The journey of the idea of the Islamic University

On our last day in Bangladesh, at the center of the Bangladesh Institute of Islamic Thought (BIIT), headed by Dr. Abdul Aziz, we had the chance to receive an extremely illuminating briefing on the idea of the Islamic university and the work being carried out in this direction. Ever since I wrote my master's thesis at METU some 35 years ago on the state of the Faculties of Theology in Türkiye and the idea of the Islamic university, my eyes have been open and my ears pricked on this subject. What was said during the meeting did not leave our minds only in Dhaka on the way back; it carried us to Istanbul, even to the very heart of Istanbul.

Because sometimes the story of an idea is hidden not in the texts that tell it but in the place chosen for it. The building, campus or city allocated to a university is the shortest but strongest manifesto written about that institution itself. What it aims at, what memory it draws on and with what claim it walks toward the future is often told by the place before words.

When thinking of the Türkiye International Islamic Science and Technology University (TİBÜ), revived last December by presidential decree, this was the first thing that caught my attention. In Istanbul, which for centuries was one of the political and scholarly centers of the Islamic world, the place chosen for the university was no ordinary choice. This site, which sets the silent thousand-five-hundred-year witness of Hagia Sophia and the splendor of Sultanahmet directly opposite it, was a declaration of an idea speaking, as it were, in the language of stones. What is wanted here is not merely to found a new university; it is also to build a new bridge between the memory of Islamic civilization and the horizon of future science and technology.

On Istanbul's historic peninsula, rising between layers of civilization stretching from Byzantium to the Ottomans on one side and the knowledge and technology challenges of the modern world on the other, this university makes one feel, at first glance, that it is more than an educational institution. The place itself recalls the great question the Islamic world has long been seeking: how can we produce the knowledge of the future while preserving the accumulation of the past?

The invisible bond between the Islamic university experience we listened to in Bangladesh and TİBÜ, sprouting anew in the heart of Istanbul, appears precisely here. What confronts us here is not merely an attempt to found a university; it is the manifestation of a quest to rebuild the Islamic world's conception of knowledge, civilization and the future.

In our conversation with the university's rector, the esteemed Prof. Dr. Mehmet Görmez, we learned with joy that the matter is seen not only as a new institution of higher education but also as the present-day new link of an intellectual quest spanning more than half a century.

In fact, to understand this university correctly, one must consider it not only in the context of higher education reforms in Türkiye but within the historical adventure of the idea of the "Islamic university" that has developed in the Islamic world since the 1970s.

Today many people, when they say "Islamic university," imagine an institution heavy on theology. Yet the emergence of this idea was, on the contrary, based on an effort to bring modern sciences and the Islamic worldview together again. The real matter was not teaching the religious sciences but rethinking the production of modern knowledge within an Islamic civilizational perspective.

THE POST-COLONIAL CRISIS

The most important reality of the Muslim countries that were thought to have gained their political independence in the mid-twentieth century also determined their fate: even political independence had been obtained only nominally, and its most important manifestation was that their education systems still carried the mentality of the colonial period.

In Türkiye, until 1950, in a strange and radical vise of secularism, all the paths of even basic Islamic education, let alone higher Islamic education, had been closed. The situation began to change only after the fifties, as democratic life was entered, but even in the best conditions the idea of an Islamic University remained a very intellectual luxury.

In many countries, on the other hand, two separate education systems lived side by side. On one side there were madrasas and traditional Islamic educational institutions, on the other Western-style secular schools. This produced not only an institutional separation but also a mental division.

On one side, elites were being raised who mastered modern sciences but became alienated from their own civilizational accumulation; on the other, segments with a strong religious formation but distant from contemporary scientific developments were emerging.

Many thinkers of the Islamic world had realized that this duality was unsustainable in the long run

MECCA 1977: A HISTORIC TURNING POINT

One of the most important milestones of this quest was the First World Conference on Muslim Education held in Mecca between March 31 and April 8, 1977. 313 academics and thinkers from 40 countries took part in the conference; about 150 papers were presented.

From Türkiye, too, Sabahattin Zaim, Nevzat Yalçıntaş, Salih Tuğ, Ali Şafak, Osman Öztürk and Nahit Dinçer, among the important names of the time, took part in the conference.

The basic question of the Mecca Conference was this:

How can Muslim societies preserve their own civilizational identity while producing modern science and technology?

The organizers of the conference argued that at the core of the fundamental crisis experienced by the Muslim world lay the matter of education. According to them, while the West's scientific and technological progress was being imitated, its secular worldview had also been imported unawares. As a result, a cultural and mental fragmentation had emerged in Muslim societies.

For this reason the conference set three basic goals:

1. To set out the basic principles of the Islamic conception of education,

2. To discuss how these principles would be applied to education systems,

3. To develop international cooperation among Muslim academics.

THE ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

One of the things that makes the Mecca Conference important is that the idea of the "Islamization of Knowledge," which would later be much debated, took shape there.

At the conference, the Malaysian thinker Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas and the Palestinian thinker Ismail Raji al-Faruqi were the prominent names. Although in the following years they would develop two different approaches, both set out from the same question:

Is modern knowledge really neutral? Are scientific theories, the social sciences, economics, politics or models of education completely neutral, or are they products of a particular worldview?

The answer given to this question was negative. According to them, modern knowledge had largely been shaped within the West's historical experience and carried secular assumptions. Therefore the task of Muslims was not to reject modern knowledge but to reevaluate it critically.

Today this idea can be interpreted in different ways. But the real aim was not to bring an alternative dogmatism to scientific production but to make visible the philosophical presuppositions behind knowledge.

THE UNIVERSITY QUESTION

One of the most concrete results of the Mecca Conference was that new university projects came onto the agenda.

After the conference, the idea of founding international Islamic universities under the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation gained strength. Different models emerged in countries such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda and Niger.

In particular, the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), founded in 1983, was regarded as the most successful implementation of this idea.

IIUM's aim was not merely to provide theological education. While offering education in fields such as engineering, medicine, law, economics, political science and the social sciences, it also tried to preserve the Islamic civilizational perspective. For this reason IIUM was designed not as a "religion university" but as a "civilization university."

In fact, this is the basic question that stands before the new university being founded in Türkiye today: will the new institution be merely an international university attracting students from the Islamic world, or will it carry the claim of developing a new paradigm in knowledge production?

The answer to this question will determine the university's historical importance.

WHY WAS TÜRKİYE LATE?

The interesting point is that Türkiye was not left outside these debates. On the contrary, Turkish academics were among the active participants of the 1977 Mecca Conference. In the following years, however, no institutional counterpart of this idea was formed in Türkiye.

There were various reasons for this. On the one hand Türkiye's experience of secularism, on the other the centralized structure of the higher education system after 1980, made it difficult for these debates developing in the Islamic world to be carried onto an institutional ground in Türkiye.

In the end, nothing like the experiences that emerged in Malaysia, Pakistan or Bangladesh took place in Türkiye.

Today, in this respect, the founding of TİBU means not merely the opening of a new university but that a debate that began in Mecca nearly half a century ago has finally found an institutional counterpart in Türkiye.

But the real question will begin after this: is it possible to rethink science and technology from an Islamic civilizational perspective?

Or will this idea remain merely a beautiful ideal?

Let us continue in our next column, but before doing so I would like to warn that the idea of the Islamic University already contains within it science, technology and all the necessary sciences. That is why I think the words "science and technology" are redundant in this name.