Verification and Renewal Curriculum
Given the geographic scope of Islam, the Muslim scholastic tradition produced many different flavors of education, though each of these is ultimately rooted in the same religious texts. These programs of study are extensive, spanning from secondary education to high-level scholarship, with the aim of developing a strong thinker who is conversant with the sources and able to respond to challenges. We can think of these programs of education collectively as the Classical Islamic Seminary Curriculum.
Following the model of these classical programs, which would revise and update themselves to tackle new realities, ASIPT aims to re-imagine the Muslim seminary curriculum in light of modernity and the contemporary western world. This initiative is called the Verification and Renewal Curriculum. Its goals, as laid out in the name, are the verification of the eternal truths of the religion and a kind of renewal that engages holistically with changes and developments in science and philosophy. In the vision of the program, this is accomplished by training a critical mass of scholars grounded in the ‘instrumental’ and rational sciences. These scholars address challenges through the traditional paradigm that sees knowledge as a unity of the rational, the empirical, and the revealed.
To these ends, ASIPT has begun a variety of projects that gather, record, and categorize the best of the Classical Islamic Seminary Curriculum. One of these projects is the Compendium of Seminary Texts, an English-language presentation of the complied Arabic teachings texts of Shaykh Muhammad Amin Er. Comprising the fundamentals in twelve basic sciences, including logic, grammar, theology, rhetoric, and linguistic theory, it is a comprehensive text by which to gain a foundation of learning. The Compendium project makes this foundation of learning more widely available with carefully chosen English technical terms, side-by-side Arabic and English, and a handy glossary.
In a similarly aimed but truly unprecedented effort, which would not even have been possible in the premodern era, ASIPT aims to collect audiovisual recordings of the entire curriculum taught at Madrasat al-Falah, a traditional Kurdish-Ottoman seminary in Konya, Turkey under the direction of the renowned scholar Shaykh Salih al-Ghursi. Shaykh Salih studied the full Ottoman curriculum, which includes over fifty key texts, which he lays out in his book Islah al-Madaris (The Reconstruction of the Seminaries). The Madrasat al-Falah Recording Archive will provide students not only a snapshot but a detailed record of the Ottoman seminary as many generations of students knew it.
In addition to these efforts, ASIPT is working to augment the texts of the classical curriculum with the Curricular Essay Series that speaks directly to the ‘big questions.’ The purpose of this series is to capture what is essential to philosophical and theological topics like epistemology (establishing what we know), cosmic semiotics (interpreting the world as signs), and cosmology (understanding God’s relation to the universe). The first step for each topic is to host a Colloquium. At these colloquia, scholars will brainstorm, share resources, and collaborate. The second step is to produce a Curricular Essay, which will form a new English language reference on the subject that can be deployed by scholars and institutions.
The Verification and Renewal Curriculum imagines a deep, sustained dialogue with contemporary western philosophy and science, much as the Muslim curriculum of each era and region has addressed its specific intellectual culture. This portion of the curriculum aims to bring together a vast but diffuse array of resources that have not yet been systematized. In order to consolidate these resources and make them available, ASIPT will provide existing educational initiatives with open-source materials as well as research, editing, and public support.
Classically trained Muslim scholars have had a presence in the west for decades, with the first major Muslim seminary in the UK, Darul Uloom Bury, established in 1979, and a the first wave of scholars returning to the US and UK from their studies abroad in the 80s. This generation of scholars founded institutions in their home countries, including Darul Qasim College (Shaykh Mohammed Amin Kholwadia), Zaytuna College (Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir), and Cambridge Muslim College (Shaykh Timothy Winter). They have, throughout this time, produced lectures and learning materials in response to various challenges of modernity but especially in the early stage, these efforts were pursued in isolation, spreading through cassette and CD recordings to other communities. These lectures were not limited to general community sermons, but often consisted of the focused study of a classical text or theological topic, with discussion of its contemporary implications.
To this end, ASIPT has embarked on a Speech to Essay Conversion program, which converts these lectures—often the only English language commentaries on the subjects at hand—into essays and articles. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there are several books’ worth of original research and explanation that could be brought to the surface through this program.
ASIPT recognizes that the intellectual trends of modernity have a presence beyond academia and the west, due both to the reach of modern western education in the postcolonial era and the highly-connected world in which we live. Therefore, ASIPT aims to produce Arabic versions of some original curricular resources for use in traditional seminaries. Due to Arabic’s role as the key scholarly language in Islam, regardless of vernacular, these Arabic versions will extend the impact and collaborative conversations across the world.
The Verification and Renewal program offers an integrative approach to academic research and classical Islamic thought that bridges a gap in the present discourse that ASIPT is uniquely positioned to address. It will both establish a framework for both preserving the knowledge and pedagogy of the past but for addressing the new ‘big questions’ that occur in the present day, each in dialogue with the other.
Curricular Essays
As discussed above, ASIPT will host colloquia for scholars to discuss critical subjects in Islamic philosophy and theology, with the aim of developing Curricular Essays, English-language teaching texts that each cover the fundamentals of the topic at hand. These essays will be freely available to partner teaching institutions as well as published on ASIPT’s website for global access.
There are six topics that form this initial slate of essays:
- How do we know what we know?
- This essay will present the general epistemology of the scholarly tradition, from textual interpretation to logic to kalam
- It will address approaches of skepticism and doubt
- The essay’s focus will be on providing a basic method for verifying and grading knowledge-claims, especially but not exclusively those about religious belief
- It will walk the reader through the process with illustrative example propositions
- Signs on the Horizon
- A treatment of how awe, wonder, and gratitude for the natural world relate to religious belief.
- The Contingent and Emergent Universe
- An essay on the cosmological proof (popularized as the ‘Kalam Cosmological Argument’) and the argument from contingency, which provide a reasoned proof for why the universe cannot exist without a Necessary Creator.
- Proofs of Prophecy
- An explanation of the concepts of tawatur (mass transmission of a narration such that it would have been impossible to fabricate), i`jaz al-Qur’an (the inimitability of the Qur’an), and prophetic miracles as evidence for veracity.
- Allah’s Volitional Agency and Scientific Inquiry
- A discussion of occasionalism in Islamic theology and its relation to investigating natural causes through the scientific method.
- First Principles of Certainty
- Built on the work of three key twentieth century Muslim scholars, Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, Mustafa Sabri, and Anwar Shah Kashmiri, this aims to distill the fundamentals of their thought for a general audience.
- Each of the three played a key role in traditional Muslim scholarship’s substantive response to modernity and their work is incredibly salient today.
- Their work is a strong foundation for how Islamic theology’s approach to rational, empirical, and spiritual knowledge can confront and address the questions raised by the contemporary world.
- This essay will bring their sophisticated intellectual apparatus into the hands of English-language readers.
Bridging Scholars
The United States is home to many skilled academic researchers in fields related to Arabic, Muslim history, and Islamic philosophy, as well as a considerable number of classically-trained scholars (`ulama). A small though growing number of scholars fall into both categories, but for the most part `ulama in the United States teach in private, and academics lack traditional training. This doesn’t mean that they lack an interest in such study—after all, it gives a much richer understanding of their subject areas—but most opportunities to pursue madrasa education entail full-time study, which is something of an impossibility for a mid-career researcher.
ASIPT aims to change that. In collaboration with Basira Education and other organizations, ASIPT will launch an online program to train scholars in the philosophical and theological sciences, without requiring them to run through a full Classical Islamic Seminary curriculum (as discussed in the Curriculum Development section). This platform will draw on ASIPT’s archival work on the classical Ottoman curriculum, linking English-speaking academics and seminary students directly to a sophisticated philosophical apparatus that they can integrate into their own work. Likewise, graduates of Muslim seminaries who did not specialize in philosophy and theology subjects can to fill in any gaps in their training.
Likewise, in collaboration with ASIPT Advisory Board member and Harvard Muslim chaplain Dr. Khalil Abdur Rashid, ASIPT will produce A Compendium of Seminary Texts. Built on the work of “the Last Ottoman”, the Kurdish scholar Shaykh Muhammad Amin Er (d. 2013), who was a teacher of Dr. Abdur Rashid, the text will compile mid-level seminary texts in subjects including logic, grammar, theology, rhetoric, and linguistic theory. Because it is grounded in the fundamentals, it is an accessible text to teach to an audience of varied experience. Dr. Abdur Rashid taught this “Mirani Program” (named for Shaykh Muhammad Amin’s tribe) online between 2017 to 2019 to a great reception. ASIPT’s research assistants have drawn on this material as well as the direct Arabic language teaching texts to develop a new English chaptered monograph that will present these subjects in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. Dr. Spevack and other ASIPT members will then use this English text as the basis for study circles in-person and online.
The impact of this program would be hard to understate. It will allow scholars to grapple with texts that they might have otherwise been able merely to read without fully understanding, as many of these sciences have their own technical vocabularies and teaching methods. They will also be equipped to benefit from the Madrasat al-Falah Recording Archive that ASIPT is producing to make the traditional Ottoman seminary curriculum more widely accessible. These initiatives aim to have a transformative effect on a myriad of pedogical environments, from the seminary to the academy, and from homeschool networks to adult education.