In recent times, there has been intense global interest on and scrutiny of Islamic education. In reforming Islamic schools, what are the key actions initiated and are they contested or negotiated by and among Muslims? This edited collection brings together leading scholars to explore current reforms in Islamic schools. Drawing together international case studies, Reforms in Islamic Education critically discusses the reforms, considering the motivations for them, nature of them and perceptions and experiences of people affected by them. The contributors also explore the tensions, resistance, contestations and negotiations between Muslims and non-Muslims, and among Muslims, in relation to the reforms. Highlighting the need to understand and critique reforms in Islamic schools within broad historical, political and socio-cultural contexts, this book is a valuable resource for academics, policymakers and educators.

In recent times, there has been intense global interest on and scrutiny of Islamic education. In reforming Islamic schools, what are the key actions initiated and are they contested or negotiated by and among Muslims? This edited collection brings together leading scholars to explore current reforms in Islamic schools. Drawing together international case studies, Reforms in Islamic Education critically discusses the reforms, considering the motivations for them, nature of them and perceptions and experiences of people affected by them. The contributors also explore the tensions, resistance, contestations and negotiations between Muslims and non-Muslims, and among Muslims, in relation to the reforms. Highlighting the need to understand and critique reforms in Islamic schools within broad historical, political and socio-cultural contexts, this book is a valuable resource for academics, policymakers and educators.

Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations. Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex, evolving, and diverse in its institutions and practices. They reveal that a struggle for hearts and minds in Muslim lands started long before the Western media discovered madrasas, and that Islamic schools remain on its front line. Schooling Islam is the most comprehensive work available in any language on madrasas and Islamic education.

Rooted in the world historical methodology of John O. Voll, this collection brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the ongoing impact of revival and reform movements beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through to the present. Ranging from the MENA region to Africa, India, and China, and covering a variety of religious interpretations, from scripturalist to Sufism, these essays offer new perspectives on movements including the Wahhabis of Arabia, the Sokoto Caliphate, the neo-Sufism of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, Sufi scholars and networks on the African continent, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Contributors explore encounters between Islamic revival and reform and modernity with a focus on the ways in which Islamic reforms influence the political sphere. Concluding with contemporary reinterpretations of Islam in the digital arena, this volume examines, but also moves beyond, texts to include embodiments of religious practice, the development of religious culture and education, and attention to women’s contributions to education, cultural production, and community building.

This book offers a comparative and cross-cultural history of Islamic reform and European colonialism as both dependent and independent factors in shaping the multiple ways of becoming modern in Indonesia and Malaya during the first half of the twentieth century.

Examining modern Muslim identity constructions, the authors introduce a novel analytical framework to Islamic Studies, drawing on theories of successive modernities, sociology of religion, and poststructuralist approaches to modern subjectivity, as well as the results of extensive fieldwork in the Middle East, particularly Egypt and Jordan.

This historical study transforms our understanding of modern Egyptian national culture by applying social theory to the history of Egypt's first teacher-training school. It focuses on Dar al-Ulum, which trained students from religious schools to teach in Egypt's new civil schools from 1872. During the first four decades of British occupation (1882-1922), Egyptian nationalists strove to emulate Europe yet insisted that Arabic and Islamic knowledge be reformed and integrated into Egyptian national culture despite opposition from British officials. This reinforced the authority of the alumni of the Dar al-Ulum, the daramiyya, as arbiters of how to be modern and authentic, a position that graduates Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood would use to resist westernisation and create new modes of Islamic leadership in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Establishing a 130-year history for tensions over the place of Islamic ideas and practices within modernized public spaces, tensions which became central to the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Hilary Kalmbach demonstrates the importance of Arabic and Islamic knowledge to notions of authority, belonging, and authenticity within a modernising Muslim-majority community.

Over the last two decades we have seen a vast number of books published in the West that treat Islamic fundamentalism as a rising threat to the western values of secularism and democracy. In the last decade scholars began proclaiming an existent or emerging "clash" between East and West, Islam and Christianity, or in the case of Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad and "McWorld." More recently, some western scholars have offered another interpretation. Focusing on the work of contemporary Muslim intellectuals, these scholars have begun to argue that what we are witnessing, in Islamic contexts, is tantamount to a Reformation. An Islamic Reformation attempts to evaluate this claim through the work of emerging and top scholars in the fields of political science, philosophy, anthropology, religion, history and Middle Eastern studies. The overall goal of this volume is to question the impact of various reformist trends throughout the Middle East. Are we witnessing a growth in fundamentalism or the emergence of an Islamic Reformation? What does religious practice in this region reflect? What is the usefulness of approaching these questions through Christian/Islamic and West/East dichotomies? Unique in its focus and scope, An Islamic Reformation represents an emerging vanguard in the discussion of Islamic religious heritage and practice and its effect on world politics.

Writing boards and blackboards are emblematic of two radically different styles of education in Islam. The essays in this lively volume address various aspects of the expanding and evolving range of educational choices available to Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors from the United States, Europe, and Africa evaluate classical Islamic education in Africa from colonial times to the present, including changes in pedagogical methods—from sitting to standing, from individual to collective learning, from recitation to analysis. Also discussed are the differences between British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese education in Africa and between mission schools and Qur'anic schools; changes to the classical Islamic curriculum; the changing intent of Islamic education; the modernization of pedagogical styles and tools; hybrid forms of religious and secular education; the inclusion of women in Qur'anic schools; and the changing notion of what it means to be an educated person in Africa. A new view of the role of Islamic education, especially its politics and controversies in today's age of terrorism, emerges from this broadly comparative volume.

Education systems and textbooks in selected countries of the Middle East are increasingly the subject of debate. This volume presents and analyzes the major trends as well as the scope and the limits of education reform initiatives undertaken in recent years. In curricula and teaching materials, representations of the "Self" and the "Other" offer insights into the contemporary dynamics of identity politics. By building on a network of scholars working in various countries in the Middle East itself, this book aims to contribute to the evolution of a field of comparative education studies in this region.