Re-imagining Muslim Education and the Cultivation of Democratic Citizens in South Africa
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Abstract
I have been engaged with Muslim education as a teacher, student, and scholar for more than four decades. I am privileged to have been born at the southern tip of the African continent—Cape Town—where my initiation into Muslim education commenced through the socializing efforts of my teachers and grandparents. They taught me to read the Quran, fundamentals of faith, elementary principles of cleanliness, and to be a person who connects with his fellow humans irrespective of race, class, language, and place of birth. I am what I became because of my fortunate rearing. The aspects of Muslim education exposited above are what contributed to my thoughts and practices today. In this sense, Muslim education is constituted by a notion of tarbiyyah—that is, being socialized into an inherited body of facts with little, if any, opportunity for critical appraisal of such tenets of faith. Such a notion of Muslim education is still dominant in South African Muslim educational institutions—mostly schools and seminaries—considering that the Muslim community comprising just under one million people continues to accentuate the significance of Quranic memorization and an adherence to fundamentals of the Sunnah or life experiences of the Prophet Muhammad (May the peace and blessings of Almighty Allah be bestowed on him). The argument I proffer in this contribution is, first, that tarbiyyah as socialized education is insufficient to advance some of the critical postcolonial, more specifically, postapartheid ideals of a three- decades-old democratic society. Second, the notion of education as the cultivation of humaneness, just and truthful living, as couched through Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s understanding of ta’dīb (Al-Attas, 1991), is a meritorious practice and would advance equitable and transformative actions within a fledgling democratic community. However, as I shall argue, in postcolonial times ta’dīb on its own seems deficient in the pursuit of just and equal human co-living. Consequently, and third, I argue in defense of ta’arruf as a conception of education that can engender equitable, pluralist, and dissonant human relations so much needed to enhance South African Muslims’ legitimate and genuine integration into a democratic society.