I. The Reform That Never Arrives
There is a pattern in the modern history of Islamic education that deserves more scrutiny than it has received. Every generation since the late nineteenth century has produced a reform movement. Every reform movement has promised to reconcile the Islamic intellectual tradition with the demands of modern life. And every reform movement has, within a generation, reproduced the very condition it set out to correct.
The Ottoman Tanzimat reformed the madrasa system and produced graduates who could administer a modern bureaucracy but could no longer read the philosophical texts that had defined Ottoman intellectual life for centuries. Muhammad Abduh’s reforms at al-Azhar introduced modern scientific subjects alongside traditional ones, yet the result was not integration but parallel curricula that rarely spoke to each other. The Islamisation of Knowledge movement of the 1970s and 1980s, led by scholars including Ismail Raji al-Faruqi and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, diagnosed the problem with real precision, yet its institutional legacy has been largely confined to universities that replicate the disciplinary architecture of their Western counterparts with Islamic content layered on top.
The diagnosis that these movements offered was, in most cases, correct. The prescription failed. This essay argues that the failure is not contingent but structural. It arises from a category error that every major reform movement has made, consciously or otherwise: the assumption that Islamic knowledge is a body of content that can be extracted from the tradition that produced it and transferred into institutional forms designed for a different kind of knowledge entirely. The classical Islamic tradition understood something that modern reform has consistently missed: that knowledge and the formation of the person who holds it are not two separate things. They are aspects of a single process. And when you change the process, you change what the knowledge is.
II. Content Versus Formation: The Category Error
The modern university, whether in London, Islamabad, or Kuala Lumpur, operates on a specific model of what knowledge is and how it is transmitted. That model treats knowledge as information: discrete, transferable, assessable, and indifferent to the character of the person who holds it. A competent chemist is a competent chemist regardless of whether she is generous or cruel. A skilled economist is a skilled economist regardless of whether he has ever reflected on the purpose of wealth. The separation of knowledge from character is not an accidental feature of the modern university. It is a foundational commitment, inherited from the Enlightenment’s insistence that facts and values occupy different domains and that only the former can be the proper subject of rigorous inquiry.
This commitment is so deeply embedded in the institutional architecture of modern higher education that it is rarely noticed, let alone questioned. It is encoded in the structure of the degree programme (which assesses knowledge acquisition but not personal formation), in the structure of the academic career (which rewards publication output but not wisdom), and in the structure of the lecture hall (which positions the student as a recipient of information rather than a participant in a formative process).
The Islamic intellectual tradition operated on a different set of assumptions. The Arabic word most commonly translated as “education” in modern usage is tarbiya, which carries connotations of nurture and growth. But the concept that most precisely captures what classical Islamic pedagogy understood itself to be doing is ta’dib: the cultivation of adab, a term that resists translation because it encompasses intellectual discipline, ethical comportment, and the right ordering of things in relation to each other and to their source. As al-Attas argued in a series of influential works beginning in the 1970s, ta’dib is not the transmission of information but the formation of a person who knows how to place things in their proper order, who understands the hierarchy of knowledge and the responsibilities that attend each level of understanding (al-Attas 1980, 27).
This is not a quaint pre-modern ideal. It is a substantive philosophical claim about the nature of knowledge itself: that genuine understanding requires a corresponding formation of the knower, and that knowledge acquired without that formation is not merely incomplete but positively dangerous. > The chemist who can synthesise a compound but has never considered the ethics of its application is not merely an incomplete human being. She is, on the classical account, an incomplete chemist, because she does not understand the place of her knowledge within a larger order of purposes.
The category error of modern Islamic educational reform is to accept the modern model of knowledge as information and then attempt to Islamise the information. The result is institutions that teach Islamic content using pedagogical methods, assessment structures, and institutional hierarchies designed for a kind of knowledge that is fundamentally different from what the Islamic tradition understood knowledge to be. The content changes. The architecture remains. And the architecture determines what kind of knowing is possible within it.
III. The Maqasid Trap
A specific version of this category error has become particularly influential in contemporary Islamic reform discourse. It involves the maqasid al-Sharia, the higher objectives or purposes of Islamic law, a concept developed most systematically by al-Shatibi in the fourteenth century and revived extensively in modern scholarship.
The maqasid framework identifies five essential interests that Islamic law seeks to protect: life, intellect, lineage, wealth, and religion. In its classical formulation, this framework served as a jurisprudential tool for reasoning about cases not explicitly addressed by the primary sources, and for understanding the internal coherence of the legal tradition as a whole. It was a tool of analysis deployed from within the tradition by scholars who inhabited its assumptions and shared its metaphysical commitments.
In its modern deployment, the maqasid framework has increasingly been used for a different purpose: to demonstrate the compatibility of Islamic law with modern liberal values. The logic runs as follows: since Islamic law protects life, it is compatible with human rights frameworks; since it protects intellect, it supports freedom of thought and scientific inquiry; since it protects wealth, it supports market economics. The maqasid, on this reading, function as a translation layer between the Islamic tradition and the liberal international order, proving that Islam already endorses the values that modernity holds dear.
This is what Mohamed Mitiche has called the “maqasid trap”: the use of the tradition’s own conceptual resources to subordinate it to an external standard of legitimacy (Mitiche 2025). The trap operates by reversing the direction of justification. In the classical framework, the maqasid derive their authority from the tradition’s metaphysical commitments: they are purposes ordained by the divine will and discernible through careful jurisprudential reasoning. In the modern deployment, their authority derives from their correspondence with liberal values: they are validated not because the tradition says they are important but because they happen to align with what the modern world already considers important.
The result is a form of reform that Mitiche accurately describes as “apologising in its own language.” The Islamic tradition is made to justify itself in terms that originate elsewhere. Its conceptual resources are mobilised, but the standard against which they are measured is not the tradition’s own understanding of the good. It is the understanding of the good that the Enlightenment tradition has established as the default. The maqasid are used, but they are used as a bridge to someone else’s destination.
A genuinely autonomous Islamic educational philosophy would use the maqasid differently. It would ask not “how do these objectives prove that Islam is compatible with modernity?” but “what do these objectives tell us about what knowledge is for, and how should that purpose shape the institutions in which knowledge is transmitted?” That question leads to ta’dib rather than to translation.
IV. What Ta’dib Actually Requires
If ta’dib is the formation of a person who knows how to place things in their proper order, what does that require institutionally? The question is not abstract. It has specific and demanding implications for how knowledge is organised, how it is transmitted, and how its acquisition is assessed.
The first implication concerns the hierarchy of knowledge. The classical Islamic tradition did not treat all branches of knowledge as equal in rank. The sciences of revelation, including Quranic exegesis, hadith, and jurisprudence, were understood as foundational. The rational sciences, including logic, philosophy, and natural science, were understood as instrumental: powerful tools whose proper use depended on the orientation provided by the foundational sciences. The practical arts, including medicine, engineering, and governance, were understood as applications whose value depended on the purposes they served.
This hierarchy is not a rigid ranking that consigns some disciplines to inferiority. It is an architectural principle: a claim about how different forms of knowledge relate to each other and to the ultimate purpose of human existence. The modern university has replaced this architecture with a flat disciplinary landscape in which each department operates according to its own internal logic and no overarching framework connects them. The result, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued from within the Western tradition itself, is that the university has become an institution that can no longer give a coherent account of why the subjects it teaches belong together in the same institution (MacIntyre 2009, 16).
Ta’dib implies a restoration of architectural coherence: not a return to the specific curriculum of any historical period, but a recovery of the principle that knowledge has an internal order and that the purpose of education is to help the student perceive and inhabit that order.
The second implication concerns the relationship between teacher and student. In the modern university, the teacher is a content provider and the student is a content consumer. The relationship is functional and, in principle, replaceable: any competent lecturer can deliver the same material, and the student’s formation depends on the quality of the information received rather than on the character of the person transmitting it.
The classical Islamic tradition understood this relationship differently. The concept of sanad, the chain of scholarly transmission, is not merely a mechanism for verifying the authenticity of texts. It is a claim about the nature of knowledge itself: that genuine understanding is transmitted person to person, that the character and formation of the teacher are part of what is transmitted, and that the student who learns from a master inherits not just information but a way of knowing. The teacher who has adab transmits adab; the teacher who lacks it transmits its absence, regardless of the accuracy of the content delivered.
This has direct implications for the contemporary crisis of knowledge transmission. The rise of artificial intelligence and large language models has made it possible to deliver information with unprecedented efficiency. A student can now access, in seconds, material that would have required years of study in a classical library. But what artificial intelligence cannot transmit is the formative relationship between teacher and student that the classical tradition understood as the condition for genuine understanding. The information is available. The formation is not.
The distinction is not between old and new, or between traditional and modern. It is between two different accounts of what knowledge is. > If knowledge is information, then artificial intelligence is a revolutionary educational tool and the teacher is an increasingly redundant intermediary. If knowledge is formation, then artificial intelligence is a useful accessory that cannot replace the human relationship at the centre of the educational process, and the teacher’s role is not diminished but clarified.
V. The Autonomous Tradition and Its Conditions
The concept of an “autonomous knowledge tradition,” as developed by Syed Farid Alatas, provides a useful framework for understanding what is at stake (Alatas 2024). An autonomous tradition is not one that refuses engagement with other traditions. It is one that possesses the internal resources and institutional confidence to engage with other traditions from a position of strength rather than dependence. It generates its own problems, develops its own methods, and evaluates its own achievements according to criteria that emerge from within its own intellectual commitments.
Applied to Islamic education, this means that the standard against which an Islamic educational institution should be evaluated is not whether it produces graduates who can compete in the global knowledge economy, though it may well do so. The standard is whether it produces persons who have undergone the formative process that the tradition understands as the condition for genuine knowledge: persons who possess not just competence but adab, not just information but understanding, not just skills but the wisdom to deploy them in service of purposes the tradition recognises as worthy.
This is a demanding standard. It requires institutions that are willing to organise their curricula around the hierarchy of knowledge rather than around the demands of the market. It requires teachers who have themselves undergone the formation they are responsible for transmitting. It requires assessment methods that can evaluate not just what a student knows but who a student is becoming. And it requires a degree of institutional independence from the pressures that currently shape higher education globally: the pressure to publish, the pressure to attract funding, the pressure to produce measurable outcomes that satisfy external metrics of quality.
None of this is impossible. Much of it is already being practised, in various forms, across the Muslim world. The pesantren tradition of Indonesia, the hawza system of Shi’i seminary education, and the surviving madrasa networks of West Africa all represent institutional forms that have maintained significant elements of the formative model across centuries of external pressure. What they have lacked, in many cases, is the theoretical vocabulary to articulate what they are doing in terms that are legible to contemporary intellectual discourse. The concept of ta’dib, understood not as a nostalgic ideal but as a substantive philosophical claim about the nature of knowledge, provides that vocabulary.
VI. Reform from Within, Not Translation from Without
The argument of this essay is not that the Islamic educational tradition needs no reform. It plainly does. Many of its institutional forms have stagnated. Many have become vehicles for rote memorisation rather than genuine understanding. Many have failed to engage with the questions that define contemporary intellectual life, from artificial intelligence to environmental crisis to the nature of consciousness.
But the reform that is needed is a reform from within: a recovery of the tradition’s own deepest commitments and their application to the questions of the present. It is not a translation of Islamic knowledge into the categories of modern Western education, which is what the past century of reform has largely attempted. Translation, in this context, always involves loss: the loss of the formative dimension that makes Islamic knowledge what it is rather than a body of information that happens to come from Islamic sources.
The practical implications are specific. An Islamic university that genuinely practises ta’dib would not begin by asking “what do employers need?” or “what do international rankings measure?” It would begin by asking “what does the tradition understand knowledge to be for, and what kind of person does genuine knowledge require?” The answers to those questions would generate a curriculum, a pedagogy, and an institutional culture that might look quite different from the modern research university, not because it rejects modernity but because it starts from different premises about what education is.
Al-Kindi wrote, in the ninth century, that we ought not to be ashamed of appreciating truth and acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us (al-Kindi 1974, 58). The principle is sound. But it applies in both directions. The truth about education that the Islamic tradition has to offer, that knowledge is inseparable from the formation of the knower and that institutions of learning must be designed to cultivate persons rather than merely to transmit information, is a truth that the modern world needs whether or not it acknowledges the tradition from which it comes. The task of Islamic educational reform is not to translate that truth into someone else’s language. It is to build the institutions in which it can be practised.
Bibliography
al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. 1980. The Concept of Education in Islam: A Framework for an Islamic Philosophy of Education. Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia.
al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub. 1974. Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics: A Translation of Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi’s Treatise on First Philosophy. Translated by Alfred L. Ivry. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Alatas, Syed Farid. 2024. “The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Autonomous Knowledge Tradition.” Sociology Compass 18, no. 8. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13256.
Alatas, Syed Hussein. 1974. “The Captive Mind and Creative Development.” International Social Science Journal 26, no. 4: 691–700.
Lumbard, Joseph E. B. 2024. “Islam and the Challenge of Epistemic Sovereignty.” Religions 15, no. 4: 406. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15040406.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2009. God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Mitiche, Mohamed. 2025. “Critique of Apologetic Reform and the Maqasid Framework.” Unpublished manuscript.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1968. Science and Civilization in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.