GROUP 8

•Fatimah Amirah Omar•Noor Zilawati Md. Uris•Sabrina Haani Salamun

•Siti Norbaya Mohd. Radzuan

•Suhamira Nordin

• Discuss, compare and contrast the

concept of man, knowledge and

education from Islamic and

Western perspectives.

QUESTION

Islamic

• Have ‘aql & nafs

• As God’s vicegerent (khalifah).

• Made from clay / soil.

• Believe in the unseen (God, heaven, hell etc.)

• Amr ma’ruf nahi mungkar

• Man (homo sapiens) evolved from apes.

• Seeing is believing.

• Based on rational & majority.

• Do not believe in the day of judgement / hereafter.

Western

• Responsibility – original goodness.

• Love – for God is the highest & strongest love he (man) has.

• Soul – mankind created from single soul

• Responsibility – original sin.

• Love – to something else that can be seen.

• Soul – as the “ source of thought activity” (The Catholic Encyclopedia)

Islamic Western

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Soul

“ Every soul will be (held) in pledge for its deeds”

(Quran, 74:38)

“(To the righteous soul will be said) "0 (thou) soul, in    (complete) rest    and satisfaction!  Come back thou to thy Lord - well pleased (thyself) and well pleasing unto Him Enter thou, then among My

devotees!  Yea enter thou My Heaven '. "    

(Quran, 89:27-30)

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Love

“ Yet there are some people who adopt rivals instead of God, whom they

love just as they (should) love God. Those who believe are firmer in

their love of God ...”

(Quran, 2:165)

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The Noble Prophet(s) has said the following in one of his moving sermons thus:

“I swear by Allah that all of you will certainly die, just as you go to sleep at night. Then surely you will all be

raised again as you wake up in the morning. Then you will definitely be judged for the deeds you had been

doing. You will get rewards for good deeds and punishment for the evil ones; it will either be the

everlasting life of Paradise or the endless torment of Hell-fire.”

(Cf.Sermons of the Holy Prophet, reproduced in Nahajul Balagha)

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"We created you from earth and return you to earth and then bring you forth

once more."

(Quran,20:55)

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"The unbelievers say: Is this not strange that we should be brought back after dying and turning

to dust? Such a return is impossible. But We are fully aware of what the earth takes from

them and it is We Who possess the Preserved Tablet."

(Quran, 50:2-4)

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"I did not create the jinn and men for aught

but they should worship Me."

(Qur'an, 51:56)

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Western’s perspectives

• Plato emphasized that the soul achieves a pure state only after release from its prison house in the body.

• Soul – immortal

- breath / life

- self / mind

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Muslims’ definitions of knowledge

• A process of knowing that is identical with the known and the knower.

• A form of cognition (marifah). • Synonymous with comprehension (ihatah) • A process of mental perception. • A means for clarification, assertion and

decision • A concept or percept subject to

apperception. • An attribute (sifah)

• A agent of memory or imagination.

• Motion

• A relative term.

• Defined in relation to action

• A product of introspection

(Tanzeem-e-Islami, internet resources)

Westerners’ definition of knowledge

• What someone knows about a particular subject

• The fact that someone knows about something

ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVES

WESTERN PERSPECTIVES

•Knowledge comes from Allah. It can be gained through al-Quran, al-hadith, other than what we discover in the world

•Al-Quran is a guidance for mankind (hudan-lil-nas) – 2:1-3

•“…that intense limitations (our) investigations have revealed…” (Descartes)

•Believe that knowledge should be somehow guaranteed by the structure of reality definition

•“Read in the name of thy Lord who createth..” (96:1) – stresses on the importance of reading, i.e seeking for knowledge

•The term used for knowledge in Arabic is “ilm” which has a much wider connotation (embracing terms covering theory, action and education)

•“seeing is believing” – believe on knowledge with concrete evidence only

•Falls short of expressing all aspects of information about something divine or corporeal e.g:god, angels, human creation

SUBJECT

FACT

PROPOSITION

causation

true

believes

•Danto’s model of knowledge

• Islam recognizes several sources of knowledge, i.e revelation, intuition, reason or rational thinking, and sense experience or empirical observation

• Believes that there is a close relationship between knowledge (ilm) and belief (iman)

•Recognizes experimenting, researching, and exploring as the sources of knowledge

•Basically, western classification of knowledge focuses mainly on the concrete or actual knowledge.

Acquired knowledge-knowledge that man acquires

or finds on his own (‘ilm al-aqliyah)

Perennial knowledge-revealed, God-given knowledge

(‘ilm al-naqliyah)

THE CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE

-2nd world conference on Muslim education, 1980-

Other Islamic classification of knowledge:

1. Proposed by al-Ghazali:

- theoretical and practical sciences- huduri (presential) and husuli (intellectual)- ilm al-shari’ah (religious) and ilm al-aqliyah (intellectual) sciences- fard ‘ain (obligatory on every individual) and fard kifayah (obligatory on community) sciences

2. Proposed by Muhammad Al-Naquib Al-Attas:

- the religious sciences- the rational, intellectual, and philosophical sciences

ISLAM STRESSES ON KNOWLEDGE

• “Read in the name of thy Lord who createth..” (96:1)

• “Our lord is He who gave into everything its nature and constitution, and then guided it aright” (20:50)

• In the Qur´an the word ‘alim has occurred in 140 places, while al-’ilm in 27. The total number of verses in which ‘ilm or its derivatives and associated words are used is 704. The aids of knowledge (book, pen, ink) amount to almost the same number. Qalam occurs in two places, al-kitab in 230 verses, among which al-kitab for al-Qur´an occurs in 81 verses. Other words associated with writing occur in 319 verses. The Islamic revelation started with the word iqra´ (‘read!´ or ‘recite!´).

‘Read: And thy lord is the most Bounteous, Who teach by the pen, Teach man that which he knew not’

(96:3-5; Al ‘Alaq)

‘A drop of sweat of the brow of a thinker is better than the thousand

blood drops of the martyr’(famous Hadith)

ISLAMIC VS WESTERNISLAMIC WESTERN

Believes in the mastery of matter & mind.(Al-Jathiya)

Introduced the inductive method, which is analytical & scientific.Is a scientific enquiry & research, which are obligatory.Islam is a scientific religion emphasizing on the need of scientific inquiry’

Emphasize on abstractions.Method of inquiry was deductive.Scientific research is opposed by the church (religion).Goal is for self-improvement.Concept of secular development.

ISLAMIC WESTERN Pedagogy method found in the Quran which is the empirical approach.

Giving false sense of objectivity when dealing with human behaviours.

• In summary, the Islamic and contemporary western philosophies of edu. Bare some resemblance to each other in their social and individual aims

• However, there are poles apart with respect to their philosophical bases.(western-lack of divine principles & values) (Islamic-imbued with divine principles & natural laws)

• More importantly it gave raise to 2 diff. sets of individuals having variant attitudes and believes towards God and His creation.

‘For you (God) subjected all that is in the heavens and on the earth, all from Him. Behold! In that are signs for people who reflect’

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‘The way one of the prophet Adam’s (PBUH) son learn

how to bury his dead brother by watching the

similar demonstration from a bird’

(E.g. in 5:27; Al-Ma’idah)back

‘Al Faruqi asserts that the humanistic studies of western man & the social analysis of western society by a western

scientist are necessarily ‘WESTERN’ and cannot serve as

a model of studies of Muslim and their society’

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