Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Islam, and Education (original) (raw)

The Exploration of Islamic Educational Reform and Colonialism Impact on Contemporary Islamic Higher Education

Khazanah Pendidikan Islam

Many historians and scholars have embraced the concept of ""tradition vs modernity,"" arguing that Islamic educational institutions play a minor role in Muslim civilization's intellectual development. Despite the fact that portrayals of Islamic educational institutions, such as madrasas, as legacies of medieval antiquity are still popular in public discourse, numerous historians, philosophers, and scholars have debated this concept over the years. This research is a comparative study to explore the modern Islamic educational reform in Islamic higher education in Tunisia and Indonesia. As well as its contribution to development. The purpose of this study is to answer what are the explorations of educational reform in Indonesia and Tunisia's higher education? What is both countries' contribution to the development of Islamic education? The study was conducted using a qualitative method with an historical approach. The historical books of colonialism in ...

Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam: Continuities and Ruptures

2011

This comprehensive collection examines a broad spectrum of Islamic governance during colonial and postcolonial eras. The book pays special attention to the ongoing battles over the codification of Islamic education, religious authority, law and practice while outlining the similarities and differences in British, French and Portuguese colonial rule in Islamic regions. Using a shared conceptual framework the contributors to this volume analyze the nature of regulation in different historical periods and geographical areas. From Africa and the ...

Rethinking the Role of European Colonization on Muslim Educational System in Indian Subcontinent (1757-1947

History of Education and Children's Literature, 2016

This paper highlights influence of colonizers on the Muslim educational systems of the Indian subcontinent which has a mixed reaction among Muslim educationists-some of whom consider colonization as an actor of educational development and most of whom found the devastating impact of colonization on Muslim education. This deserves rethinking the role of colonization on Muslim educational systems because without reflecting on it, current Muslim educational development would be impractical even it would be unknown to the Muslims that how the present came into being and what trends will dominate in the near future. The British modernized the education of India and this modernization does not contradict the essence and target of Islamic education if the education integrates Islamic epistemology with learning resources. Perhaps the clash starts when the scope of Muslim education is thought as the madrasah education but in fact madrasah education is only a part of entire Muslim education system.

Islam and Colonialism

The academic theme of Islam and colonialism is controversial, vast and inexhaustive. With colonialism almost all over the Muslim world from the mid 19 th Century and the diverse impacts and implications it has on the colonized countries, it is understandable if views differ and diverge. In Africa, Central and Southeast Asia as in most neocolonial countries of the world, colonial legacies still replete as they endured to the contemporary times. The study of Islam and colonialism in Northern Nigeria is expectedly so partly because of the nature and substance of the British rule between 1897, when Ilorin emirate was conquered and 1960, when the then colonially formed Nigeria got her independence. Northern Nigeria is diverse though dynamic and colorful in terms of its people, culture and socio-material setting. As such, Muhammad S. Umar's narrowing the research to the intellectual responses of the Northern Nigeria Muslims to British colonial rule is a brilliant decision. This is not to say that such a task is a simple one. The outcome of this research engagement is largely a success.

Introduction: the Culture, Politics, and Future of Muslim Education

Schooling Islam: the culture and politics of Muslim …, 2007

, hundreds of radical Islamist paramilitaries sprang up in cities and towns across the country. Several boasted of their ties to Islamic schools. In late 2002, a handful among the country's 47,000 Islamic schools were discovered to have had ties to militants responsible for the October 2002 bombings in Bali, in which 202 people died, most of them Western tourists. For many analysts, these and other examples lent credence to the charge that madrasas are "jihad factories" and outposts of a backward-looking medievalism (see e.g. Haqqani 2002). Against this troubled backdrop, the contributors to this volume seek to shed light on the culture, practices, and politics of madrasas and Islamic higher education. The authors were participants in a ten-month Working Group on Madrasas and Muslim Education that, with the generous sup port of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University, came together in Octo ber 2004 and May 2005 to examine the past, present, and likely future of Islamic education. Our concern was not with general or secular educa tion, but with institutions charged with transmitting Islamic knowledge and disciplines. The approach we adopted was comparative and theoreti cally eclectic, on the assumption that Islamic education is a total social phenomenon, in which knowledge, politics, and social networks interact in a complex and "generative" (Barth 1993, 5, 341) manner. The Working Group was organized with an eye toward interdisciplinary collaboration and included scholars from history, political science, anthropology, reli gious studies, and education. Although the story told by each author in this book is as different as the case study in question, the contributors share two points of view. The first is the conviction that Islamic education is characterized, not by lock-step uniformity, but by a teaming plurality of actors, institutions, and ideas. Islamic schooling is today carried out by government and nongovernment organizations, and its purpose and organization are matters of great de bate. At the heart of the dispute lie two important questions: just what is required to live as an observant Muslim in the modern world? And who is qualified to provide instruction in this matter? Disputation of this sort, in which different groups argue publicly about who they are and what their institutions should do, is a clear sign that the madrasa is anything but unchanging or medieval. On the contrary, Islamic education has been drawn squarely into the reflexive questioning and public-cultural debate so characteristic of modern plural societies. Indeed, if there is a struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims taking place around the world, which there certainly is, madrasas and religious education are on its front line. This first point leads to a second. The members of the Working Group felt it important not to allow the sound and fury of recent political events to obscure the fact that this contest for Muslim hearts and minds began

South Asian Islamic Education in the Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Periods

2020

This chapter surveys the history of Islamic education in South Asia from the 1300s to the present day. It discusses the importance of Sufi masters in spreading Islamic teaching through both oral and written means when South Asia was under Muslim rule. The Sufi master-disciple relationship was also a template for the training of religious scholars ('ulama). In the eighteenth century, Delhi became an intellectual hub due to the influence of the Sunni reformer Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) and his successors, their madrasa being famous for the study of prophetic traditions (hadith). With the onset of British rule in 1858, Muslim religious education changed decisively by adopting new institutional features borrowed from British models. The purpose of madrasa education also changed. No longer intended as a means of training future administrators for Muslim states, the Dar al-'Ulum, Deoband, the leading center of Sunni Muslim education in North India, and other madrasas focused on cultural preservation, training 'ulama who could provide guidance to the Muslim public in matters related to everyday life through the dissemination of juristic rulings (fatwas). Today, madrasas offer some secular

Schooling the Muslim Nation: Muhammad Iqbal and Debates over Muslim Education in Colonial India

South Asia Research, 31.1 (February 2011), 69–86

Abstract: This paper examines Muhammad Iqbal’s critique of contemporary approaches towards Muslim education. In his writings, poetic and prose, Iqbal took on both the traditional religious authorities who administered the madrasas and the modernists associated with the Aligarh College for failing to provide an education that was true to the “national character” and for failing to develop a synthesis of Islamic and western knowledge. While the former were criticised for ignoring modern intellectual developments, the latter were attacked for being intellectually captive to the west. At a broader level, this paper employs Iqbal as a foil to debates over the empowering potential of western education. Iqbal’s views are studied against the background of attempts by Muslim intellectuals to negotiate between the adoption of a universal modern education and the development of an educational system that kept Muslims grounded in Islam and their “national character”. These negotiations took on a number of shapes - pedagogical, polemical as well as theological.