalist refers to the entire field of religious education both formal and informal as well as explicit and implicit. Each of these sites produce a world-view where the bearers and consumers of Islamic education are connected through the chain of symbolic value in the making of civilization. This consists of Islamic education within or beyond the madrasa tradition, Sufi orders, and related sites of market (craft guilds) and civil society that draw upon the valued and sacred knowledge which the tradition of Islamic education produces within the common symbolic ecosystem. For understanding the efficacy of the product of religious education, this paper employs examples of moral conduct on the site of learning or in the context of their use in the wider world. This section gathers together evidentiary fragments from various parts of the Muslim world, from India, some countries in Africa, and Ottoman Turkey to suggest that Islamic education not only schooled its learners in the tradition of valued knowledge but also instilled moral virtue and an ability to engage in sacred cosmology as active members. This allowed the acquired scholarly knowledge, skills and dispositions to have a positive bearing on trade and commerce, symbolic world-making, and the work ethos of the artisanal craft as well as civil and military services. In the imagining exists an inter-relationship between sacred knowledge and the performance of vocation, trade, artisans, and crafts. The vital presence of Islamic knowledge and moral virtues is evidently supportive of various productive roles. In the context of a waning religious tradition, its various segments belong to the scattered milieus, making it difficult to connect these into some semblance of an integrated world. The symbolic resources of faith and sacred knowledge were variedly produced not only within the fold of Islamic education but outside of it as well in a range of kindred institutions. These belonged to the division of labor in a common social order.

The graduates groomed in Islamic education in the general universe of madrasa education, embody the religious cosmology and codes of conduct that are consummated in various contexts of collective living. Wherever the graduates fill productive roles in trade, artisanal workplaces, or craftsmanship in the making of objects of aesthetic and practical use, there is evidence of the religious orientations and attitudes toward productive roles. This helps dispel the myth implicit in the policy initiatives that the curriculum of Islamic education needs to be modernized for greater relevance to the modern world of market and statecraft. The presupposition in the modernization of Islamic education is that its excessive emphasis on revelatory sciences at the expense of instrumental and scientific subjects disjoints it from the scientific ethos of the modern world. The modernization argument holds that Islamic education has little demonstrable potential for building the modern world. In contrast, the historical evidence regarding Islam and the arts of the Ottoman empire clarifies how Islamic art was not merely about mosques, religious texts, and artefacts but to also have extended prominently into secular arts produced for the states, rulers, and dynasties that followed the Islamic faith. Islamic art includes many media, materials, and functions such as the art in worship, in trade and commerce, in historical, scientific and government documents, in items of personal adornment, and in metal arts, ceramics, woven textiles, and carpets (Asian Art Museum Education, 2020).

What follows is an attempt to survey selected literature from the history of the Islamic education and to understand how its spiritual resources and related intellectual reserves had helped build diverse fields in the production, distribution, and exchange over long distances of material goods. The disparate sites of the vital engagements that employ religious conceptions offer ample testimony that ethical and spiritual resources remain vital in the making of the secular world. The role the institutions of Islamic education have in the supply of the religious conceptions and cosmologies attendant upon the making of the material goods and services in the surrounding world is currently available in scattered sites. These may be gathered together in scholarly representations to retrieve the interconnections that may be inferred either in the presence of a salient religious orientation in places of production or in the existence of the institutions of Islamic education and Sufi lodges as part of the common ecology in the domain of religious and cultural reproduction or sites of civilizational creation. This just as much requires a close-up exploration to identify the sources of the continuous supply of religious conceptions in various productive institutional settings beyond the framework of Islamic education. The modernist discourse proposes that, with an injection of modern secular sciences, a curricular reform should enhance the employability of graduates of Islamic education in the contemporary market. This paper inverses the curricular reform argument to say that the symbolic resources of Islamic education have been vital in the making of the material civilization. This is akin to saying that the material world has always subsisted on the symbolic resources of Islamic education and that its reform for modernization can scarcely afford to discard the traditions it seeks to reorganize.

In taking account the scattered milieus working with the blends of Islamic values and productive ventures, the present analysis critically distances itself from the mega-narrative of the modernity-tradition hierarchy wherein the tradition plays a subordinate role in explaining the emergence of the modern world. The attendant policy perceptions view religious traditions to be either playing second fiddle or simply receding into their socially privatized spheres. The possibility of critically distancing from the grand narratives of the modern-tradition dichotomy lies in viewing Islamic education to be integral to the production of the secular world and far removed from being merely an insular site of the transaction and inculcation of valued knowledge.

The institutions of Islamic education are viewed to be a part of the assembly of kindred fields whose product of internal goods of knowledge, moral virtue, and cosmological imagination have helped build the wider world. Islamic education is not about some knowledge-packed curriculum as modern reform initiatives believe. The salient emphasis of the institutionalized form of personal transmission of valued knowledge between the teacher and learner has made the embodiment of knowledge possible. Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud elaborated upon this view through the Javanese Islamic scholar Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (2009). Al-Attas’ dwelled on the notion of Ta ‘dib [discipline] to be the foundation that has made the personalized transmission of knowledge possible between teachers (mu’addib) and students. The author claimed Ta’dib to have enabled the making of distinguished professionals and authority figures in various walks of collective life in history from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The term ta’dib, enabling the development of senses, intellect and morals, expands pure knowledge into the persona of a learner. Its success as part of learning outcomes includes an indelible mark of spirituality in the students’ personality alongside knowledge and wisdom.

Here a distinction needs to be drawn between internal and external goods (MacIntyre, 2007) that an institution and its implementations produce. This distinction is drawn from philosophy to say that Islamic education and spirituality formed the cornerstones for framing various institutions of state, civil society, and market to cohere into a common moral order. The upshot of this distinction is that the internally produced culture was vital for maintaining the standards of excellence and cooperation among actors in the production of civilization goods and the related world. The element of virtue and spiritual disposition a person acquires in Islamic education are believed to produce the values of courage, justice, and honesty: courage when facing risk and loss in performing one’s role, justice in being both accurate and fair when performing one’s productive role, and honesty when transferring the learned skills and aptitudes to the designated outcomes and products. West (2018, p. 29) examined MacIntyre’s conception of these virtues and their bearing on business ethics. To be virtuous and spiritual (i.e., being a craftsman or an artist) means to ensure the quality and standards in the practice of one’s vocation. Virtue is about the internal good that wards off the corruptions of power and commerce and the temptations of profiteering.

The ethnographies from Africa show how the spread of Islam had enabled artisans to labor together in work communities and combine patterns in producing and performing their ethnic and religious lore. Trimingham (as cited in Dilley, 1987, p. 247) described how the performance of craft involved the transmission of hereditary lore, where the belief in supernatural powers was reinforced and the ritual participation combined the spiritual and mystical understanding through the occupations being practiced and the material being handled (1959, p. 137). Dilley’s ethnography shows how Islam had expanded through the variety of Muslim artisans plying their skills as ironworkers, goldsmiths, and weavers quite broadly throughout West Africa had a veneer of religious faith. This is further reiterated in an illustration from Bilad al-Sudan (Loimeier, 2013, pp. 103–104) where the Qur’anic schools were not limited to memorizing the sacred text but also provided skills and social knowledge that could be meaningfully translated into social competence.

The artisanal culture in the Muslim world appeared to have blended artisanal skills with spiritual resources for maintaining craftsmen’s high motivation to pursue their craft with diligence and attentiveness. Accounts of artisans and craftsmen support the view how engaging with the sacred text of the Islamic tradition (e.g., reciting the Qur’an) was linked to gaining focus and mental poise in the hand–eye coordination needed to produce material artifacts to perfection. At the same time, the spiritual dimension also took care of the contingency and periodic collapse of the familiar meanings and life supports. Thus, a semblance of mental fortitude was routinely fostered for dealing with the conditions that made the world of craft possible.

For this, one needs to unpack the component of adab, the paramount skill whose context of deployment doesn’t distinguish between the so-called secular or religious domains.

Ahmad Shalaby (1954) wrote on the importance the early period of Islam laid on understanding at least a given selection of verses from the Qur’an. Having students learn 10 verses until they knew their meaning and implemented what the verses enjoined became customary. Quoting Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s al-Musnad, Shalaby (pp. 19–20) wrote how Ibn ‘Umar had spent eight years learning Surah al-Baqarah and that the Companions had said, “The man who was able to read al-Baqrarah and al-Imran seemed a great man amongst us.” Furthermore, Shalaby observed how learning the Qur’an preceded everything, and religious instruction came next. Shalaby quoted from Al-Jahiz’s (Vol. II, p. 92) al-Bayan that the curriculum drawn up by ‘Umar ibn Khattab had an instructive suggestion for people in various parts of the Muslim world:

Teach your children swimming, horsemanship, famous proverbs, and good poetry. The main subject taught in children’ schools was Adab so that the schools of children were called Majalis al-Adabs. During the time of the Umayyad’s era, those who had to be schooled to join the state offices travelled to Bedouins’ encampments where they lived for a specified duration for learning reading, writing, religion, the art of war, and athletics. The objectives of such education were to produce what was called at that time the “Well-Rounded Man. (Semaan, 1966, p. 194)

The development of a spiritual economy based on arts and crafts in Kashmir is vividly described in the accounts of fourteenth-century Sufi saint Mir Syed Ali Hamadani (Rafiabadi, 2005, pp. 251–266). The salience of the religious-spiritual ethos in the making of artisanal products and crafts demonstrates how spirituality, religious knowledge, and artistic expression were correlated in the material craft. Unlike the prevailing practice of religious people who subsisted upon the favors of landowning communities, Shah-i-Hamdan (as the Sufi sheikh was titled) demonstrated the example of self-employment through cap making. His Sufi order of the Kubrawi Silsilah were able to organize Sufi khanqahs [sufi lodges], mosques, and artisanal communities in the common framework of worship, religious knowledge, and artisanal workshops. Mir Syed Ali Hamadani had disciples as handicraftsmen and artisans who worked with wool textiles of a fleecy soft texture and delicate embroidery worked into silk and wool hand-woven carpets bearing delicate warps and wefts. The disciples also exhibited paintings and designs on papier-mache goods, wood carving, and metal work conforming to the high standards of both aesthetics and utility. Under the influence of the khanqahs, the artisanal communities developed a strong culture for earning their subsistence through lawful means and regarded engaging in artisanal work as a form of prayer. As a Sufi sheikh who fostered communities of artisans and other handicraftsmen, he combined the act of worship and productive work, the karkhana [workplace] and khanqah (Malik, 2021, p. 7). This reiterates the view how the transmission of religious faith and knowledge and the production of civilizational world coexisted on a common plane.

In outlining from historical and field-based observations, the argument is being developed for showing how the narrative on modernizing tradition has privileged modernity to view placing religion into the making of modern civilization with skepticism. What continues to challenge social science scholarship is how the importance of self-accountability was established through the medium of faith so as to be vital in the quality standards of material artefacts as well as in maintaining working people’s communities over the course of history and society. The modernist argument that reduces the components of revelatory sciences in favor of instrumental and scientific subjects is rather flawed when viewed in isolation. What the modernist reformers of education need to acknowledge is how to embody the resources of faith, its knowledge, and attendant ethics into communities of professionals and various employees in production as well as how to organize it into the affairs of state and society.

Following from the Peircean pedagogy of religious education (Falcone, 2016, p. 381) is the argument that the instructions in Islamic education produced ethical-moral conduct among the learners. Subsequently, as bearers of their faith and imagination in the real world, they would perform the role of their ancestral or acquired vocation vital to the running of state and society. Thus, institutions of Islamic education and the wider world formed part of the common division of labor. One may draw upon Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (2004, p. 4), who described how the Ottomans had inherited the madrasa tradition from the Seljuk Turks and developed it to provide “the necessary religious, scientific and educational services for the society and the state as well as for training administrative and legal personnel for the state administration. The madrasa graduates were both knowledgeable in Islamic jurisprudence as well as customary practice.” Ihsanoglu further elaborated on the relative autonomy the madrasa tradition enjoyed that had allowed the appointed teachers to work independently of their own initiative within the framework of the waqf (foundation) regulating the instruction given to students.

Ihsanoglu (2004, p. 6) drew upon illustrations that suggest how important institutions of learning that don’t strictly fit the category of religious studies also came to flourish alongside Seljuk madrasas. Ihsanoglu indicated how various sciences such as astronomical observations and medicine grew alongside the main curriculum of the Anatolian Seljuk madrasas. One would need further evidence of the microprocesses to assess how the extracurricular activities in an Islamic seminary had developed into an organized interest in philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Here, the probe is directed toward the contribution of faith-based spiritual resources and their bearing on the pursuits of rational sciences. In the wider perception behind the current emphasis on curricular reform in a madrasa, the relationship between the religious and rational sciences is conceptualized as two distinct domains that show discontinuity followed by continuity. As a historical illustration, Ihsanoglu (p. 8) described how Mehmed the Conqueror transformed several Byzantine buildings into mosques, madrasas, and dervish lodges after taking over Istanbul. The madrasas in the Fatih Mosque Complex and the Samaniye madrasas were imagined together in a single totality of educational and pastoral provisions: hospital, library, and a soup kitchen to provide for food, drink, shelter, and medical dispensation.

The relevance of Islamic education even lent itself to the training of elite corps under the Ottomans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Necipoglu, 1991). The Palace school for pages, called dar al-ilm [house of learning] was a modern equivalent to the academy for schooling civil and administrative servants. The Palace school of Topakapi complemented the madrassas of Mehmed II’s mosque complex in Istanbul, which trained the ulama for the state. The trained pages were admired for their prudence as well as other virtues. Kritovoulos (as cited in Necipoglu, 1991, p. 111) noted their distinguishing talents in terms of their nobility, talent of soul, and outstanding manners and morals. According to the chronicler Menavino, a page himself observed how the training produced service men who excelled in letters and speech with “profound courtesy and honest morals.” Another page in the seventeenthcentury, Bobovi highlighted the characteristic feature of the palace school to be one of religious indoctrination and instruction in court etiquette, liberal arts, sports, and crafts rather than training of mere scholars. The dominant expectation from the trained servants was their respect for books, especially the Qur’an. Turkish books were found devoted to Islamic faith and law as well as Persian authors of literary classics such as Saadi Shirazi and Hafez. The training included curriculum where learning of text, discipline of its reception, etiquettes of fellowship, initiation into becoming a parsa [one who excels in purity and abstinence], and practicing silence and solitude were vital inputs in pages’ complex education. The broad setting of mosques and madrasas remained part of the schooling of service men (Necipoglu, 1991, p. 112). After all, statesmanship and state services subsist on the self-regulatory power of the outstanding manners and morals for their long-term survival and protection against corruption.

Islamic Education for Making Sense of the Modern World

The Islamic education of tomorrow must develop conceptual tools and modules to know the wider world in a participatory manner. Literature is found to support the view that Islamic education is firmly situated in a tradition where resources of faith have contributed to the organization of artisanal skills, statesmanship, and its attendant civil and administrative services. Here, the artisan is not passively engaged in the practice of the craft. Rather, the practice of artisanal and professional skills is woven into the vocation in a way in which the artisan connects to the Creator through the craft. An Islamic education graduate needs to be refreshed on how to be groomed into becoming an active citizen and enter the mainstream of employment, artisanship, and modern professions with both submission and critical consciousness. Pierce’s suggestion for the Christian tradition (Falcone, 2016) of creative education may be shared for enriching the pedagogy of Islamic education in its effort to create active citizens for facing the globalized world. To revisit one’s religious tradition is to “understand humans as both created and creating: weavers of words, images, stories, and plans of action, co-participants in God’s own plans for the world” (p. 394). Here the emphasis is laid on learners’ active self during their initiation into religious education. This echoes the recent ‘Adab Symposium in Pre-school Education (Yaygın Eğitim ve Kültü Derneği [YEKDER], April 3, 2021), which has the potential to develop a perspective on learners as active receptors of the oral and textual narratives in Islamic tradition, which are the pedagogic strategies for developing the metaphysical imagination to relate to the Creator and creation as well as to the authority of the knowledge tradition. Such an educational transaction of sacred knowledge fixes the future of those who bear the Islamic tradition in the heart of the secular world as an active stakeholder of the religious and secular components of the shared civilizational framework.

The broad motifs of the learning outcomes of Islamic education are fearlessness in critiquing authority, defensiveness of the sovereignty of one’s country, and worry about how to include the socially excluded into the mainstream of society’s opportunity structures. The students trained in Islamic education on how to deal with the wider society are able to gather ample resources of faith and knowledge to respond to the context of the breaking points in established meaning with self-confidence and a strong motivation to transmit the chosen ideas and practices from the sacred tradition that are to be imparted to the next generation. An individual suffers hopelessness in the face of layoffs and failures, powerlessness before economic recession, and meaninglessness consequent to an ill-conceived policy failure. The spiritual resources from religious education equips an individual to remedy these breaking points in established meaning to something that transcends the given experience and to remedy the issue in “something beyond the empirical” (O’Dea, 1966, pp. 4–5).

A person of faith knows the distinction between the transcendental reference of a creator and its worldly isomorphs, the self-fashioned look-alikes as gods in this world. From this vantage point, a person groomed in religious education can approach the productive role in society with adab [sincerity and focus]. Such a person can defend and critique institutions and their secular heads from behaving as if they are gods in relation to their employees. Therefore, no reference to a future can be entertained if the spiritual skills in the training in Islamic sciences are not recognized to be of vital consequence to modern professions. A competent engineer, doctor, developmental policy maker, or overseer of welfare programs requires a strong base of ethics and the spiritual orientation necessary for both the specialized task at hand as well as for building human-to-human relations for a collective living within a wider cosmological order. This makes Islamic education also relevant for the future of the community as part of the national framework.

This material on the relation Islamic education has with the secular world is intended to inspire a debate between the realm of the religious and public (secular) spheres. Drawing upon Jurgen Habermas’ (2006, pp. 1–25) exposition of the dialogue between the religious and public spheres in Europe, one can surmise for the present argument that the dividing line between the religious and secular positions is about their differing self-understandings and claims of existence. The actors and institutions in both spheres require attitudes with complementary learning processes. The limitations of learning processes remain where the secular state must not enforce its claims and policy visions on religious institutions through laws or politics. The constitutional freedom of religion is based on the secular character of the state, which makes religious pluralism possible. The secular state can ensure positive and negative liberties among the secular and religious contestants: the positive liberty to practice one’s own religion and the negative liberty to remain spared from the religious practices of others.

One important component of the curriculum of Islamic education is the imperative to know one’s basis in a wider framework by studying different educational institutions in varied and specific contexts. This is to develop awareness about the institutions of Islamic education in terms of how their producers and consumers of symbolic units define their purposes and outcomes. One would also like to know how such a unit is understood in terms of both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. These two rewards must not be equated, especially during research or while making a policy decision. Equally important is inquiry into the interfaces of the institutions of Islamic education with secular society and state. This interface should highlight the complex of exchanges and relations that have taken place within the tradition of faith in various regions. Having research study their continuities and changes in the contemporary post-colonial world is important.

This article has attempted to prepare a conceptual space to allow for either a secular translation of a religious logic or religious language to demonstrate how the Islamic faith contributes to the flourishing of the material civilization and strengthening of the public sphere. The anthropology of the faith tradition in the moment of reproducing itself through education has the capacity to vitalize the spheres of production and trade and to maintain the corporate existence of believing individuals. The educational reform of religious pedagogy and curriculum must be imagined in terms of how to promote citizens within Islamic tradition and institutions to have a conceptual basis for participating in secular society. In the absence of a consciousness recognizing the synergy between religion and secular society, the latter is likely to get cut off from the key resources, both material and symbolic, that are produced out of faith-based meaning and identity.