Islamic Education Quotes
In early Islam, scholarship and science was encouraged in all fields and in most areas the Muslims state of knowledge was greater than that of Christian Europe. However, over time the fundamentalists restricted the concept of knowledge to the Koran under the theory that anything worth knowing was in the Koran and that which was not should not be studied. In modern times Islamic nations, holding this very narrow view of education and learning, have intellectually stagnated—especially in modern science, technology, politics and philosophy. Most Islamic universities and madrasses teach only theological subjects and Koranic prescriptions of life and law and the few exceptions tend to be in strongly secular countries like Turkey.
First Muslim to win the Nobel Prize
Nowhere else in the world was there this large a number and density of sophisticated learning institutions. These colleges were midway between a college and a high school in the learning level and student ages of modern times.
The letter had been written earlier, but this and 51 other letters written when she was in Turkey were published in 1763. At the time, Turkey, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, was an Islamic state operating under Islamic law, as were all countries within the Ottoman Empire. Today, Turkey is a secular state and the clergy and the legal profession are separate.
This quotation is fascinating but sad. In 1902, Aga Kahn III and other Muslim reformers gathered to improve the terrible state of Muslim education. Muslims could attend the English operated public schools which were excellent, but the Imams fought these schools as they were purely secular and not under their control. Yet the Madrassas religious schools that then existed taught by rote and only Islamic religious content—no mathematics, science, other literature, art or anything else. Much of the teaching was religiously extreme with not even modern religious content. Over a century later the Schools of Pakistan—the Islamic nation carved out of India and those of most of the Arab nations are little better and despite a century of progress, the curriculum is the same.
The writer was born and brought up a Muslim and because he criticizes Islam, he has had a death fatwa issued against him much like Salman Rushdie.
