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Muslim Ethos Within Muslim Schools

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Islamic Schooling in the West

Abstract

This chapter looks at the ‘culture of managerialism’ that many claim pervades the contemporary educational sphere. The non-materialist and iconoclastic nature of the Muslim dynamic is at odds with such managerial paradigms. Nonetheless, this culture has been deeply absorbed into the contemporary Muslim educational discourse and even the theology of Islam itself, leaving modern Muslim education counterproductive in the Foucauldian sense. It is contended here that in standardising and commodifying, the bureaucratisation of education requires the reifying of concepts such as ‘school ethos’ to be employed for marketing purposes. This work examines these issues and the implications these may have for the ethos within Muslim schools, followed by options afforded by classical thought.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ulrike Schuerkens, Global Forces and Local Life-Worlds: Social Transformations (London: Sage, 2004).

  2. 2.

    Robert Locke and John C. Spender, Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance (London: Zed Books, 2011).

  3. 3.

    George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996).

  4. 4.

    Ibid., xvii.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 21.

  6. 6.

    Thomas Kilkauer, Managerialism – A Critique of an Ideology (London: Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2013).

  7. 7.

    John W. Drane, The McDonaldization of the Church: Spirituality, Creativity, and the Future of the Church (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2000).

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 45.

  9. 9.

    Wilfrid Cantwell-Smith, Traditional Religions and Modern Culture in Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 51.

  10. 10.

    Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (London: Harper Collins, 2000), xi.

  11. 11.

    Elizabeth Oldfield et al., More than an Educated Guess: Assessing the Evidence on Faith Schools (London: Theos, 2013), 46.

  12. 12.

    Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), and also see Niall Livingstone, “Writing Politics: Isocrates’ Rhetoric of Philosophy”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (2007).

  13. 13.

    Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. William David Ross (Ontario: Batoche Books, 1999), 13.

  14. 14.

    Padraig Hogan, “The Question of Ethos within Schools”, The Furrow 35, no. 11 (1984): 695.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Caitlin Donnelley, “In Pursuit of School Ethos”, British Journal of Educational Studies 48, no. 2 (2000).

  17. 17.

    Oldfield et al., 46.

  18. 18.

    Donnelley, 2000.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 150.

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    Ibn Abbas Rundi, Sharh al-hikam al-`Atā’iyya, The Guiding Helper Foundation, 2004 [cited 29 December 2016]. Available at: http://www.filosofiaorientalecomparativa.it/foc15/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Hikam-of-Ibn-Ata-Allah-commentary-by-ibn-Abbad-in-English.pdf.

  22. 22.

    James Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down – The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Canada: Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers, 1992).

  23. 23.

    John Holt, How Children Learn (New York: Pitman Publishing Company, 1967).

  24. 24.

    Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2000).

  25. 25.

    Oldfield et al., 40.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 11.

  27. 27.

    Brian Boyd, “Scottish Schools: An Ethos of Achievement”, The Phi Beta Kappon 79, no. 3 (1997).

  28. 28.

    Deci et al., “Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education: Reconsidered Once Again”, Review of Educational Research 71, no. 1 (2001): 3.

  29. 29.

    Terence McLaughlin, “The Educative Importance of Ethos”, British Journal of Educational Studies 53, no. 3 (2005).

  30. 30.

    Ian Thomson, “Heidegger on Ontological Education, or How We Are”, in Heidegger, Education and Modernity, ed. Michael A. Peters (Oxford: Roman & Littlefield, 2002), 218.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 124.

  32. 32.

    Abdullah Trevathan, “Spirituality in Muslim Education”, in Philosophies of Islamic Education – Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses, ed. Mujadad Zaman and Nadeem Memon (New York and London: Routledge, 2016).

  33. 33.

    Donnelley, “In Pursuit of School Ethos”, 152.

  34. 34.

    Oldfield et al., 44.

  35. 35.

    American Philosophical Association, ‘Philosophy in the Education of Teachers’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1959, 63, http://docslide.net/download/link/guidelines-for-accreditation-of-education-component-of-teacher.

  36. 36.

    Tom Sherrington, “Building a Trust Culture: It’s not all hugs”, Teacherhead, 2012, http://headguruteacher.com/2012/11/19/building-a-trust-culture-its-not-all-hugs/ [cited 24 September 2016].

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Plato, The dialogues of Plato, vol. 1, trans. Into English with analyses and introductions by B. Jowett, M. A. in Five Volumes, 3rd edition revised and corrected (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 485: 276d. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/111 [cited 11 November 2016].

  39. 39.

    Mohammed A. al-Jabri, Arab-Islamic Philosophy—A Contemporary Critique, trans. A. Abbasi (Austin: University of Texas, 1999), 55.

  40. 40.

    Qur’an 42:11.

  41. 41.

    Qur’an 50:16.

  42. 42.

    Qadi ‘Iyad: 1992: 79.

  43. 43.

    Malik ibn Anas, Al-Muwattah of Imam Malik, trans. A. Bewley (Norwich: Diwan Press, 2014).

  44. 44.

    Robert Bly, The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

  45. 45.

    Qur’an 4, 50.

  46. 46.

    Qur’an 34.

  47. 47.

    F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88.

  48. 48.

    Abdal Karim Ibn Ataīlah, Sufi Aphorisms – Kitab al-Hikma, trans. V. Danner and Brill Publishers (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1978), 37.

  49. 49.

    Yannis Toussulis, Sufism and the Way of Blame (Wheaton: Quest Books, 2011).

  50. 50.

    Jong et al., “Malamatiyya”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs, 2012. Accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0643.

  51. 51.

    Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Penguin, 1985).

  52. 52.

    Dale F. Eickelman, “The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 4 (1978): 86.

  53. 53.

    Cantwell-Smith, Traditional Religious and Modern Culture in Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, 11 and also see Carl W. Ernst, Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (Charleston: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 63.

  54. 54.

    Abdal Karim Ibn Atā’illāh, The Hikam of Ibn ‘Ata’llah, trans. Aisha Bewley. [Online] 2011, http://bewley.vitualave.net/hikam.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Green School of Benguerir, Benguerir, Morocco

    Abdullah Trevathan

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  1. Abdullah Trevathan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Mohamad Abdalla

  2. University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Dylan Chown

  3. University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Muhammad Abdullah

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Trevathan, A. (2018). Muslim Ethos Within Muslim Schools. In: Abdalla, M., Chown, D., Abdullah, M. (eds) Islamic Schooling in the West. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73612-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73612-9_7

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