As the Government begins a review of how Islam is taught, Michael Mumisa says students must be free to reinterpret classic texts in a way that goes beyond political correctness
Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, last week singled out "weaknesses" in the way young Muslims are educated about their faith in a report on the teaching of Islam in colleges and universities. "There is reason to think that in some cases students are being exposed more than any of us would like to wrong-headed influences, under the name of religion," he said. His comments follow press revelations that some Islamic seminaries, colleges and schools in the UK are preaching hatred of other religions.
The teaching of Islam and its texts in the UK has local and international implications. Some Muslims are taught a literal reading of medieval texts that emphasises the imagined threat posed by "disbelieving outsiders" to Islam, and this has had a great impact on how Muslims view themselves and how they have dealt with the people they have come into contact with throughout history. Some of the colleges and Islamic educational centres that preach such readings are linked to higher education institutions and have influenced the study of Islam at university level. Although some leading British universities offer degrees in Islamic studies, traditional Muslims do not regard those programmes as fulfilling the spiritual need of their communities. This has forced some departments to compromise academic and intellectual values by entrusting Islamic studies to what Neal Robinson, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter, referred to in a recent article in The Times as "unthinking traditionalists and groups that may have overt or covert hardline political agendas".
There are three types of independent Islamic institutions and colleges that offer advanced Islamic studies in the UK. The first are the traditional Islamic seminaries, which are referred to as the Darul Ulooms and Hawzas.
The second are Islamic colleges, which offer undergraduate degrees in Islamic studies validated by UK universities. The third are also linked to universities but offer only postgraduate degrees and diplomas.
Islamic teaching in the seminaries is based on a curriculum that was developed between the 11th and 14th centuries of the Islamic empire. Since Islamic seminaries are highly ideological, the curriculum is fixed.
Students (all male) spend between six and eight years reading and studying medieval texts. Teaching is usually confined to the passive transmission of ideas and theories from the texts. Teachers, textbooks and, in some cases, even students are carefully selected on the basis of their ideological and theological affiliation. In most cases, teaching staff must come from a specific racial group. Thus, white and black Muslim teachers are hardly ever employed in Islamic seminaries.
When I studied at a seminary, we managed to sneak a 20th-century text on Islamic legal theory by our modernist teacher on to the curriculum. It was quickly removed when the traditionalists discovered a paragraph in which the author argued that there was no strong evidence from Islamic sources that a Muslim must keep a long beard. Because Islamic seminaries consider the keeping of long beards mandatory, the paragraph was seen as undermining religious power. There are no innocent paragraphs in religious texts.
The traditional Islamic seminaries are still trusted by a large number of Muslims to produce imams or clerics for mosques and communities. However, there is also a growing sense that the seminary curriculum fails to equip students with the knowledge and tools they need to reinterpret Islam in 21st-century pluralist societies. This has led to the emergence of independent Islamic colleges and Islamic institutes that offer BA honours degrees in Islamic studies validated by universities. Because such colleges are established and funded by traditional Muslim communities with their own ideologies, and in some cases by fundamentalist Islamic governments, they have experienced a crisis of identity. Should they function purely as independent academic institutions or do they have a responsibility to their financial sponsors to work as propaganda and proselytising centres? Instead of assuming the role of critics who question the Muslim communities in which they work, the undergraduate Islamic colleges have become centres that endorse and legitimate the views and ideologies of their communities.
Lecturers who hold what are deemed "dangerous modernist ideas" are easily replaced. The content of their undergraduate Islamic programmes is basically a glorified seminary curriculum written in a modern academic language, with modules on feminist theory, religion and pluralism outlawed or supplanted by subjects such as "interfaith studies" that have not gone beyond sentimentalism and "political correctness" to ask serious questions about how we reinterpret controversial religious texts in a pluralist society. For most Muslims, the interfaith project has become an effective public relations exercise and a convenient way to sidestep serious theological debate. Is it enough for me as a Muslim to share a cup of tea with my Jewish and Christian friends or should I also spend time rereading and reinterpreting the text that tells me that they are my enemies condemned to perish in hell?
The postgraduate institutes of higher education established by Muslims and validated by UK universities have succeeded in avoiding the problems faced by undergraduate Islamic colleges and seminaries. There are three main reasons for their success. Because they were founded and established by prominent Muslim theorists and academics with international reputations who spent their lives in secular universities, they have always operated as independent higher academic institutions, just like any other secular university in the UK. According to Ataullah Siddiqui, director of the Markfield Institute for Higher Education, a prestigious postgraduate institute based in Leicestershire and validated by Loughborough University, the institute's success is due to the fact that it is not "another seminary". "We are the only academic institute in the UK offering postgraduate courses or modules on Islam and feminist theory, Islam and pluralism, Islamic economics, Islamic banking and finance," says Siddiqui, who is leading the Government's review of the teaching of Islam at universities and colleges.
The postgraduate Islamic studies classes at Markfield are attended by students from a wide range of academic backgrounds, nationalities and religions. Graduates from the Islamic seminaries study alongside graduates with degrees in sociology or philosophy from secular universities.
Lecturers who teach Islamic subjects are qualified in classical Islamic disciplines as well as subjects in contemporary humanities and social sciences from secular universities. "The seminarians graduate after mastering the contemporary secular disciplines they need to reinterpret and contextualise Islam in 21st-century societies while students from secular disciplines will also have the opportunity to master complicated Islamic disciplines," Siddiqui says. To give back to the wider British society, Markfield has introduced a masters in Muslim community studies that is targeted at those who want to work as chaplains, imams, or in related fields.
The postgraduate Al-Maktoum Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, in Scotland, has a similarly broad remit. Abd al-Fattah El-Awaisi, its principal and vice-chancellor, says it does not consider itself an "Islamic" or "Muslim" institute, although it was established by Muslims.
"We are a Scottish higher academic institute functioning and working like any other university in the UK," he says. "A large number of our academic staff are not Muslims, and they come from diverse cultural and national backgrounds. Our agenda can be described as post-traditionalist, post-Orientalist, multicultural, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary."
These postgraduate institutions are not only confident in their identity as higher academic institutions, but have also demonstrated through their research and publications that they see themselves as critics of their religion and communities. Unlike the Islamic colleges, they suggest the way forward, offering programmes designed to fulfil the intellectual needs of their students rather than the spiritual needs of Muslim communities.
Shaykh Michael Mumisa is a visiting lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Birmingham University.