Why are you not an ‘Islamic’ School? (An Interview, pt. 2)

Can you clarify, why you are not an ‘Islamic’ School?

We must put to bed the paradox of Islamic schools once and for all. I’m sure he will not remember our chance meeting over a decade ago, nor the impactful words and company he shared with me, but I learned something from Dr. Sherman Jackson one evening over dinner. I was a student of psychology at the time and I asked if we should Islamicize psychology and stuttered explaining how perhaps we could formulate our own therapies using ‘Ghazalian’ precepts. He simply asked why there would be a need to Islamicize anything? Then he turned the question–and me–by saying, just be a Muslim. In other words allow knowledge to exist in its form and move toward it in your form, as a Muslim–period.

So the notion of an Islamic school to me is a used idea that lacks creativity or innovation. We have “Islamicized” schooling when schooling was already the problem. It’s like non-alcoholic beer or working hard to make something permissible or tolerable just because working on ourselves is too hard. This has inhibited innovation (for lack of a better word) in the way we teach children, not just in Muslim communities, but in society at large. Every few years there is a new national approach addressing the same fractures in the education system. Muslim communities should be the vanguards of establishing safe and effective learning models based on the Prophetic and Divine templates we have.

We must focus ourselves and our children on Allah and seeking (all of) His knowledge, not schooling. This begins–without any distraction of educational theory or dogma–by teaching adab. Then focusing on the standard and scared sciences with the Greatest goal in mind. At Sanad Prep we try to focus on education of the inward and outward, and seek the best way to facilitate this–period.

And Allah knows best.

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