WHAT MAKES AN ISLAMIC SCHOOL ISLAMIC? ::: DEVELOPING THE CURRICULUM

WHAT MAKES
AN ISLAMIC SCHOOL
ISLAMIC?

:::
 DEVELOPING THE CURRICULUM

[A paper presented by B. Aisha Lemu at the National Conference of NAMIS (Nigerian Association of Model Islamic Schools) in Ibadan, 4th/5th April 2003.]

Schools are places where knowledge is imparted. But what knowledge? Knowledge simply means "things that are known". There is no way that all things that are known can be taught to students in primary and secondary schools, or even in universities.

Therefore there has to be selection of knowledge. To establish a school curriculum, groups of experts over the years have identified various fields of knowledge which are given names like languages, maths, history, physics, art, technology, literature, geography and so on.

Over the centuries and in different civilizations the curriculum in schools has changed. These changes reflected not only the knowledge that was available at the time, but also what a particular civilization at a particular time thought was important for the next generation. That is to say, the curriculum reflected its values. For example in ancient China the imperial examinations for recruitment into the civil service focused on philosophical essays and poetry, with the idea that Government administrators should be scholars, aesthetes and cultivated gentlemen. In ancient Greece the curriculum included music, whose harmonies were seen to be related to mathematics. In the England of my youth, we were automatically taught Latin, the language of the Romans. Even though it is a long-dead language, exposure to the logic of its grammar and to its literature was considered to be an essential civilizing intellectual experience, and until well into the twentieth century every "educated" person including those holding high rank in the civil service would have been taught Latin and possibly also ancient Greek.

These subjects were in the 20th Century largely displaced by the scientific and technological subjects that have come to dominate our modem world.

The status of religious education has also drastically changed. In medieval Europe as in much of the Muslim world religious studies were heavily weighted in the Curriculum. Later, during the European Colonial rule religion was a core subject in Christian schools all over the world. In many parts of the Muslim world today there are still Madrassahs or Qur'anic Schools which focus on religious education exclusively.

We who are engaged in the establishment of Islamic Model Schools in the 21st Century should not therefore neglect intensive thought and productive debate on what we should be teaching our children that will equip them to think and live as Muslims fully engaged with our contemporary world.

The question is how to do this? For many people, an Islamic Model School is a school exclusively for Muslims with an all-Muslim staff, where the Qur'an, Islamic Studies and Arabic are all taught alongside the National Curriculum. The School uniform and the school assembly conform with Islamic norms. We then call it an "Islamic" school and hope that we are turning out authentic Muslims.

There is no doubt that the widespread movement for Islamic Schools and Islamiyyah Schools is a big step forward. If we do not control our children's education we lose control of our future as a Muslim community. Many of the Model Islamic Schools are doing very well and producing good results in academics and Islamic knowledge as well as good behaviour of their students.

This is certainly an improvement on what prevails nowadays in Government Schools. However this cannot be regarded as the summit of our aspirations, for several reasons.

Firstly, due to shortage of financial commitment and competent manpower resources among Muslims in Nigeria, the great majority of Islamic Model Schools are at Nursery/Primary level. We should not forget that it is at secondary level that most students start religious questioning and may or may not develop serious religious interest and commitment. There is a need for academic research on what happens to the products of the Islamic primary schools when they go on to secular secondary schools and universities. Does their Islamic primary school education influence their later attitudes and way of thinking? If so in what ways?

Secondly, is it sufficient just to teach so-called "secular subjects" and so-called "religious subjects" under one roof and call it "Islamic education" without a serious attempt to develop a clear relationship between the two - that is, an Islamic perspective on modem knowledge, and a modem perspective on our understanding of the divine message?

At the secondary level there is enormous scope for this process -particularly in boarding schools where students may be involved in co-curricular activities in the evenings and at weekends.

New Horizons College, Minna, was established by the Islamic Education Trust in 1994, and for the first 7 years it functioned as a dual system school - that is, modem subjects and Islamic subjects taught under the same roof.

What follows is a case study of how over the past two years we have been trying to integrate aspects of the curriculum in an effort to develop a holistic approach to knowledge.

I shall therefore take it as a kind of Case Study of how we are approaching the issue of Curriculum, which is the topic of this paper.

::: New Horizons College: A Case Study

Our starting point is to recognize that we in Nigeria, as a former colonized country, tend still to be very imitative. Changes in education in the Western world take place and within a few years we follow, without really analyzing the benefits and losses of such a change. "Western" means "advanced" and of course we all want to be "advanced".

Secondly, throughout the Muslim world, Islamic education itself has been, so to speak, self-imitative for centuries. A teacher is expected to teach what he was taught, using the same methods by which he was taught. Hence it is extremely difficult to get most Islamic Studies and Arabic teachers to look at any textbook other than the textbook from which they learned, or to consider any change in the method which might speed up the pupils' learning.

Therefore people running schools, and especially Islamic Schools, tend not to think beyond the boundaries of their own experience or look for solutions by examining the problems from broader perspectives.

As an example of this I have put as an appendix to this paper a copy of the 9-dot problem, with which some of you may be familiar. (I request you to wait until after this presentation before attempting it.)
The point is to show that we allow ourselves to be mentally confined by boundaries that do not really exist.

Perhaps we should therefore not focus so much on the curriculum as on what do we want to be the outcomes of our curriculum, and then find the ways to achieve those outcomes, which may be innovative and experimental. In this way we may build up our own curriculum for Model Islamic Schools.

New Horizons College was the great challenge for us and it was from the time we started admitting boarders, 2,5 years ago, that we began to take a fresh look at the concept of a Model Islamic School, and to go beyond just teaching two unrelated educational curricula under the same roof.

When you have boarders on your premises 24 hours a day for 36 weeks of the year it soon becomes apparent that the children of well-to-do Muslim parents today are often exposed to all kinds of influences, modem and traditional, some of them very harmful, and that many suffer from parental neglect and undesirable peer group pressure. Some parents transfer their children into Islamic boarding schools precisely because they have gone off the rails and are out of control - even to the extent of taking drugs.

Therefore unless we can change their way of thinking and make an impact on their perceptions, we shall not be able to achieve the outcomes we desire, and our students will be just like any other students in Nigeria except that they know some Arabic and perhaps can recite the Qur'an a little better than others.

This is a serious issue, which those establishing Islamic Schools have to address.

Therefore in our own case we set up an Islamic Orientation Board composed of key individuals within the school and the IET to consider the question: "What makes an Islamic School Islamic?" Is it just a name or does that name actually describe something that is going on in the school?

In the broadest sense the formal and informal curriculum includes everything that a student is expected to experience at school, both in and out of class.

Therefore we examined the entire school environment and experience, from early morning until night to identify what needed to be done to promote Islamic manners, morals and understanding, including personal relationships between staff and staff, between staff and students and between students among themselves.

We looked into the disciplinary system to lay more emphasis on counseling and recognition of good behaviour rather than on punishment.

We looked into the motivation and development of staff so as to encourage them to become role models for the students. We encouraged team games and inter house activities to develop team spirit. We encouraged many clubs an societies to develop the children's practical skills and talents. We used the mosque not only for prayers but for all forms of nasiha and enlightenment by the students as well as staff and invited outsiders.

Then we looked at the aspect of the formal curriculum. How feasible is it to "Islamise" the teaching of the National Curriculum subjects such as English, Maths, the Sciences, the Social Sciences, Technical and Vocational subjects? And what do we really mean by "Islamizing" knowledge? Knowledge is surely knowledge - if it is true knowledge it is automatically "Islamic".

Therefore, apart from the massive problems of "Islamizing" the syllabus and the textbooks and the teacher training and orientation, the question arises "Is all this necessary?"

It seems to me that we do not have any quarrel with most of the factual component of the National Curriculum. It is more a matter of "what do you deduce from this information?" "How does this relate to other things that I know or believe as a Muslim?"

In other words we want students to develop Islamic perspectives on knowledge, we want them to perceive "Allah's signs in the universe" in whatever they may be studying - whether it be Geography or Physics or Food and Nutrition.

Therefore while it would be ideal for all teachers to be able to stimulate "Conceptual Transformation of Knowledge" as applied to their subjects in the classroom, we cannot depend on that for a number of reasons relating to way the modem universities teach and chum out graduates who have memorized handouts but have not been taught how to think.

::: Islamic Perspectives:

We have therefore found it productive to introduce a separate subject called "Islamic Perspectives". This subject is taught by people who may or may not be regular full-time members of staff, but who have actually understood the approach. Such teachers must have broad knowledge of the arts and sciences, up-to-date knowledge of the modem world, and a sympathetic understanding of the students' existing ways of thinking (in other words it should generally not be the Islamic Studies teacher!). Islamic Perspectives is the meeting place of the Qur'an with so-called secular knowledge. The person teaching it must have thought deeply about this and integrated them in his own mind.

The task of the teacher is to expose the students to various books, video cassettes or concepts which stimulate their thinking and relate these to what we understand from the Qur'an. The lesson will therefore include a lot of discussion, because we are not just focusing on the factual information but also on its;
interpretation and understanding in relation to other knowledge and in the light of the divine revelation.

When you have helped the student to internalize these Islamic insights you are on the way to developing young people who think and feel and act like Muslims. This is because you .are teaching the method of Conceptual. Transformation of Knowledge (CTK) based on which the students can themselves apply it to any knowledge which they are taught, whether in school or later at university. It is a kind of inoculation against the secular approach. One might call it "Do it yourself CTK".

The materials to be used in this process may vary as we change them
whenever something better appears. At present we are using the following books and cassettes.
JSS 1: Islamic Manners and Social Conduct (Lemu, Orire and Rodrigo) IET Publications.
JSS 2: Wonders of Allah's Creation (Harun Yahya) Ta Ha Publishers, London.
JSS 3: Steps on the Right Path (Selected Hadith on the Moral Teachings of Islam) (edited by Lemu and Dolley - IET Publications). To this we plan shortly to add a new book of Selected Qur'anic passages in English translation entitled "Getting the Message".
SSS 1: For Men of Understanding (Harun Yahya) Ta Ha Publishers, London.
SSS 2/3: Islam the Natural Way (Abdulwahid Hamed) MELS, London
Video Cassettes: Any of the cassettes on aspects of Science by Harun Yahya. The Global Environment (BBC Video Series) Legacy (ITV Series on great civilizations of the past and their intellectual and moral legacies.) Empire of Faith (USA) on the Civilization of Islam The Trials of Life (David Attenborough, BBC) and other programmes by the same presenter on Animal and Plant behaviour.

::: Train-the-Trainers Course in Da’wah and Dialogue:

We also concluded that every student who graduates from our school should be able to convey the message of Islam to others (Muslims or non-Muslims) and to be skilled and confident in dialogue with non-Muslims in particular.

Therefore for 2 years (SSS1 and SSS2) the students have one period a week of training in this subject. They learn comparative religion, how to deal with misconceptions about Islam, how to handle areas of disagreement among Muslims, how to present Islam, public speaking and individual dialogue.

Since it is a Train-the-Trainers Course, students are required to learn and practice teaching others - which greatly helps them to remember the material and topics they cover.

::: Arabic and Qur'anic Arabic:

When we started the school we naturally taught Arabic language to all students in the expectation that they would all study it for 6 years and take it as a WAEC/SSCE subject.

Unfortunately, the university people who drew up the Arabic syllabus for 6-3-3-4 made it suitable only for students of specialist Arabic institutions, by including a large component of Arabic Literature, which cannot be covered in the time available in the regular secondary schools which can only allow 3 periods a week for Arabic.

A year ago we conducted a workshop on this problem with NATAIS (Nigerian Association of Teachers of Arabic and Islamic Studies) but it seems they are not ready to make a move to popularize the subject by cutting down the literature component.

This is disappointing as students do not want to register for a subject in which they have little chance of getting credits in SSCE. We have therefore had to drop it for science students in senior classes and make it compulsory for Arts students only up to SSS 2. However, students are taking a greater interest with the recent provision of an Arabic Language Laboratory and Arabic Club.

However in order to ensure that every student is helped in the reading and understanding of the Qur'an, we have the following subjects for the whole 6 years:

Qur'anic Arabic and understanding the meaning of the Qur'an

Qur'an: Reading, Recitation with Tajwid and Memorization (with regular competitions).


Since the latter is time-consuming it cannot all be done during the regular teaching periods. Therefore boarders do it in the mosque after Subh prayers and 3 ;times a week in the evenings, while parents of day students are asked to ensure their children cover the same syllabus with home tuition or local Islamiyyah schools.

::: Subject Weighting

If we add together the number of periods per week given to the Islamic related subjects (Islamic Studies, Islamic Perspectives, Arabic, Qur'anic Arabic, Da'wah and Dialogue and the Qur'an with Tajwid) it comes to about ten, out of 38 periods per week - that is just over one-third. To this, should be added the time spent on Qur'anic reading and recitation after Subh prayers and before Maghrib about 3 days a week.

Yet in spite of this time taken out of the so-called secular curriculum the students are getting among the best results in the country in their WAEC and NECO exams.

Social Interaction between boys and girls:
When we established the school we would have preferred it to be single sex, but we felt it would be unfair to offer our style of education to boys only or girls only, therefore we took both. However for both social and academic reasons we decided to divide our school block into 2 sections, for boys and girls, but with shared laboratories, computer center etc. Likewise we have separate hostels for boys and girls, and boys and girls do afternoon games on alternate days.

However, we have other activities where the boys and girls participate together, such as clubs and societies, debates, quizzes and so on. We take into account that in the adult world in Nigeria, including the universities, there is no gender segregation, therefore, it is important for both boys and girls to learn to interact in a sensible and responsible manner in an Islamic environment as training for later life.

::: Non-Muslim Teachers:

There is also the question of employing non-Muslim teachers in a Muslim school. Some people are totally opposed to this idea but this is not our view, based on 9 years of experience of employing teachers of various nationalities and religions on condition that they do not in any way undermine our objectives as an Islamic school. The employment of non-Muslim teachers was initially based on the need to find the best teachers available, who in some cases are non-Muslims.( However some of our Christian teachers have shown greater dedication and loyalty than many others, and set standards for young Muslim teachers to emulate. Secondly, we recognize that we live in a multi-religious society and a multi-religious world, where we live and work together with non-Muslims. There is therefore no point in isolating our students from non-Muslims and creating barriers instead of developing inter-religious co-operation and trust. This is based on our teachers' understanding that we are an Islamic school and wish all teachers to uphold and promote its Islamic moral ethos. We raise this issue in the teachers' job interviews and we have not had problems with it.

::: Conclusion:

This paper has covered most of the key areas of our experience in developing an Islamically-oriented secondary school.

Of course there are many other models for an Islamic school, and some proprietors may choose different areas of emphasis and formulate different policies. This is entirely healthy as it gives each school the chance to test its ideas and approaches, evaluate the outcomes, and change or fine-tune them in the light of experience.

Some people urge standardization of the curriculum in Islamic schools, but I think this is premature and should be entirely voluntary. There is nothing to stop private Islamic schools meeting to discuss curriculum and policies with a view to sharing ideas, exchanging materials and learning from one another. But we are developing a very new approach to education which draws its inspiration from the challenges of the Qur'an and relates them to modem knowledge and the realities of our situation today. We need more thinkers and educationists to be free to continue the search for the best practice and to test their ideas against realities.

This process is now being encouraged at international level by an organization called IBERR (International Board for Educational Research and Resources) headed by Br. Yusuf Islam with an Advisory Board drawn from the U.K., USA, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Malaysia, Kuwait and the-United Arab Emirates (UAE). It has done a lot of work to bring the ideas of Islamization of Knowledge formulated over the past 25 years into the practical realm of curricula, textbooks and guidelines for all the stakeholders in Islamic Schools: proprietors. Boards of Governors, Principals, Teachers and parents.

Meanwhile, NAMIS is playing a very important role in bringing together the hundreds of Islamic Model Schools all over Nigeria to exchange ideas and materials and to benefit from each others' experience as our own contribution to the worldwide movement for the development of an Islamically-based educational system.

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