Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

Islamic education has a tradition that is formed around the principles and teachings of the main sources of Islam and blended with the historical experience of Muslims. The Islamic education tradition, which has both a static and dynamic structure like every tradition, has been formed as a result of filtering from a wide range of religious, intellectual, and cultural accumulations whose core part has not changed and whose shell is constantly renewed. Thus, the Islamic education tradition continued its journey into the future as a tradition that contains different epistemological and pedagogical theories in its unique way. To benefit from the rich legacy of Islamic education, one should deal with it comprehensively in terms of education. Undoubtedly, the issues of “knowledge” should be among the most prominent subjects of these studies.
The subject of this paper is to discuss the knowledge production, sharing(learning-teaching), and circulation culture of Islamic education in terms of quality. The main question of this paper is: "What kind of culture dominated the Islamic tradition of education in terms of the production, sharing, and circulation of knowledge". It aims to discuss the educational value of the knowledge culture of Islamic education in some respects through the examples selected via the document analysis method. While realizing this purpose, it will discuss some negative claims about the Islamic education tradition. The aforementioned claims, namely, Islamic education is dogmatic, stereotyping, based on memorization, and external authority-centered.
While responding to these claims, the fact that there are important differences between theories and practices in Islamic education has not been overlooked, although the theoretical framework in which Islamic education is fed has been taken into consideration. Based on the idea that it will be the subject of a different study, in this article, reference is not made to the main sources from which the Islamic education tradition is fed, namely the Quran and the Sunnah. The mainframe of reference of the study is often limited to the literature on the traditional structure and practices of Islamic education.
At the end of the research, it has been seen that according to the data in the literature, the culture of learning, dominant in the Islamic education tradition is neither compatible with strict dogmatism and uniformity nor it is based only on knowledge transfer. It is found that evaluating knowledge by discussing and approaching information critically is encouraged in this culture. Depending on the preference of different curricula and sources according to geography, time, and other conditions, it is seen, the circulating knowledge also differs occasionally. The fact that education changes in structural and behavioral dimensions both in different geographies of the Islamic world and the same Muslim society indicates that the claim of "uniformity" or "stereotyping" cannot be justified for Islamic education. Although memorization occupies an important place in Islamic education, it has never been seen as a form of mechanical learning based on the transmission of knowledge and separated from the act of understanding. Prioritizing the memorization activity does not indicate that this tradition has a rote learning approach. In addition, within this tradition, "multidisciplinary specialization" appears to have been common. Specialization in different disciplines before the main discipline of expertise would save Muslim scholars, to an important extent, from the limitation of producing knowledge in the framework of a single discipline. Moreover, according to the findings of the research, it can be said that the culture of learning formed around the concepts of "scientific dignity" and "academic freedom" in Islamic education prevents the arbitrary interventions of political and epistemic authorities in the production and circulation of knowledge.
The knowledge/information culture of the Islamic education tradition has important outputs that will contribute to our current understanding of education and its practices. These outputs can shed light on solving some of the problems of Muslims regarding education. To overcome the incompatibilities and crises experienced by Muslims in the face of contemporary education, studies should be conducted that evaluate different aspects of the Islamic education tradition from different perspectives.