Schooling Islam : the culture and politics of modern Muslim education

Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations.

Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex, evolving, and diverse in its institutions and practices. They reveal that a struggle for hearts and minds in Muslim lands started long before the Western media discovered madrasas, and that Islamic schools remain on its front line.

Schooling Islam is the most comprehensive work available in any language on madrasas and Islamic education.

Author Notes

Robert W. Hefner is Director of the Program on Islam and Civil Society at the Institute on Culture and Religious Affairs at Boston University. Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Robert H. Niehaus '77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University.

Robert W. HefnerJonathan P. BerkeyMuhammad Qasim ZamanBarbara MetcalfMalika ZeghalDale F. EickelmanBekim AgaiAzyumardi Azra and Dina Afrianty and Robert W. HefnerLouis BrennerPeter MandavilleMuhammad Qasim Zaman

Acknowledgments	p. vii
A Note on Transliteration and Spelling	p. ix
Contributors	p. xi
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Culture, Politics, and Future of Muslim Education	p. 1
Chapter 2 Madrasas Medieval and Modern: Politics, Education, and the Problem of Muslim Identity	p. 40
Chapter 3 Tradition and Authority in Deobandi Madrasas of South Asia	p. 61
Chapter 4 Madrasas and Minorities in Secular India	p. 87
Chapter 5 The "Recentering" of Religious Knowledge and Discourse: The Case of al-Azhar in Twentieth-Century Egypt	p. 107
Chapter 6 Madrasas in Morocco: Their Vanishing Public Role	p. 131
Chapter 7 Islam and Education in Secular Turkey: State Policies and the Emergence of the Fethullah Gulen Group	p. 149
Chapter 8 Pesantren and Madrasa: Muslim Schools and National Ideals in Indonesia	p. 172
Chapter 9 The Transformation of Muslim Schooling in Mali: The Madrasa as an Institution of Social and Religious Mediation	p. 199
Chapter 10 Islamic Education in Britain: Approaches to Religious Knowledge in a Pluralistic Society	p. 224
Chapter 11 Epilogue: Competing Conceptions of Religious Education	p. 242
Index	p. 269

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Table of Contents