Contemplating an Education System for Decolonization and RejuvenationYusuf ProglerAny meaningful program of education for decolonization and rejuvenation has to take into account the damage already done by Western civilization, and must take steps to undo that damage, heal the wounds, and especially avoid repeating its reprehensible and destructive characteristics in a new guise. Such a prospectus requires a two-pronged approach, which will simultaneously dismantle the destructive tendencies and institutions built upon them, and assemble more constructive beliefs and practices, in light of human and ecological needs.Western civilization has hegemonic control over three areas of existence: cosmology, epistemology, and methodology. A meaningful program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to weave these three together, not compartmentalize them, into a program of study whose goal is a sustainable, peaceful and just life for as many humans as possible.Since western bodies of knowledge are intertwined with method, it seems necessary to come up with new methods. Otherwise, 'non-western' systems may merely add some exotic frills to otherwise essentially western systems. Western methodologies will probably be the most difficult to overcome, since many people who are talking about decolonization are doing so from within western institutions.A necessary step away from this hegemonic system is to legitimize peoples whose cosmological, epistemological and methodological legitimacy is not based solely on their having passed through the hierarchical system of education in the west, whose highest award is the Ph.D. Difficult although this may seem, the program of rejuvenation will need to start by downgrading the Ph.D. and similar colonial certificates from their places of privilege. Even a cursory look at the history of colonization will bear this out, as the white man worked to set up institutions of legitimization, with their rewards and punishments, and these systems preceded their bodies and frameworks of knowledge.Where does this leave institutions of higher education? Clearly some will adjust, and others will not. The ones that do adjust to the program of decolonization and rejuvenation will survive in a world driven by peace, justice and sustainable living, and the ones that cannot do so will wither and fade away. The danger lies in forming alliances, because of economic or political expediencies, with existing institutions, because their colonizing habits will severely limit progress in the kinds of projects most needed for genuine and meaningful decolonization and rejuvenation.From agriculture to child-rearing and medicine, and within the realms of politics, economics and science, wide-ranging efforts need to persevere in elucidating the nature of the destructive systems and replacing them with more sustainable systems. Much of this will entail looking at workable models on the ground, keeping in mind that the best workable models of peaceful and just sustainable survival are context- and bioregion-specific, worked out within the means and locales of specific cultural and ecological settings, and being wary of universalized, standardized and westernized systems.The Project on Andean Technology (PRATEC) deserves such study. Its developers created a program of decolonization and rejuvenation that evaluated western knowledges and methodologies from a baseline Andean cosmological system. The designers and practitioners of PRATEC speak of 'eating, digesting, and excreting' the western knowledges and methodologies, in an interesting twist on the usual rigid dichotomy of acceptance or rejection found in westernized oppositions to colonization, such as Marxism and liberalism.Once the Andean cosmological system was understood, it became a matter of evaluating knowledges and methodologies in terms of a baseline set of assumptions. In this scheme, people with western Ph.D.'s actually played the role of mediators; they were on the front lines with the western development 'experts', disputing their plans and projects in their own language, having digested the western ways of seeing and being able to explain them back to their designers in ways that could not be easily written off, before rejecting them in light of local needs and beliefs. In this light, there is still a role for the Ph.D., though it is more of a mediating role than an authoritative role.Similar workable alternatives could be studied as well, for the ways in which they combine a two-pronged approach to the decolonization and rejuvenation project, with respect to locally relevant types of knowledge and experience. So any meaningful education in this sense will require a field-based component, which in a sense undermines another tenet of western education: book learning. This is not to reject books, but only to say that their knowledges need to be worked out by people, and so studying the ways people apply and enact their knowledge systems, for better or worse, is a necessary part of the project. With these cautionary remarks in mind, some 'courses' in a program of decolonization and rejuvenation might include the following:'Civilization and Sustainability' can examine the ways in which civilizations have collapsed once they strayed too far outside the bounds of their bioregions. This course will treat the Western notion of civilization as problematic in light of non-Western cosmologies, and look at what might count for a 'civilization' in an ecologically-sustainable cultural setting. Studying the relationships between mental and environmental ecologies will be necessary to develop a conceptual framework for the course. 'Comparative Studies in Cosmology, Epistemology, and Methodology' can evaluate western and non-western views on these topics, in light of the findings from studies of civilization and sustainability. Cosmological studies can look at the three-part relationship between human beings and the unseen world, human beings within and among themselves, and human beings within a seen world or an environment. Knowledge studies can look at indigenous definitions of knowledge, and evaluate various knowledges as an antidote to the colonial educational systems that have insisted on a singular definition of knowledge as that which benefits the colonized way of life and its beneficiaries. Studies in methodology can proceed from the above, by looking at how methodologies can embody cosmologies and epistemologies.'Explorations in Other-than-Human Sovereignty' can ask the basic question of what happens when human beings are not the sovereign of the land. Whether it be in a deity and revealed religion, as in for example the Islamic sense of sovereignty, or in nature being the sovereign, as in many indigenous people's cosmologies, such a course will pose major challenges to the humanistic western system of thought, which places the human being at the center of a rational universe. In order to avoid reproducing past pathologies, however, this course of study will need to look at how many belief systems, such as contemporary forms of Judaism and Christianity in the west, have embraced humanism at the expense of their cosmological teachings; this in itself will also complicate efforts at purely relativistic studies and conversations, such as in interfaith dialogues. 'Psychology of Consumption' will, at the risk of being colonized by the jargon and norms of western psychology, take to task the electronically-mediated environments of western consumer culture, and evaluate its effects on local cultures. This will involve fieldwork and counselling, with the intention of drawing connections between consumerism and non-sustainability, and asking basic questions about how much is enough, and what people really need to be happy.Many more courses of study along these lines could be proposed for a new kind of education, perhaps involving an institution with a new name ('poliversity'?), which may not even meet the western criteria of an educational experience, with its campuses, certificates and hierarchies. The key issue will remain whether or not it is possible to have an educational system that, seemingly paradoxically but perhaps only temporarily, will have as one of its goals its own demise. This will remain a paradox for as long as the western norms of thought and action form the basis for non-western allegiances, which can only be made clear once a program is developed with a sense of simultaneous decolonization and rejuvenation in view.[Dr Yusuf Progler is Assistant Professor of Education, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA.]Muslimedia: February 1-15, 2000

Decolonizing Contemporary EducationBy Dr. Yusef ProglerBuilt on a whirlpool of theories and methods, modern education systems have evolved to project an image of knowledge and objectivity, but how much of it is really acknowledging the student and how much of it is simply a form of enculturation? Acknowledged as such by Native American and African educators, these systems of learning are now gaining momentum in Islamic schools in the United States. Teaching Methods At a recent workshop for Muslim schoolteachers, a professor of education spoke at length on the theories of learning, with particular reference to Dewey, Kohlberg, and Vygotsky. Of Arab Muslim background, the professor received his PhD from an American university and now teaches at a university in an Arab country, which has begun to seek collaborations with its local public and private schools. The professor lectured on many other topics as well: The effective teacher Verbal and non verbal communication Instructional technologies Instructional groupings Seating arrangements Large and small group and individual work Teaching methods Objectives and planning Simulations/role playing Problem solving Classroom management and discipline Testing and assessment Performance and portfolio based assessment Professional growth Reflective teaching Active research. The teachers dutifully took notes and asked questions drawn from their own experiences with teaching various subjects to a wide range of local school children. A fairly representative sample of contemporary American thinking on modern schooling, the professor's topics would typically be spread out over an entire semester course on the foundations of education, with somewhat more depth and several assigned readings. But the gist would be the same. Contemporary educational theory treats most problems as either technical or personal. It borrows from psychology"especially from Skinner, Pavlov, Piaget, and Freud"in its tendency to objectify students in a way similar to how Western medicine treats patients. Building on this foundation, recent educational thinking has added a host of notions on human development drawn from humanistic philosophy. While no doubt offered with honesty and good intentions, the good professor's presentation contained the usual contradictions that one finds in such discussions: talking about "critical thinking" without actually practicing it, or emphasizing "constructivist" or "cooperative" learning in a strictly didactic format. It seems that if professors of education want to be taken seriously with all of these theories"some of which may at times be meaningful and useful"then they ought to use them in practice in their own seminars and workshops. Void of Social or Cultural Awareness However, a more severe omission from such standardized presentations is that they lack any social or cultural awareness and they exist in a world without context. There seems to be a general belief that theories are not born of any particular social setting and are applicable anywhere, or that the "objective sciences" (i.e., the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or even the "hard sciences" like biology and physics) are neutral, universal, and value free. This is not the place to unpack these problems; suffice to say that there is a growing literature clearly suggesting that the various sciences are just as socially constructed and culture bound as anything else, and therefore learning them is a form of socialization and enculturation. Educational theorists often ignore this, and in a cross-cultural setting such as teaching American theories to Arab Muslim teachers, the problems become more acute and warrant careful and extended study. In order to help understand how Western theories of education might or might not be applicable to the daily practices of schools in Muslim communities, one would have to spend considerable time working with administrators, teachers, and students in both Western and Muslim contexts. One consistent theme that would emerge is a growing realization that schooling is a form of (implicit or explicit) socialization. This is observable in American schools (i.e., the phenomenon of what Native and African American educators call "internal colonization"), but it is intensified by the multiple marginalities and cultural border crossings at work in many Muslim schools, and not necessarily only those operating in non-Muslim societies. One of the fundamental sites of socialization and enculturation is in the meaning, role, and purpose of education itself. In the West, and in America particularly, there is a very broad definition of education, especially that which is undertaken in a formal, institutional setting. Contemporary American education is rooted in Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, scientific, humanist norms. Originally founded to educate Protestant ministers and the ruling elite of colonial America, the Ivy League universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton emerged as the epitome institutions for a liberal education, whose norms are embedded to this day from kindergarten to advanced graduate study. To be considered "educated" in such a system, one is assumed to have taken an array of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences. But American education does not end in curriculum. There has always been tension between liberal and vocational education, and, partly in response to this tension, vocational schools have proliferated during the late 20th century. Some of this is also evident when secondary schools and colleges track students into vocational courses with various professional certificates, as is general practice in many European educational systems. In America, the tracking is not so rigid, but the tensions are no less acute. Some American schools expand even beyond the liberal and vocational norms, offering instruction in athletics and health, or in something as basic as learning to drive a car. Oddly, and despite its roots in the Protestant mission, most modern schooling is entirely secular. Background The above-mentioned theories of education developed to serve this Western educational system, and they embody all of its contradictions and assumptions. No matter how educators fine-tune them, in the end the theories of education are Western theories that rely on a host of Western assumptions about human nature and how the world works. But before this corpus emerged at the end of the Christian 19th century and into the 20th century, what guided teaching and learning in the West? More significantly, how did non-Western peoples and societies engage in teaching and learning before Western norms became universal norms? Or, more fundamentally, what does it mean to be "educated" outside the norms of the modern Western system? Self-Assessment It seems prudent, if not necessary, that Muslims step back and away for some time to evaluate their own schooling and education. Such evaluation includes careful assessment of their community needs and aspirations before adopting wholesale an educational system from the West. At best, introducing the Western system is like laying a thin socio-cultural membrane over indigenous society and norms, creating a sort of cultural schizophrenia. At worst, imposing the Western system of education builds a support mechanism for direct colonization, which has dogged non-Western peoples for several centuries. Ignoring any serious consideration of these issues cannot be seen as simply remaining "neutral" or "objective." Rather, in the present aggressive climate of American triumphalism, ignorance or passivity can amount to self-degradation and indirect colonization. Any meaningful program of education for decolonization and rejuvenation has to take into account the damage already done by colonialism, and must take steps to undo that damage, heal the wounds, and especially avoid repeating its reprehensible and destructive characteristics in a new guise. Such a prospectus requires a two-pronged approach, which will simultaneously dismantle the destructive tendencies and institutions built upon them, and assemble more constructive beliefs and practices in light of human and ecological needs. Process of Decolonization The colonial powers gained some hegemonic control over three crucial areas: Cosmology Epistemology Methodology A successful program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to weave these three together, not further compartmentalize them, into a program of study whose goal is a sustainable, peaceful, and just life for as many humans as possible living in full awareness of their role in the biotic community. In particular, since modern bodies of knowledge are intertwined with the modern scientific method, it is necessary to come up with new methods. Otherwise, Third World systems may merely add some exotic frills to otherwise essentially modernist systems. Modern methodologies will probably be the most difficult to overcome, since many people who are talking about decolonization are doing so from within former colonial institutions. A necessary step away from this hegemonic system is to legitimize those peoples whose cosmological, epistemological, and methodological lives are not based solely on their having passed through the hierarchical system of modern schooling, the highest award from which is the PhD. Difficult though this may seem, any program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to start by downgrading the PhD and similar colonial certificates from their places of highest privilege. Even a cursory look at the history of colonialism will bear this out, as the colonialists systematically worked to set up institutions to legitimize themselves and their own knowledge base, along with their institutional rewards and punishments, and these colonial systems supported their bodies and frameworks of knowledge. Transition Where does this leave institutions of higher education? Clearly some will adjust and others will not. The ones that do adjust to the program of decolonization and rejuvenation will survive in a world driven by peace, justice, and sustainable living, and the ones that cannot do so will wither and fade away. The danger lies in forming alliances, because of economic or political expediencies, with existing institutions, because their colonizing habits will severely limit progress in the kinds of projects most needed for genuine and meaningful decolonization and rejuvenation. From agriculture and handicrafts to child-rearing and medicine, and within the realms of politics, economics, and science, wide-ranging efforts need to persevere on two fronts, by revealing the nature of the destructive and violent colonial institutions and replacing them with more sustainable and peaceful networks. Much of this effort will entail looking at workable models already in place and functioning on the ground, keeping in mind that the best workable models of peaceful and just sustainable survival are context and bioregion specific, worked out within the means and locales of specific cultural and ecological settings, while wary of universalized, standardized and modernized systems. As one of many workable models, the Project on Andean Technology (PRATEC) deserves careful study. Its developers created a workable program of decolonization and rejuvenation that evaluated modern knowledge systems and methodologies from within a baseline Andean cosmological framework. The designers and practitioners of PRATEC speak of "eating, digesting and excreting" the modern knowledge systems and modern methodologies, in an interesting twist on the usual rigid dichotomy of acceptance or rejection found in Westernized oppositions to colonization, such as within Marxism and Liberalism. Once the Andean cosmological system was understood, it became a matter of evaluating a variety of knowledge and methodologies in terms of a baseline set of assumptions. In this scheme, academics holding the Western PhD found they could best play the role not as guides and vanguards of new knowledge, but as rear-guard mediators, where they used their expertise to face off and challenge the modernist development experts, disputing their plans and projects in their own language, having digested the modern way of seeing and being able to explain them back to their designers in ways that could not be easily written off, before rejecting them in light of local needs and beliefs. In this light, there is still a role for the PhD, though it is more of a mediating role than an authoritative role. Similar workable alternatives could be found and studied as well, and especially those noted for the ways in which they combine a two-pronged approach to the decolonization and rejuvenation project, with respect to locally relevant knowledge and experience. Any meaningful form of education in this sense will require a field-based component, which will have to undermine another tenet of modern education: book learning. This is not to reject books, but only to say that their knowledge needs to be worked out by people, and so studying the ways people apply and enact their knowledge systems, for better or worse, is a necessary part of the project. With these cautionary remarks in mind, some aspects of a program of decolonization and rejuvenation might include the following: Civilization and sustainability. This aspect will explore the ways in which civilizations have collapsed once they strayed too far outside the bounds of their bioregions. Such study will need to treat the modern notion of civilization as problematic in light of traditional cosmologies, and look at what might count as being a "civilization" in a more ecologically sustainable framework. Studying the relationships between mental and environmental ecologies is necessary to develop a conceptual framework for this aspect, and will have to carefully consider the role of institutions in perpetuating unsustainable thought and action. Comparative studies in cosmology, epistemology and methodology. This aspect can evaluate modern and traditional views in these three areas, in light of the findings from the above-noted studies of civilization and sustainability. Cosmological studies can look at the three-part relationship between human beings and the unseen world, human beings within and among themselves, and human beings within the cosmos. Knowledge studies can look at indigenous definitions and applications of knowledge, and evaluate various knowledge systems as an antidote to the colonial-derived modern schooling that has insisted on a singular definition of knowledge as that which benefits the colonized way of life and its beneficiaries. Studies in comparative methodology can proceed from the above grounding in epistemology and cosmology by looking at how viable methodologies must embody traditional cosmologies and epistemologies. Explorations in other-than-human sovereignty. Here the basic question must be asked: What happens when human beings are not the sovereigns of the land? Whether it be a sovereign deity and spiritual entity from within the framework of religion, as in for example the Islamic sense of sovereignty, or whether nature be the sovereign entity, as in many indigenous people's cosmologies, this aspect will pose major challenges to the humanist and modernist systems of thought and practice, which place the human being at the center of a rational universe. In order to avoid reproducing past pathologies, however, this project will need to look at how many belief systems"such as contemporary forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam"have embraced humanism at the expense of their deeper cosmological teachings. This in itself will also complicate efforts at purely relativistic studies and conversations, such as in the fruitless interfaith dialogues. Psychology of consumption. This program of thinking, intertwined with a new way of living, but perhaps at the risk of being further colonized by the jargon and norms of modern psychology, will need to take to task the electronically mediated environment of modern consumer culture and evaluate its effect on local cultures. Fieldwork, internships, and counseling programs are necessary here, with the intention of drawing connections between consumerism and non-sustainability, and asking questions about how much is enough and what people need to be happy. Learning Environment The above can provide only a beginning towards a focused attention on some crucial and necessary aspects of decolonizing education. However, these should not be construed or even offered as college and university courses. In fact, the most meaningful work in these areas will likely have to be done outside the institutions of modern schooling and higher education, and will perhaps find a home nestled among families and communities living in specific bioregions. At the same time, given the addiction to institutionalized schooling and higher education that many people face, if they are truly honest, it becomes necessary to work within some institutions that are willing to allow these perspectives and willing to allow an activist-oriented program of study. Within such institutions, courses can be proposed with an eye toward a new kind of education, perhaps involving an institution with a new name, a "multiversity" of sorts, which may not even meet the modern criteria of an educational experience with its campuses, certificates, and hierarchies. If working in an institutional setting is the only option, the question remains how to develop an institutional system that will have as one of its goals its own demise, no matter how ironic or paradoxical this may seem, because the structure of colonized knowledge is just as important to recognize and remove as the content of colonized knowledge. In the end, this will only remain a paradox for as long as the modern norms of thought and action form the basis for knowledge allegiances, which can only be made clear once a program is developed with a clear sense of simultaneous decolonization and rejuvenation in view.Yusef Progler (yusefustad@hotmail.com) is a professor, teacher, and writer of culture, politics, and education. He is manager of the Multiversity Group (groups.msn.com/multiversity), co-creator of the Multi-world Network (www.multiworld.com), and editor of the Radical Essentials Pamphlet Series (www.citizensint.org).

Moving beyond western theories of education?J A ProglerAt a recent workshop for Arab Muslim school teachers, a professor of education spoke on the theories learning with particular reference to Dewey, Kohlberg and Vygotsky. Of Arab/Muslim background, the professor received his PhD from an American university and now teaches at a university in an Arab country which has begun to seek collaborations with its local public and private schools.The professor lectured on other topics as well: the effective teacher, verbal and non verbal communication; instructional technologies; instructional groupings, seating arrangements, large and small group and individual work; teaching methods, objectives and planning, simulations, role playing, problem solving; classroom management and discipline; testing and assessment, performance and portfolio based assessment; professional growth, reflective teaching, active research. The teachers dutifully took notes and asked questions drawn from their own experiences teaching various subjects to a wide range of local children.A fairly representative sample of contemporary American thinking on liberal education, these topics would typically be spread out over an entire semester course on the foundations of education, with a bit more depth and some assigned readings. But the gist would be the same. Contemporary educational theory treats most problems as either technical or personal. It borrows from psychology especially Skinner, Pavlov, Piaget, and Freud in its tendency to objectify students in a way similar to how western medicine treats patients.To this foundation, recent educational thinking has added a host of notions on human development drawn from humanistic philosophy. While no doubt offered with honesty and good intentions, the usual contradictions that one finds in such discussions were present in the professor's presentation; e.g., talking about `critical thinking' without encouraging or practising it, or emphasizing `constructivist learning' or `cooperative learning' in a strictly didactic format. It seems that if professors of education want to be taken seriously with all of these theories some of which are meaningful and useful they ought to use them in practice in their own seminars and workshops.However, a more severe omission from such standardized presentations is that they lack any social or cultural awareness. There seems to be a general belief that theories are not born of any particular social setting and are applicable to any setting, or that the `objective sciences' (i.e., social sciences like psychology or sociology, or even to some extent the `hard sciences' like biology and physics) are neutral, universal, and value free This is not the place to unpack these problems; suffice to say that there is vast literature which clearly suggests that the various sciences are just as socially constructed and culture bound as anything else, and therefore learning them is a form of socialization and enculturation. Educational theorists often ignore this, and in a cross cultural setting such as teaching American theories to Arab Muslim teachers, the problems become more acute and warrant careful and extended study.In order to help understand how western theories of education might or might not be applicable to the daily workings of schools in Muslim communities, l have spent considerable time working with administrators, teachers, and students in both American and Muslim contexts. One consistent theme that emerges is a growing realization that schooling is a form of (implicit or explicit) socialization. This is observable in American schools (i.e., the phenomenon of what Native and African American educators call `internal colonization'), but it is intensified by the multiple marginalities and cultural border crossings at work in the Muslim schools, and not necessarily only those operating in non Muslim societies. One of the fundamental attributes of this enculturation is in regard to the meaning, role, and purpose of education itself.In the west, and in America particularly, there is a very broad definition of education, especially that which is undertaken in a formal, institutional setting. Contemporary American education is rooted in Graeco Roman, Judeo Christian, scientific humanist norms. Originally founded to educate Protestant ministers and the ruling elite of colonial America, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton soon emerged as the epitome institutions of a liberal education whose norms are embedded to this day from kindergarten to advanced graduate study. To be considered `educated' in such a system, one is assumed to have taken an array of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences.But American education does not end here. There has always been tension between liberal and vocational education, and, partly in response to this tension, vocational schools have proliferated during the late 20th century. Some of this is also evident when secondary schools and colleges track students into vocational courses with various. Professional certificates, as is general practice in many European educational systems.In America, the tracking is not so rigid, but the tensions are no less acute. Some American schools expand even beyond the liberal and vocational norms, offering instruction in athletics or in something as basic as learning to drive a car. Oddly, and despite its roots in the Protestant mission, most modem schooling is almost entirely secular.The above mentioned theories of education developed to serve this western educational system, and they embody all of its contradictions and assumptions. No matter how educators fine tune them, in the end the theories of education are western theories that rely on a host of western assumptions about human nature and how the world works. But before this corpus emerged at the end of the Christian 19th century and into the 20th century, what guided teaching and learning in the west?More significantly, how have non-western peoples and societies engaged in teaching and learning before western norms became universal norms? Or, more fundamentally, what does it mean to be `educated' outside the norms of the modern western system?It seems prudent, if not necessary, that Muslims step back and away for some time to evaluate their own training in education-which includes careful assessment of their community needs and aspirations-before importing wholesale an educational system from the west. At best, introducing the western system is like laying a thin socio-cultural membrane over indigenous society and norms, creating a sort of cultural schizophrenia. At worst, imposing the western system of education builds a support mechanism for direct colonization, which has dogged non-western peoples for two centuries.Ignoring any consideration of these issues cannot be seen as simply remaining 'neutral' or 'objective.' Rather, in the present aggressive climate of American triumphalism, ignorance or passivity amounts to self-degradation and indirect colonization.

NORMS AND ALLEGIANCES IN MUSLIM EDUCATIONYusef ProglerEven the most casual observers of current events will have noticed a tension between Western civilization and Islam. This tension is often made explicit in American public discourse about "Islamic fundamentalism" and a "clash of civilizations." Similarly, Muslim public discourse often focuses on the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the American occupation of Iraq. But careful observers may also notice that this tension contains within it an odd paradox. While many Muslims are quick to denounce instances of direct aggression and duplicitous politics, more subtle legacies of colonialism and imperialism receive less attention. This is apparent when one examines forms of institutionalized colonization, such as education.While Western education is extroverted, introducing the norms of modernity to all of its subjects and engaging the worldviews of those subjects, Muslim education is introverted, introducing Islam and its relevance in private life but without engaging many of the normative assumptions and associations of Western modernity. Thus, Muslims learn Islamic values in a sort of isolation, detaching themselves in many ways from the social, political, and economic machinations of the Western neo-colonial agenda, and yet pledging allegiance to Western science and other aspects of modernity as universal steps forward for humankind. Any struggle within this framework becomes more about control of the normative trappings of modernity and less about evaluating and re-assessing any allegiances to modernity. Both educational systems are normalizing Western modernity, while compartmentalizing Islam as a cultural and religious artifact and presuming that it has nothing important to say about many aspects of modernity. This tendency has been further exacerbated with recent American-led efforts to restructure curricula in Islamic schools and universities in the Muslim world, while encouraging its own brand of Islamic studies (for strategic purposes) in the US and Europe. In any case, each party has embraced the other's assumptions, creating the illusion that there are dichotomous struggles between "tradition and modernity," "Islam and the West," "belief and disbelief," and a host of other binaries and alterities. The purpose of this essay is to engage this paradoxical tension by discussing allegiances to the norms of Western modernity in contemporary Muslim educational settings, by way of a case study on modern Turkey, and then considering how some often neglected aspects of the Islamic tradition might inform a critique of Western modernity and its normative modes of education.Contested Education in Modern TurkeyDuring the past decade, the Turkish government has attempted to implement a series of new policies and restructuring programs aimed at Muslims in Turkish schools and universities. While Muslim women were already forbidden to wear Islamic modest dress, or hijab, in selected Turkish universities, new policies were set to extend that ban nationwide. In addition, semi-autonomous religious schools came under tighter government control, in a wide ranging program designed to prevent practicing Muslims, women in particular, from achieving the high level of success they are known for in Turkey's educational system. Those university administrators not in support of the proposed measures faced termination from their positions. The new proposal broadened an earlier policy, enforced since the 1980s, in which Muslim women were banned from wearing hijab in Istanbul University and at Dijla University in Diyarbakir, Eastern Turkey. In some instances, after weeks of public protest and lawsuits, a Turkish court had ruled some of the proposals unconstitutional, but implementing the ruling is more precarious and the future of Muslim education remains uncertain.[1]Education has been contested territory for most of modern Turkish history. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, General Mustafa Kemal ("Ataturk") implemented a series of official policies to curb Islam and steer Turkey toward Western secularism and modernity. The polices included changing the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Roman script, thus severing the 600 year heritage of Ottoman Islamic literary history, and banning most forms of Muslim public practice, especially those involving dress codes and the use of Arabic. Upon Ataturk's death in 1938, the Turkish military became the enforcer of secular modernism in Turkey. Although the Ottoman sultans were the first to introduce Western education into the Empire during the 19th century, under Kemalism state schools and universities were pressed into service to teach secular Western knowledge, strictly forbidding or severely circumscribing most vestiges of Turkey's Islamic heritage and its knowledge base. There have been several waves of Islamic resurgence since then, most notably during the presidency of Adnan Menderes in the 1950s, when the Arabic call to prayer and other aspects of Muslim public life were restored, but secular educational policies have remained stringent.[2]During the 1960s, the Turkish government attempted to monitor a growing Islamic movement by opening a network of state sponsored Muslim schools, the Imam Hatip Lisesi system, which would teach officially sanctioned forms of Islamic theology and jurisprudence to a new generation of Turkish Muslims. At the height of the Cold War, and perhaps in a bid join NATO, the government also supported Muslim schools against leftist nationalism and communism. Since then, however, the Imam Hatip schools have expanded to provide a wide-ranging curriculum in a seven year, post-primary program of study that includes Arabic language and secular Western subjects. In the 1980s, Turkish Muslim scholar and author Fethullah Gulen returned from exile abroad and established a charitable foundation. The Fethullah Gulen Hoja Foundation soon opened a series of private Islamic schools, universities, and student hostels which have attracted an increasing number of Muslim students away from state secular schooling, but which have also gained a reputation for political quietism. The Fethullah Gulen and Imam Hatip schools both provide separate facilities for male and female students, allow Islamic ritual practice, and encourage female students to wear hijab and men to wear beards. They provide a supportive environment in which to study toward university degrees, offering instruction in Islamic beliefs and practices along side of a relatively standard curriculum similar to those found in most Turkish public schools, emphasizing Western knowledges. In recent years, graduates of Imam Hatip and Fethullah Gulen schools have become top performing candidates competing for Turkish university degrees.Despite the academic success of their students, Imam Hatip schools are facing some difficult decisions as a result of new government policies that are restructuring the time frame of compulsory schooling. In place of the usual five years of compulsory public primary schooling, after which students could opt to attend the seven year secondary program in Imam Hatip schools instead of public secondary schools, the government will require eight years of compulsory primary schooling for all students in the Turkish public school system. Because the schools are government run, and their teachers and administrators officially appointed, Muslim parents and teachers who wish to provide any sort of an Islamic education for their children will struggle for a say in restructuring. The lengthened time frame for compulsory primary schooling means that Imam Hatip schools have to reduce course offerings and limit their curriculum to three or four years, since few students are able to study for seven years in secondary school after eight years of primary schooling. As a result, it will be virtually impossible for Imam Hatip schools to maintain their delicate balance between Islamic studies and secular Western academic subjects in such a short period of time. They will have to reduce the curriculum to its barest essentials, most likely focusing on the private aspects of Islamic practice in order to maintain their identity and credibility as Islamic schools. The policy will reduce the possibility of Muslim students continuing on to higher education, which requires a rigorously secular secondary preparation.Since education is one of the few roads leading to jobs in the public sphere, where secular modernism is also strictly enforced, the new policies may further force Islam into the private sphere. Government supported or otherwise, there is a general tendency in Muslim education to study Islam in what amounts to oppositional isolation, while normalizing Western knowledge publicly. This normalization involves validating and extending the assumptions and techniques of Western modernity, especially with respect to science, politics, and economics, but also includes applying to Islam the secular epistemological and hermeneutic methodologies of Western rationalism. The latter tendency is evident, for example, in a recent book comparing Islamic and Kantian ethics, the Muslim author of which finds Kantian ethics more suitable to the modern world, without asking how that world came about. Other books recently books published in Turkey and elsewhere attempt to prove the veracity of the Qur'an by subjecting it to the norms of Western scientific inquiry without situating that inquiry.[3] What these instances indicate is that, while the struggles will likely continue for the right to obtain an education in Turkey, whether secular or religious, these struggles appear almost as a distraction, since there is little discussion, public or private, on the kind of knowledge people are seeking through higher education.Muslims in Pursuit of "Higher Colonization"Muslim students who ponder entering Turkish universities find themselves in a double bind. If they wish to practice their Islam, they may have to compromise their education; if they wish to pursue an education, they may have to compromise their Islam. The right to wear hijab in a university is certainly an important issue, and Muslim women should not be punished by the state for practicing their religion and expressing their identities, especially in predominantly Muslim society such as in Turkey. But even when Muslim students are successful in gaining access to the schooling they desire, the struggle for their identity does not end once they enter the halls of higher education. While issues of exclusion based on dress are hotly contested, issues of curriculum and methodology are rarely discussed on any side of the cultural divide. Universities in Turkey, as in most other Muslim locales, are generally modeled on Western institutions of higher education, in both form and content. The tacit assumption with respect to knowledge in the Muslim world is that the West knows best. The curriculum for an academic major in Education at Yildiz University in Istanbul illustrates Muslim colonization by Western education. Muslim students planning to be teachers or administrators begin with foundational courses, reading from the Greek classics, Platonic idealism, Aristotelian dialectics, and the Socratic method. Most courses then leap forward, past the Church, the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance, and resume with readings from Rousseau. The European 18th and 19th century educational thinkers occupy a major part of the semester: Pestalozzi's humanism, Froebel's kindergarten, the British Lancaster method, and the American common school. But at the same time, this canonical survey of the great white men of Western education is filtered and sifted according to official political preferences, so that while students may also read some John Dewey, his work is given nowhere near the attention it gets in America. This could be because Dewey's often cited discussion of "democracy and education" is dangerous in a military dictatorship, or perhaps it is due to Dewey's recommendation, which he made when the Kemalists invited him in the 1920s, that they not abolish the Arabic alphabet. In any case, Dewey is more or less written off as a "liberal humanist" by an otherwise West-directed educational establishment that might be termed "conservative" in America. Similarly, Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," is popularly denounced as a "leftist" or a "communist," which is the kiss of death for any epistemological association in a state that is still recovering from its associations with NATO in the Cold War, and earlier strained relations with the Soviet Union and Russia.After these selected philosophical foundations, most students will move on to studies in Child Psychology, another core course for Education majors, which also has some overlap for first year Psychology students. Such courses often focus heavily on the work of Sigmund Freud, typically followed by readings from Jung and Adler. After time surveying other founding fathers, Child Psychology majors will then dwell at length on the work of Jean Piaget. At Istanbul University, students will take interminable courses in Child Psychology with professors who themselves studied with Piaget. Students at Yildiz University follow a rigorous course of study in behaviorist and cognitivist theory, reading especially the work of Benjamin Bloom. As with Piaget, Bloom has several disciples in Turkey, most notably Veysen Sonmez, whose works are now canonical. Sonmez's students, in turn, are fine tuning Bloom's theories in their own research. A higher degree in Education will progress along the same general trajectory, painstakingly learning selected theories of education as developed in the West. Graduates from such programs teach what they have learned to their own students, and the cycle of colonization by education continues unabated.Such a scheme is not limited to Turkey, and there are similar relationships to Western knowledge in other Muslim locales. For example, in Palestine prior to the recent uprising I attended a workshop for Arab Muslim school teachers in which a presentation was made be a Professor of Education at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank who has his Ph.D. from an American university and is now in local teacher education. The Professor lectured on the following topics: theories of learning (Dewey, Kohlberg, Vygotsky), the effective teacher, verbal and non-verbal communication, instructional technologies, instructional groupings, seating arrangements, large and small group and individual work, teaching methods, objectives and planning, simulations, role playing, problem solving, classroom management and discipline, testing and assessment, performance and portfolio based assessment, professional growth, reflective teaching, and active research. The teachers dutifully took notes on this whirlwind tour of Euro-American educational knowledge, and asked questions drawn from their own experiences in teaching various academic subjects to a wide range of local children. Though a bit more progressive than Turkey, the Palestinian discourse on education remains a fairly representative sample of contemporary European and American thinking on education. I was particularly surprised by the unquestioned reproduction of the dominant Western educational discourse, much of which is about delivery systems and which treats problems as either technical or personal. Although most of the students and teachers were Muslims, the focus was almost entirely on Western knowledge with no consideration of Islamic approaches to teaching and learning. And, as in Turkey, secular modernism defines the form and content of schooling. Such circumstances indicate that despite the recent outrage at American meddling in Muslim education, the tendency to teach Western knowledge at the expense of Islam was prevalent long before recent demands for reform.One can also find evidence of this paradoxical tension between Western policies and Western knowledge in Muslim minority situations. For instance, the Muslims of South Africa, who were always clear in their denunciation of racism and apartheid, joined the conversation on educational reform for a post-apartheid state. By way of participating in various national committees, South African Muslim educationists succeeded in convincing policy makers that economics courses for high school students ought to include the Islamic perspectives on economics, alongside those of the West. However, the celebration of this achievement proved to be short-lived. Soon there after, a South African gay and lesbian coalition asked the same committee to include gay and lesbian lifestyles and families in the public school curriculum. Appalled by what they saw as an affront to their moral norms, Muslims members considered resigning from the committee, and began looking into private schools, ironically joining the conservative Christian movement in South Africa. But while their resistance to personal immorality was active, there was little discussion on more fundamental questions about the guiding principals of Western education. Things like Western science and technology with respect to curricular content, or "outcomes based learning" and "authentic assessment" with respect to method, which were being introduced by the American and Australian consultants, were left unquestioned. In the same way, Muslim schools in other minority settings, such as those in Europe and the United States, face similar situations. In most cases, Western knowledge and methodology are taken as the universal norm, irrespective of being in a minority or a majority setting.[4]Muslim Education and the Problem of "White Studies"A course of study in virtually any academic discipline at most Muslim universities will likely follow a trajectory similar to that identified above, by first identifying the great white men of each field and then drilling their theories and practices as universal holy writ, while ignoring or undermining all forms of indigenous knowledge. Thus, in Biology, genetics reigns supreme, supplanting cell biology after Western scientists isolated the double helix, while completely ignoring Islamic biological knowledge. Physics dwells on Isaac Newton's model, with a taste of Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics for the adventurous, but neglecting the pre-Newtonian physics that enabled Muslim architects to build magnificent structures. The staple of any Math major is calculus, but with indigenous knowledge like the Muslim roots of algebra carefully filtered through the Cartesian worldview. Philosophy majors run the gamut of Western thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Sartre, but with little more than a passing wave to the great Muslim philosophers like Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Mulla Sadra. Western Medicine is based on a mechanistic Cartesian model, with mastery of surgical and pharmaceutical technique being the ultimate goal, while the humoral medicine practiced by pioneering Muslim physicians such as Ibn Sina is undermined or even ridiculed. Western Chemistry strips away the self-edifying and spiritual aspects of its Muslim forebear, alchemy. Sociology often begins with the work of Durkheim, while Weber is seeing a revival, but Ibn Khaldun receives little more than a historical footnote. Muslims studying Economics will learn all about Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, and perhaps even Marx, before delving into Milton Friedman, neo-liberalism, and the techniques of transnational capitalism, but rarely will any course of study consider the economic implications of the Islamic ban on usury. In short, from History and Political Science to Agriculture Health Care, Western knowledge is the only knowledge. Native American scholar Ward Churchill aptly dubbed this complex of Western thought and practice "White Studies."[5] Among other things, pursuing an education in White Studies means adhering to a set of norms and practices largely developed with the emergence of Western modernity. How this knowledge ended up being taken for granted in the Muslim world is an interesting story that needs to be told, though that is beyond the scope of this essay.For now, it will be instructive to look more carefully at this monolithic entity and consider the institutional structure of White Studies, which has allowed modern higher education to normalize Western knowledge. Higher education relies on rigid compartmentalization and departmentalization of knowledge, developed in its present form during the 19th century and further modified during the Cold War. Supposedly rooted in Western civilization by way of the Seven Greek Sciences, the Roman Quadrivium, and the Enlightenment's Useful Arts, White Studies as presently configured in most modern universities assumes that the best way to control thought is to make sure that no one ever sees the big picture, how the Useful Arts fit together, how the Quadrivium meshes with the Seven Sciences, and so forth. Compartmentalization was perfected during the Manhattan Project, under the direction of General Leslie R. Groves, who later admitted that his main achievement was to compartmentalize, and thus control, the scientific research for the atomic bomb.[6] During the Cold War, most universities adopted his tactic. This corresponded with the so-called "independence" of most modern nation states, many leaders of which eagerly adopted the compartmentalized discourse of White Studies as their normative mode of thought and action. In such a system, non-Western knowledges are compartmentalized, and soon marginalized.Graduates with a degree in a White Studies discipline often use their limited sense of empowerment to reproduce Western modernity, sometimes finding solace in the pious fraud that Western knowledge is the sum total of human knowledge. The resulting pathological condition, often referred to as being "educated," means that one takes Western science as the arbiter of truth, even in matters of religion. It means that unlimited technological progress and economic growth are the keys to human happiness. It means that quantity is more important than quality and that technique and efficiency must govern all aspects of a desacralized life. Muslims seeking guidance and prosperity through White Studies may find that the best they can attain is to practice Islam in private and let the West do the rest in public.Norms and Allegiances in Islam and the WestThe above discussion suggests that, despite the socio-political tensions between Islam and the West, there is an unquestioned allegiance on the part of Muslims to the normative modes of thought and action associated with Western modernity. Much of this is not limited to Muslim societies, and one could likely find similar allegiances to Western norms throughout the Third World. Since partially emerging from direct colonialism, most national discussions on education have been concerned with gaining empowerment within the modernist world system, with a general lack of any social or cultural awareness that modernity is peculiar, and that Western knowledge is situated in Western culture and society.[7] But this is only part of the problem. Along with curricular and methodological issues relating to Western modernity, significant political implications emerge when one considers Western education as an interconnected series of norms and allegiances. In other words, the ongoing desire of Third World students to get educated in Western universities perpetuates colonization in several ways.This form of colonization through education was illustrated during a period of unrest in the Philippines in the late 1980s, when it appeared as if nationalist rebels might topple the American-backed regime of Corazon Aquino. American corporations and military and political officials had a strong stake in maintaining the status quo in the Philippines, if not in the persona of Aquino, then certainly in the socio-economic system she policed for them. The Western media focused on then-Vice President Dan Quayle's management of the crisis (he was left in charge, as President Bush was attending a summit meeting with Gorbachev), with most news agencies reporting his decision to intimidate rebel-held installations with US jets. But what was not well-reported, perhaps because it offers a rare glimpse into the role of education in Western political strategy, is that Quayle also ordered a mobilization of university graduates. Word went out to American institutions of higher education to provide lists of recent graduates who were Philippine nationals. Though details were sketchy, the thinking seems to have been that someone completing a program of higher education in an American university would have allegiance to a system of thought and action that would not pose any real threat to Western interests. In the end, Aquino remained in power for a few more years, but the mobilization of American university graduates has lessons for Third World peoples, including Muslims, especially those who are currently pursuing or considering an education in the West.[8]The previous example highlights the question of norms and allegiances in education, and suggests how Western education creates allegiance to the norms of modernity, but we also need to consider how Islamic civilization establishes its own norms and allegiances. Allegiance to the norms of Islam provides the basis for a workable social, political, and economic system. According to the Islamic understanding of the evolution of religions, Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, re-established original monotheism, the primordial religion of humanity, after it had been repeatedly corrupted by worldly desires and human forgetfulness in other religious communities. The Qur'an itself challenges those people who cling to these corrupted religions and who dispute the veracity of the renewed message: "This is the truth from your Lord, so be not of the disputers. But whoever disputes with you in this matter after what has come to you of knowledge, then say, Come let us call our sons and your sons and our women and your women and our near people and your near people, then let us be earnest in prayer, and pray for the curse of Allah on the liars" (3:61).[9] To generations of commentators, this was a test of truthfulness after all rational arguments had been exhausted. The disputers, generally taken to be Christians, backed out of the challenge, kept and developed their own system, and, to make a very long story short, the resulting Western system is on the verge of ruling the world today, and it is demanding from Muslims, and other peoples worldwide, allegiance to its system of norms, which by Islamic standards are corrupted.[10] However, as the Qur'an reminds Muslims: "The Christians and the Jews will not be pleased with you, until you follow their religion. So say: Surely Allah's guidance is the true guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that has come to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper" (2:120). Allegiance and guardianship are key concepts for our purposes here, and their place in the Islamic tradition is worth further consideration.The Qur'an states that Allah is the Ultimate Guardian over Muslims, and that they are not to take Christians, Jews or disbelievers as their guardians: "O you who believe! Do not to take the Jews and Christians as your guardians, for some of them are guardians to others of them. And whoever amongst you takes them as a guardian, then surely you will become one of them, for Allah surely does not guide the unjust" (5:51), and "O you who believe! Do not take the disbelievers for guardians instead of the believers. Do you desire that you should give to Allah a manifest proof against yourselves?" (4:144). In the Islamic worldview, acknowledgment or denial of these basic tenets becomes a yardstick for measuring true faith in the Divine purpose for humanity and whether or not one is faithful to the Divine Trust. The Qur'an warns of corruption and oppression for those who do not make allegiance to Allah as the Ultimate Guardian, and, in turn, to the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, and a series of "rightly guided" or "infallible" believers as their temporal guardians. The purpose of this series of allegiances is to establish an Islamic social and political order based on the Qur'anic normative injunction of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil.Acknowledging the Islamic system of norms and allegiances can create conflicts of interest for those whose allegiances are intertwined with the currently dominant Western system. For Muslims, knowledge and guidance derive ultimately from a Divine source, not earthly desires or corrupted texts. To know Islam is to express allegiance to its set of norms, but this allegiance forms a dilemma when those norms become deviant vis--vis a corrupted yet dominant set of norms. And this is not just a theoretical presumption, because the dominating Western normative system threatens to subvert or destroy what it sees as deviant sets of norms in order to maintain supremacy for its own corrupted set of norms. In the Western system, which based on falsehood and corruption as defined by the Islamic tradition, allegiance to a Divine set of norms may come only at great sacrifice, certainly in terms of life and livelihood, but also in terms of faith and practice of one's religion to the fullest extent of its ascribed potential.Education is an important site for exploring the interplay between conflicting sets of norms and allegiances. This is especially evident if one views education as a process of becoming, rather than as a body of knowledge with certificates and degrees, or as a preparation for a profession or livelihood. When a person seeks an education, that person is in a sense making a commitment to become something, or someone, different than when they started. Depending upon how much the education system differs from one's own system in terms of norms, this process of becoming can be quite profound. Entering into such an arrangement means that the person who exits the other end will be quite a different person, with various degrees of allegiance to the particular set of norms adhered to and promoted by the system from which they sought an education. Education is also a two way process. On the surface, a student seeks and obtains knowledge, training and certification from a particular educational institution. A student also contributes to an institutional system in obvious ways, such as through paying tuition and making donations as an alumnus. But, more subtly, students validate an institution by seeking its form of education over the forms offered by other institutions. Students may also contribute by way of securing awards, patents or grants for their alma mater, thus bringing heightened prestige for the institution and further validating its normative system. The same can be said of publishing one's works with various Western university sponsored academic journals and publishers. This is particularly important in cross-cultural situations, where students from one cultural background can contribute to the intellectual validity and prestige of educational institutions in a different cultural setting, while at the same time marginalizing those of the own cultural background.Education, therefore, takes place within a complex system of intersecting norms and allegiances. First, there is the education of the self. To be a Muslim means to know Islam as a normative system (and, as suggested above, this in itself is not easy). To be considered as an educated person in an Islamic system means first and foremost to have allegiance to its norms and to make every effort to put them into practice. Next, there are implications for any particular local community of Muslims, who are continuing the norms of Islam along with their own language and cultural practices. Then there are implications for Muslims worldwide (what Muslims call the ummah, or global Islamic nation), in terms of making cultural, political, social and economic connections with other communities, developing over the years into a broad based Islamic movement. Finally, there are implications for humanity in general, part of which involves identifying its problems and hindrances to establishing an ethically just order. Unjust normative systems and their patterns of allegiance feed back into the development of self, community, ummah and humanity. The potential for corruption or co-optation can enter the cycle at any point by way of education, and threaten to misguide Muslims on any or all fronts. Therefore, the process of education itself needs careful study and deep reflection. It cannot be entered into hastily and uncritically. What one is talking about is joining a system of norms and allegiances that will have potentially profound repercussions for generations to come. This affects not only the practice of one's religion, but also virtually every other aspect of life, ranging from agriculture and architecture to medicine and child rearing. Western civilization has created a network of allegiances to its normative system of thought and action, and this network operates by way of education and the accompanying temporal and temporary rewards. Any true movement toward liberation and autonomy, especially one which claims to have allegiance to Divine norms, will have to rethink the meaning and purpose of the forms of education it values and pursues.An Islamic Perspective on the Quest for KnowledgeNo matter how educators fine-tune theories of knowledge and education, in the end they are Western theories that rely on a host of Western assumptions about the meaning and purpose of education, and about human nature and how the world works. But before this corpus emerged at the end of the 19th Christian century and into the 20th century, what guided teaching and learning in the West? More broadly, how have non-Western peoples and societies engaged in teaching and learning before Western norms became universal norms? Or, more fundamentally, what does it mean to be "educated" outside the norms of the modern Western educational system? Muslims are beginning to step back and evaluate their own training and education - which includes careful assessment of community needs and aspirations - before importing part and parcel an educational system from the West. At best, introducing the Western system is like laying a thin socio-cultural membrane over indigenous society and norms, creating a sort of cultural schizophrenia. At worst, imposing the Western system of education builds a support mechanism for direct colonization, which has dogged non-Western peoples for several centuries. Ignoring any consideration of these issues cannot be seen as simply remaining "neutral" or "objective." Rather, in the present climate of dogmatic American triumphalism, ignorance or passivity amounts to self-degradation and indirect colonization. It is for this reason that alternative systems of norms and allegiance become worthy of our study, and while this has implications for any other cultures and societies concerned with its own knowledge and learning, for the purposes of this essay I will focus on Islam.The Islamic tradition encourages all Muslims to seek knowledge. In a series of celebrated sayings, or hadith, the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, is reported to have said "seek knowledge even in China," "seek knowledge continuously," "seeking knowledge is incumbent upon all Muslims, men and women."[11] While Muslims have heeded his call for centuries, recent developments in Western civilization are posing new challenges to seekers of knowledge. Western civilization is rushing headlong into a commodity driven and individualistic "information age" with little sense of the difference between information and knowledge, and with few criteria other than advertising and desire to help make distinctions. In order not to be sucked into the information whirlpool, some selection criteria seem necessary. To illustrate, visit any large on-line bookstore or search engine, and type in a key phrase, like "child rearing." Thousands book titles and web pages will appear on the computer screen. Even though, in terms of time and money, it would be virtually impossible for any seekers of knowledge to avail them selves of what is contained in all of those books and web pages. But someone might try to sit down and read as many of those books and pages as they could, if they found some way that they didn't have to work or sleep, or do anything else, and just read them for the rest of their lives, and they will have sought knowledge. But will they then be knowledgeable?In answering such questions, with respect to the above hadith on seeking knowledge, one problem arises in translation of the Arabic word 'ilm, which is rendered above as "knowledge," and which is also often rendered as "science." But if 'ilm is knowledge, then what is the word for "information" in hadith? Do the hadith and other traditional sources that speak of seeking knowledge also apply to seeking information? Does the Islamic tradition possess the resources for making meaningful distinctions? In Muslim intellectual history, there is another hadith from the Prophet that can shine light on such questions. Muslim scholars through the ages have commented upon this hadith, ranging from Imam Ghazali (d. 1111 CE) to Mulla Sadra (d. 1640 CE), and, more recently, Imam Khomeini. The wisdom of this hadith has informed Muslim seekers of knowledge for centuries, although less so among Western educated technocrats in the colonial and post-colonial periods. In the Arabic, the hadith is quite eloquent, a sure sign of its authenticity to historians of the Islamic tradition. In English rendition, it is as follows:The Messenger of Allah, may Allah's benedictions be upon him, once entered the mosque where there was a group of people surrounding a man. "Who is that?" inquired the Prophet, upon whom be peace. He was told, "He is a very learned man." "What is a very learned man?" asked the Prophet, upon whom be peace. They told him, "He is the most learned of men regarding Arab genealogies, past episodes, the pre-Islamic days of ignorance, and Arabic poetry." The Prophet, upon whom be peace, said, "That is knowledge whose ignorance does not harm nor is its possession of any benefit to one." Then the Prophet, may Allah's benedictions be upon him, declared, "Verily knowledge ('ilm) consists of these three: the firm sign, the just duty, and the established practice. All else is superfluous." [12] Scholars will produce commentaries on this hadith, and they will do speculative research to help determine what is meant by "firm sign, just duty, and established practice." But in a general sense, what the hadith says is that Muslims ought to classify and prioritize the knowledge they seek. This seems to be in full recognition of the mortality of the human being, who only has a certain amount of time in this world. One can sit an entire lifetime in front of a computer or in a library or bookstore, reading all those books on child rearing, for example, and never do anything else, seeking that knowledge (or is it information?). But without some criteria to classify that knowledge, and thus give it meaning, this effort could be construed as wasting one's time. Or, at best, the seeker of knowledge could be spending a lifetime on something that is superfluous, an extra, a nicety, at the expense of time that could be spent on pursuits that are more important and meaningful, as implied by the hadith. However, when modern Muslims hear this hadith for the first time, many of them will tend to look into it in terms of what is forbidden and what is permitted (haram and halal, in Islamic terminology). They might want the quick and easy prescriptions, asking, "Well, does that mean that some knowledge is haram, and some knowledge halal? Then which is which?" And they cannot get out of the dichotomy between haram and halal. But the hadith is not really about what is halal and haram in seeking knowledge. It is about what is in between, on a sort of sliding scale. It is about classifying and prioritizing the time and effort spent on seeking knowledge. To put it as simply as possible, this Prophetic hadith suggests that some knowledge is more important than other knowledge, and that there are priorities.Knowledge, Power and WealthDuring the period of colonialism and neo-colonialism, Muslims have given over a key part of their lives to the West: the ability to classify and prioritize the seeking of knowledge as outlined in the above hadith, and as put into practice by Muslims prior to colonial disruption. Now, the West decides what is important knowledge, and what is not. This is done to suit the beliefs and goals of Western civilization. An elaborate system of certificates and degrees, which act like so many rewards and punishments, has assured that the Western system of knowledge is taken as the universal system. But this is a fallacy, one of the hoaxes perpetrated upon Muslims by Western civilization, as revealed by reflection on the above hadith. There are other hadith in the Islamic tradition that can also shine light on certain aspects of modern schooling and education, but we need to first look a little closer at some foundational metaphors of modernity.As Mulla Sadra was writing his commentary on the Prophetic hadith cited above, the European philosopher and would-be statesman Francis Bacon uttered the infamous words "knowledge is power." Bacon is often credited as the "father of modern science," yet his celebrated dictum is rarely understood in the context he intended. Bacon believed that "human knowledge and human power meet as one" so that nature can be "forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded" in order to "establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the universe." In addition to defining it as such, Bacon insisted that this knowledge of power over nature remain the exclusive trust of an elite corps, later to be known as "scientists," who must "take an oath of secrecy for the concealing of that which we think fit to keep secret."[13] While this way of thinking has inspired many in the modern West, from an Islamic perspective there are grave errors in Bacon's thinking. Since only Allah has dominion over the universe, Muslims ought to see the Satanic flaw in the Baconian worldview, in its insistence that human beings use knowledge to secretly extend "dominion of the human race over the universe." Nevertheless, this flaw has not stopped Western civilization from forging itself upon Bacon's dictum. Bacon's paradigm of thought and action, largely protected by a conspiracy of denial and silence, has fueled the domination of Western civilization for nearly four centuries. However, while knowledge was indeed a form of power, it was only for those who already had access to power.[14] The Baconian vision enabled the West to establish a stranglehold on nature, wringing from it the minerals and other resources to fuel its civilization at the expense of the rest of the world. Today, this legacy means that barely 20% of the world's population consumes over 80% of all natural resources. Americans are on the vanguard of the Baconian vision, with their meager 5% of world population consuming a full one third of all natural resources worldwide. And compared to the world averages of consumption, Americans use over three times the arable land, five times the energy resources, three times the fresh water, and over seven times the paper, to name only a few areas of consumption.[15]"Knowledge is power" has served the Western world elite over the centuries, and some of the most brutal and protracted modern wars have been fought to protect the bitter fruits of its exclusivity. But this just makes it all the more difficult to understand how it has come to pass that Bacon's dictum is today splattered all over the global mental environment. From internet commercials to school logos, in advertising and entertainment, the slogan "knowledge is power" has now become commonplace and is repeated on the tips of people's tongues from all walks of life. Bacon's dictum is no longer a secret. In fact, the corporate media now encourages everyone to buy the latest computer technology or pay for high priced schooling precisely because "knowledge is power." It is clear that Bacon and his successors knew that one of the real keys to knowledge as power lie in the exclusivity of that knowledge. So how is it that the West now wants everyone to know its secret? The answer may very well be that "knowledge is power" is no longer the driving force behind Western civilization, so it is no longer necessary to keep it secret. While the West certainly still enjoys, and jealously guards, the benefits of implementing four centuries of the Baconian dictum, it is no longer useful or even relevant in and of itself, because a new dictum is dethroning "knowledge is power." In Bacon's day, the Church and feudal establishment were the benefactors and beneficiaries of the "knowledge is power" apparatus. Today's universities and corporations have taken over that role, so one can find evidence of the new dictum by looking into the corporate boardrooms and elite educational establishments."Knowledge is wealth" is replacing "knowledge is power" as the generative force behind Western civilization. But, somewhat ironically, the "information age" allows for clues of the new dictum to be discovered if one knows where to look. For instance, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a Washington DC think-tank funded by big business and the Carnegie and other large foundations, has taken a leading role in school reform in the US. The NCEE mission statement reads: "Knowledge - and the capacity to put knowledge to good use - is now the only dependable source of wealth all over the world. The people, organizations and nations that succeed will be those that make the most of the human desire and capacity for never-ending learning."[16] What is carried over from Bacon's day, though not as successfully, is the necessity for secrecy, or for some other way of assuring that, just as knowledge was power only for the powerful, knowledge will be wealth only for the wealthy. For now, what we have here is a faint glimpse at the blueprint for the new world order of globalized corporate power emanating from Western based institutions and fueled by Western science. Building on its exclusive domination over the fruits of the Baconian dictum, the West is now moving into the realm of knowledge and intellect. But think of what this means. While the results of four centuries of the Baconian order are seen in an increasingly strained natural environment, the West's habit of consumption, its venerated "way of life," is putting an even more terrible burden on global ecosystems, with many now at the point of collapse. Meanwhile, the old and the new dictums of the West are intertwined with issues of "intellectual property rights" in the context of food, botany and genetics. If the Baconian dictum of the past means the environmental inequity and destruction of today, then it is not too far a leap to see that the new dictum of today may be the "mental" inequity and destruction of tomorrow.[17]Knowledge and Wealth in the Islamic TraditionReconfiguring knowledge as "the only dependable source of wealth all over the world" has many disastrous implications, among them being the specter of patenting various forms of life, including plants and seeds, and even genes. This is especially so for people who will be subjects of the new knowledge order. But one advantage of knowing this now is that it may enable some kind of preemptive measures to disallow the West from making the crucial transition from imperial control over natural resources to imperial control over natural and mental resources. Many modern Muslims, especially those cleared by the Western political investment community and who wield some limited power over their own peoples, have largely bought into the normative worldview based on the Baconian dictum of knowledge as power, a tendency they share with their nationalist and communist rivals and predecessors. This allegiance to Western norms has produced mixed results, in terms of economic and political self-determination, but most modern Muslims have little sense of how it contributes to environmental destruction. Therefore, it may be all the more necessary for them to think carefully about the emerging dictum. What does the Islamic tradition say about the relationship between knowledge and wealth? Is it possible to develop an Islamic alternative before the new Western paradigm shift is complete, and before its mechanisms and rewards are too hard to resist?The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, once declared to his companions: "There are two kinds of greedy people who cannot be satisfied: the seeker of knowledge ('ilm) and the seeker of this world (dunya). While the seeker of knowledge receives an increase in Allah's pleasures, the seeker of this world delves deeply into tyranny."[18] If we accept, as the Qur'an suggests, that wealth is one of the trappings of the dunya, then the wisdom of this hadith becomes more apparent the more one spends time in reflection. In one sense, the hadith suggests that knowledge and wealth are separate, yet subtly linked, in the Islamic worldview. But how are they linked? Does the Islamic tradition support the emerging vision of knowledge as wealth? Aren't there any alternative visions? While Muslims have in their intellectual tradition ways to decide upon some set of criteria to discern knowledge from information, or to determine what is knowledge and what is superfluous, as discussed above, their traditions also provide some criteria grounded in Islam for making distinctions between knowledge and wealth, and the subtle interplay therein. While it is well beyond the present scope to offer an exhaustive account of all the Islamic traditions on these matters, it is possible to point the way in a few directions, from history and tradition.The Prophetic recognition cited above, that the seekers of knowledge and the dunya are insatiable and that the latter will lead to tyranny, was born out on several notable occasions in early Islamic history. It is widely accepted among Muslims that the heir to the Prophet's knowledge and wisdom was Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's son-in-law and the youngest person to accept Islam, who is also remembered as one of the "rightly guided" political successors of the Prophet and the first imam. When Imam Ali became the leader of the Muslims, he faced a challenge in the emergence of dynastic rule within the Umayyad family. The Imam had first-hand experience with the relationship between knowledge and wealth, and this became more acute after his death as dynastic rule solidified under the Abbasids.[19] During that period, the great Muslim scholars and imams, like Ja'far Sadiq, Abu Hanifah and Ibn Hanbal, languished in prisons because they exhorted people to knowledge - as defined by the Prophet - while the dynastic regimes exhorted people to wealth and superfluity. Imam Ali's reign lies at the crossroads of this shift, so his deeds and sayings are quite instructive for our purposes. On one occasion, he is recorded as having said to his companion Kumayl:O Kumayl! Knowledge is better than wealth sevenfold. First, knowledge is the heritage of the prophets, while wealth is the heritage of the pharaohs. Second, wealth decreases by spending, while knowledge multiplies. Third, wealth is in need of protection, while knowledge protects those who have it. Fourth, knowledge enters into the burial cloth, while wealth stays behind. Fifth, wealth happens to disbelievers and believers alike, whereas knowledge does not happen except to the believers especially. Sixth, everyone is in need of knowledge in matters of religion, whereas no one needs the owner of wealth. Seventh, knowledge empowers humankind to pass within the straight path, whereas wealth blocks it.[20]This tradition makes a strong case that knowledge is not wealth. In fact, wealth is a sort of dwindling, and even corrupting, burden, while knowledge is a growing, and at times regenerative ease. It also suggests that knowledge and wealth be kept separate. With the Baconian dictum increasingly exposed as the spinner of inequality, greed and destruction in terms of the environmental health of humanity, and with "knowledge is wealth" potentially being wielded by the same powers, the mental as well as the environmental health of the planet and its inhabitants may depend on the abilities of Muslims and other non-Western peoples to mine their own traditions and try to configure another way, based on deeply-rooted teachings like the ones cited here. This alternative way would have to first problematize the relationships between knowledge, power and wealth, by forming a grounded critique within which may lie a regenerative vision.Avoiding a Defective EducationIn the West, it is entirely possible for someone to complete a course of study in higher education, but to graduate as an irresponsible liar and a greedy miser. Worse yet, from the Muslim perspective, a Western graduate could receive high honors and yet be an apostate, atheist or disbeliever, or even a Satanist. Though they might be able to function as bankers, corporate executives, or politicians in the Western modernist system, to Muslims such educational outcomes would indicate that either the student has failed miserably, or that the educational system itself is dysfunctional. Along these lines, there are two other famous teachings of Imam Ali, both of which suggest what the outcomes of education ought to look like, and what they ought not to look like. When asked by one of his companions about how to recognize a knowledgeable person, or what we might understand as some one who is well educated, the Imam replied:To those who are seekers of knowledge, knowledge has many merits. Its head is humility, its eye is freedom from envy, its ear is understanding, its tongue is truthfulness, it memory is research, its heart is good intention, its intellect is knowledge of things and matters, its hand is compassion, its foot is visiting the learned, its resolution is integrity, its wisdom is piety, its abode is salvation, its helmsman is well-being, is mount is faithfulness, its weapon is softness of speech, its sword is satisfaction, its bow is tolerance, its army is discussion with the learned, its wealth are refined manners, its stock is abstinence from sins, it provision for journey is virtue, its drinking water is gentleness, its guide is Divine guidance, and its companion is the love of the spiritual elect.[21]Conversely, another teaching from the Imam, which also problematizes the possible outcomes of the dictum "knowledge is wealth," provides clues as to the undesirable results for someone who has pursued the wrong course:The people of this world (dunya) are excessive in eating, laughing, sleeping and anger. They find little satisfaction and do not apologize to whomever they offend, nor do they accept apologies from whoever has offended them. They are lazy in their obedience but courageous in their disobedience. They are not responsible for their inner wants and desires. They are of little advantage to anyone, yet they are excessive in their speech. They have no pie