all right so

good evening everybody and welcome to

the philosophy of education seminar the
lent term card
and um i have to say that when daniel
initiated the philosophy education
seminars about a year ago in the faculty
of education i was really excited that
we were able to do this and at that time
you know even at that time we had a
wonderful response from the faculty
because we haven't really had much
philosophy of education for some time
in cambridge so it's been great to have
a whole series of different seminars
which have been quite
wonderful and with zoom it's grown and
we have probably
quote some very large audiences now so
just to
introduce you to today's session so we
have with us um
professor tim winter he's a university
lecturer in islamic studies at the
university of cambridge and also dean
of cambridge muslim college and he'll be
speaking about islamic and british
models of education conflict or
convergence
so the abstract is that the young and
rapidly growing muslim demography of the
uk has established over 150 full-time
educational institutions
in which the engagement of muslim
theology and ethics with british values
is variously performed so in this talk
professor hunter will consider the
theories of some contemporary muslim
educationalists as they grapple with the
paradoxes
of maintaining a faithful muslim
episteme in the secularizing regulatory
and philosophical environment on modern
britain so
without further ado i'm going to hand
over to professor winter and he will
begin his talk he will be speaking for
about
45 minutes to an hour and then following
that there will be
time for a discussion question answers
um we are restricting
q a to the chat this evening
and um just to let you know because just
the audience is so large that that's
probably the best way of doing it so if
you have any questions please put them
into the chat and we will
um put them to the um to the speaker
okay so
i'm going to um hand over to professor
winter now
and uh you know for his talk
thank you very much it's actually a
pleasure to be
speaking for a change under the auspices
of the uh
faculty of education i'm really grateful
for having been
invited to do so i find that my memory
of this kind of
uh engagement goes back all the way to
1983
when the late paul hearst of course
recently this deceased
alas and professor ali ashraf jointly
convened a cambridge conference on islam
and education
the proceedings of which were published
and have had an abiding
influence the growth of the muslim
community in the uk which significantly
drives this area of interest comprises
one of the most salient demographic
and cultural facts of our time and even
in the distant days of 1983
educationalists were showing themselves
reasonably alert to the need to
understand the specifics of muslim
people
cultures just to underline this reality
by citing some
elementary statistics almost 40 years on
from the first cambridge conference
the muslim school population has more
than quadrupled with a further doubling
just in the last decade
perhaps one in every 10 students now
attending a british school
claims a muslim heritage between the
2001
and 2011 census date the
self-identifying muslim population
grew from 1.5 million to 2.7 million
and around half of these uk muslims were
aged 25
or under whatever the results of this
year's census this growth will probably
continue
the office of national statistics
projects that 20
of british people will claim muslim
affiliation by the middle of the present
century
literacy in the basics of islam thus
forms an indispensable part of any
trainee teacher's preparation for this
multi-religious
and rapidly shifting environment and as
an educator some of whose graduates are
now working
as teachers in the state sector i i find
it pleasing to note how
enthusiastically young teachers
acknowledge this need
paralleling this steady growth in muslim
school demographics there has been a
less spectacular but in many ways more
politically challenged growth in the
private and state aided muslim
school sector the 1983 conference noted
the failure in that year of the attempt
by the bradford muslim parents
association to establish its own
voluntary aided muslim school
radford's local education authority
noting that inadequacy of the proposal
had emphatically turned it down
today the landscape is transformed not
only in the range and number of muslim
schools but in the calibre of the
education
being delivered
while some full-time schools which claim
a muslim ethos are still
under achieving the better muslim
schools are clustered very near the top
of the relevant league tables so in 2019
the last pre-covered year for which
indicative statistics are available
it was striking to note that the
published league tables showed that
eight
of the 20 highest scoring schools in
some key categories were schools with a
muslim ethos
to take one example tauhel islam girls
school in blackburn
which had opened in 1984 just a year
after our conference and was then lodged
in an inadequate building with only 96
students
was able steadily to transform itself
until it gained recognition as the first
islamic state school in the northwest
in 2005. its mission statement
runs to promote a culture of educational
excellence
from within a caring and secure islamic
environment
the 2019 figures gave this specialist
humanities school a progress 8 score of
plus
2.17 the highest in the country
while 83 percent of pupils achieved a
strong path in inc
pass in english and maths compared to
the england average of 42
in 2018 76 of its students received the
english baccalaureate
the average score was 6.55 compared to
the national average of 4.07
the success of the school has enabled
its multi-academy trust body
star academies to expand to include 28
primary and secondary schools
schools such as tahedah islam maintain
discernible intellectual and spiritual
roots in the muslim
seminary system the uk is currently host
to an estimated 30 full-time higher
islamic seminaries
comprising the so-called sector
which graduate over a thousand trained
muslim religious scholars
every year my own very small institution
the cambridge muslim college
has run a one-year diploma which takes a
selection of these
seminary graduates and offers them a
thorough methodological and historical
retraining
which gives access to masters programs
at so as in london
and other higher education providers in
the mainstream secular domain
one of our graduates is now a professor
at georgetown university
several phd students and there are many
other examples
of such excellence in our alumni
database
the upward trajectory from an
underprivileged minority upbringing
through the star academies the direct
law sector and then on to academic
imminence
by the cambridge muslim college ibrahim
college and other
specialized bridging institutions offers
a remarkable testament the hybrid
and still in many respects experimental
pedagogic and curricular model
as well as to the capacities of these
muslim
demographies
my purpose here is only to be indicative
of the fact that schools which in some
way
integrate an islamic ethos are capable
of competing with and even potentially
outperforming the alternatives but an
extrapolation from the recent trends of
star academy and various muslim-med
schools
such as islamia girls school in
williston suggests that despite
maintaining an intake among historically
disadvantaged communities
they will increasingly show themselves
to be among the most outstanding schools
in the state sector year on year
the conversation with the alum trained
chief executive
of star academies raised for me a
somewhat obvious question
to what extent does the rise of this
sector supported by the darul alum
infrastructure
which has historically provided many of
the teachers for these primary and
secondary schools
reflect the orientation and content of
the curriculum and ethos
even though the schools are adhering
strictly to the national curriculum
and offer no initiation into the
religious life
but each religion for those who opt for
army in a comparative
and inclusive framework these schools
are
in the wake of the so-called trojan
horse inquisition of 2014
particularly anxious to emphasize their
tolerant ethos and universalist
credentials the answer is often said to
turn
on a simple level on the generally
higher levels of discipline and work
ethos
and obedience to authority associated
with conservative religious communities
but behind this as it were moralistic
etiology there may be a more subtle
epistemological differential in play and
it's this possibility which i propose to
speculate about in the remainder of this
paper
as several of the participants in the
1983 conference noted
our culture assumes that since modern
education is a
paradigmatic entailment of the
enlightenment empowerment of free
criticality
that the inculcation of a static
religious worldview
constitutes an implicit or explicit
alienation of the child
from her or his freely chosen selfhood
and is hence highly
undesirable charles taylor has detailed
the ways in which the enlightenment
shifted the conception
of the human subject from that of a role
holder defined by social duty
to undefined internally through the will
so that authenticity was transformed
into a sense of remaining true to
oneself
russo had insisted that religion
oppressively imposed other men's
authenticities
upon the believer whereas the true man
is the one who lives directed by his
inner life
outwardly directed virtues such as
sincerity and honor
become progressively less salient as
this introspective turn
intensifies from lock to hegel a strong
conviction evolved
that the misplaced traditional respect
for those who primarily self-defined as
adherents of social convention
should be replaced by an apparently
paradoxical societal esteem
for those capable of defying society's
norms
whose consequent alienation would
conduce to autonomy and hence to a truer
form of life
accompanying this now i think
overwhelmingly dominant narrative
the apparent risk to social cohesion
posed by the potentially consequent
narcissism
has often been counted by a russo-esque
assurance
that an innate noble and philanthropic
quality in humans
would be discovered by these processes
of self-assessment and self-liberation
which would naturally incline to the
dispassionate deployment of reason
which would then discern and enjoy the
personal happiness ensuing from
altruistic action
this inner assessment which focal
famously saw as an inheritance from the
catholic sacrament of confession
would lead to the reasonable discovery
of public and political virtues
rendering the old christian order both
superseded and
unnecessary as is then as taylor puts it
an age of authenticity
the other's narrative must never be
self-imposed by the same
for fear of inducing a painful and
humanly incapacitating heteronomy
so the implications for education entail
a return
to the etymology of the word and educare
a drawing out of what is imagined to be
already there
the authentic self obscured in the child
by ecclesial and familial socializations
which are to be interrogated although
not necessarily abolished
by the disclosure of the imminent and
sovereign modern self
this is the head-on collision between
religious indoctrination
and the liberating episteme of the
modern school constructed as a sort of
clinic of the will
in which prematurely damaged minds are
subject to a process of restoration to
their natural health
and empowered through their reasoning
autonomy to discover the good life for
themselves
the presence of this antinomy between
religiously mandated false consciousness
and modern inward liberation remains i
think a very frequent assumption
a superstition perhaps of an age which
imagines that the simple dichotomies of
the enlightenment
continue to be unproblematically
sustainable
analogously with so much traditional
religious faith this
enlightenment doctrine survives as a
familiar and
comforting residue even in the early
20th century much literature
art and music was already interrogating
the magnificence
of the enlightenment self preferring
edith sitwell's definition of our
consciousness
as a bundle of small griefs and fears
michael oakshott and to some extent paul
hurst later came to be very aware of the
slow sinking
of the old model of subjectivity but saw
a thorough grounding in european history
and high culture as the provider
of a sense of self that could enable
education to avert
any instrumentalizing as a simple
utilitarian exercise
in training actors and wealth creators
for the material and knowledge economy
for oak shot considering the emancipated
modern subject
this is the very meaning of liberal
education
liberal because it is liberated from the
distracting business of satisfying
contingent wants
oakshot writing his essay a place of
learning in 1975
we're still confident about this ghost
in the machine model
our will is not reducible to the
measurable concatenations of our biology
our self-aware maturity is evidently
more than a development of the fetuses
organic adaptation to circumstance he
asks
is dr watson's discovery of the helical
structure of dna molecules
properly to be described as itself a
chemical reaction to an environmental
input
which promoted his biological survival
and could assume that this would be
heard as a rhetorical question
this conservative philosophy of mind was
already competing with foucault's
well-known
entire rejection of the idea of a
constant self possessed of a true
core which might be reflectively
differentiated from peripheral
more socially driven and mimetic
motivations
others were noting the implausibility of
an account of personal identity
which alleges a freedom from the social
impingements that have shaped it
most seriously of all neuroscience has
grown reluctant to notice the ghost in
the machine
reducing our allegedly autonomous
subjectivity to the status of a neural
mirage take two recent examples
michael graziano's rethinking
consciousness came out just last year i
think
and daniel dennis from bacteria to bach
and back
the evolution of minds here it's
proposed that consciousness
is effectively an illusion the brain is
convinced that it is conscious in some
vaguely non-corporeal way
since it operates in terms of apparently
non-physical procedures of directed
awareness
in reality however we have no will we
are an essence automata
in which the brain constructs after our
actions the mirage of a sequential
process
of intentionality and free choice
the scientific reductionism steadily
replaces subjectivity with
matter so that mind becomes nothing more
than internal patterns of data
processing
devoid of centered or continuing
subjectivity
this can dovetail in complex respects
with the reductionism of the
behaviorists whose philosophy of mind
can do no more than identify mind with
the things
we do
since modern education finds it
increasingly difficult not to ground
itself in a model
that simultaneously doubts the self-ex
self's existence
while insisting that upon its foundation
can be grounded
an entire educational ideology geared to
the liberation of a sovereign human
subject
it appears to have become conceptually
unstable perhaps
some are claiming little more than a
noble lie an exercise in wish
fulfillment on the part of governments
appalled by the full implications of
neurological and scientific
deconstruction and
determinism it is a parallel to many
other contemporary pious fictions
favored by officialdom
such as the insistence on promoting
british values
while no longer being able to define
what britishness might signify
this kind of state heteronomy presents
itself almost as a resurrection of the
mauve foie
and the false authenticity rooted in
mysteries of faith for which catholicism
was blamed three centuries ago by the
philosoph
john gray in his the soul of the
marionette it was written amusingly
about this precarity and devoutly
wishful thinking
in the contemporary episteme the
quasi-religious temper of our attraction
to paradox may
as simon vile claimed for christianity
prove
richly creative in fact it does but this
authenticity cult
vehemently repudiated by adorno as a
fake theology
a bogus absolute a kind of inverted
mysticism of self adoration
finds it difficult not to subvert the
authenticity on which it
attempts to stand its precarity tends to
yield an unstable modern self
whose anxieties it can only it can offer
healing only through the burgeoning
counselling industry
or by the administration of
pharmaceuticals
even more it is under political pressure
from feminists and advocates
of identity politics who see the liberal
autonomous self as potentially
exclusionary and tyrannical
underestimating the self's formation by
external generators of identity
such as race which are hardly
susceptible to revision
for this reason for instance shane
phelan in her work on lesbian politics
concludes that classic enlightenment
ideas of the autonomous
and self-rectifying cells inevitably
tend to exclude minority
or historically undervalued groups and
should be rejected
as oppressive
the consequences for educational
philosophies grounded in enlightenment
assurances of human autonomy
are as many will know furiously argued
every side has everything to gain and
lose
we cannot track the arguments further
here we will content ourselves as
observing that the secular claim to
surpass
religious definitions of human becoming
has fallen
on hard times jean-luc mario and michel
de serto
have claimed this is a starting point
for repristinated catholicism
and many others are working on the
implications of the crisis
in the enlightenment faith in human
autonomy for the possible rebuilding of
other religious traditions
still others as slav has noted refer to
buddhism
with his anata belief in the illusory
nature of the self
as the most appealing and authentic way
of ritually sacralizing
the contemporary epistemic void
well we seem to have strayed a little
from our original intention to interpret
the growing success of islamically led
schooling in britain
but perhaps my not terribly subtle drift
has already become
clear inevitably we'll shortly be taking
a look at islamic epistemologies of the
self
before we venture upon that task however
let us redirect ourselves a little and
review the nature of the particular
idiom
of christianity against which the
enlightenment philosoph
were pleased to invade this was the
discourse of suarez of bossaway
and a neo-augustinianism which veered
not infrequently towards
jensenism the reactive nature of
enlightenment secularity and deism
is not difficult to interpret and may
perhaps even attract our sympathy
the augustinian view which is by no
means evident in the gospels but is
based on jerome's famous mistranslation
of a passage in paul this is romans 5
verse 12
saw human subjectivity as vitiated not
only by actual but by original sin
we might say to be more clear inherited
sin
all humans were mystically present in
adam as he sinned
and we are hence individually
accountable for his primal error
so we are all born both sinful and
guilty the defect being transmitted
through sexual intercourse it is this
morally distorted nature of the
inflected human subject which in turn
generates actual sin
and hence the disorder of the world
as augustine saw matters the problem of
theodicy requires
that suffering be attributed to humans
not to god
so a baby dies because of its sin rather
than because of any divine delinquency
this view was if anything intensified by
the influential
ancelmian turn reinforced at the council
of trent
with its emphasis on a sateriology of
judicial atonement
which presented sin not only as a
psychological defect but as an ontology
the reformation with the lutheran and
calvinist doctrines of total depravity
maintained and even reinforced the
augustinian hematology
charles wesley's longest work was on the
subject of
original sin
the anti-clerical enlightenment drive to
ekkhaze lampham
recognized in its more scholarly moments
that it should not apply to a generic
christianity in its historic and
doctrinal diversity
since the orthodox churches had always
treated augustine with reserve
holding that the fall redemption arc arc
was subsidiary to the greater one of
creation deification
this apparently apostolic teaching that
the human subject is
disordered rather than guilty suspected
to be pelagian
by the church fought by the
enlightenment was in due course the
object of much hematological
source culminating in recent times in
emil brunner's
wry comment shared by not a few
that belief in original sin is nowadays
as reasonable as belief in centaurs
the old so-called monogenism which
believed adam to be
ancestor to all humanity could not
survive
neo-darwinism and so the science and a
certain humanism coalesced to shape
for instance vatican ii with its
implicitly pelagian retirement
of some of the negative beliefs about
unaided human morality and volition
which had been affirmed with such vigor
in the 18th century
we turn at last to a consideration of
where islamic theological anthropology
might converge or diverge from this
enlightenment
anti-christian dialectic which replaced
the old nature grace binary
with the new axiology expressed in terms
of self-determined authenticity
leading to the fragile paradox of
today's liberal pedagogies
we may begin with the observation which
has become commonplace among historians
of primal islam
to the effect that islam emerges in
history not as a discrete paradigm shift
a heavy hergelian counterweight to an
existing system in need of renewal or
retirement
but more as a novel configuration of
already existing
near eastern patterns of negotiating the
implications and antinomies of
monotheism
on this view islam judaism and
christianity
exist as alternate expressions of a
single complex and ever-shifting project
to establish a symphony between
hellenism
paganism and the mosaic legislative and
monotheistic ethic
holgers ellenton garth foden and
frederick denney would be significant
advocates of this new and
less tidy way of viewing islam's
self-understanding as a reforming rather
than an
original dispensation on the question of
hematology
islam appears as a result of rabbinical
jewish interpretations
of the twin genesis tropes of adam's
fall and his status as imago dei
jewish psychology referred to the yet
the human tendency to sin as a disorder
of the will
which could be rectified through inner
athleticism in service to the law
and indeed this rabbinic validation of
human conscience
came to feature largely in the jewish
enlightenment apologetics of moses
mendelssohn
as also in 20th century jewish critiques
of christianity
notably that of joseph soloveitrik
in the case of the moral capacity of
selves unsupported by divine grace
the three loosely bounded traditions
maintained internal diffractions
and continue to cross secondary as with
the case of the influence of
arab aristotelian philosophies of the
soul on the likes of albertus magnus
yet the augustinian ontology of sin as
inheritance
rather than a tendency symbolized but
not engendered by the fall
is very seldom paralleled in either
rabbinical or islamic thinking
the relatively rare exceptions
comprising precisely the type of
crypto manichaean dualisms which
according to some
underlay augustine's intellectual
formation and his cosmology
the primal muslim version of abrahamic
figurings of the human subject may be
discerned clearly enough
in the quran itself a document whose
explicit reparative self-understanding
may be understood to extend to its
psychology
the muslim scripture repristinates the
genesis fall narrative
but as the exegetes immediately noticed
as that after their banishment from the
primeval garden adam and eve repented
and god apparently drew a line under
their guilt
actual sin and yet remained of course
and the quran continues with an edited
re-reading
of the biblical fear drama which sees
history as a cyclical cosmic struggle
between submission and rebellion the
hebrew bible's he psychological lexicon
particularly with words like spirit
self nephesh
appears again with the quran's arabic
cognates
with a substantially unchanged
significance
this as it were shared semitic
anthropology the old idea of conquering
arabs is little more than
jews on horses or of islam as a kind of
early reformed judaism
is only partly inhibited by the presence
of a christology
in the muslim scripture since this
appears to construct a historical
jesus innocent of the vicarious
sacrifice which
on the christian view alone allows
believers to retrieve
humanity's pre-lapserian integrity
cognate with rabbinical judaism too is
islam's construction of the human self
as intensely embodied
a body subject to use male or ponte's
language
a certain naturalism and resistance to
dualism
was implicit in the existence of the
revealed law
or sharia terms with similar meanings
the self cannot be discarnate and aloof
from its passions
but is in part constituted by them and
since they are not themselves sinful
the semitic subject worships fasts and
eats
in entirely unfallen ways most notably
the augustinian identification of eros
as the vector of original guilt is
absent this
if you like some pelagian anthropology
added to the factors shaping
enlightenment interpretations of islam
jeff einberden minol reeves and others
have documented this
philo islamic or in the language of the
day oriental romantic view of islam
which was sometimes as noel malcolm
documents in his new book useful enemies
constructed as a merely polemical and
ultimately insincere foil
against church obscurantism and
oppression
but was on several occasions rooted in a
sense that islamic metaphysics
and socio-political practice were
observably superior
to their contemporary western christian
equivalence if the enlightenment is the
wellspring of the idolatries of the will
and of reason
which underlie many modern educational
theories
then this enlightenment construction of
a desirable muslim alternative
is of direct interest to our project
on this we must be succinct others have
written here at much
greater length and depth let us sum up
this enlightenment convergence with what
some europeans took to be islam
under three major heads
firstly and this is really the main
concern of malcolm's study
ottoman society was seen as an argument
against those who believed that the
religiously faithful commonwealth
must oblige the king's subjects to
follow his religion
this of course was one catalyst of the
wars of religion which formed the
backdrop to the lumiere
in england john locke henry stubb and
various quaker
and unitarian radicals pointed to the
relative religious tolerance
according to minorities by the great
turk
ottoman practice was not of course akin
to contemporary
secular egalitarianism or indifferentism
far from it but it does seem that lock's
writing on the turbanet nations for
instance
served to bring the islamic example into
play in christendom
and generated a small but symbolically
important shadia subtext
to some of the liberalizing that was to
come
secondly islamic monotheism was taken to
be comparatively rational
given its rejection of key mysteries of
the church
notably the trinity the incarnation and
the vicarious atonement
for instance the conte de bonavillier
writing a biography of the prophet in
1728
decides that there is never existed
quote a more plausible system than his
more agreeable to the light of reason
it was the desert the bulla villier
imagined that it saved the arabs from
superstition and priestcraft
and preserved among them the natural
notion of the true god
the third of our argument is the related
one of islam's theological epistemology
islam's major traditions of
philosophical theology
taught to this day are ashadism and
mataridism
and both insist on the necessity of
beginning the road to god with reason
for ashari's blind faith based on an
inherited regard for scripture is
imperfect and even precarious well for
the mataridis
every muslim has the responsibility to
deploy nazar
dialectics including logic if his or her
faith is to merit divine sanction and
salvation
this applied to the basics of religion
belief in god
and the divine justice however sunnism
came to reject the more absolutist and
demanding position of the mortezalites
who had held that every doctrine of
religion must be derived by every
individual believer through
the use of reason alone
the matari epistemology was that of the
ottoman empire
the major quarry of information about
muslim culture
available to enlightenment thinkers
which arrived various
via various translators and travelers
the insistence that blind faith through
scriptural imitation is problematic or
even
invalid was one of the aspects of
islamic intellectual culture that
naturally resonated with
enlightenment thinkers this was
understood to be linked to the nazar
dialectical method
which insisted that for every premise
and doctrine a rational counter-argument
must be engaged with and shown to be
fallacious
clearly this impressed goethe who wrote
as follows
something of that faith is held in us
all then the muhammadans begin their
instruction in philosophy
with the doctrine that nothing exists of
which the contrary may not be affirmed
thus they practice the minds of youth by
giving them the task of detecting and
expressing the opposite of every
proposition
from which great adroitness in thinking
and speaking is sure to arise
certainly after the contrary of any
proposition has been maintained
doubt arises as to which is really true
but there is no permanence in doubt it
incites the mind to closer inquiry and
experiment
from which if rightly managed certainty
proceeds
and if this alone can man find thorough
satisfaction
you see that nothing is wanting in this
doctrine that with all our systems we've
got no further
and that generally speaking no one can
get further
it's the end of the quote from goethe
now such early modern judgments suffered
from a weak informational base but they
did
bear some relation to the reality of
much muslim discourse
maturity scholasticism which in
principle allowed all propositions to be
entertained
was itself rooted in a principle of
scriptural hermeneutic which
surprisingly perhaps determined that one
of the four concurrently valid senses of
the hadith which prohibited
chronic exergy on the basis of personal
opinion
was that in the words of one grand mufti
of the empire
it is forbidden to consider that one's
own interpretation
alone is correct for that would be to
raise one's view to the rank of
revelation
this was symptomatic of the hermeneutic
modesty which permitted many pre-modern
muslim cultures
to harbor concurrently tolerated but
diverse schools
including the force on new schools of
law the maturity and the ashley
theologians
this toleration was in ghazalian mode
supported by pious and ultimately sufi
conceptions of the wrongness of
fanaticism
facilitated by the absence of an
ecclesial structure which might seek to
impose
religious conformity goethe and
enlightenment figures who followed him
seem to have picked up on the type of
ottoman religion which allowed the
social coexistence of radical types of
mysticism
explicit but tolerated heresies and the
rationalism of the no less
diverse nazar discourse
so we have three enlightenment themes in
which a convergence with islamic
normativity
was detected for those interested in
pressing the juxtaposition which should
not nonetheless be
overstressed one could add another the
humanistic
use of literature oak shot and hearst
after him
point to the central role of the
literature of the western canon
as a facilitator of conversationalism
the ongoing inter-human dialogue that
pursues betterment through exploring the
moral and aesthetic dilemmas and dramas
conserved by other minds this is
literature
as oakshot says recognized as the
contemplative exploration of beliefs
emotions human characters and
relationships in imagined situations
here again although uh with partial and
rather complicated exception of goethe
this was not generally noted by the
phyllo oriental enlightenment
we'd still note a parallel with mother
subculture
for the indian world a madrasa course
would invariably
include a considerable repertoire of the
persian classics
particularly those generated by the
so-called timurid renaissance
salient amongst these would be jamie's
romance
joseph and zolajha and the lights of
canopus
incidentally this latter showcase of
persian belletre was taught here in
cambridge in the 19th century
to equip officials of the east india
company with the literary elegance they
would require
in dealing with muslim elites
this literature was defined as adab the
usual islamic term for literature
which has the literal sense of courtesy
or refinement
the madrasa graduate would not only be a
philosopher
but would be more or less an oak shot
sense
a conversationalist able to exchange and
share subtle aspects of human
intersubjectivity to the exchange of
reflections on the human condition
in the refined salons patronized by
pre-modern islam's
scholarly elite
we thus appear to have located four
constituent features of classical muslim
pedagogic culture
which seem convergent with the
enlightenment tropes which fed into much
modern liberal thinking on education
and here i will not rest my case for i'm
not actually seeking to
prove anything much today but merely to
i think confound
certain perhaps prejudicial assumptions
about the deep culture of british
muslims and its
present day utility those who consider
muslims of british perhaps asian
extraction to be
cultural misfits in the grip of a
superstition
need to reflect on the heritage that
produce some of the finest artifacts
in say the victoria and albert museum
but it will certainly be helpful to
examine the culture of the darwin
cemeteries which supply some of the
teaching staff for the star academies
and other
growing infrastructures of pedagogy in
this country
to determine the genealogies of their
success
and to try and answer the question i put
to their ceo
some time ago the british seminary
system
whatever its formal denominational
adhesion is overwhelmingly rooted in the
so-called firangi mahal curriculum
which originated in lucknow in the 17th
century
for most of its history the seminary
culture maintained a strong emphasis
on classical rational sciences known as
marquette
prescribing over a dozen textbooks on
logic
including medieval arabic commentaries
on aristotle and pothari
which were understood as prophetics to
the right interpretation not only of
theology but of law
so the deorbandi curriculum followed by
most uk seminaries today is rooted in a
tradition
which requires that third year students
cover the entire
monte the introduction to modal logic by
al-taftazani
while fifth year students studied the
sullamen an advanced text on logic
by muhammad bihari who died in 1707.
this is what will be expected given
indian islam's overwhelmingly
maturity heritage yet since the first
indian war of independence in 1857
the weight of the new raj engendered a
reaction away from the map or that
towards the manhulat these are the
rote-learned
disciplines of fatwa collections and
hadith narration
today in the mother mother of dale band
to which around
around 80 percent of british seminaries
pay at least formal allegiance
this re-weighting is ongoing and one
notes that logic is studied mainly as an
adjunct to jurisprudence rather than
theology
similarly one remarks upon the decline
of interest in adam literature among
seminarians
reflected in a diminishing emphasis on
the literary
persian this shift
may well be in the process of
rebalancing as the recent and often
noted
revival of the fortunes of nazar reaches
the seminaries
only three months ago the publishing arm
of zaitana college pass america's best
known
muslim university published a
translation of a 12th century
mataridi primer with a detailed
annotation explaining its contemporary
philosophical application
and there are signs that literature of
this type is playing a role
as the seminaries in this country switch
their language of instruction
from order in arabic to english
leading british muslim publishers such
as white thread press and beacon books
are also
releasing mataridi titles and young
muslims are showing an increasing
interest in this nazar heritage
it was interesting to note that of the
nine graduates of the cambridge muslim
college's ba program last summer
three went into philosophy masters
programmes two at ucl
and one in istanbul the college is also
considering launching a program
in persian with a view to strengthening
knowledge of the persian literary
classics among trainee imams
my inference and it really is only
speculative is that the
background of some leading figures in
the star academies
and other muslim educational initiatives
may offer part of the explanation for
their institutions success
their literary and philosophical
heritage while somewhat attenuated
in recent times may have assisted rather
than obstructing their evident
adaptability
to the extremely stringent regulatory
requirements of modern britain
we might however take our hypothesis one
step further
let us recall our pessimism invoked
earlier about the modern philosophy of
mind
which appears to be progressively
shriveling under the weight of
contemporary assurances that
matter is objective while subjectivity
is doomed to diminish
what is really noted is said to be what
can be defined in public terms
the subjective is unreal the sovereign
will thus appears as a chimera
risk to liberal theories of education is
is apparent some muslims are taking this
as an
opportunity to declare victory for
communitarianism
in its decades-long struggle against the
liberal hope that the mind is capable of
pure and free choice
it's certainly justifiable to assert
that we cannot be amputated from our
cultural origins and supports
and still be ourselves some muslim
education theorists and activists have
chosen this strategy
in their critique of the liberal hegemon
however a communitarian option for
muslim thinking about schools
runs the risk of declining into a
populism on introspection
unsuitable for life in a multicultural
national environment
in classical islamic terms it might
resemble a jailia
an ignorant vaulting of tribe maintained
irrespective of propositional truth
or universal ethics
a mataridi approach while in its hanafi
juridical manifestation
recognizing the individual right to
self-identify with a national
subheritage
or confessional module would if we read
the madrasa texts correctly
prefer what john wallbridge calls the
caliphate of reason
the insistence on the authority of ratio
characteristic of pre-modern and
pre-islamist muslim culture
because muslim pupils and teachers have
access to maturity
and potentially other rationalizing
arguments for a comprehensive world view
they are potentially superior national
subjects
accessing not only proposed secular
epistemes
rooted in a ghost like cuntianism but an
additional and thicker palette of
knowledge gateways
contemporary doubts about the reality of
the mind and of the objectivity of
reason are implicitly dismissed
in the maturity texts which always
instruct the madrasa student to avoid
the sophistry
of those who deny the reality of things
the word used is safsata
which is simply an arabized version of
the greek sophistics
which for the muslim memory references
plato's dislike
of those salaried scholars who cause
doubt about propositions through the use
of
elaborate and deceptive rhetoric
for the nasa tradition rooted ultimately
in the socratic method
the right form of life may be logically
inferred from sense perception
the order of the world and the existence
of cosmic constant
all of which are to be assessed using
logic and dialectic
the mind which is a reality created by
god can
authentically choose and eschatology
points to the momentous nature of our
moral choices
and their rootedness in the intrinsic
order of the cosmos
these are the individuals acquired
choices
as the quran says no soul burden shall
bear the burden of another
and all minds shall appear at the
judgment seat alone
this insistence on individual
accountability and on the problematic
nature of taklid
the taking of propositions on authority
is accompanied
as in the liberal model by a strong
discourse of self-transcendence
only the dispassion itself is reasonable
here the deployment of adab literature
serves a vital purpose
indicating often with humor the
consequences of animalistic behavior
but the seminary culture also
internalizes sufism
taken to be the systematic and
empirically based technology
of the cognition and the purification of
the self the aspect of education known
as tarbia
soul making this is energized by the
belief that a self-purified of ego may
approach god
as summarized by one modern sufi
theoretician
to approach the psyche through the body
is inherently reductionist and hence of
only limited value
since material reality is more
contracted and prescribed than psychic
reality
true and stable objectivity and
psychological matters cannot be obtained
by material means alone only an
understanding of the psyche in the
context of reality that is subtler
and more extensive than the psychic
domain can provide such objectivity
this subtler reality this higher
objectivity
is the metaphysical order
this pneumatic anthropology which the
sufis assume
is understood to enable an authentic
freedom unlike the illusory freedom
offered by the reductionist theories of
mind with which liberalism increasingly
has to work
the american muslim theologian charles
upton observes this
human spiritual integration does not
conform us to the system of collective
passion
egotism and delusion upon which profane
society is based
but frees us from it definitively
so the same authentication of human free
volition which underpins the
material insistence that reason can
indeed know truth
and recognize virtue also delivers a
freedom akin to that which for oak shot
is the meaning of liberalism itself
a deliverance a freedom from
inauthenticity
but the authenticity it claims in
recognizing values
including the intrinsic and inviolable
rights of other human
beings claims to be more surely grounded
now whether the maturitism which is the
heritage theology of the great majority
of british muslims
particularly those of subcontinental or
turkish origin
might lead to a great displacement as
thick muslim epistemes prove better
as securing public goods and
post-dualized secular theories of mind
seems unlikely note further that i have
at no point claimed that the maturity
metaphysics
rests on an unproblematic philosophical
warrant in its classical form
my point is simply that the seminary
heritage which is now a significant
element of this country's educational
landscape
may be claimed to provide better grounds
for serving the liberal quest for an
enhanced human authenticity
than the reductionist and physicalist
models which increasingly prevail in our
contemporary definitions of human
selfhood
religious theories of education can
certainly generate isolationist
and communist responses to the modern
crisis of meaning
as we see in the rise of religiously
articulated populism in many countries
of the world
but there is a serious case to be made
that theology may also be enlisted
as a helpful and timely ally in the
urgently required pushback against the
current
thinning of the liberal episteme
so that's essentially what i wanted to
say and i hope that i've returned at
least approximately to
the question i began with uh i apologize
for the somewhat wide-ranging nature of
my presentation but
perhaps in these times when we're only
permitted one hours walk a day
we may be forgiven for wishing to visit
a disparate variety of places of
interest
as as we go thank you very much
i think thank you professor winter for
very wide-ranging and very
informative talk and i certainly took a
lot away from it i've got lots and lots
of questions but when i come to my
questions
um there are some questions that have
been sent directly to me
and if anybody has any questions if you
can put in the chat and then
where it says two if you click on that
and put um find farah ahmed
then that will be where um uh you'll be
able to post
you know i would be able to see them
then that will come directly to me
so we've got um a couple of questions
here already
one from harun sidat saying that
given the epistemic narrowness generally
observed today to invert the openness
observed in islamic intellectual history
how can muslims
return to this time ordered tradition
and he
adds to that could it be argued that the
west might actually be the incubator to
this return
are we already observing the early
shoots in the manitoba
graduates now entering academia and
forming creative spaces of intellectual
inquiry
uh he refers to james pickett's
polymaths of the son and buhari and
colourful and rich intellectual history
of south asia is painted by the likes of
maulana manazer ah sanjayani
okay well there's a bunch of questions
there um
uh i'll just take what seems to be the
most
sort of salient or provocative aspect
which is that uh the idea that
in the uh the intellectual domain of
britain or the modern west generally one
might
start to see a certain retrieval of
what walbridge would see as the
pre-modern islamic
love of rationalism in a way that can be
done more easily than
in the majority or islamic world itself
that may well be the case partly as a
result of more
conversations with philosophers and
rationalists which is
possible in a modern university but it
may also be the case that the
increasingly coercive
management of religion by most of the
regimes in the muslim world
makes uh free conversations about
theology and even a return this kind of
resource
more uh really extremely difficult
uh that every country now has a ministry
of religious affairs and a ministry of
education
who prioritize this security agenda so
religion in places like egypt or morocco
saudi arabia cannot be freely taught in
the traditional
manner but instead is quite forensically
curated by the regimes
who will tend to stop sometimes quite
vehemently
any discourse that doesn't seem to serve
the the standardized narrative of
religion that the state deems necessary
to its survival so
it's certainly easier i would say in
many western academic spaces to
theologize in this way
even though there are sometimes a
secular bias in universities
or even an institutional bias that
allows the episteme of a christian
insider theology in universities but
hasn't
quite acclimatized itself to the idea
that there might be
uh academic discourse that inside the
theologies of other traditions
islam hindu traditions even judaism and
so forth there's a certain
unevenness in the episteme that allows
christians to speak as insiders within
an academic context in the west and to
explore questions like this
whereas islam is generally taught as
part of oriental studies or religious
studies
environments where developing the
tradition rather than simply writing
about it as a putative
outsider are generally strongly frowned
upon so it's uh
swings and roundabouts i think but
certainly there's some interesting
voices emerging
okay thank you for that um we have a few
other questions we have a question
that let me just find it again
had there ever been any tension in the
history of islamic philosophy of
education
analogous to the tension between
education as a public
good versus education as a private good
and
i think that's quite an interesting
question in terms of most of what you
discussed was
pre-20th century or late 19th century
when education as a public good emerges
in the form of mass schooling um but
that's the question that's there
yeah yeah it would depend on the level
of education
uh education in the pre-modern islamic
world although it's enormously diverse
and it's very hard to generalize about
anything you're talking about medieval
spain you're talking about sumatra
you're talking about the ottomans it's
very difficult to find a single pattern
uh there would generally be basic
education
at the village or the town district
level
which was supplied for free which would
provide a basic literacy
and which wasn't really theorized beyond
the idea that
learning to read and write is a
prophetic injunction and ennobles the
believer as well as
opening certain uh certain career
opportunities
to him usually it was the males
at the higher level you're talking about
some very complex and again diverse
madrasa traditions that assumed that the
service
wasn't really to society in the first
instance but to
the knowledge supplied by god so one was
the servant
of revelation and then through the use
of reason
one would figure out the best
interpretation of revelation
that was nonetheless still linked to an
idea of public utility
um anbar eman at the university of
toronto has recently pointed out that
traditional islamic learning and
philosophy is actually very well adapted
to enter the
liberal public sphere because it does
deal with
verifiable and rationally determined
public goods
it's not a completely private discourse
a very important
important understanding uh understanding
that
and to the extent that that debate was
was promoted by the madagascar
environment then
then certainly but whether you can
generalize over such an enormous
historical range more than a thousand
years and the pre-modern world's biggest
geographically speaking civilization is
is really rather
rather different but the difference
between the public and the private would
be articulated in shittier terms in
terms of the distinction between
god's rights and the rights of human
beings
or something like praying regularly as
sort of god's right as it were
whereas marriage rights for instance are
regarded as things that
impugn or impinge upon the rights of
other
subjects in in the believing community
so that distinction which is a logically
necessary one was
recognized but it wasn't policed quite
so
uh forensically and perhaps strangely uh
as it has been in
into the post-enlightenment western
discourse okay
well that segues very nicely to a
question from david ware
um he's asking about the cartesian
version about the enlightenment um
i'm not sure exactly what he want he's
referring to
david please you know if you want to add
to that send me another message but um
he wanted to ask a bit more about uh for
you to talk a little bit more about that
yeah i mean i was skating very quickly
over some pretty central and highly
contested arguments
uh the enlightenment frequently assumed
that there was a dualism between mind
and body
which comes from stereotypically from
descartes but you can find it in earlier
christian scholastic
reflection as well and just a lot of
hellenistic philosophy but descartes
thought it was
something that could be particularly
clearly announced
nowadays particularly with the
neuroscience there is a physicalist
definition of consciousness
that would certainly deny the
possibility
even of the kantian conscience
that there is something that cannot be
reduced simply to matter that is
some some ghost in the machine uh
and it's that that crisis really that
collapse in the enlightenment central
hope um very idealistic hope that i've
been
been looking at so the cartesian model
of a mind
body dualism is very seldom
upheld nowadays because the neuroscience
has simply moved
moved beyond that even though we still
don't have a scientific definition of
consciousness
still the general presumption is that it
is either inseparable
from physiology or is simply a an aspect
of physiology
but the ghost in the machine idea is is
is alien so we now have debates
regarding artificial intelligence for
instance
or arguments about animal minds there
are a lot of ethical questions which
arise what are the implications for
the classic liberal idea or indeed the
liberal idea of the autonomous
human subject of transhumanist
revisions of human consciousness through
perhaps genetic
or surgical manipulations of the
physical matrix in which consciousness
appears to
to be embedded and the science is
already
is already enabling
theoretically enabling this although
legally it isn't
um the case and um
uh a number of uh philosophers like
jurgen habermas in his book the end of
human nature have said we're not
just at the end of the cartesian
parenthesis but we're at the end of the
larger parenthesis because the human
subject itself
can now change the basic ego the cogito
which was the basis of the philosophical
project is nowadays subject to revision
either through being transplanted into
artificial
intelligence matrixes that have some
kind of quasi-consciousness or superior
consciousness
it's not inconceivable they tell us all
because of certain genetic manipulations
and
enhancements of human physiology
for which there is we are told
significant moral
warrant so you have ray kurzweil i
suppose uh head of engineering at google
who tells us that of course there's no
ghost in the machine and descartes
is all bunkum and that he hopes to live
long enough to be able to upload his
consciousness onto the internet
so that professor kurzweil can live
forever and
what that does to the traditional
content understanding of human autonomy
and subjectivities
is another question where the definition
of the human being
which has been really fairly unarguable
as the basis for everything we say since
the pre-socratics if that itself is
being revised all of these debates
including theological debates are going
to be in
in crisis mode i think yeah i mean
i found it really fascinating um when
you
were honing in on this idea of autonomy
and
its role within islamic education i've
actually just
recently published a paper myself with
my sort of
you know preliminary kind of thoughts on
this idea mainly from the perspective
that
as you rightly point out um islamic
education is considered
quite suspect in that it is considered
as something which is dampening down
autonomy and agency as opposed to
allowing for it and although you've you
you've given the historical
and philosophical basis of that one that
the way what i was thinking when you
were speaking is that this sense of
selfhood
which islam is not does not have that
dichotomy of the individual versus the
communitarian um you know broadly
speaking
but how to to translate the notions of
the islamic self
the epistemologies of islam itself as
you mentioned
into a language which can be used by
educators to
understand how the beer might function
um from a at various ages not not just
simply in the in in
for the higher education level and that
so trying to translate some of what
you're saying into practical
ideas one of the things that came to my
mind was
to what extent could we even trace or
identify
such a notion of an epistemology of
islamic self in
schools such as muslim ito schools such
as the star academies that you mentioned
or even in terms of um the kind of
evening
addresses that are common across the uk
so i have
i have kind of questions about how
you've
how you framed it and so on which i need
to reflect on but also i have questions
about how
how we might take this idea and
and apply it to what can be done to move
education forward in these spaces
yeah i think that in many ways uh being
transplanted
into the very secular demanding and
centrally regulated
uk environments is
uh catalyzing religious communities to
think again
about ways in which they can continue to
perpetuate their
their legacies in the paradoxical
liberal space that on the one hand
purports to allow communities as well as
individuals
the right to choose their future but on
the other hand
tends towards more and more
centralization of values to national
curriculum and
teaching of questions of of gender and
so forth and other things that
religionists are often uncomfortable
with
uh it can sometimes seem coercive as
well as uh
liberative and i think that the better
religious communities the the religious
memes that deserve to survive i think
will be those which
regard this as uh
a challenging opportunity to be creative
to think again
to re-examine and to resuscitate in the
sort of hanafi mataridi case older
and to some extent somewhat dusty and
neglected traditions of
emphasizing the importance and the
dignity of individual choice
and moving from rote learning the
memorizing of fatwas from
the time of the emperor jahangir and
into a space where people are encouraged
once again to
to think for themselves so it can be
presented in ways that are not simple
ruptures
with minority experiences and narratives
that represent
a kind of resource or even a revival
and i think that is probably the only
way of selling
such a transformation away from the
alleged heteronomy of the imposition of
the consensus of past minds and towards
the idea that we are liberated through
thinking
for ourselves which i think is to some
extent a romantic and
inapplicable idea when you're teaching
the alphabet for instance or mathematics
you're just inculcating truths you're
not indoctrinating by teaching them the
alphabet
but when it comes to higher questions of
citizenship
value choices and so forth um i think
that a return to
what was called in the hanafi tradition
in other words a nation seeing the
reasons for everything
the idea that islamic law for instance
is ultimately taken to be a
rationalizing structure
god does not legislate arbitrarily but
does so
in keeping with with the wisdom and the
human mind is challenged to
interpret and to understand that wisdom
and the wisdom can be used through
processes such as istighzan and it
becomes quite technical sometimes
in order to determine where reason
might well enable a shift from one
position to another and
john wallbridge talks about this in his
book the caliphate of reason
and says at the outset well i'm not a
muslim and i'm writing about this
amazing
islamic intellectual philosophical
heritage
maybe there are some muslims nowadays
who still think this is interesting but
nowadays they seem to be just
interested in memorizing texts and
perpetuating
old curricula but i see amongst the
younger generation
particularly kids at places like the
cambridge muslim college
zaytona other places young people really
have a natural desire to want to think
for themselves and to understand
rather than just known creeds yes just
to um sort of
follow on from that and this uh reflects
to some of the questions that come up in
the chat as well
so one of the things that i've been you
know i've been work working this field
for for a long time now but one of the
things i'm
trying to grapple with is that with the
dara loom tradition
i think all the things you've identified
are incredibly important
in in moving forward but how do we in
the uk
context for example draw upon the
experiences and the the knowledge base
of educators who are working within the
community who perhaps don't have the
dharalum training
but are able to bring um other forms of
knowledge to to the discourse because
in my experience at least um in
discussion with people who
emerging from dara looms yeah and that
that is changing as
some of the people have mentioned it's
it's very
you know these languages are you're not
it's very difficult to cross the kind of
paradigm barrier that that you're trying
to function in and
we're in this space this liminal space
um so
from your perspective you know you you
that in the talk you coming mainly from
the thorough loom
how that can move forward and given the
example star academies but there's other
examples
where things are emerging in the in
muslim school
the islamic schooling field um as
opposed to schools with muslim ethos and
there is a distinction
which can perhaps be drawn on and are
maybe
more likely to move faster and move
further a little bit faster
so i was wondering what your thoughts
were on that yeah i mean i think
that again one of the bracing and
challenging aspects of life in an
overwhelming
secular and skeptical context
is that educators cannot escape the
responsibility of explaining
things to young people it is no longer
possible just to get them to
memorize a detailed blueprint for their
lives
derived from ancient thick manuals and
expect that that will guide them
from the cradle to the grave that
happens only for a minority and probably
not more intelligent minority
young people ask questions they ask
questions that are challenging to
parents to
community elders mosque communities you
can go online and see the
proliferation of sometimes wild
sometimes quite heartfelt
questions that are happening in muslim
communities and educators need to
move from the sort of sub-fundamentalist
or strongly tuck-lead-oriented
environment that unfortunately um
prevails
in some circles in the muslim west into
an environment where as the hanovers say
al-assad
the basic principle in islamic
jurisprudence and ethics
is to determine the reason for something
the why is alcohol forbidden you can see
is there in the quran but there's also a
reason
because we're made in the image of god
and this is part of our nobility
and alcohol diminishes that and
therefore it's offensive to god and
always on the newspapers today that
we're top of the international league
tables for drunkenness i don't know if
you've noticed that
yeah so on that basis even with fairly
simple arguments for small children
it is essential to give them
explanations to the extent that the
explanations could be found you might
struggle a bit with the prohibition of
pork and so forth
but there has to be a shift away from
the simply quoting quran and sunnah
approach to education and waving the
stick when they still seem uncomfortable
to a different pedagogy in which
teachers
uh actually strengthen the faith of of
young people by explaining the reasons
for things
and woolbridge would certainly say this
is a tradition that is based on
rational explanation the consequences of
muslim reason
may not always be those which the
western liberal consensus
likes it might end with something like
hijab which causes
islington feminists to hyperventilate
well that's just too bad but the liberal
paradigm
should be able to encompass that kind of
recent discussion
and accommodation of diversity
okay thank you thank you and you kind of
addressed a question here which is about
um young british muslims uh experiencing
islamic education through evening
withdresses and how to improve that and
um it click it what you've said here
links a little bit more to
another question which is here which is
to do with
right so we we're talking about the the
teachings of islam and
being able to discuss that the reasoning
behind it and so on
but perhaps like from one of the other
things that we can do with young
children is
is to give them a deeper understanding a
better understanding of why the quran
becomes a legislative text what is the
strength behind
accepting that as a registered text and
even allowing questions of things to do
with
um uh you know the idea of what
why why muslims might think that god
that there is a god or god exists or
uh tawheed and so on so and that links
on to another question which is
um taking you back to the themes of your
talk which link directly to this and
this is what i'm trying to draw this
um connection between the ideas that
you've presented and and the practice on
the ground
where the question is asking might you
spend a moment and return to some of the
key themes of your talk the embodied
self
rationality and the super irrational
episteme of sufism
and whilst the question doesn't point to
this i would also like to
you to add about the humanists that you
added and the question is what is the
order or proportionality of the three
and what does this order imply perhaps
for contemporary debates on holistic
education and formation of self
well there's about 20 questions there
farah um
apologies for that to think about that
um
maybe to reiterate the point that i was
making as a kind of disclaimer
that it may be difficult in the context
of
modern secular discourse to validate or
to warrant
some of these epistemologies of the self
my point is simply to indicate that the
theological heritage
of these muslim communities
does seem to result in a stronger belief
in human autonomy intense moral
accountability capacity to make
choices then seems to be emerging from
the scientific reductionism
which i don't think has been fully
assimilated
by many educationalists um because the
implications of it
are pretty dire really um
that that's as far as i want to go but
i'm not i'm not saying that this is
the answer because in its classical
formulation for instance the material
metaphysics is rooted in
a pre-modern idea of physics essentially
aristotelian about natural causality
a world made up of stable atoms
which following einstein relativity and
so forth are simply no longer
sustainable
okay um i'm just looking at through the
questions that are coming up in this
they're not none of them are are that
straightforward maybe
i'll just go back to um the question
about cut uh
cartesian thinking that came up and
there is a response to that that
to what you've said which is thank you
tim for your answer and analysis of
cartesian accounts
the enlightenment with all of which i
agree seeking to broaden our
understanding of what
mind is and does is a and mind is and
does is a very appealing outcome of some
neuroscience research that expands our
picture without necessarily entailing
reductionism
i suggest that lebanese insistence on
the ethical priority of the claims of
the other
can also comprehend a version of society
that is compatible with islam
and i suggest that john murray's version
of personalism is not superficial but
implies a sophisticated and wise version
of how society works
that is also closer to islam than the
individualistic competitivity of
contemporary judeo-christian apologetics
for late capitalism that have currently
become dominant in some aspects of
education
i don't know if you want to comment
further on that but i thought it'd be
good to
to read that out lebanese i think is of
considerable
interest to muslims and his sort of
talmudic readings and his
philosophical self-grounding in a
certain type of text-based
reason and reasoning resonates quite a
bit with the way in which muslims
philosophized in dialogue with texts and
particularly his understanding
of the other and the
determination to let the other be the
radically unknowable
other rather than simply a reduction
into the categories imposed by the the
same
uh it does again i think have resonances
it's not simply a post-modern
deconstruction or an emporia and
leviness of course takes this uh
enormous and very ethical system
out of precisely the paradox that we
can't understand the human other
we can't we can't get under somebody
else's skin we can only
inductively assume that they are somehow
inside
analogous to ourselves we have no direct
experience of that
uh and that therefore if we leave the
other to be the other
in the abyss that separates
us in seeing the face of the other
we glimpse a trace not quite of
transcendence but of something that's
sort of beyond
transcendence i think he uses the phrase
excellence
exxon does which is transcendence
implies that there's a
something transcending something else
whereas a sentence is
that which is completely the other
but which is nonetheless a presence the
absence of it
itself is a presence just as he says a
great a great void
is nothing but it has a tremendous
presence and and
thus is sort of apparent semitic
tradition that is working with
i am that i am the the unnamable uh
absolute
uh so the intuition of something beyond
transcendence and therefore
the absolute moral value and
entitled status of the unknowable human
other
uh is i think an interesting way to go
it's obviously
subject to the same kind of critiques
that
post-modernizing discourses are
generally
liable to um but i think
its philosophical interest is is
considerable what would like to see more
muslims
engaging engaging with lebanese i think
hard work though
all right okay now thank you um for that
and um just to
come back there is a one quite
straightforward question in a way
um which goes back to the notions of
selfhood and you quoted
goethe in the talk um and that quote
from goethe is also used by muhammad
um when he talks and and he uses that
emotional rationality and transforms it
towards the sense
of this notion of selfhood in terms of
hoodie and
the the question around that i suppose
is
is it would you would you say that in
some ways
this is a different form of reaction to
the deer bundy reaction to
of of the the the situation in the
subcontinent at that time
and to what degree is is iqbal's notion
of selfhood
derived from the persian
culture in and it as a as a response to
what's happening here what i'm trying to
get at is how can we
in what ways could we draw on this
notion of selfhood and
as a way of moving forward in terms of
what we're trying to achieve in terms of
education
today i mean
iqbal is a complex figure and draws on
various
early 20th century europeans he was in
cambridge of course
more and i think um bergson kind of
vitalist tradition is
in in some ways interested in nietzsche
everybody's interested in nietzsche but
he seems to have
had a particular interest but he also
stirs into his mix the the great persian
oh it's uh roomy in particular
overwhelmingly roomy
this idea of the the self
mystery of the self that is the subject
that tries to understand itself the
paradox of the mirror
is something that he works out quite
consistently
uh whether he is working ultimately with
a western or an eastern
psychology i would say probably it's
mainly the sufi picture
that that interests him which is why he
only writes about it really in the
context of
poetry um in his prose works he doesn't
deal with it very much
the preserve itself is more to do with
identity and being muslim in the context
of
an endangered minority in late british
india
it's more political and communalist but
in his poetry
you know it's it's the old sufi very
elaborate and complex in the persian
context
idea of the self what is it it has to be
real it's not just a buddhist illusion
that nirvana you realize you were never
there at all which is another problem
for uh
dovetailing a certain type of theravada
buddhism with
humanism as well if the self isn't there
then what's going on
uh it's it's more substantive than that
but it's its tributaries are to be found
in all of those tributaries including
near pythagorean-ism uh and
uh indigenous persian beliefs as well as
sufi and islamic beliefs that
kind of in the pudding that stirred by
the great age of the persian
persian poets uh but it is a uh
a doctrine of selfhood in rumi
ultimately that is experienced through
uh suffering and self-discipline you
understand
the self through going against the self
otherwise you'll never be able to look
in the mirror yeah
i'm just wondering there's a number of
questions about how to take these ideas
into
um uh into practice into educational
practice i'm just wondering if you have
any thoughts on
on on taking the what is saying here
about the self about and because
it from it could be interpreted as a way
of drawing
on encouraging agency but then
as you've just said it can also be
interpreted as a way of
of problematizing what that agency kind
of means and
so in terms of if we are thinking about
um making this as a way of
taking making changes and how we
practice as educators
what kinds of things that could we do to
develop this i mean the obvious thing
would be
is that teachers need to engage with
these ideas and perhaps not on
such an academic level but at a
different type of level
and another idea might be that um
we would want this to be these kinds of
things to be
worked into aims of what we're trying to
actually achieve
and then there are supposed layers of
how to bring that down in terms of
pedagogy and curriculum and so on but
just because there's a number of
questions people asking you know
how do we what do we do with teenagers
what do we do with children what do we
do those kinds of questions that there's
a number of them here
i'm just wondering if you want to try
and relate this discussion to those
to answer those questions one thing that
i touched on only tangentially is the
importance of literature
in traditional islamic education which
is a kind of
parallel curriculum in dale band i think
traditionally they have a few teachers
who can teach rumi and the persian
classics but it's a little bit
tangential
it's kind of extracurricular but
nonetheless as part of the general human
formation
of the muslim elite the literature was
at the center of everything
which is why the british east india
company before they could
be respected members of north indian
society
had to train these guys in persian and
the persian classics because that was
if you didn't quote persian poetry you
weren't a gentleman
you wouldn't get the deal for the silk
or the opium or whatever it was
and i think a resuscitation of that
would be a very civilized thing to do
it it is present amongst some of the
older instructors in the
alum uh context i always think it's a
an interesting circumstance and
generally not suspected by the outside
world
that uh the place in modern england
where you're most likely
to sit with people who routinely quote
poetry to each other
is in the mother says the muslim
seminaries i've never encountered
another space in modern britain where
people so
kind of routinely and naturally quote
poetry
um with very considerable error edition
sometimes
it's a civilized thing still to see that
uh if that could spread a little bit
so that literature rather than just
rules of ablution and the glories of
muslim history and so forth are taught
to young kids
um but they get the subtleties which
it's possible to convey through
beauty and through creative writing
i think that would be enormously
important and thankfully most of the
persian classics are available in
fairly serviceable english translations
now they don't have to look version
before they can access it
yeah absolutely that's very interesting
i'm sure um
the previous secretary of state michael
go talking about i'd add to that as a
footnote that it doesn't actually have
to be
muslim literature because the great
literature of the world is that which
wrestles with questions that everybody
has to think about
and in shakespeare milton and so forth
dickens
all of those moral dilemmas and those
theological
light versus dark engagements
they're islamic as much as they are
christian universal
so a friend of mine was an american
non-muslim who taught
english literature in cairo for 30 years
and he says it's much easier teaching
shakespeare to egyptians than it is to
teach shakespeare to americans
because they have that whole imaginative
world they know about
revenge they know about god they know
about these enormous
sort of to us rather baroque and
overstated shakespearean
heroic qualities they know about gender
that
they're part of that universe so
his insight which is that it's easier to
teach the western canon
to traditional muslims than it is to
modern western kids is i think
a kind of refutation of that govian idea
of our island story and
the natives need to trade up to reading
our
great books and so forth it's it's in
many ways it's actually the other way
around
uh muslims inhabit a traditional
imaginative world and can access
that literature once they get past the
obvious
linguistic barriers pretty quickly
okay just a few minutes and i'm just
going to try and take
the last questions together
um and there are a couple of
announcements at the end so please do
wait for that but
i suppose there's a couple of
challenging questions here and and i did
say i would
try not to give you too many challenging
questions but i'm going to
put these to you which is um one is what
might professor winter see as
areas of less permeability between
traditional islamic pedagogy and the
liberal
episteme for instance are the more
experiential
aspects of the confessional approach
that simply do not translate to the
paradigm of the western academy and then
somebody else has given some examples of
that
um saying that you mentioned that islam
reject the holy trinity but it does
consider stories like adam and eve and
noah's ark
as actual historical events i find that
islam logic argument
hard to argue as stemming from the islam
itself that culture history and
philosophy contributed
what are your thoughts again that's a
bunch of questions
um inevitably
although we try to converse as well as
we can
and to mutually respect as well as we
can in a multicultural society
where different people are holding to
historically different even contesting
narratives
there are going to be areas of
misunderstanding areas
of mutual problematization and we
shouldn't underestimate that
it's not possible that we can find a
lowest common denominator that keeps us
all happy
but my hope is that the older kind of
lockheed vision of a liberal political
space
where people can be allowed to have
mutually conflicting narratives
can be resuscitated in place of what
seems to be the current government idea
which is that we have
an island story and british values and
everybody has to comply with the
sometimes quite forensically
micromanaged value set
in the citizenship curriculum for
instance which is quite coercive
and that if anybody disagrees with that
they have a different view on
transgender issues for instance
they shouldn't be shut down or cancelled
and teachers who take a different view
should not be shut down and cancelled
but there can still be a genuine
conversation
i think that we're moving in rather a
statist and de-registered and
coercive direction unfortunately there's
a coercive liberalism
at work the french state has it much
more they've just shut down all the
muslim schools
they don't want to hear a different
voice at all it just has to be
republican values or nothing
in the name of freedom liberty which is
the great irony
so hopefully in the anglo-saxon
tradition which is always a little bit
more
pragmatic empirical and unsystematic
there will be a space for people
passionately to disagree
okay thank you so much for your talk and
thank you so much for engaging with them
the multitude of questions that have
been put to you really very much
appreciate
um the you know uh all the discussion
and everything that's been said here
i'd also like to thank the audience for
everybody who's attended and the
questions that you've put i've done my
best to try and
put as many of them as possible to
professor winter inevitably there's
going to be a few that i i haven't
managed to cover
i apologize for that um just so
before we close just to a couple of
points actually there was a
many requests not more than one request
for a copy of the paper
and it's entirely up to you whether i
mean what i've said to the audience
already is that we
this will be recorded and it will be
available so they they can definitely
access it again
um but what i i would say is that
i'm not i don't want to put you on the
spot but i will put the question to you
and i will
send out an email to attendees and in
regards to whether the paper is
something that needs to be published
first or
whether we could uncirculate it so okay
um and the and just a couple of other
things i want to say before we close
and that is that next week's talk is a
really exciting one
um associate professor
at the university of waikato new zealand
and he'll be talking about the
interconnection of things in an era of
colonization
maori and education please do go on to
our website or rent break page and have
a look at the details of that talk it's
a very exciting
talk and do join us then and then also
just to
mention that the following week well
actually not the following but on the
16th of february
we're going to have um a round table on
dignity and education and
you know there are some parallels and or
some similarities to some of the themes
that were
discussed today about and you know that
that is we've got
uh six different people coming to have
that discussion so that's
going to be a very another really
exciting event so do join us for that
event you can register for that through
the eventbrite page
um so just to yeah just to finish off
with those uh
announcements and to say thank you to
everybody and
um that's we're going to bring the also
thank you to
dr daniel mullens desert who's been very
behind the scenes doing
amazing technical work and making making
all this work
together so we're going to bring bring
it to a close now and i'll leave it to
daniel to do that
thank you very much everybody good
evening