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Madrasa Discourses equip young Islamic scholars with scientific literacy – Word For Peace

The Madrasa Discourses team uses what it terms an approach which is "elicious." "We work from within the tradition and encourage them to understand the already rooted scientific logic in the tradition," Mirza said.

Madrasa Discourses equip young Islamic scholars with scientific literacy – Word For Peace(RNS) — When 29-year-old Pakistani Waqas Khan graduated from his madrasa at Karachi, he felt disillusioned.

While he’d received top grades in his education, he felt uncertain about the position of the 21st century religion and Islamic scholars. “I could not connect the learned knowledge to the world I live in,” Khan told Religion News Service. “I needed to know what I need but I couldn’t.”

He then met with Ebrahim Moosa and the dots began to connect.

Moosa, a South African, had felt similarly disenchanted after graduating from the renowned Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama seminary in Lucknow, India, one of the most respected madrasas in the Muslim world. His interest pushed him to obtain a journalistic certificate which led him to report on the struggles over apartheid in his native country.

He then turned into academics, graduating from Cape Town University before heading to the U.S. to teach Islamic studies at Harvard, Duke, and Indiana’s Notre Dame University.

Such encounters, Moosa told RNS, helped fill the crucial holes in his madrasa education and encouraged him to support other Muslims who were highly but narrowly educated. In 2015, Moosa created the Madrasa Discourses, a Notre Dame-based research program that sometimes skips madrasa graduates — students like Waqas Khan — with the science and philosophical issues typical madrasas present.

Madrasa is the Arabic word for any kind of school but most frequently refers to Islamic seminaries, which are usually attached to mosques. They’re priceless, Moosa said, author of the book “What Is a Madrasa? “As ‘Islamic heritage repositories.’ But some orthodox Muslims, he says, ‘make an idol out of tradition, without realizing that heritage is alive.

Studying with Moosa and his colleagues, Khan said, has helped him to understand “difference of perspectives.”

Moosa’s program, funded by a John Templeton Foundation grant, is now in its third year and has taught over 80 students at Notre Dame and Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi , India, as well as at GIFT University in Gujranwala, Pakistan.

The initiative is intended to support the madrasas themselves just as much as its students. The ulema, or the Islamic scholars of the world, were once intellectual and spiritual leaders within Muslim societies. Moosa says today, they are rapidly losing their moral authority because their madrasa education has left them out of step with the times.

The Madrasa Discourses seek to counter the “trends in armchair theology” of today’s madrasa scholarship by taking it into dialogue with modern intellectual currents, as organizer Mahan Mirza puts it.

Imparting basic scientific literacy is therefore critical.

Moosa, who considers himself mainly a theologian, relies on experts with academic experience to help participants understand the context and processes of scientific research.

His colleague Mirza, a professor at Notre Dame who directs the Contending Modernities program, helped develop the curriculum and teaches every week online.

Mirza has studied mechanical engineering in Texas, earning degrees in theological studies from Hartford Seminary and Yale University. Mirza has also served as the faculty dean at Zaytuna College, America’s first accredited college of liberal Muslim arts, where he taught Arab-Islamic studies and science history.

Many from the traditional schools that come to the program have little or no science literacy. “Maybe some of them know what the periodic table is, or an atom or an electron,” Mirza said. “Yet we start with next to nothing. “Their understanding of the long engagement of classical Islam with philosophy, logic and science, he said, provides them with a solid base to build upon. “These sort of issues are already integrated into practical theology,” explained Mirza. “But students no longer really accept them as science, since they find them part of the tradition of Islamic intellect.”

The Madrasa Discourses team uses what it terms an approach which is “elicious.” “We work from within the tradition and encourage them to understand the already rooted scientific logic in the tradition,” Mirza said.

That’s the crucial difference, Moosa told RNS: “When our participants realize that Islamic history isn’t stagnant, that there is a history of growth and development and change, it makes them very confident.”

Learning about people such as Ibn Khaldun, an Arab historian who died in 1406 and is considered a social science founder, “rattles their cages.”

The students take part in roundtable discussions with local scientists in the second year of the three-year course, and compare texts from Islamic and Western science and philosophy. Readings are provided which depict how Islamic intellectual history is developed and debated.

One essential conceptual framework for the second-year course is the notion of “Broad History,” a recent academic phenomenon that looks at universe and human evolution in terms of large trends rather than culture-by-culture, politically oriented events.

The biggest mental shift for Waqas Khan has been understanding evolution. He hadn’t believed it was real before arriving at Notre Dame. Today, he said, he sees this as a “significant scientific idea.”

Not everybody walks away from Madrasa Discourses with their values, having completed a 180. That’s just good for the organizers of the system.

“In this programme, you won’t get any answers,” Mirza said. “So you are going to be getting a lot of questions. So we want to make sure you understand those things.

For example , the goal is not to prove that evolution is real. The aim is to illustrate what a scientific theory is, so madrasa graduates will no longer dismiss evolution as “just a theory.” Most madrasa-trained thinkers, Mirza said, consider scientists trading in theories as “incompetent goofballs” playing guessing games.

Once participants start to understand the ambiguity, Mirza said, “They begin to ask, ‘What does this mean for creation? What do we think theologically about this? ‘”said Mirza.

“But it is here that our work ends. They are the Islamic scholars as they are the ulema and that’s why we welcomed them,” Mirza said.

At that point, Mirza tells his charges, “Hopefully now you can develop a culture where you can start engaging with these questions — and perhaps come up with some answers.”

Some Islamic scholars and madrasa leaders have criticized the Madrasa Discourses, questioning why the reforming madrasa education of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, should be such. “There is a fear that this is some sort of a neocolonial project,” said Mirza.

But Moosa and Mirza say they do not wish to impose any Western Orientalist reform on the madrasas. We point out that the local faculty of the project in India and Pakistan, respectively, are drawn from the prestigious Jamia Hamdard and Al-Sharia Academy, and have buy-in from community leaders.

“We are raising these questions and working along with Muslim societies on these ideas,” Mirza said. “We ‘re studying and working together instead of making a top-down effort to unsettle everything.”

Maybe the proof is in Waqas Khan’s pride now includes in his conventional education. Since collaborating with Madrasa Discourses, Khan said he had started wishing that instead of Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, the conventional madrasa he attended, he had studied at a modern university. However, working with Moosa helped him to understand the importance of his Islamic training.

“Now I think it’s nice to have both traditional and modern educations in a community like mine,” he told RNS. Working with Islamic scholars such as Mirza and Moosa, he said, helped him “connect both of them and understand the religion of our times.”

Zaid Hassan, a fellow participant, who lives in Gujranwala, agreed. While at Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi, where he completed his studies in 2015, he felt pleased with all he studied in madrassa, though he acknowledged that his “heart was often troubled by the apparent impracticality of these teachings in the real world.”

Therefore, he says he is thankful to Madrasa Discourses for exposing him to a new way of thinking, one that is rooted in the Islamic way of thinking but open to a range of perspectives.

But learning this way of thought, Hassan told RNS in Urdu, “has given birth to new responsibility, a feeling of great weight on our shoulders.” Because going forward in communication with the world around him with the concern of “harmonizing faith into the new modern society” is no simple task, he said.

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