Advancing Islamic Learning—Preserving Standards; Extending Reach

I got involved in a wonderful conversation over on Twitter this morning, after Suhur, with two Muslim brothers discussing the desire of one to offer a Ramadan program exploring a significant Islamic text, with the other expressing concern over the organizer lacking proper ijaza. And the thing is, they're both 'right'.

Ijazas and Understanding

After posting my thread, I ended up deciding it was worth reproducing here as an article. There are several complex issues at play here, which I want to address as both a senior Learning Sciences scholar and a seeker of knowledge undertaking formal Islamic study under Shaykh Muhammad Al-Yaqoubi . The concerned brother is correct in his major point: one of the strengths of the Islamic system of education is that those teaching Allah's deen are expected not merely to be knowledgeable in the content, but to have been certified by their teacher(s) as competent transmitters of it. And those teachers were certified by their teachers, who were certified by theirs—all the way back to the Prophet?. This is the system of ijazas—licenses to teach the particular content one is teaching; when I retweeted the eager organizer's program the other day, it was under the assumption that he had proper ijaza for it.

One thing the concerned brother was (mostly) WRONG about, though, was his (mis)understanding of Western education—we have these requirements too: before you can teach high school mathematics, you must not only have earned a degree in education; you must also be licensed to teach high school mathematics, a process that requires having demonstrated your competence to both your faculty and in the classroom, to senior teachers. Before you can teach Philosophy in college, you have to have earned your doctorate in philosophy—a process that requires a dissertation, defended before senior scholars in your discipline, to demonstrate that you are ready to join them as colleagues. Schools & colleges won't hire people who haven't met those bars—because they'd lose their accreditation if they did.

Of Interaction Types and Alphas

I mention all this because, as a scholar of education systems, I've seen classes like what it seems the organizer was trying to do go horribly wrong: somebody very bright gets excited about something they just learned, and they start talking about it to the people around them—who want to learn more! But there aren't enough accredited institutions out there to teach them—or they're too far away, too expensive, taught in a different language, or otherwise inaccessible. So our bright young learner—who may also have studied education—decides to gather the people around them who they've gotten interested to study what they just learned, together. Cognizant of their own limitations, they ground their little group in the text, so they're leaning on its eminent author's qualifications, rather than their own. Then they start discussing it.

They're all excited—which means they have questions! The organizer says what THEY think—which may even be right. But since they're not actually a credentialed teacher, one of the "alpha males" in the group says they see it differently and the organizer has it wrong. Somebody else argues a third perspective. Since none of them are credentialed teachers, to everybody else in the group, all these different interpretations seem equal. Nobody even knows that the author of their text had a peer who answered those questions—much less what those answers, grounded in centuries of understanding, are.

So the most forceful personality—that alpha male, who knows even less about the discipline than their (unqualified!) teacher, carries the day, and the whole group goes away with their budding knowledge infected by his misunderstanding. This is just one illustration of the (valid) concern the second brother (and others) was raising.

A Dearth of Supply—or Reach

But...it doesn't solve our organizer's problem—which is also valid: Islam is (ma sha' Allah) the world's fastest-growing religion, even in the West...and there aren't nearly enough properly-qualified ulema to teach all these people hungry for a millennium and a half of scholarly knowledge of Allah's deen.

And some of this is structural, because there aren't enough properly-qualified ulema to teach enough properly-qualified ulema either—in part because those that there are tend to be in places where Islam has been strong for centuries...while those who need to learn from them (including those like our young organizer whom, I'm sure, would love to get a proper ijaza!) tend to be clustered where it hasn't—but is growing fastest. Our organizer, living in Pakistan, may not have that particular problem—but that still doesn't mean there's a prominent institution teaching from the desired madhab, etc., accessible to him. And too few people have the resources, freedom, or lack of other constraints to just pack up their lives and move to another country for six or seven years to become an alim.

And so we have a paradox: we have growing hordes of seekers, hungry for knowledge of Allah's deen, who are looking around them for teachers—and not finding them. It's all well and good to hold the line on ijazas—critical, in fact, for the reasons I've laid out above—but at the same time, we also have to understand that by doing so (by, in effect, turning those seekers away), we aren't solving the problem. And if they don't find a well-intentioned peer like our organizer to teach them, they're at best going to study the texts independently (where they have no one to challenge any emergent misconceptions). Our concerned brother was again correct: that's not forbidden...but its permissibility doesn't remove its dangers—dangers which the scholars have recognized: for example, in the context of ahadith, "Al-Qayrawani reported: Sufyan ibn ‘Uyaynah, may Allah have mercy on him, said, 'The prophetic Hadith cause misguidance, except for the scholars of Fiqh.' (Source: al-Ja?mi’ fi? al-Sunan wal-āda?b 1/118)."

And that's at best. At worst, they're gonna find a teacher perhaps less well-intentioned: among the #Khawarij...or the Ahmahdis...or some Western "reformist" or "Islamic Studies" professor who will lead them outside the fold of Islam altogether. So while it's important to hold the line on ijaza, as we do so we incur a sacred obligation to solve the problem, so we have enough ulema with proper ijaza to meet the demand, accessible to its seekers.

Towards an Effective Solution

This is why Shaykh Al-Yaqoubi and I are trying to join our expertise—his in Allah's deen and mine in the Learning Sciences—to create and expand such avenues, where the same traditional scholars from whom one would seek an ijaza (in the same traditional venues from @Darul Uloom, to Al-Azhar University , to Al-Qarawiyyin, to Islamic University of Madinah and the like), using the same traditional methods & curricula, are empowered by the evidence-based tools & methods of faculty-led, cohort-based online & blended learning that I've been using for a quarter-century to create award-winning education systems accessible to all, from where they are.

So I also thank the brother who, encountering this problem, took the initiative—for reminding us of the task at hand; it would be just as injurious to the cause of Islam were we to simply crush his enthusiasm and walk away--rather than finding (or creating!) ways to help him pursue the ijaza to serve our ummah in the capacity he could.

After all, there are millions like him—and alhamdulillah, because we need them!