Education or Indoctrination?

"Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children"

Malcolm X

This quote by Malcolm X is a succinct description of our state today. The current education system that we all are educated in, whether in the east or the west was imposed on the world during the Colonial Period. It was part of the European colonial strategy to impose its hegemony over the entire world. In the Muslim world all Islamic institutions (political, economic, social and educational) were replaced by Western ones. This was not a choice or a natural and gradual transition. Rather it was a deliberate forced policy to impose total hegemonic control over the Muslim world.

This needs to change now. Your education determines your life choices, your thinking and your entire personality. How many generations of Muslims will be sacrificed at the alter of secular western education for us to realize that a major reason for our religious and intellectual decadence in the Muslim world is this education system? This is not education, it is indoctrination into a godless, a-moral, a-spiritual paradigm that teaches you to conform to the global status quo.

This is best expressed in the words of Prophet Muhammad (saw):

"Close to the End of Time, the pen will prevail but ignorance will be more".

(Sahih Bukhari 80)

Meaning education will not serve its purpose. It will be used for the proliferation of ignorance. People come out of universities thinking they know a lot, in fact the institutions even robbed them of what they knew, their values, their spirituality, their critical thinking and handed them some data, numbers and a skill to earn enough to pay their bills. This is not education according to Islam. This is mental slavery.

Take the example of science education. An unwarranted import of naturalism and a naturalistic worldview characterizes all science education today. According to Naturalism, all physical phenomena must be necessarily expressed in terms of natural forces and laws without ever resorting to supernatural agencies like God and Angels. This is an assumption and a presupposition. Not an observable fact or a scientific conclusion. Now this is seriously problematic for Muslim students. Why? Because all of Islam rests on the belief in the supernatural.

Science was studied and developed in the Islamic world for no less than 900 years and many Muslim scientists and philosophers subscribed to Naturalism. But even then their commitment to Naturalism did not give way to a negation of a religious and metaphysical view on reality. They viewed laws of nature as divine laws that bring regularity to the physical world. Just like how divine laws pertaining to human beings bring regularity in human societies.

Many young Muslims complain of how science shook their faith or how evolutionary biology shook their Imaan. The primary reason for this predicament is the subtle import of the philosophical assumption of Naturalism along with the science. It's not really the science that is problematic, but it's philosophical baggage that is ever so often slipped along with it. The only way to undo the damage would be to revive Islamic education or in the least revise the current curriculum using Islamic values.

Another area that we can see the creeping western secular worldview in education is history. History is one of the signs of Allah Most High according to the Quran. Muslims traditionally had an ethical and moral approach to the study of history. It wasn't just a series of empires, wars, kings and civilizations. It was the unfolding of divine wisdom and justice. Muslim sociologists and anthropologists then created social theories based on this ethical reading of past civilizations. But today history is divorced from any moral reading. Thus students of history come out of institutions loaded with dates, names and events but bereft of any meaningful understanding of human history.

And similarly we can go over each an every field of knowledge today and deconstruct it to see the secular onslaught on education which is draining out every bit of spirituality and sense of higher purpose and meaning from young Muslims.

Because we at KNOW are greatly concerned about this, most of our effort is to revive true education which shaped the intellects of Early Muslims. We believe that what made us great was our superior education system. Muslims historically were world leaders in education. We want to revive that legacy InshAllah.

Watch our latest episode on education in Islam.