Theology, Tradition and Contemporary Muslim Educational Institutions

Last Friday night, I made my way to Kadiköy in Istanbul, Turkey to attend a gathering where some brothers regularly get together to study the works of the Turkish scholar, Said Nursi (1877–1960). While my sense is that Nursi is not very well known in the United States, in Turkey, he is thought by some to possibly have been a mujaddid (reviver) of the fourteenth hijri century.

While many volumes of Nursi’s vast catalogue are available as translations in various languages and several conferences and studies on his life and works have come out in recent years, I want to use this opportunity to reflect upon some of Nursi’s ideas in thinking about our contemporary Muslim educational institutions.

In her intellectual biography of Nursi, Sukran Vahide provides some historical background of the medreses in his time:

With their syllabi and curricula virtually unchanged since the fifteenth century, their buildings in advanced stages of decay, the student facilities nonexistent, and their independent sources of income (the pious foundations) [awqaf] having been appropriated by the central government in 1840, the condition of the medreses by the end of Abdülhamid’s reign can only be described as lamentable….As noted above, the medreses and whole learned institution had been superseded by the Western-type legal and educational systems introduced by the Tanzimat, a process, unexpectedly perhaps, continued by Abdülhamid. […]

While recognizing the differences in their ways, he [Nursi] stresses that the barriers between them should be broken down, and by way of a remedy, modern science should be taught in the medreses “in place of obsolete ancient philosophy,” religious sciences should be taught “fully” in the secular schools, and scholars from the medreses, “some of the most learned ulama,” should be present in the Sufi tekkes. He then goes on to analyze the reasons for the ineffectiveness of the preachers, who played such a vital role in educating the mass of the people. He wanted the preachers “to be both searching scholars, so that they can prove what they claim, and subtle philosophers so that they do not spoil the balance of the Shar’ʼīah, and to be eloquent and convincing. It is essential that they are this.”

Intrigued by Nursi, I asked the Cambridge based theologian Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) about Nursi’s works and its relationship with traditional Islamic thought. He answered: “It does not seek to be a rearticulation of traditional Islam; neither does traditional Islam require itself to be simply rearticulated. It is a set of arguments for the existence of God based on a series of complex and deep meditations on the Qur’an.”

On this point of engaging with the philosophical issues of our day, a point can be taken from Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s introduction to Shaykh Saleh al-Ghursi, during the Rihla program last year in Konya, Turkey. Shaykh Hamza spoke of how Shaykh al-Ghursi had penned an important super-commentary upon al-Bajuri’s (d. 1227 AH/ 1860 CE) commentary on Laqani’s (d. 1040 AH/1631 CE) Jawhara al-Tawhid, a famous didactic poem in theology, as well as other books including one on reforming the madrese tradition curricula. Notably, Shaykh Hamza highlighted how Shaykh al-Ghursi believes that “Many of our kalam (theology) books address issues that are dead. They died a long time ago, yet we teach these and talk about them, when really they’re relics of history. We are dealing with new challenges (tahadiyat) [and] we don’t have ulama that are addressing these challenges.”

Shaykh Hamza makes a reference to this gap in the introduction to his translation of the Creed of Imam Tawawi where he writes, due to “the current intellectual stagnation of Muslim theology…modern [Muslim] theological works are almost entirely devoid of contemporary issues-such as evolution, dialectical materialism, postmodernism, and quantum physics-that pose serious challenges to all religions.”

Notre Dame University professor Ebrahim Moosa draws attention to the problem of what he calls the “effective mummification of tradition.” Moosa argues that contemporary institutions of Muslim higher learning prize ‘authenticity’. What is needed, Moosa argues, is the recognition that “being faithful to tradition includes the ability to question and reinterpret it.” It is this dynamic process of reevaluation in light of new circumstances to reinvigorates and keeps alive a living tradition. In this light, Yale anthropologist, Zareena Grewal highlights how in the contemporary crisis of authority in global Islam, “custodians of tradition suppress skepticism and insist only on veneration, undermining the very lifeblood of tradition, its debate.” In her monograph, she examines how Muslim American students travel abroad seeking ownership of that discursive tradition, but are often challenged in their ability to return home to the U.S. as meaningful custodians able to transmit and translate what they learned to their contemporary context.

Shabbir Akhtar, currently at Oxford, has attempted to tackle some contemporary philosophical issues in his books A Faith for All Seasons and The Qur’an and the Secular Mind (both on Prof. Tim Winter’s book list). Akhtar, in comparison with Muslim scholars who do not even acknowledge contemporary issues, takes up the challenge of secularism seriously and gives it a very serious hearing. He outlines some of the major reservations and assumptions of secular humanists, and faults the proponents of Islamic orthodoxy as being “thoughtless” and “trapped in the classical straightjacket.” However, Akhtar fails to give an adequate response to this crisis, and in his attempt to refuse “to cherish the unemprical,” he even dismisses the Islamic mystical tradition of Islam and the kalam tradition which I believe could actually be used profitably to address contemporary philosophical issues.

In the Spring of 2012, I took a seminar with John Sexton, president emeritus of New York University, who earned a PhD in Religion from Fordham, before going to Harvard Law School. I was intrigued by Sexton’s approach to meaning and an appreciation for the sacred through a most creative approach — “Baseball as a Road to God” — the title of his seminar and book. There, Sexton prioritized experience — the idea that there are “elements of our lives that lie beyond what can be captured in words alone — ineffable truths that we know by experience rather than by logic or analysis.”

Translating this sentiment to an Islamic context, we might say that studying creedal formulations of Islam, such as The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi, provide an important framework and foundation for establishing a worldview regarding the Divine. However, simply stopping there does not necessarily lead one to what Imam al-Ghazzali (d. 505 AH/ 1111 CE) described in his spiritual autobiography as dawq or “fruitional experience.”

This journey in exploring a sense of wonder and mystery in the experience of our daily lives is essential to searching for God in the modern age and what I believe is often missing from the talk of much of our preaching and teaching. We must re-evaluate if this is the indeed the case and if it is so, we must adjust the mission of Muslim educational institutions to center and prioritize seeking the Divine.

USC Professor Sherman Abdal-Hakim Jackson has noted that for many, the abstract declarations of classical theologians in Islam “in its present form obviates little relevance as a source of liberation or a bridge to primordial meanings.” While studying traditional texts is important and foundational, and while we must read and engage with them, we must make that inherited tradition speak meaningfully to the modern conscience.

In his remarks at the Zaytuna Convocation in 2012, Dr. Jackson called for the need extend or stretch that tradition as the custodial generation for our own context. As he puts it “While we be inspired, instructed and even profitably challenged by the tradition that has been bequeathed to us by our ancestors, we cannot look to our intellectual ancestors alone to undertake a task that only we can be expected to execute with any real meaning and effectiveness.”

In his written works, Jackson argues to “look to the classical legacy as the starting point rather than the end of its contemplation.” To address the challenge of articulating an authentic and relevant understanding of the religion, Jackson writes that both mastery (i.e. deep study of the rich scholarship of Muslim tradition) and appropriation (i.e. making relevant to one’s own circumstances) are necessary.

The Cambridge Muslim College and Kalam Research and Media recently hosted a two-day meeting of Muslim educators in Cambridge that focused on the theme of ‘The Future of the Madrasa’.

According to Sohail Nakhoodah:

The meeting was chaired by Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad (Dean, Cambridge Muslim College), who set the meeting in motion with the observation that the discourse of the ulema was not a “key-fit” to the modern mind. The question, he said, was whether there was any systematic rational framework that might give us both religious authenticity as well as philosophical authenticity in the modern world. […]

Professor David Ford (Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge) made a guest address on the first day of the meeting, in which he described the critical importance for all faith traditions to do “academically-mediated religion” in higher education. He described the benefits that universities, living religious communities, and the wider society had to gain from such “academically-mediated religion”, particularly when it was done in an interfaith context because the modern world was one in which everyone must always be in conversation, and described his experiences as a Christian theologian in higher education.

A gargantuan and continuous effort in this area is vital for carrying Islamic scholarship forward today. As the accomplished Islamic legal scholar and historian, Dr. Umar F. Abd-Allah, writes:

Without enlightened educational institutions that attract talented students and in the absence of curricula that impart a mature understanding of modern thought and realities, it is unlikely that a sophisticated understanding of the Islamic religious tradition can ever be fostered. Without careful examination of their original historical context, the thousands upon thousands of dusty manuscripts and old books preserved in Islamic libraries will remain little more than interesting fossils of history. Until classical Islamic learning is made meaningful to contemporary Muslims, it is difficult to fault those who question its relevance.

I would like to conclude by noting that there are a number of notable institutions that have recently been established for the full-time study of Islam in the West in a seminary/devotional context: EDEP (under the direction of Dr. Recep Ṣentürk in Istanbul), Cambridge Muslim College (Cambridge, UK), Zaytuna College (Berkeley, CA), American Islamic College (Chicago, IL), Dar al-Qasim (Chicago, IL), Ebrahim College (London, UK) Madina Institute Seminary (Atlanta, GA), Tayseer Seminary (Knoxville, TN), the Islamic chaplaincy program at Hartford Seminary (Hartford, CT), and Bayan Claremont (Claremont, CA). This is in addition to the number of Dar al-Uloom’s that have been established from Buffalo, Chicago, across the UK, Canada and in South Africa.

How all of these institutions will tackle maintaining continuity with tradition, while also forging their own paths to “extend tradition” into our context — and thus heed Nursi’s call — remains to be seen.

Ebadur Rahman is a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He has previous degrees from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and is a graduate of the pilot seminary program of Zaytuna College. At 15, he memorized the Qur’an, while in high school in New York.

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