4 Muslim Education Quarterly Muslim Education Quarterly, Vol. 13, No.

1, 1995
The IslamicAcademy, Cambridge, U.K.
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beings and external nature we go back to Religious Sciences whose source is
revealed knowledge.
It is necessary for teachers and students not only to know theoretically
about knowledge but also to find its presentation in different branches and BASIC PRINCIPLES IN THE FORMULATION OF
know the teaching methodology as suggested earlier. CURRICULUM FOR TERTIARY EDUCATION WITH
If we do not take it up immediately we are going to produce generations
SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO HUMANITIES
who have lost senses of values, for whom now human life is meaningless-
killing and looting and cheating are becoming day to day things, as if these do
not matter. This is the condition in the West in spite of their long-standing
tradition of education and the tradition of values based on Christianised Syed Ali Ashraf
Greco-Roman tradition. That tradition has been broken down, thwarted and
spurned by new generations. The same is happening in Bangladesh.
Once education is reformed according to the broad lines suggested and
explained in detail in our books and repeatedly put forward in the editorials of
this journal, it will be possible to rehabilitate Islamic values in education and Using the word 'science' in the old western classical sense of 'scientia'
thereby produce a new generation that will be able to face the satanic (knowledge) I would like to divide it into three branches on the basis of three
conspiracy to undermine all human values in the name of secularism, education relationships that can be conceived of human beings: God-Mankind
for all and freedom. relationship, people to people relationship and Mankind-Nature relationship. At
Even education cannot easily purify the mind if something is not done the centre is their relationship with God. This is 'Religious Sciences'. The
to stop the evil influence of the corrupt programmes that are broadcast over second kind of knowledge makes us aware of pur relationship with each other
the television and radio, especially the late night programmes sent round the and is called 'Human Sciences'. The third kind of knowledge makes us aware
h
j world through the satellites. Malaysia and Singapore governments have of external Nature and our relationship with it. This is known as 'Natural
I
declared these programmes as illegal and all satellite programmes are banned in Sciences".' Of these three, the first is one of essentially 'Revealed Knowledge'
those countries. Even in the normal programmes the religious norms of values and all ancillary branches of knowledge are based on the knowledge that was
II are not upheld. In the name of freedom, the secularists attempt to undermine
the religious norm and not give any substitute except the norm of the 'self'.
revealed to mankind by God directly through the prophets. The other two were
characterised at the First World Conference on Muslim Education held in
The individual is placed in the category of "god" and the material self of the Makkah in 1977 as 'Acquired Knowledge' ('ulum al-muktasibah), acquired
individual is pandered to. Sex has become the most outstanding attraction. through human efforts though the knowledge is granted by God according to

I Thus children are made to lose all sense of shame and righteousness. Violence
is another physical item shown as the only true form of bravery. This is one of
the ability of the person getting it and according to that person's efforts.? Of
these, 'Human Sciences' should be subdivided into 'Humanities' and 'Social

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the major sources of making children lose their sense of modesty and their
sense of humanity.
It is only by the reassertion of the norm of values that all the faiths have
I been teaching for generations and that Islam has always upheld that we can
save humanity from the disaster that may engulf the entire world into another
I much more monstrous calamity. By getting away from faith into the arena of
faithless, rootless non-morality we are proceeding towards self-destruction.
Syed Ali Ashraf
Sciences' because their approaches and the method of acquiring knowledge are
different. Imagination and emotive responses play the dominant role in
acquiring the knowledge that we find enshrined in literature and fine arts. This
is the sphere more of intuitive realisation than of discursive reasoning.
Discursive reasoning is the main modus operandi for the acquisition of
knowledge that is known now as 'Social Sciences' such as History, Geography,
Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, Political Science, etc.
In order to design a curriculum for the Humanities, it is necessary to take
this total concept of knowledge and understand the relationship that exists
between Religious Sciences and the two other branches of knowledge.> Even
prior to this it is necessary for-us to realise that from the Qur' anic point of
view, knowledge in the sense in which God terms it as 'ilm, which is
characterised by certainty, absoluteness and eternity, is available only in the
revealed Truth. All other branches of knowledge are to some extent 'relative'
and 'conjectural' (?anril). Humanities, on the other hand, claim Truth,
permanence and universality.s Writers and artists seem to act from the point of
-'~~:c_
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view of some realised Truths however partial, individual and personal that truth
may be. It is because of its partiality and individual perception of reality that it
has to be differentiated from 'Revealed Truth'. That is why revealed
knowledge was, and still is, central to Muslim education. Muslims still consider
it central to their educational planning. The two other branches of knowledge
must derive their basic principles from the principles about human life and
Nature given in the revealed knowledge and the knowledge enshrined in the
human manifestation and symbolisation of that knowledge in the sayings and
doings of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon him. Only
then can we see human life as an integrated whole. This of course assumes the
necessity of faith. The justification of faith is in its impact on historical
situation, the historical impact of the presence of the Prophet upon other human
beings and on the society as a whole. In order to achieve this end it becomes
necessary to cultivate faith in revealed Truth from childhood onwards. To
create doubts in the minds of children about revealed knowledge is to lead
them away from their spiritual moorings. It is the duty of both teachers and
parents, so the Qur' an tells us, to nurture the true nature of the child, the nature
that responds to spiritual truths. This nurture implies not merely the cultivation
I of faith in God but also a similar cultivation of faith in Absolute values such as
J Justice, Mercy, Truth, Charity, Love and Righteousness all of which are
enshrined in the names of God. God has implanted their roots in human nature.
Nurture and hence education should help the child grow and flourish. The child
l should grow up with the realisation that a human being is not just a piece of dirt
with some intelligence somehow poured into its bodily frame but a complete
I being who must be responsible for his or her actions, whose intuitive faculty is
developed and the infinite possibility of the person's mental and spiritual
growth becomes a reality>
Though Humanities is regarded as a branch of 'acquired knowledge' and
hence does not have that completeness that revealed Truth possesses, its
II intuitive method of realising Truth appears similar. Revealed Truth is granted
to human beings by God through His chosen people. It contains a complete
1 code of life. Human beings are directly called by God to follow that code so
that they may be prepared physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially to draw
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closer to Him by cultivating within themselves those values whose roots are in
the attributes of God and which God has planted within human beings as
potentialities. Except devotional literature which has the same or similar aims,
1 literature in general tries to draw human beings out of their narrow cells and
give them a wider cognition of the reality as the writer sees it. Thus literature
also tries to draw human beings away from the narrow limited boundaries of
their own selves into the wider field of 'truths which, the writer feels,
transcends the local, temporal, changeable reality." But, as literature and fine
arts are the products of individual realisation, the values manifested in them
cannot be regarded as complete and whole as the values expressed through
revealed truths are. These individually realised Truths must therefore be
assessed in the context of the whole in order to gauge their levels and ranges of
realisation.
The Formulation of Curriculum for Tertiary Education 7
In order to organise the study of fine arts and literature at the tertiary
level, therefore, the following objectives should be kept in view: (1) To
sharpen the ability of emotive perception of truths so that falsity, cliches and
copies may not be mislead the reader, listener and viewer; (2) To widen the
range of perception; and (3) To enable the reader to transcend the narrow
restrictive bonds of customs, conventions, ideologies and self-interests and
know the method of assessing the range and depth of the writers' or the artists'
, perception and presentation of Reality and their success in taking the audience
into the realms of Reality.
These objectives assume the presence of the Higher Norm that God-given
Revealed Truths impart to mankind. Those Truths must become what T.E.
Hulme calls 'the inevitable categories of mind'.? Teachers must be so
accustomed to them that they would see everything else through them even
without thinking about them. All human values which claim universality,
essentiality and transcendence above and beyond day-to-day customs and
assumptions are ultimately derived from the Absolutes that belong to God.
Justice, Truth, Righteousness, Mercy, Charity are God's own attributes. Human
beings possess them because God has endowed them with a spirit from His
Own Spirit. 8 According to the Qur'an God has endowed that spiriA with the
knowledge of all His Qualities, the Qualities that He has used to create each
and every object in this universe.? That is why each object manifests some
Quality of God-His Beauty is reflected everywhere. His grandeur is evident in
the ocean, the sky or mountain ranges-in the whole of His creation. He
creates, sustains and destroys and creates again. From early childhood, human
beings show that they appreciate and understand Truth, Mercy and Justice. All
of them love also the other Divine Quality, Freedom. But they need proper
cultivation. Though human beings start seeing human activities and also
external nature through these basic values without even realising that they are
doing so, it is necessary for their own ultimate good to be aware of them and to
cultivate them. Otherwise passions and desires of the material selves that
human beings possess may twist and torture that vision of reality and lead
human beings away from being just, truthful or righteous. To obey God and to
follow revealed truths is to help those forces of the Good to grow and flower
forth within ourselves. To study good and great literature and great works of art
is to achieve the same ends partially or at least prepare grounds within
ourselves for those values to flourish. Our qulub (hearts, sing. qalb), the
spiritual organs of spiritual cognition, the seats of intuition are purified through
our attempts to cultivate those eternal virtues which are enshrined in the Names
of God. The study of great works of art and letters contribute towards that
attainment by purifying our passions, by the katharsis of our emotions and
feelings. \0
The basic difference between the effects of these two upon our selves is
twofold. On the one hand by following revealed truths we gain a
comprehensive and hence a balanced vision of the whole whereas by studying
great works our vision still remains partial. On the other hand, the vision
generated by revealed truths commands and goads our hearts to realise our true
 8 Muslim Education Quarterly
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identity through action, through good deeds, whereas the study of great works
leads us to contemplative consciousness and not to immediate action. The
effect on our action is always then indirect and partial. We do not jump on the
stage to kill Iago or Goneril but our consciousness of the forces of evil and our
recognition of the processes, our expanding sympathy or the generation of
'pity' purifies the mirror of our hearts and we rise the 'morrow' almost with the
vision of the ancient mariner.
Those who would prepare the curriculum for Humanities must therefore
have the necessary training to be able to assess what they are prescribing from
the point of view delineated above. Those who consider literature and fine arts
as subjects that would give some aesthetic pleasure and refine the emotive
sensibility without the aims stated above, those who reject the higher norms of
life or the search for something eternal and permanent as the aims of all great
works of art and letters, they will not be able to prepare a curriculum for
Humanities that would lead the teachers and students to understand the integral
relationship among different branches of knowledge. The first prerequisite then
is the necessity of a group of scholars who accept the higher norm of human
existence and are themselves in search of certainty, permanence and
universality, whose minds have not been befogged by the shadows of the
externals and who want to see the Absolutes realised in contingent
circumstances. They are the people who understand that aesthetic pleasure is
only a means to lull the argumentative self asleep in order that the reader or the
viewer or listener may lead into the stage of the contemplation of Reality. Only
then education in the Humanities becomes complementary to religious
education. II
Actual curriculum therefore demands that an initial course should be
designed to develop in students a proper critical approach, a course which
should be both theoretical and practical. The present-day method of applying
critical principles which do not show any awareness of the spiritual referential
framework stated above is insufficient and sometimes abortive in its
application. It brainwashes children and gets them habituated to expect some
kind of aesthetic pleasure only. It does not rouse in them expectation of being
transported into inner reality, into a realm of unity, permanence and certainty
'I even when the writer fails to do so. What we need is 'Reconstructive
Criticism' .12 Teachers and students need this reconstructive approach so that
lj education in Humanities is based on a central concept of humanity, so that the
J inevitable categories of the human mind become part and parcel of our
consciousness. Only when you have an integrated curriculum based on a
central concept of humane nature, aims and objectives of human existence and
a higher norm of values whose absoluteness, centrality and universality are
unquestioningly accepted can such a goal be achieved. As most of our
universities are based on the western concept of 'liberalism' which is another
form of secularism, it becomes difficult to introduce such a central concept.
Probably the best thing that the teachers in Humanities then can do is to
introduce this critical approach in their faculty and thereby make their faculty
of Humanities the nucleus for the reconstruction of the entire education system.
The Formulation of Curriculum for Tertiary Education 9
One facility that we have in liberal education should not be missed, the
freedom to introduce such courses provided they are not doctrinairily
dictatorial. We who believe in what the humanists call the charter of human
rights and thus subscribe to the hidden curriculum that consists of unwritten
laws of human behaviour most of which are derived from religion, should take
this opportunity to initiate an approach that would appear to be similar but that
would take the teachers and students beyond the narrow, rather biased approach
, towards deeper realisations.
It is the cultivation of this approach to literature and fine arts through
theoretical discussions and practical demonstrations that should form a course
for all students of the university. Going back to what I have said regarding the
division of knowledge into Religious Sciences, Human Sciences and Natural
Sciences and the necessity of making it obligatory for all university students to
take at least one course from Religious Sciences, two courses from the
Humanities of which one should be from either literature or fine arts and one
from Social Sciences and one course from Natural Sciences, I would like to
insist that this course in Reconstructive Criticism should be a Foundation
Course in Humanities (including literature and fine arts) for all students. If
education in Natural Sciences is going to train the discursive intelligence of
students and help them to think logically, coherently, and also in symbols and
the education in Social Sciences is going to expand their vision and rouse their
social humanitarian sensibility, education in Humanities becomes a necessity to
train emotive responses to life and go deeply into the interior meanings of life,
letters and language. Moreover, whereas the attention of Natural Sciences is
generally confined to the material universe or the world of matter, and of Social
Sciences to the world of facts about human life in society, the attention of the
Humanities is fixed on the spiritual and moral dimensions of existence. That is
why in the first year in the university, all university students need these
Foundation Courses including a course in Humanities. 13
As far as courses for specialisation in literature or fine arts are concerned,
besides the general principle that stress should be laid on great and good works,
other principles are more specific. I shall here discuss only the principles on the
basis of which courses in literature should be designed.
Besides a higher level course in methods of literary criticism there should
be at least one course in language that should deal with the essence of language
and meaning and style. The essence of a language is in its meaning, the essence
of the meaning is beyond sounds and alphabets. As language is the means of
creating literature, a proper appreciation of literature is not possible without a
knowledge of the essence of language. Speech is one of the essential Attributes
of God. All revealed truths came through speech. It is speech which is the
means of creation. God says, 'Be' and 'it is'. The faculty of language is not
man-made. It is God-given. It rests on the structure of the human nervous
system and therefore cannot be taken as something created by the human being.
It is intimately bound up with the structure of the brain. It is therefore innate
and not acquired. 14 The diversity of languages indicate the ability granted by
God to use the sound systems in different ways and herein comes man's role in
 10 Muslim Education Quarterly
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making different languages, and the acquisition of a particular language Notes
becomes a possibility. That the essence of a language lies in its inner meaning, 1.
in what the mind and the heart or the qalb of the person wants to say or signify
comes out clearly when we see that some saints are capable of understanding
what a person wants to say or is thinking in his/her mind even when the saint
does not know the language of the person. It is this inner sense that a language
conveys which is untranslatable but which can still be reproduced in another
language. Metatinguistics has tried to enter into this deeper region of language
activity.t> A student of literature should therefore know the different
approaches to language that have developed in the last thirty years and the
implications of this knowledge in the study of literature. Special emphasis
should be on semantics and stylistics and the significance of their application to
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1, literature.
The next basic principle is the method of organising the course. Should 2.
the emphasis be only on great works of art or on the evolution of a particular 3.
literature throughout its existence? In most cases a compromise formula has 4.
been evolved. Historical division of literature into periods are accepted but only 5.
selected few are studied from every period. In the case of English literature at
the University of Cambridge another new formula was used and is still being
used. For Preliminary and Part I of the Tripos examinations the historical 6.
method has been adopted. But for Part IT Tripos the emphasis is on certain
,Ij 7.
forms as well. And here world literature provides the specific books or authors, 8.
I not only English literature. This I think is a happy combination. In some 9.
The Formulation of Curriculum for Tertiary Education 11
This can be represented as follows:
GOD
God-Human Beings
Relationship (A)
HUMAN BEING
Human Beings & Human
Beings Relationship (B)
HUMAN BEINGS NATURE
The basic principle for B and C are derived from the God-given code in A.
See "Recommendations" in Conference Book, London-Jeddah, 1978.
For further discussion see the two essays in Literary Educaiion and Religious Values by Syed Ali
Ashraf and Stephen Medcalf, The Islamic Academy, 1984.
Syed Dawalibi has discussed this in detail in his book, Qur'iinic Epistemology of 'Ilm.
About human nature see my article, "Education and Values: Islamic vis-a-vis the Secularist
Approaches" in Muslim Education Quarterly, Vol. 4, No.2, 1987. Allah says in the Qur'an,
"And I breathed into him of My Spirit" (15:29). See also, Qur'an 30:30 and Frithjof Schuon,
From the Divine to the Human, World Wisdom Books, Bloomington, USA, pp. 5-7, 9-10.
See S.A. Ashraf, "Literary Education and Religious Values" in Literary Education and Religious
Values by SA Ashraf and S. Medcalf, The Islamic Academy, Cambridge, 1984.
Speculations, ed. H. Read, Hudson, London, 1936, pp. 1950-51.
Qur'an 15:29.
That is the Trust that God has given to Man. "Divine Names are the archetypes of all values

I countries world literature is introduced under the title 'translation'. To

introduce world literature through the study of some basic forms is a far better
manifested in contingent circumstances to be realised through action in the human world." See
Literary Education and Religious Values, ibid., p. 15, note 30. See also Schuon, Understanding

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approach. Though students will be reading literature produced in other
languages but translated into the language of their own land, their attention will
not linger on the appropriateness and success of translation.
Another principle focuses the attention of the readers on the
interrelationship between literary activity and the socio-cultural consciousness
10.
Islam, Allen Unwin, London, 1963: "Man is a theomorphic being endowed with an intelligence
capable of choosing what leads to the Absolute" (p. 13).
Similar to Aristotle's concept of Katharsis though the result as explained is deeper.
11. S.A. Ashraf, in "Literary Education and Religious Values" In Literary Education and Religious
Values, ibid., p.8.
12. As against the whole principle of 'deconstruction'.
13. See my proposal to King Abdulaziz University published in New Horizons in Muslim Education;

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of the people. It is sometimes entitled as a course in 'literature, society and
culture'. It is otherwise known as a course in the sociology of literature. The
danger of such a course lies in treating literature as a measuring stick for the
14.

15.
London, 1985.pp. 95-97.
Unpublished Professorial address by Professor Eric Fudge entitled, "Theolinguistics-Language,
Man and God", pp. 7-8.
See the works of Benjamin Lee Whorf.

'I literary consciousness of people. Instead of helping students to understand

depths and range of literature proper such a course turns into a means to assess
I the shades of cultural consciousness of the people. Probably such a course may
make teachers and students conscious of an internal linkage between Social
I Sciences and Humanities and is from that point of view, justified. But a sharp
eye is necessary to guard the precincts of literature and never allow it to be
dragged into a phenomenon in which literature starts getting treated almost as a
form of sociology.
If the above principles are kept in view and courses are framed and taught
with the intention of making and shaping good men and women, we will
achieve great success. This is the way the supra-temporal, the metaphysical, the

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emotional and physical depths get blended into unity.