Western or Islamic education?

UNDERSTANDING Islamic Education is the title of a tape by Imam Hamza Yusuf that I have been listening to recently. Interestingly, just a week before, an article came to me via the internet called :The Impact of Western Hegemony on Muslim Thought" by Prof Yusuf Progler.

First of all, I had to look up "hegemony" in the dictionary. According to the dictionary, it means, "predominance of one state over others". As I had hoped, the article was a link to understanding the differences between Islamic and Western Education.

In both articles, the authors spoke about the contradiction of Western education and Islamic education, the effects of Western education on the Ummah in recent history, and most importantly, the effects on us and the next generation of Muslims, our children.

In my family, this has recently become a predominant topic of study and conversation as my 3,5 year-old daughter is rapidly becoming the human sponge that Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala created children to be.

The important thing about this phenomenon is the way that children learn from watching and imitating what is around them. I did not realise this fully until one day during Maghrib prayer she recited the Fatihah and two other surahs. Just like that. I was pretty surprised and upon coaxing, I found out that she also knew two more surahs and could call the Iqamah.

Subhana Allah! The need for formal education for her in another year and a half has led me to investigate different avenues available to us; private Islamic school, homeschooling, or public school.

In Prof Yusuf Progler's paper, he warns against Muslims participating in the Western educational system. He says that by using it, one adopts Western assumptions on the nature of existence.

"Most Western practices of education have institutionalised (their) one version of what it means to be a human being... Muslims ought to re-evaluate their situation because the Western understanding of existence is quite different than the teachings of Islam. Islam has its own explanation..."

Western colonisers of Muslim countries knew the importance of taking Islam out of the minds of Muslims, and achieved this by secularising schools and teaching Islam only in an historic context at the end of the school day when the student's concentration was at its lowest.

Results of this can be seen in many immigrant Muslims in America. When someone suggested to an immigrant sister that she should not let her children watch so much TV, and instead, teach them about their Din (Islamic life), she said that only Allah made people Muslims and she prayed that Allah would make her children Muslims. She honestly didn't understand the concept of educating her children about Islam.

On the internet, a sister raised in a Muslim country was writing about the wonderful freedoms of living in the US.

Some Muslims seem to take the influence of an Islamic atmosphere for granted; azan being called at each prayer time, modestly dressed people, halal food the norm, everyone greeting with salams, lack of crime, availability of Quranic teachers and people treating one another as brothers and sisters in Islam, as being an influence in their upbringing.