This 800-page book, which targets specialists in Islamic studies and the social sciences, provides methodological and epistemological grounds for future interdisciplinary dialogue. It starts from the belief that religion cannot be isolated to just fiqh, that fiqh necessitates an ethical understanding, and that applying fiqh to reality requires scientific tools that were developed and still lie in the space of the human sciences in general and the social sciences in particular. One of the most important tasks of these sciences is to connect religious practice and affiliation to other social phenomena, and how these practices were institutionalized through religious social institutions (Islamic movements and parties, mosque, fatwa institutions, the religious virtual space, etc.). In light of these concerns, this book will attempt to answer these questions:
- What is the aim of religious education? Does it aim to graduate people who specialize solely in religious affairs, or does it extend beyond that to the necessity of building the believer in a comprehensive human framework?
- What are the different schools of thought on Sharia education?
- What is the nature of the relationship between the social sciences and the Sharia sciences? To what extent can Islamic studies benefit from the social sciences?
- What are the characteristics of sharia curriculum and the quality of the dominant pedagogical system in Sharia departments? Is the end result of this curriculum which graduates today receive qualify them to participate in the local debates of socio-political thought or even global debates?
- What suggestions can we make to Sharia jurisprudents to develop their tools to understand the world, religion, and society in light of an era characterized by pluralism? And how can we imbed the social sciences in Sharia departments?
- What are the most important intellectual orientations which are the most present in the university space at the level of the student and teacher body?
- What are the characteristics of knowledge production represented in academic books, articles and university theses?
All of these questions are connected to the theoretical framework to understand the crisis of Sharia education
The book is the results of field research I conducted over five years (2015-2020) of studying some of the Sharia departments in the countries mentioned above. I studied the components of these departments in terms of their curricula and teaching styles in the Sharia sciences and the relation of these sciences to other fields of knowledge, the social, human and empirical. I conducted, with the help of a working team, approximately 263 interviews with teachers and students in Colleges of Sharia and the social and human sciences, some of whom were heads of departments or deans or even university presidents. We met some of them in their universities, and others through academic conferences and seminars, and through their academic production, and articles in refereed journals, media writings and social media participation. The focus of each case study varied as some issues were focused on more specifically than others, as called for by the need to understand the context of the development of teaching the Sharia sciences, the circumstances of field research and the extent and access of our information. If field visits were the most important method we used for field research, my intensive attendance of academic conference, given my position as President of the International Sociological Association, and previously the Vice-President of Arab Council for Social Sciences, and a member of its board of trustees, aided me in unevenly gathering a large amount of information among the mentioned case studies. We will discuss this methodologically in detail, as needed, in the introduction of the coming chapters of this book.
In addition to this introduction and a conclusion, the forthcoming English version of the book (which is shorter than the Arabic one) is composed of four parts and fourteen chapters as follows:
Part One discusses the theoretical problems of teaching the Sharia sciences and its context in three chapters. The first chapter discusses Sharia education in terms of its history, centering on the transformation of some mosque complexes into universities through three examples: Zaytouna, Al-Qarawayn and Al-Azhar. It then gives the example of Islamic madrasas in the West, with France as a model. I then discuss the three main orientations: traditional/classical (taqlidi), Salafi and maqasidi. I will then analyze what many actors have called the crisis of Sharia education and the different approaches of confronting this crisis. I center here on four approaches: the approach that teaching religion is not the same as religious teaching; the approach of just teaching cultural courses on religion with a focus on rituals; the approach of studying the religious entity as an ontology; and finally the approach that teach all functions of religion. I will suggest an approach close to the final approach, however while connecting the teaching of Sharia sciences with the social sciences, which I will term as the “ethical approach to social phenomena.”
Chapter Two discusses the characteristics of the Arabic religious fields with a focus on religiosity and its relationship to the social and political, and the Arab tracks of partial secularization from below or from above (ie. including civil state or partial secular state), before moving to understanding the tools of fatwa-making in its three schools. This will then move us to study the Islamic renewal from inside the religious field, while throwing light on some of its new components, such as: The Arab Network for Research and Publishing, and Namaa Center for Research and Studies, and Believers without Borders for Studies and Research. Finally, I study Friday prayer sermons through a case study of Sunni and Shia sermons in Lebanon, centering on preachers’ characteristics and their relation to the state: supervision, financing, their sources of information, analyzing sermons’ content (that point to social and political issues, ethics in the public sphere, or relationships with non-Muslims). The third chapter discusses the problems of Islamization of knowledge and ta’sil (rooting), pondering if it is truly necessary or rather identity politics, and suggesting a new approach that I will call “separation, connection and pluralistic praxis” as an alternative to Islamization.
As for Part Two, it centers around Sharia higher education in the Arab world. First in the Arab East, I examine the cases in Lebanon, and Jordan, which are fundamentally influenced by the traditional approach, although this leads to results which go beyond the “traditional,” (Chapters 4 and 5) in addition to the Kuwaiti example, which has a Salafi orientation (Chapter 6). Then I deal with Sharia education in the Arab Maghreb through the Moroccan case (Chapter 7). [1]
In Part Three, I examine three prominent examples: The College of Islamic Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa in Qatar, which retrieved the ethical side in Sharia sciences (Chapter 8), the Dar Al-Hadith Al-Hasaniyyah in Morocco (Chapter 9), and then the case of an important university in Malaysia, The International Islamic University of Malaysia, which was a laboratory in Islamizing knowledge and a trajectory of moving from identity politics to more integrating knowledge in a manner more akin to an ecology of knowledge, as I call for (Chapter 10). In the beginning of each of these case study chapters there is a section on some of the particularities of the religious field in the case study’s country, which I will describe in a manner which can explain the orientation of religious education in its universities. I will naturally touch upon the religious madrasas when I have sufficient information on them, even though they are technically outside the scope of this book’s focus.
Finally, Part Four (Chapter 11) presents a general vision of the problematic characteristics shared between Sharia colleges, where I discuss the problematic aspects which these colleges must avoid, which are: Firstly: attitude vis a vis integrating Sharia sciences with other fields of knowledge; Secondly, the pedagogical process, specifically the style of monotony, taqlid and filling up pages; Thirdly, the binary between reason and revelation; Fourth, enforced specialization; Fifth, academic weakness in Masters and Doctoral Theses; Sixth, the limited capacities of Sharia students; and finally the stakes of feminization and its positive or negative consequences.
This book ends with a return to its subtitle, “Is Not the Dawn Near?” as I decided to not discuss only the obstacles of Sharia sciences’ engagement with the social sciences, but to also point out three approaches that guarantee the progress of teaching the Sharia sciences and their bridging with the social sciences: Cultivating knowledge according to the “separation, connection and pluralistic praxis,” the Maqasid methodology, and the ethical approach to religion. As we will see, these approaches have been tested to a reasonable degree in three important experiences: The College of Islamic Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa, the International Islamic University of Malaysia, and Dar Al-Hadith Al-Hasaniyya.
[1] For those interested in reading more about the Maghreb case, you can refer to our Arabic version of this book where contains an extra chapter with Algeria as a case study.