The Mosque in Education

The Mosque in Education

In addition to being a place where preaching and wor­ship take place and where the community assembles, the mosque has also been from the beginning a place of instruction in religion and its application in life. The Qur'an speaks of religion as something that can be known and communicated with the help of reason. Muhammad is said to have taught and answered ques­tions in the mosque of Medina, and throughout Islamic history study of religion has been constantly en­couraged.

The mosques that came into use after the Arab con­quests were the natural places to learn about religion. On an elementary level this implied simply learning by heart verses from the Qur'an and hddiths. Already at an early stage children were encouraged to memorize verses and passages of the Qur'an, as they are still today. This tradition has spread to the kuttdbs (Qur'anic schools) ev­erywhere in the Muslim world, which are found mostly in or beside mosques, even in regions where Arabic is not spoken. Equally, up to the present day selections of famous hadlths are' memorized and recited on numer­ous occasions.

On a less elementary level, mosques were also places of religious inquiry, discussion and debate, besides serv­ing as places for communal worship and assembly, pri­vate study, and meditation. In other words, the mosque was the place where the religious aspects of things could be investigated and where people could look for reli­gious truth, norms, and rules, and for religious guid­ance in the broader sense of the word, all centered around the Qur'an.

Out of this kind of service and function of the mosque, it became the custom in early times that those possessing knowledge of religion and recognized as such were free to communicate their knowledge and to teach if they found an audience. This no longer consisted merely of learning by heart but extended to teaching the meaning of Qur'anic verses, hadlths that were not yet locally known, prescriptions as to how one should act in different situations of life, and answers to doctrinal problems related to knowledge of God and revelation. This advanced religious teaching started in the mosques and led eventually to the development of the religious sciences.

Thus from the beginnings of Islam mosques have functioned as centers of religious education, both in the sense of instruction (ttflim) and in the sense of building a moral personality in the student who becomes an inte­grated member of the community (tarbiyah). However mechanical and rational certain techniques may have been, this education created a communal sense and transmitted the basic truths by which the community distinguished itself from others. There was a close con­nection between what was held to be the true religion and the kind of education developed to transmit it. In Sufi circles the learning process and education of the heart took place under the personal leadership of a murs-hid. The 'ulamd' would teach the rational study of scrip­ture and law, which required in the first place a good memory and intelligence. We are concerned here only with this second, formal kind of instruction and educa­tion as it was practiced in the mosques.

When Islam became institutionalized as a religion and its main prescriptions and doctrines had been fixed, knowledge of religion became more and more identified with knowledge of the Qur'an and sunnah on due hand, and of the shari^cah (religious law) on the other. To­gether with some less important disciplines, this became a corpus to be assimilated. To the construct of the reli­gion corresponded a construct of knowledge of this reli­gion, with particular ways of teaching and of studying that were in part indebted to existing educational tradi­tions in the Near East.

The gradual acceptance of a certain corpus of knowl­edge to be acquired, embodied in texts that had to be read, did not exclude variety. And variety there was: regional cultural centers of religious learning, each with its own local sunnah (tradition), and different schools of fiqh (jurisprudence) and kaldm (scholastic theology). There were majority views and the opinions of dissidents: ShPIs possessing their own chains of authority (isnads) and their own corpus of traditions (akhbdr), their own kind of education, and their own mosques; Zahirls with their literal conception of texts and the study of texts; or Mu^ctazills making extensive use of reason and Aristotelian logic. The Sunnl majority, rec­ognizing the established caliphate, needed only to de­fend itself by asserting that its idea and practice of reli­gion was in line with established tradition (sunnah). But the Shl^cl minorities had to justify intellectually their specific ideas and practices as different from those of the majority; they may from the beginning have had a greater interest in good education because they were a minority, though a tolerated one.

It was Fatimid Isma^cills in late tenth-century Egypt who started to establish institutions for the education of their preachers and missionaries. Partly as a response to this, Sunnl authorities from the second half of the elev­enth century promoted the establishment of Sunnl edu­cational institutions (madrasahs) that assumed to a large extent the educational function of the mosques, at least beyond the primary level. These institutions, which quickly spread through the cultural centers of Islam, presented a coherent outlook on the world, humankind, and religion. At the time, the corpus of texts of authori­tative religious knowledge according to the Sunnl per­spective had been largely fixed, and religious education became more and more restricted to reading, learning, and explaining scripture, tradition, and texts according to authoritative commentaries. Hardly any new knowl­edge could be added; philosophy in the Sunnl institu­tions was largely reduced to the principles of Aristote­lian logic; and the empirical disciplines, to the extent they were permitted, had only an auxiliary function with regard to the normative religious disciplines. Edu­cation in matters of religion, in both mosque and ma­drasah, had become the assimilation of knowledge essen­tially acquired in the past. Its aim was the simple transmission of religious truth known for a long time, to be inculcated into generation after generation of stu­dents. Basically, this orientation of madrasah and mosque education continued until the independence of many Muslim countries around the middle of the twen­tieth century, when national governments reorganized traditional institutions of Sunnl religious education. In some countries, such as Turkey, the reorganization oc­curred earlier; in others, such as India and Pakistan, where private institutions have continued to exist, it was less thoroughgoing. On the whole, Shfl religious education paid more attention to philosophy; its institutions enjoyed more political and financial independence. The mosque continues to play an educative role when Mus­lims migrate to the West.

I shall concentrate here on some major Sunnl mosques and the education given there around the turn of the nineteenth century: the Great Mosques in Mecca and Medina, the Azhar Mosque in Cairo, the Zaytunah in Tunis, and the Qarawlyln in Fez. Other mosques where religion was taught, as in Damascus, Aleppo, Kazan, Bukhara, Lahore, and Delhi, did not differ fundamen­tally from these. We also leave aside religious education given in madrasahs (Sunnl and ShPI), Sufi khdnqahs and zdwiyahs, and private associations founded in the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries and concerned with the study of the Qur'an and Islam generally. The following paragraphs note the features characteristic of the educa­tion promulgated in the great Sunnl mosques at the time.

Knowledge of classical Arabic was presupposed and further instruction in this language given according to traditional patterns that made such study, in particular of grammar, extremely difficult. Furthermore, a corpus of authoritative texts of the Islamic religious sciences ('ulum al-din), dating from the classical (medieval) pe­riod and offering the view of Islam at that time, had to be studied with the help of authoritative commentaries.

The teaching was offered by individual fuqahd' and ^ulamd' (shaykhs) to students who assembled in circles (halaqdt) around them according to their own choice. After years of study with a particular shaykh a student could obtain a written statement (ijdzah) from him certi­fying that he had successfully studied certain texts with the teacher and was now allowed to teach these texts in his turn. Students might come from great distances in order to study in this way under highly reputed schol­ars; most students would come, however, from families living in the town or the surrounding countryside. In the teaching given at a particular mosque there was no coordination between the subjects actually taught, and there were no formal study programs and degrees or di­plomas other than the individual ijdzah.

The pedagogy applied was based on the absolute au­thority of scripture, tradition, and the other texts stud­ied, as well as on the authority of the masters of the past and the teachers of the present; both kinds of authority had to be respected. Such pedagogy required both the mental assimilation of the texts studied by means of memorization (printed texts were not yet available) and the sharpening of intelligence by putting and answering questions in discussions with the teacher.

As a result, a vision of Islam, the world, and human­ity was presented that was supposed to be universally valid beyond time and space. At least in mosque educa­tion, no knowledge was provided about nature, society, history, or geography, not to speak of Western lan­guages. A kind of self-sufficiency or at least a feeling of superiority prevailed among both teachers and students, oroud of not only possessing the absolute religion but knowing it, which made self-criticism and dialogue others difficult.

. the economic basis of this mosque education con-iSted principally of the revenues from waqfs (charitable endowments) that had made possible the foundation and upkeep of the mosques, and also of gifts, donations and legacies from people of the wealthier classes. Lodging and feeding of students was often provided in the same way, many students living in houses (riwaq) according to their regions of origin. At the time the mosques were practically independent of political authorities and gov­ernments at large, although there were often close per­sonal links between the shaykhs and prominent person­alities of public life through commercial and marriage alliances. It was rare for shaykhs to protest against gov­ernment politics; they rather supported the regime in place, which would be able to offer appointments to gifted students and further the careers of ambitious ^ulamd'. Although there was a basic solidarity among the ^culamd' as a class, they had no independent religious organization to defend the interests of their profession and themselves; they had to rely on their high social prestige among the population and the private wealth and influence of some members.

The social profile of the students was extremely broad. For many of them, coming from the countryside or the lower classes of the towns, mosque education hardly cost anything and was the only path to upward mobility. For sons of the urban upper classes and of the ^culamd' themselves, this education gave access to im­portant positions in the judiciary, state administration, and of course religious education itself. In a traditional Muslim society mosque and madrasah provided the edu­cation needed to fill the existing "intellectual" positions in the overall socioreligious structure.

Several explanations may be advanced for the major changes that occurred in this traditional mosque educa­tion between 1850 and 1950 and finally put an end to it. First, the modernist reform movement initiated by Muhammad ^cAbduh (1849-1905) in Egypt and Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) in India was largely stimu­lated by educational concerns. Muslim thought had to come to terms with modern knowledge and the prob­lems of the modern world, and Muslim students had to be prepared to face it. It was thought that a reform of Islam on the basis of a new, rational interpretation of its main sources, Qur'an and sunnah, would make this possible. Much more than traditionalist Muslims, the reform movement had a vision of education as an engine to propel Muslim societies from the "backwardness" re­sponsible for the success of foreign domination. The call for the reform of education was readily adopted by stu­dents committed to the reform of society and to nation­alist movements, social development, and justice. It was also taken up by students who realized that finding a job in the society to come would be more difficult for those who came from the traditional educational system than for graduates of the increasing number of institu­tions offering a modern education.

New government policies also had their impact on tra­ditional mosque and madrasah education. Muhammad ^CAU in Egypt, Khayr al-Dln in Tunisia, and some en­lightened sultans in Istanbul not only took the initiative in founding new educational institutions on a higher level; they also tried to limit private waqfs and to exert some control over the traditional educational institu­tions. Most nationalist movements were highly critical of a kind of education that was in fact a remnant of medieval times. Whereas most foreign colonial adminis­trators were not allowed by their governments to med­dle in the internal affairs of the Islamic institutions in the countries they ruled, the succeeding national and generally revolutionary governments could and did in­terfere with institutions sanctioned by traditional reli­gion, like waqfs, mosques, and religious education. This was a natural consequence of the hard fact that, in order to survive, the newly independent countries needed to start planned economic development. To bring about the necessary changes, and for other reasons too, their societies were placed under complete governmental con­trol. Moreover, in their efforts to modernize their coun­tries the new nationalist governments reduced the spheres of influence of the traditional religious authori­ties, including the realm of education. Thinking along the same line, such governments have actively promoted modern educational institutions (including modern reli­gious education) opposed to the traditional ones. They have also made concerted efforts to make the traditional.educational institutions more functional, serving what they define as society's priorities.

Beyond the forces of Islamic reform and government policies, however, it was the changing economic and so­cial structures of society that brought traditional mosque education to an end. Formerly students could exhibit their ijdzahs and find decent jobs in the tradi­tional society of the time. In modern society people after their studies had to show diplomas and compete for a job. Those coming from traditional education often lost the battle because of their poor pragmatic qualifications compared with those of graduates from modern institu­tions who could show degrees and diplomas. The once-dominant traditional religious views had lost their mo­nopoly in the minds of the people when nationalist and other secular ideologies offered themselves to the younger generation. Whereas the traditional mosque and madrasah education had been of great service to the traditional Muslim societies, rather closed to the outside world, they lost relevance once these societies were bro­ken open not only by the penetration of the colonial powers, foreign capital, and Western ideas, but also by the efforts of new leaders—secular nationalists, military revolutionaries, socialists, and technocrats—not to speak of the many influences Muslim countries have un­dergone since independence. Traditional mosque educa­tion simply stood in the way of these new forces.

As a consequence, with the exception of certain re­gions of the Indian subcontinent, traditional mosque ed­ucation at present persists only on the elementary level, that of learning the Qur'an. This may be in the form of the traditional Qur'anic school (kuttdb) where children learn parts of the Qur'an and certain hadiths by heart, in addition to learning how to read and write. Or it may be listening to religious preaching or participating in study groups organized by mosques or other associa­tions where adults receive instruction in Qur'an and sun-nah, no longer sitting in halaqat on the floor around the shaykh who leans against a pillar in the hall of the mosque, but now assembled in a room designed for the purpose under the roof of the mosque, provided with a library of printed books instead of the manuscripts found in the older mosques.

Religious education on higher levels has been mostly transferred to more or less modern Islamic university institutions. The Zaytunah in Tunis finally became an Islamic university; so did Qarawlyln in Fez. In 1961 even the venerable mosque university al-Azhar of Cairo became an Islamic university endowed with a great

number of faculties similar to those found at modern universities, distinguished only by having faculties of Is­lamic law (skari'ah) and theology (^cusul al-dm), and also a women's faculty (kulliyat al-bandt). Al-Azhar has in addition an immense network of Islamic education on all levels throughout Egypt. In most Muslim countries, surviving madrasahs have been transformed into higher institutes for Islamic research or faculties of shari'ah attached to universities.

In the course of the twentieth century higher educa­tion in Islamic religion in its Sunnl version has been shifting from the mosque to the university (whose Ara­bic names both have the same root, j-m-⁽, meaning "coming together"). Of course, the mosques still have an important educational function, but not on the level of formal education in the religious sciences of Islam. As a result of the increasing interest in Islamic studies in Muslim countries today, new Islamic universities, higher Islamic institutes, and faculties of Islamic reli­gious studies and shari'ah have been opened in many countries during the past few years. Governments are attentive to how Islam is presented in these institutions, partly to counter interpretations of it that might be po­litically threatening.

[See also Azhar, al-; Education, articles on Religious Education and Educational Institutions; Madrasah; Zay­tunah.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmad, Mohammad Akhlaq. Traditional Education among Muslims: A Study of Some Aspects in Modern India. New Delhi, 1985. Important survey of the content, form, and organization of present-day Is­lamic education in India.

Belambri, A. Bibliographic systemalique sur ['education islamique. Paris, 1988. Indispensable for any research on Islamic education.

Berque, Jacques. "Ville et universite: Aperc.u sur 1'histoire de 1'ecole de Fes." Revue de 1'histoire du droil franfais et etranger 27 (1949): 64-117. Contextualizes the Qarawlyln mosque and its educational system in the social history of Fez.

Dodge, Bayard. Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning. Wash­ington, D.C., 1961. Highly readable account of the history of the al-Azhar mosque and its educational aspects up to the reforms of 1961.

Dohaish, Abdullatif Abdullah. History of Education in the Hijaz up to 1925. Cairo, 1398/1978. Survey of the development of modern education and the history of traditional Islamic education up to the establishment of Sa'udl rule.

Eccel, A. Chris. Egypt, Islam, and Social Change: Al-Azhar in Conflict and Accommodation. Berlin, 1984. Fundamental study with rich documentation on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of al-Azhar within the context of modernizing Egyptian society.

Fischer, Michael M. J. Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution.