The Role of History in Islamic Education

The Role of History in Islamic Education

OUR VISION

The Muis Lecture 2014

A Muslim Community of Excellence that is religiously profound and socially progressive, which thrives in a multi-religious society, secular state and globalised world.

The Muis Lecture Series is organized by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis). It features eminent statesmen, intellectual leaders and thinkers of international standing who will deliver the Muis Lecture on topics relating to Islam and its relationship with the modern world. The Muis Lecture Series will also focus on the new trends in Muslim thoughts and ideas in dealing with change and modernity in the context of changing global challenges of the 21st century.

OUR MISSION

To broaden and deepen the Singapore Muslim Community’s understanding and practice of Islam, while enhancing the well-being of the nation.

The Muis Lecture Series

Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore)

OUR PRIORITY

To set the Islamic Agenda, shape Religious Life and forge the Singapore Muslim Identity.

DR ISMAIL SERAGELDIN Muis Theatrette ¡ Singapore

The Role of History in Islamic Education The Muis Lecture 2014

DR ISMAIL SERAGELDIN

25 March 2014 · Muis Theatrette · Singapore

Hosted by:

Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis)

Organized by:

Muis Academy

Yayasan Mendaki

This publication is a transcription of The Muis Lecture 2014 delivered on Tuesday, 25 March 2014 at The Muis Theatrette, Singapore.

Copyright Š 2014 Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura Published by Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura Designed and Printed by Oxford Graphic Printers Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-981-09-6466-5

Distinguished Dr Ismail Scholar’s Profile Serageldin With thirty-four honorary doctorates and a PhD from Harvard University, Dr Ismail Serageldin is considered a global expert, particularly related to scientific and agricultural development. He was the former Vice President of the World Bank, and is the founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the Library of Alexandria, in Egypt.

Currently, Dr Serageldin also chairs the Boards of Directors for each of the BA’s affiliated research institutes and museums. In addition, he serves as Chair or Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific and international institutions and civil society efforts, including the Advisory Committee of the World Social Science Report for 2013, as well as the UNESCO-supported World Water Scenarios (2013-) and Chairs the Executive Council of the World Digital Library (2010-) and the executive council of the Encyclopedia of Life (2010-) and the ICANN Panel for the review of the internet future (2013-).

Dr Serageldin has published over 60 books and monographs and over 200 papers on a variety of topics including biotechnology, rural development, sustainability, and the value of science to society. He has hosted a cultural programme on television in Egypt (over 130 episodes) and developed a TV Science series in Arabic and English.

He has received the Order of the Rising Sun from Japan and the Legion d’Honneur from France and is a Commandeur of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. In 2013, Dr Serageldin and the BA received the Calouste Gulbenkian International Prize for thoughts and actions that make a decisive contribution to, and have significant impact on understanding, defending and fostering the universal values of respect for diversity and difference, a culture of tolerance and the conservation of the environment. He has also received the Pablo Neruda Medal from Chile, India’s Bajaj Prize for upholding Gandhian values outside India, and was the first recipient of the Grameen Prize for lifelong efforts to fight poverty, and received the “Champion of Youth” award by the World Youth Congress in Canada.

Transcript

The Role of History in Islamic Education

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What are the highlights of the tradition that we would like to bring back? How did the Muslim historians, not the Muslim rulers or jurists, handle the traditions and how should we teach history, today?

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Dr Ismail Serageldin The Muis Lecture 2014

Introduction Thank you Minister, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great privilege to deliver this lecture. There has never been a time when the polarization of feelings has been acute and the stakes for the promotion of a common understanding of the Muslim heritage has been as great, as it is today. Advocates, around the world, of the clash of civilizations, want to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. And in the comfort of the statements of the extremist few, the media amplifies the statements and views, of those who do not want to know better, hence the voices of reason are drowned out in the cacophony of images and messages that preach hatred and destruction. Regretfully, many of the Muslim scholars also contribute into this lack of understanding. They are locked into a particular vision of the past and are torn between a view that cultural authenticity requires that we remain faithful to what our forbearers have produced and history becomes a dead hand on contemporary innovations. There is also the other view, that innovation can come only if we break free from that past and join the contemporary global society, with these, predominantly Western, frameworks of thinking and of values. Today, I would like to reject both these views and argue that proper education for any Muslim must include a proper understanding of history. It is not a rejection of that past but an appreciation of how glorious it was, in its own time. This is, really, the central theme of what I will be saying today.

Yes, we were ahead of the world. Yes, the dark ages, as they were known in Europe, represent the glorious periods of learning, tolerance, in the Islamic World, from Andalucía to the Indian Sub-Continent. However, that was then, and today our context has changed. It would be a mistake, to try imagining that what was done, in those periods, brilliant as they may undeniably be, ought to be what should be done today. The primary matter here is not what the great jurists of that day, such as al-Shafiʿī or Mālik said, but rather, what they would say if they were with us today. It ought to be remembered that they were great innovators and agents of change in their times but their eras were a thousand years ago. Even back then, they acknowledged that change is the only constant and that rulings must be adjusted accordingly and so should perceptions, even within a single lifetime. As such, it is that perception, to acknowledge that change is the only constant, which ought to be the primary framework used in the study of history. For example, Western

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education draws much from Athens of Pericles, the glory that Greece was, without saying that they must follow what Athenians did in their society, 2,500 years ago. Modern day Athens finds much to admire in the thinking and the writings of philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, and so do I, and we Muslims have translated the works of these great thinkers, and we gave them the title of al-Hakeemain, the two wise men. So, what we need is to recognize is that learning from the past, about history, will reap benefits for us, so we should be continuously learning from it. We have a great tradition to be proud of and to reflect on. I submit, our tradition enjoins us to be bold and imaginative in dealing with our contemporary problems, like our predecessors were bold and imaginative in dealing with the problems of their days.

Against this background, I would like to post three questions, which may have been highlighted by the Minister, in his introductory remarks. What are the highlights of the tradition that we would like to bring back? How did the Muslim historians, not the Muslim rulers or jurists, handle the traditions? How should we teach history, today? So, let me say a brief word about each of these three topics and I hope to advance some conclusions.

Lessons from History Let me start that for us, learning about history is essential. First of all, it is important because you cannot really interpret either the Holy Qur’an or the Sunnah (Tradition) of the Prophet, without knowing more about the history of Islam. Thus, this is a good place to start. Secondly, that we have been enjoined, like no other group has ever been enjoined before, to study and to read. The very first word of the Qur’anic revelation was Iqrāʾ (read). In order to read, the Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) told his followers to seek knowledge everywhere, even if it means to go all the way to China, in his day and from his place, considered to be the end of the earth.i He placed, on a very high pedestal, the idea of learning. He even said that the ink of scholars is equal to the blood of martyrs. Nobody has ever enjoined his followers, with such passion, to learn. He liberated any of the Qurashites, who were caught, if they taught Muslims how to read.

There was an enormous push for that. At the same time, this same Prophet, who was divinely inspired, transformed the history of the world, for we are witnesses

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here, fourteen hundreds years later of how he transformed the history of the world. He told his followers “you [the followers] are more knowledgeable about your daily affairs than I am,”ii in the incident of the palm tree pollination, which you all know. So, he encouraged them to read, and encouraged them to think.

If you read through the Qur’an, you are consistently being reminded to look at what others have done, look at the āyāt (signs) of God around you and learn.

The word, ʿilm, and its derivatives appear 880 times in the Holy Qur’an.

Being Bold and Imaginative I am regretful, especially when I hear the discourse of many of the more extreme views, who claim to be Muslims, and still justify the spilling of innocent blood.

The history of early Islam, in the 7th century A.D, is totally contrary to many of the popular myths, especially those that are being propagated, in some circles in the Western media. Let me give two examples of such contradictions, of Islam and peace. Islam was not spread by the sword; rather, it was largely spread by the power of example, in a peaceful manner. Indeed in the thirteen years of the Prophet’s effort to spread the message of Islam, in Mecca, while he was confronting prosecution and maltreatment, he only had a hundred followers. Then, he went to Medina in 622CE when the phase of open struggle began. In Badr, the first battle with the Qurashites, he could have had 300 men, despite being the master of a secure base in Medina, but 6 years of war led to very little. He went to Hudayibiyyah, with two thousand followers, ˙ where he signed a peace treaty with the Qurashites, and the peace treaty was honoured by the Muslims. But the most important thing is that, it brought peace. And it was the Qurashites, two years later, who would break the peace.

Interestingly, during the two years of peace, compared to the thirteen years in Mecca and six years in Medina, Islam spread like wild fire, and when the Qurashites broke the treaty, the Prophet went to Mecca with 10,000 men.

From 300 to 10,000 - it quintupled in two years of peace and what happened when he went to Mecca? As you know, he took it without bloodshed and declared a general amnesty for all.

This is the example we have to learn from our history, not just about conquest, not just about wars but about how not to make wars and how to make peace. As we all know, thereafter, in the next year of peace, all of the Arabia converted.

It was a shaky conversion, I grant you, and the war started shortly thereafter Hurūb al-riddah, an 18 months war. However, the Prophet had died and it was ˙

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his close companions who introduced the systems of the Khilāfah (Caliphate).

There is nothing in Islamic teaching that specifies the system of Khilāfah. It was established in Saqīfah Banī Saʿidah, where 29 people got together and they decided that this is the way that they should go and they named Abu Bakr [alSiddīq] as the first Caliph. On the basis of “let there be consultation between ˙ people in the settlements of their affairs.”iii And the Prophet purposely did not designate the successor, he did not designate a system of governance, he even said, as I mentioned earlier, “you are more aware of how you handle your own affairs.”

I could marshal many more stories on this but one in particular, I would like to cite - after the Caliphate system and after the war of Ridda, what occurred was that Islam became a vast empire that included Iran, part of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. Egypt too had become a part of it. Egypt had been conquered by ʿAmr Ibn al-ʿAˉ s , who, upon finding that everybody ˙ there was a Christian, established a tax, the jizyah, because unlike other conquerors, the Muslims did not destroy the cities they took, they did not force people into slavery, and they did not force them and press them into military service in Muslim armies. They allowed them to resume their lives normally under, what was known as, the ‘civil contract,’ which was given to the Christians of Jerusalem.

When ʿUmar al-khat t ab took the keys of Jerusalem peacefully he promised to ˙˙ give the Christians security and he promised them that they could continue to enjoy their rights and handle their own affairs. But they paid the jizyah, and lived under Muslim protection. So, ʿAmr Ibn al-ʿAˉ s , who was in Egypt, ˙ which was all Christians, had collected a lot of tax. So this was going well and he was happy, but then, two years later people started converting, in droves, to Islam and he, as the governor, said “wait a minute this is not very good.” So he declared a new law, whereby people who decided that they wanted to convert to Islam had to wait for one year, sort of probation, during which they continued to pay tax. In response to this decision, ʿUmar al-khat t ab, sent him one of his typically laconic messages saying, “God send ˙˙ Muhammad to bring bushra [(glad tidings)] to the people, not to be a tax collector. So you are not to look into the hearts of men and decide whether they are converting out of economic necessity or out of interest or out of whatever. Allow them there.”

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I could share many more stories including that Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world today, was converted through trade and not in any other way. But I invite you to read the details of that history and make up your own minds on this point. The reason I emphasise on the attribute of peace and tolerance in Islam, is to remind us today that some people, who claim to be Muslim but go around saying, “He is a kafir (unbeliever);” and instruct us not to deal with non-Muslims, etc., do not have a sound understanding of history.

Our history shows, very simply, that although Islam came out of Arabia within a very short time, the Arabs were a minority of Muslims. Secondly, written in the Holy Qur’an very clearly, there is no difference between an Arab and non-Arab except in taqwā (God-consciousness).

Rule of Law The second thing I would like to say about that history, which we need to dwell on, is not just the pluralism, openness and so on, but the law. The law that it brought, contrary to what people are saying today, was an incredibly progressive law. Shariʿah law, which is the application, by the jurist, of the Principles, as they understood it to be the proper legislation, was incredibly progressive, in its time. Please, let us always remember, in its time. We are not emphasizing what happened a thousand years ago or twelve hundreds years ago, we are instead, highlighting what these people showed they could do, twelve hundreds years ago, compared to what everybody else was doing. That is how we should behave compared to what everybody else is doing today. So Shariʿah is really the application of the revealed principles and rules in the Holy Qur’an, as elaborated by the practice of the Prophet, into the codified system of laws, to govern the transaction of people in a Muslim society. As such, it is a related body of knowledge that has been built, through centuries of interpretations and practice by legal scholars. It is not a single divine law. It is the ijtihād (effort) of lots of individual scholars, over the years. Just like, you look at all the rulings of all the different courts; of different countries and you observe that they make a body of text that is important. It is a source of inspiration for legislation, much as one would argue that ruler’s laws, natural laws, defense and civil codes, could be sources of inspiration for legislation too. There is no reason to exclude the Shariʿah, but it is important to underline that it is an accumulation of opinions and rulings that represent the best judgments and interpretations of mortal men. And one of the greatest of them, Imam Mālik, the founder of the Mālikī

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school of Sunni Jurisprudence, which is applicable in most of North Africa, and West Egypt, who lived in Medina, used to point to the Prophet’s grave and say, “all of us except, he who lies there, are prone to be in error.” He also said “you can challenge me as I can challenge you, all of us, except for the hadith of the Prophet.” So that’s the basis of it.

Secondly, contrary to the contemporary image, the legacy is remarkably progressive and I will cite that we should be very proud of the legislation that was produced, at the time of the early Muslims Caliphate, specifically, by the second Caliph of Islam, ʿUmar al-khat t ab. His philosophy was ˙˙ incredibly progressive for someone who ruled in the seventh century.

He actually ruled from 634AD to 644AD, the first half of the 7th century.

By today’s standards, some of his rulings are still very modern and very challenging, even in the West.

Let me give you an example, here is the remarkable letter, which is my favourite document, where he wrote to Abū Musā al-Ashʿarī that he is appointing him as a judge and he’s telling him what he should do. Firstly, there is to be no pronouncement of a crime or a sanction without a text. He cannot simply decide “you did something wrong so I am going to punish you.” Secondly, the presumption of the innocence, after the preamble of the letter, was declared with a beautiful phrase that says “the burden of proof is on the accuser; and from the accused, only a denial of the oath is required.” Should the accused, having done something, but claimed, “I haven’t done it,” then that is all that is required. You are assumed to be innocent until proven guilty.

This is unbelievable, in the 7th century; look back at the history of jurisprudence, in the Middle Ages, people would use torture to obtain confessions from people. Well, fourteen hundred years, almost thousand years later, during the inquisition in Europe, Galileo stood on trial trembling before the inquisition in 1633. That is exactly a thousand years after ʿUmar’s letter to the Qad ī (judge). A thousand years later Galileo was afraid, he had ˙ no presumption of innocence and they had to recant his observation about the Copernican systems.

However, even more dramatic is ʿUmar’s ruling that evidence gathered illegally is not acceptable as evidence. Modern concept, we all know that, but well, it was there and it says, you cannot break the law in the name of

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maintaining the law. Then, my friends, ʿUmar advised that “justice delayed is justice denied” and he said to the judge, in the letter that “the poor cannot afford to wait and it may be that the rich can afford to wait; but justice delayed is justice denied.”

Regarding confronting the accuser, he said “when somebody brings an accusation, you have to set a time whereby the accused has the right to confront his accuser, in a court of law, in your presence and bring witnesses to his defense.” My friends, we are talking about the state of legal affairs, fourteen hundreds years ago, this is as progressive as it gets.

Then he made many rulings on what was the social security system, of his times. He said “Christians have to receive alms from the social security system, because, after all, they paid tax, so they are entitled to take from it [the social security system].” Furthermore, he even went on to exclude some people who had been recognized to be part of the muʾallafah qulubuhum (new converts, whose hearts had been inclined towards Islam) group. They had been recognized as deserving of alms, by the Quranic scripture itself, by the action of the Prophet, and by the action of Abu Bakr. These are the people who can receive alms from the treasury, the poor, the destitute, etc. and you can buy slaves and set them free, and you can pay the muʾallafah qulubuhum. And it had been done, yet, he banned it and he said “no I’m not going to pay them.” Those around him questioned “how can you do this? It is in the Holy Qur’an, the Prophet practiced it, and so did the first Caliph.”

He said “things have changed.” When was this? Six years after the Prophet’s death. He said things have changed; Islam is now a vast empire governing over. Let those who fear retribution, come and live with us, those who want to wage war, let them wage war. That is a boldness that we need to acquire to deal with contemporary issues by a contemporary reading of our history.

Those people are incredibly bold in confronting new situations, which did not exist before. And what is more, I will cite you a dramatic example from the Prophet himself.

The Prophet himself, in the last year of his life, when he was receiving delegations, in that year that was known as ʿam al-wufūd (the year of the delegations) from all over Arabia. They were converting to Islam and he would accept their conversion and send one of his close companions with them, to teach them Islam. One such delegation came from Yemen and he

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asked Muʿādh Ibn Jabal, one of his close companions, to go back with them to Yemen. Now mind you, this is during the Prophet’s lifetime; it was considered ‘moving’ from what today is Mecca and Madinah, down to Yemen. And he said to Muʿādh “when you will go there, how are you going to rule?” And he said “by the book of God, the Holy Qur’an,” and he said “and if you confront problems that you don’t find the answers to?” He responded “I will follow your example.” And he said “if you don’t find anything in my example.”

He said “I would do my best to think and come up with something and do my best.” And the Prophet responded, “thank God that He has guided you on that path, because that is what you should do.”iv Now, that is not only the Prophet encouraging people to be bold in their thinking, but he is actually saying that just by moving during his lifetime from Hijaz to Yemen, you will confront situations where you will not find, necessarily, an answer, prescribed, already written, in the Holy Qur’an or in the prophetic tradition.

And you are going to have to use your mind in order to arrive by applying the general principles to the specific conditions.

Now I ask you, how is it that we have all these incidents in our history and they are very well-known and very well-documented, yet, we still have people who want to freeze us in an image of the past, that is theirs, and it is not even accurate?

Search for Principles Allow me to give you another example; the word jihad (struggle) and we keep hearing jihadists and takfīriyyīn used to label all those who use terror, supposedly in the name of Islam. Now what is jihad? I pointed out to Westerners in many of my lectures that it has nothing to do with Holy War. Jihad, if it was Holy War, it would be called al-harb al-muqaddasah. Instead, ˙ jihad means struggle. And the first and the most important struggle is jihād al-nafs (struggle against the self), against your animal instinct, against your base instinct, against your desire for revenge, etc.

And the second form of jihad is called al-jihād al-ʾafdal which denotes the struggle it takes to say a word of truth unto an errant power. If you have somebody in power who is errant and you speak the truth to that person that is the best form of jihad. This is a hadith.v And then and only then you come to the question of when do Muslims wage war? Particularly, when there is

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an enjoinder that if there is a slight inclination towards peace, then go unto peace, but if there is a need to fight back then defense is necessary with the observance of the rules.

So when my friends tell me “Aha! You see, there it is! There is a form of jihad which involves war!” I say yes but what does it also say? It sets down the rules for war. You should not attack a non-combatant. You should not cause environmental damage, by saying do not cut the palm tree and do not destroy a well. You cannot set fire to a village. All of that is prescribed.

A Muslim, when he enters into a war of jihad, he has to observe all of these things. And I said to my friends, in the West, and you know what? We did this in the 7th century, and it took you another 1300 years, before you came into the 20 th century, and you passed the Geneva Convention.

The Geneva Convention basically stipulates that just because you are at war, does not mean you can do anything. No, there are acts that we are going to call war crimes. There are acts that are not acceptable. That convention was passed in the 20 th century. That is exactly what the rules of jihad prescribed, since the 7th century, and it was already applied. It was applied by ʿUmar alkhat t ab when he entered Jerusalem, and gave free reign to the Christians ˙˙ who were there. It was applied by Salāh al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī, when, after re˙ ˙ taking Jerusalem, in the battle of Hattin, he gave free pass and safe conduct to Lusignan and wife, Sibela, King of Jerusalem and all the Christians who wanted to leave. In fact, Salāh al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī, was the one who brought the ˙ ˙ Jewish community back into Jerusalem, because when Jerusalem was under the Christian rule, they had kicked the Jews out.

In fact, the following example illustrates the extent to which Muslim rulers cared for the people of the lands they conquered. When ʿUmar al-khat t ab ˙˙ entered Jerusalem, the Patriarch was impressed because ʿUmar told him that he could keep all their churches, but not build new ones, run their own affairs, rule the Christians with their own law, and that only when disagreements arise between the Muslims and the Christians, then Muslim law will apply.

So, the King invited him to pray with him at the church of the Holy Sepulchre.

But ʿUmar al-khat t ab declined. Dismayed, the King asked “don’t we pray to ˙˙ the same God?” ʿUmar said, “Yes, but if I were to pray in the church, I fear that my followers would convert it into a mosque.” So he prayed in an empty lot where today, in Jerusalem stands, the mosque of ʿUmar. Thus, out of

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concern for the Church, ʿUmar al-khat t ab decided to pray at a vacant lot, ˙˙ instead.

The main point of all of this is that, as you study your history, find principles that emerge. Principles, that are about justice, of the presumption of innocence, and about a lot of things, such as, how to treat minorities, how deal with others, how to be open to other communities, how to embrace all those who want to join you, how to go towards peace etc. All of these principles are there. But you also find that these are how others previously applied them, in their own time. The question today is how would we apply these same principles, were we to have the upper hand today? Regretfully I find that some of our behavior is lacking.

Open Your Heart and Mind The second thing about these studies or these examples from ancient history, today, is that this tradition is incredibly open and tolerant. In fact, I gave you the example from the early Islamic period because it was closest to the Prophet and his immediate companions. But we all know the marvelous examples of the golden period, from Andalucía to the India of Akbar of the Moghuls. Andalucía was a marvelous mix of different communities where Jews, Christians and Muslim consorted together, produced great poetry, architecture, science, philosophy and literature. This contrasts sharply with what was imposed thereafter when Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile’s took over in 1478. They launched the Inquisition, which we all know what came out of it, and that was with the approval of Pope Sixtus IV. Furthermore, the Roman Inquisition which was set up by Pope Paul III, and till 1542, it was still going strong almost a hundred years later. In addition, the most famous trial of Galileo took place in 1633; almost a thousand years after ʿUmar alkhat t ab laid the ethical principle of presumption of innocence in his letter ˙˙ to the judge; yet Galileo had to stand and recant that he was wrong in order to save his own life. And instead of being sentenced to death, as his captors had done with Giordano Bruno, who was burnt alive, he spent the last eight years of his life in forced residence.

Now what happened to all these people is totally in contrast with what the Arabs and Muslims did when they encountered Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and science. Indeed, they were the first to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle,

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and referred to them as the two wise men. They took what was needed or what they wanted, in terms of contrasting a philosophy that was suited to their day in Islam - we see that with al-Farābī,vi with al-Kindī vii and with others.

And contrary to the general perception, it was the Muslims who defined the modern scientific method and created the climate of openness and tolerance that allowed science to flourish in the Middle Ages. It is not a surprise that it was not flourishing in the Northern part of the Mediterranean, while it flourished from India to Andalucia, in the southern part of the Mediterranean. It is not an accident. Why? It is because these people from as early as the tenth century, took enormous pride and power and had the liberty to express themselves, had liberty of free speech, which Galileo would not have six centuries later.

About freedom of enquiry and speech, Ibn al-Haythamviii or Alhazen, as he is known in the West said, “he who searches for truth is not he who reviews the works of the ancients - remember this when we are talking about the importance of history in Education - it is the beauty of he who reads science books, if he wants to learn the truth, that he should set himself up as an opponent to all that he looks at, accepting only that which is supported by evidence and logical argument.”ix This was said in the tenth century. Furthermore, he laid down the rules of the modern scientific method by observing the reality, creating hypothesis, doing an experiment and measuring it. And he said we start by observing reality, we try to select the solid unchanging observations that are not affected by how we perceive or measure them. We then proceed by increasing our research and measurements, subjecting premises to criticism and being cautious in drawing conclusions. In all that we do, our purpose should be balanced and not arbitrary. The search for truth is not supported by opinion. This is the modern scientific method, in all its glory, that later on, became framed and made famous by Descartes and Galileo.

Now this is not the only one. By the thirteenth century, you have Ibn al-Nafīs, who was a great medical man who discovered the circulation of the blood.

And he talks about the need to listen and not just tolerate, to listen and engage with the unusual or the contrarian view. What he says, when hearing something unusual is that one ought not to pre-emptively reject it. That would be folly. The Arabic word is ‘taysh’. Indeed, horrible things might turn out to ˙ be true and familiar and praised things might turn out to be lies. Truth is truth unto itself not because many people say it is so. And these are the kind of

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people from our history that we should listen to. That’s why they were able to be open to the mathematics that came from India, added algebra, and passed it on to Europe which became the Arabic numeral that was used in the decimal count after the old medieval European, M , C, V, X, Y, L. So that is what they did.

So now, I want to emphasize something else, the tolerance in that society was general, it was not just for scientists. Contemporary to Ibn al-Haitham, in the tenth century, is a very famous Arabic poet, Abū ʿAlaʾ al-maʿarrī. He lived in Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, Syria and he died in the eleventh century. He was a blind man, but a brilliant grammarian, Arabist and an incredibly talented poet. He was a giant of Arabic literature; he wrote poetry that attacked religion, god, the Prophet Muhammad, all the prophets, all the believers who follow them.

Yet, nobody killed him. Nobody banned his works. They have arrived to us complete since his time. He died a natural death and at most, people would say, at this day, you know he was valuable even if I disagree with his views on religion, but his other works are great.

Where today, do you would find such tolerance? Today we talk about a fatwa against Salman Rushdi for "The Satanic Verses."x Look at how our forbearers were, and what principles they espoused, principles of free speech, presumption of innocence, etc. Then take these principles and apply them to the contemporary situation. This is what we need to do and what we need to hear today. So with our past legacy, we can push for the modernization of our values. So that they become the values of modernization in the 21st century, not only as they were in the 7th through to the 13th century. We need to do more.

Don’t Describe, Analyze Let me move to the next question. I have three questions to tackle. How did the Muslim historians handle that tradition? First and foremost, the study of history started with the study of Sirah, the biography of the Prophet. It starts with the man called Ibn Ishāq, who wrote the Sirah, about a hundred years ˙ after the death of the Prophet and it was picked up again by Ibn Hishām.

Regretfully, the manuscript of Ibn Ishāq does not exist anymore, so all we ˙ have is the detailed version of Ibn Hishām. It is now considered the oldest of the Sirah we have but it was picked up again by al-Tabarī and others. Now, ˙

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Ibn Hishām is said to have grown up in Basrah and then he moved to Egypt ˙ while others narrated that his family descended from Basrah. But either way, ˙ it was in Egypt that he gained a name as a grammarian and a student of language and history. And so his book has become an essential part of a two-part structure that allowed us to deal with history.

The second one was the work of the great Imam al-Bukhārī. And this was on the hadith (oral tradition of the Prophet). The Muslim companions of the Prophet refused to write down the hadith so as not to confuse it with the Holy Qur’an. Even when ʿUmar al-khat t ab was told that if you don’t do it ˙˙ now, others will do it later; he said “let them handle their own problems later I will deal with my decisions now.” And it was important that the Sirah of Ibn Hishām that recounts the entire context provided the context for the hadith. Now these hadith confronted a challenge. There was a lot of presumed hadith, by the time of Imam al-Bukhārī, whose grave I visited next to Bukhara in Uzbekistan.

Imam al-Bukhārī did a major effort in choosing what he considered the right hadith. How did he choose it? He established a system. He didn’t choose because he likes this hadith and reject that hadith. He set a system, we have to be able to proof the lineage of that hadith, where it came from, all the way to ʿAishah (the Prophet’s wife), ʿAlī Ibn Abī Tālib (the Prophet’s nephew ˙ and son-in-law), Abū Hurayrah (the Prophet’s companion), or who ever. We give lesser prominence to ahādīth al-ahād, so if a single person mentioned ˙ ˙ a hadith, it is not as credible, as other ahādith that have multiple sources. He ˙ paid special attention to where there were conflicts. It is pretty much what we do in the modern scientific world. Anyway, when we look at evidence, we accept those experiments that have been validated by more than one laboratory, as opposed to experiments that are claimed by one person only.

And so Imam al-Bukhārī gave us a complimentary work to the Sirah, which is the hadith. These two together, with of course, the Holy Qur’an and the Qur'anic exegesis constitute the base for the religious subjects of Islam. But remember what I said in the beginning, the Prophet said ‘you are more aware of your earthly affairs.’ He invited us to use the principles that we discussed to deal with our own problems.

Now, historians would tell the story in various ways. But first two observations

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must be made at the outset because, I think, how history was told and how it has entered into the minds and the mindset of most Muslims has created problems. Firstly, the oldest most important of the historians were al-Kindī and al-Firdawsī.xi Al-Firdawsī’s work the Shahnameh (The Story of Kings), includes history that goes from the dynasty in Persia which is about 500BC, then the history is cut off, disappears, when Alexander the Great defeats Persia and moves the center of knowledge to Alexanderia. Thereafter, the Shahnameh’s history continues up to the rule of ʿUmar al-khat t ab. And that’s ˙˙ the coverage of al-Firdawsī. It has been looked at as a primary source by many.

As for Ibn al-ʿAsirī xii who lived in Musol, Iraq, he focused on the study of history of the fourth Caliph, who was ʿAlī Ibn Abī Tālib, an extremely ˙ important figure for the Shi’ite. He was the nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet and he was a very learned and abled man, who, in fact, made many statements about learning history. Including one, if I may, Mr Minister, please, since some of our friends cited George Santayana, that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. ʿAlī Ibn Abī Tālib actually ˙ said it 1300 years before Santayana. He said, “study and take heed from studying the experiences of those who preceded you, i.e., study history in order not to become yourselves examples for people who will follow you.”

So, effectively, he said read history or you will be condemned to repeat it.

Many tended to write, what we refer to today not as real histories, but chronicles, like the "Chronicles of Holinshed," of the British Kings, which Shakespeare used as source material for many of his plays. In these chronicles they described events - this happened, and then this happened and then the King died, and another King came and then so on - there are no discussions until you get to a fabulous figure of Ibn Khaldun.

Ibn Khaldun’s Analysis Ibn Khaldun was not only a polymath, but was also a judge, a pioneer in sociology, the founder of urban science, an ambassador, a man of great courage, and he was also a great historian. He was originally born in Tunisia, then lived in Andalucía, Damascus and Alexandria and then moved to Cairo, where he lived his last 22 years. He wrote a book, which has become very famous. It was published in many volumes, of which the introduction

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was known, as the Muqaddimah (The Introduction) has become one of the important works in history. In the Muqaddimah, he discussed why civilizations rose and why they collapsed.

Ibn Khaldun said “it is not enough to tell the story of past kings. It is important for us try to understand what is it they did wrong.” He tried to understand how events were inter-related. Did some rulers mistreat the environment and so their societies were prone to desertification and had to abandon their cities? Did others commit errors of judgment, did others do what? At the end, he brought out one of the most pervasive and powerful forces – that of ʿasabiya (group solidarity) which is the opposite of pluralism. He observed that societies blossomed and flourished when they embraced pluralism.

They get narrower and narrower if they embraced exclusive group solidarity, particularly because, in the end, other tribes will inevitably emerge and be more powerful than their tribe. And will defeat them.

This was the first time that we have a discussion of the meaning of history.

It was not just looking at facts and figures, but actually trying to understand what is it that makes society function. Regretfully this is not what happened to Muslim history and history writers. Ibn Khaldun stands out as a remarkable and unique example.

Then, another scholar, which I would like to cite is al-Farābī. He was a great a philosopher and the founder of Islamic Philosophy. And he was one of those who translated the works of and wrote exegesis about Aristotle and Plato and so on. He wrote that as far as I know the only Utopia, in Muslim history which is called the Virtuous City. My question is why others didn’t follow his example? I mean after all, western literature is filled with Utopia, even with Dystopia. People write about how they imagine the future as being disastrous with environmental collapsed and with nuclear war. We see this all the time, the Dystopia or Utopia about how the future will be either this or that. It is a word that comes from Thomas Morse, early sixteenth century, when he wrote about Utopia. But others fit into that category, too. So why didn’t Muslims try to look forward and imagine what a bright future could be like. After all, these were people who were involved in science who did enormous things to glorify rationality and knowledge.

Why didn’t they do that?

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Let me offer two reasons, one is in al-Farābī's Virtuous city itself, because he discussed basically a template from Plato’s Republic where Plato said we need a philosopher-king for the ideal state that he crafted in the Republic.

Contrary to what people imagine, Plato was not at all for giving the vote to the masses. He was very elitist in his thinking and he said we need a philosopherking. And al-Farābī said we in Islam have had better than Philosopher-king, we have had a divinely inspired leader who was both ruler of Medina and the inspired Prophet of our religion and founder of our religion and culture.

And since that time, Muslims have tended to always look back to the period of Medina and the early companions of al-khulafāʾ al-Rashidīn and they say “this is Utopia. We had Utopia, it existed. We don’t have to invent it.” As a result, they acquired a crack in their neck! Looking backwards, always, whenever they were unhappy with their conditions as they were and they will turn and say “Argh! Look at the time of Prophet at Medina, look at the time of ʿUmar al-khat t ab.” So, instead of looking forward and inventing the future ˙˙ and trying to imagine what sort of instruments we should be designing, they didn’t. They looked to the past and part of that permeated profoundly the fiber of Islamic thought and discussion today.

Teaching History Today: Analysis and Difference of Opinions And so that brings me to my third and final question, how should we teach history in Islamic Education today? I would argue, from what preceded, that we should teach history in two strands. In one strand, we should have a history of Islamic thought, not the chronicles, but thought; to document the kind of arguments that great jurists, the kind of logic that allowed ʿUmar alkhat t ab to change things so radically, six years after the death of the Prophet ˙˙ and got him to say that ‘things have changed.’ We need to focus on that.

In addition, I think we should focus on, another very important aspect that has great relevance to us today, and that is, how differences of opinion were dealt with. Now, differences of opinion were remarkably tolerated in the Muslim world in the heyday that we like to think of as the golden period. They were remarkably well tolerated, even al-Maʾmūn, son of Harūn al-Rāshīd, at the peak of his power, who was supporting the mu'tazli'tes, was opposed by Ibn Hanbal, but all he did to him was put him in jail for awhile. As I said, think ˙ of the comparable period in Europe, at that time - he would have been burnt

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alive immediately. There would have been no trial or anything. So it was a very mild rebuke compared to his time, I don’t mean to say that today you should imprison somebody who doesn’t agree with you. But if you were the all-powerful Caliph that ruled from Morocco to India and from central Asia to Sudan, and somebody disagreed with you and challenged your opinions, putting him in jail for a little while, is not that bad in those days. But the principle is there, so I will apply these two strands to the three issues, I hold as essential for our life in this 21st century.

1. Freedom of Expression Firstly, it’s the freedom of expression. The last few millennia have been a long struggle for the acceptance of human rights, the expansion of the scope of freedom of choice and action. All of which would not have been possible without freedom of expression, which was necessary for people to advance ideas - which are usually not accepted at the beginning, but gradually became accepted. Remember, everything we take for granted was at one point a minority position. It just gradually became a majority position and finally it became widely accepted. So freedom, as much as imagination and boldness, is at the heart of the search for truth and the attainment of knowledge. It is necessary for any viable system of self-governance.

Therefore, mass ignorance is the breeding ground for intolerance and bigotry, which in turn leads to oppression and tyranny, and therefore, we not only have to defend freedom of expression, but we have to practice it in the teaching of Islamic thought.

2. Status of women The second issue that I have to address, because I am ashamed, is about the status of women. I think no issue looms larger on the reform agenda then the status of women. It is the ultimate litmus test for whether the predominantly Muslim societies, not here in Singapore, but the predominantly Muslim and Arab societies have finally made the transition to the twenty-first century.

The short answer is not yet. I was giving the Minister some bad examples of some of the practices that we are witnessing right now. But there are some promising movements here and there and many would say that Islam improved the condition of women, as compared to what existed in preIslamic Arabia. While that is true, it is totally irrelevant. That was then, and

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this is now, and the world has more than caught up with that. In the last two centuries non-Muslims women have, by far, surpassed the prevalent status of women in predominantly Muslim countries. So today, we must recapture the progressive stands that we always had in comparison to the times and move to similarly progressive stand in today’s time; because if we do not, our society will lag behind. The global experience shows that the emerging centrality of women; they are the true vectors of development. There is ample evidence that the key to development lies in the education of girls and the empowerment of women. These are the most important actions that you can take in any society today. Indeed, women’s rights are human rights.

And these must be protected by the rule of law where all are equal before the rule of law and no one is above the law.

And speaking from this podium, as a Muslim man and an Arab man, let me be clear, there is no ‘cultural specificity’ argument that can be tolerated, to justify depriving women of their women’s right, in the name of tradition, or to mutilate girls in the name of custom. And there is more, women are not just the victim of the vectors of oppression or the vectors of change; rather they are the artisan of social capital - that lattice of values that is the glue that holds the society together. It is they who repair the torn fabric of community, in difficult post war conflicts situations. They are the custodians of values, to nurture them in the next generation. However, you must engage all men in this endeavor. Men must not just be made to understand, they must be mobilized. Women issues are society’s issues. And men must be involved.

We need to breathe with two lungs, we need to walk with two legs, and thus we cannot continue to train the women of tomorrow and leave aside the man of the yesterday. We have to change that and it has to be done.

3. Scholarship Now, the last point is on political thinking for the 21st century. A distinguished scholar from Asia said that we have hundreds of Islamic schools and universities that now produce hundreds of thousands of Islamic legal scholars, but hardly any that produce political theorists or philosophers. He goes on to say, that to some rare exception, this intellectual poverty has reduced Islamic thought of the status of medieval legal tradition. I regret to say he is largely correct.

However, a proper reading of that history and the tradition, along the lines of the perspective outlined today, with the principles and the examples I have

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given you, is something that we need. We need to know who we are and where we came from and where we are going. That legacy is the touchstone of our memories and the wellspring of our imagination.

Conclusion And therefore let us teach history in a thematic fashion, one that encourages a lively intercourse of ideas that would enrich the expanding sciences.

Empowered by a proper understanding of where we came from, we stand secure in our own self-knowledge and we are not afraid to criticize ourselves, to criticize our past, and to challenge the future. It’s only by doing this and armed with a greater understanding of history that we will be able to not only honour our past but to celebrate our present and also to invent our future.

Thank you very much.

i

See, Risalah for building a Singapore Muslim Community of Excellence, Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura, 2006: 35

ii

Al-Qazvini, Imam Muhammad bin Yazid Ibn Majah, “The Chapters on Pawning,” in Sunan Ibn Majah, Vol. 3, Book 16, Hadith 2470, http://sunnah.com/urn/1267880 (Last accessed: June 2015) “It was narrated from Simak that he heard Musa bin Talhah bin `Ubaidullah narrating that his father said: “I passed by some palm trees with the Messenger of Allah and he saw some people pollinating the trees. He said: ‘What are these people doing?’ They said: ‘They are taking something from the male part (of the plant) and putting it in the female part.’ He said: ‘I do not think that this will do any good.’ News of that reached them, so they stopped doing it, and their yield declined. News of that reached the Prophet (‫ )ﷺ‬and he said: ‘That was only my thought. If it will do any good, then do it. I am only a human being like you, and what I think may be right or wrong. But When I tell you: “Allah says,” I will never tell lies about Allah.”

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Al-albani, Muhammad Nasiruddin, “The Chapter on Consultation,” in Al-adab al-Mufrad, Book 13, Hadith 258, http://sunnah.com/adab/13/3 (Last accessed: June 2015) “Al-Hasan said, “People never seek advice without being guided to the best possibility available to them.” Then he recited, “and manage their affairs by mutual consultation.””

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As-Sijistani, Imam Abu Dawud Sulayman ibn al-Ash’ath, “The chapter on Struggling for an opinion when passing judgments,” in Sunan Abi Dawud, Book 25 http://sunnah.com/ abudawud/25 (Last accessed: June 2015) Some companions of Mu’adh ibn Jabal said: When the Messenger of Allah (‫ )ﷺ‬intended to send Mu’adh ibn Jabal to the Yemen, he asked: How will you judge when the occasion of deciding a case arises? He replied: I shall judge in accordance with Allah’s Book. He asked: (What will you do) if you do not find any guidance in Allah’s Book? He replied: (I shall act) in accordance with the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (‫)ﷺ‬. He asked: (What will you do) if you do not find any guidance in the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (‫ )ﷺ‬and in Allah’s Book?

He replied: I shall do my best to form an opinion and I shall spare no effort. The Messenger of Allah (‫ )ﷺ‬then patted him on the breast and said: Praise be to Allah Who has helped the messenger of the Messenger of Allah to find something which pleases the Messenger of Allah.”

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v

Abu Dawud; and At-Tirmidhi, “The Book of Miscellany,” in Riyad as-Salihin, Book 1, Hadith 194, http://sunnah.com/riyadussaliheen/1/194 (Last accessed: June 2015) “The Prophet (‫ )ﷺ‬said, “The best type of Jihad (striving in the way of Allah) is speaking a true word in the presence of a tyrant ruler.”

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Netton, Ian Richard, “Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr (c.870–950),” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Leaman, Oliver, Vol. 3, pp 554 – 558, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/alfarabi-abu-nasr-c-870-950 (Last accessed June 2015) “A philosopher, logician and musician, he was also a major political scientist. In the arena of metaphysics he has been designated the ‘Father of Islamic Neoplatonism’, and while he was also saturated with Aristotelianism and certainly deploys the vocabulary of Aristotle, it is this Neoplatonic dimension which dominates much of his corpus. This is apparent in his most famous work, al-Madina al-fadila (The Virtuous City) which, far from being a copy or a clone of Plato’s Republic, is imbued with the Neoplatonic concept of God. Of course, al-Madina al-fadila has undeniable Platonic elements but its theology, as opposed to its politics, places it outside the mainstream of pure Platonism.”

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Kennedy-Day, Kiki, “Al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq (c.866–73)”in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Leaman, Oliver, Vol. 5, pp 250 – 253, https://www.rep.routledge. com/articles/al-kindi-abu-yusuf-ya-qub-ibn-ishaq-d-c-866-73 (Last accessed: June 2015) “AlKindi is notable for his work on philosophical terminology and for developing a vocabulary for philosophical thought in Arabic, although his ideas were superseded by Ibn Sina in the 11th Century. The debate about the allowability of philosophy in terms of orthodox Islam also began with al-Kindi, a battle that is usually considered to have been won for religion by al-Ghazali.”

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Lorch, Richard, “al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham,” in Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2004, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Ibn_al-Haytham.aspx (Last accessed: June 2015) “The Arabian physicist, astronomer, and mathematician al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (ca. 966-1039), or Alhazen, established the theory of vision that prevailed till the 17th century. He also defended a theory of the physical reality of Ptolemy’s planetary models.”

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Sabra, Al., Hogendijk JP, The enterprise of science in Islam: new Perspectives, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, in “Ibn al-Haytham,” New World Encyclopedia, 2014, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ibn_al-Haytham#cite_note-Sabra-40 (Last accessed: June 2015) “Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.”

x

For more information of the controversy that was sparked by the British-Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie, by writing his Satanic Verses, see, http://www.theguardian.com/world/rushdiefatwa. (Last accessed: June 2015)

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Khaleghi-Motlagh, Djalal, “Ferdowsi, Abu’l-Qasem,” in Encyclopedia Iranica, 2012. http:// www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ferdowsi-i (Last accessed: June 2015) Ferdowsi (c. 935 – 10206) was a Persian poet, author of the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”), the Persian national epic, to which he gave a final and enduring form, although It was based on an earlier prose version.

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“Ibn al-Athir,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 2015, http://global.britannica.com/biography/ Ibn-al-Athir (Last Accessed 2015) Ibn al-Athir Abu al-Hasan Ali Izz al-Din (c. 1160 – 1233 – 4) was an Arab Historian, who recorded history as a sequence of military engagements, such as the Mongol invasion of the Islamic Empire. Believed history had both religious and mundane value and that moral lessons could be drawn from it to reform kingdoms. His chief work was a history of the world, al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh (“The Complete History”), starting with the creation of Adam.”

“As you study your history, find principles that emerge.

Principles, that are about justice, of the presumption of innocence, and about a lot of things, such as, how to treat minorities, how deal with others, how to be open to other communities, how to embrace all those who want to join you, how to go towards peace etc. All of these principles are there. But you also find how others previously applied them, in their own time. The question today is how would we apply these same principles, were we to have the upper hand in something today?�

Dr Ismail Serageldin The Muis Lecture 2014

Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information and Minister-incharge of Muslim Affairs greets Mdm Fatma Fathelbab Galal, Egyptian Ambassador to Singapore. Dr Ibrahim chaired the session.

Ms Nurlaila Khalid, the Master of Ceremony, officiates the commencement of the Lecture.

Dr Ismail Serageldin delivers his address

“The primary matter here is not what the great jurists of that day, such as al-Shafi’i’ or Malik said, but rather, what they would say if they were with us today. It ought to be remembered that they were great innovators and agents of change in their times but their eras were a thousand years ago. Even back then, they acknowledged that change is the only constant and that rulings must be adjusted accordingly and so should perceptions, even within a single lifetime.”

Dr Ismail Serageldin, The Muis Lecture 2014

“So when my friends tell me “Aha! You see, there it is! There is a form of jihad which involves war!” I say yes but what does it also say? It sets down the rules for war. You may not attack a non-combatant. You may not even cause environmental damage, by saying do not cut the palm tree and do not destroy a well. You cannot set fire to a village. All of that is prescribed.”

Dr Ismail Serageldin, The Muis Lecture 2014

Members of the audience applaud Dr Serageldin’s address.

The presentation of token of appreciation to Dr Serageldin. From left to right: Mr Abdul Razak Hassan Maricar, CE, Muis; Mdm Tuminah Sapawi, CEO, Yayasan Mendaki; Dr Ismail Serageldin; Mdm Fatma Fathelbab Galal, Egyptian Ambassador to Singapore; Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information and Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs

Dr Farid Al-Atas, Associate Professor, Sociology Department, National University of Singapore.

Dr Michael Hudson, Director, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Mr Jawad Abdullah, Haji Yusof Mosque.

Dr Noor Aisha, Associate Professor and Head of the Malay Studies Department, National University of Singapore, appears on the screen as she shares her thoughts and insights.

Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information and Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs, and chairman of the Muis Lecture 2014, listens to Dr Serageldin as he responds to the comments from the floor.

Questions and Answers Dr Farid Al-Atas, Associate Professor, Sociology Department, National University of Singapore: Dr Serageldin, thank you very much for your presentation. I am very sympathetic to what you said about the need to learn from history. However, my comment and my question has to do with why we have, as a society or civilization today, failed to be inspired by history in the way that you suggested. And my comment is that part of the reason, may have to do with the uncritical way in which we approach history. You mentioned the methodology of the hadith scholars, you rightly pointed out the similarities between, their method and the scientific method. However, Ibn Khaldun was very critical of the hadith method for its excessive reliance on ‘chain of transmission’ and so on. There was not enough emphasis on logic, on whether an event that is reported could have logically taken place or not. What he called the is tilāhāt (impossibilities) of events. In other words, ˙ ˙ he said you have to look at whether events reported could have possibly happened based on our understanding of the nature of human society, on the context and so on. I want to just give an example, you mentioned Ibn Ishāq and the early historical works. Widely accepted by Muslims historians, ˙ you know, the event of the Banu Quraydah, where the Prophet is reported ˙ to have allowed the killing of a few hundreds Jewish men. If we apply the method of Ibn Khaldun as one or two scholars have, one would conclude that those events could not have taken place the way they were reported. We can find many other examples of what is handed down from generation to generation of Muslims, which are very problematic.

For example, it is also reported in the early works that Imam Ibn Hanbal was ˙ very reluctant to accept ʿAlī as the fourth Caliph, but it was much later that he conceded, but you know these kinds of things are not taught, we do not have a critical historical approach to history. It would be very difficult to learn valuable lessons. Ibn Khaldun said that the future resembles the past more than one drop of water resembles another. He also said governments as a rule are unjust. These are very interesting lessons. He was not interested to talk about the ideal state; he wanted to talk about reality as it was. And there you have the lesson about what happens to the states as they rise and decline, the role of corrupt elites, so on and so forth. So if we are not critical towards history, it would be difficult to learn good lessons. So what is your recommendation about not only to introduce history but also to introduce it in a critical manner?

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Dr Serageldin: Well, thank you professor, I agree with you. I did try to say that we should teach history through history of thoughts and ideas and of disagreements in those ideas, because that’s how you learn to become critical.

It is to learn to listen, as Ibn al-Nafīs said "however contrarian the view is, do not reject it out of hand for that would be folly." So let us hear the views that are similar to our own and the contrarian views of people who applied critical thinking. Ibn Khaldun used an example saying this amir (prince) came with hundred thousand men but he was ruling a small principality and the amir, who had a much bigger principality at the time, was only able to marshal only 45,000 men, so how could he possibly marshal 100,000 men? For example, that shows an effort in his day to try to look critically at the history. And it was great in his day. I will come back again to this point.

That was then, this is now. We have now a lot more sources that people did not have before. Just to take it outside of the Muslim world, there was a long discussion between historians about whether or not Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the USA, had had an affair with his slave, Sally Hemings.

Some of her descendants claimed that was true, but the conventional historian denied. Well, now we have DNA evidence; there is something in the descendants of Sally Hemings, which resembles the male chromosome of the Jefferson family. They couldn’t have had this analysis earlier on but now we do. And we should use all the tools at our disposal. We have ways now of checking manuscripts, checking the dates of manuscripts, which didn’t exist before; we could do codicology, it is a whole science in itself that allows you to know whether this is an original manuscript, or has it been tampered with etc. A lot of things could be done. So the short answer is I agree with you fully. We need a critical approach to history and I suggested that by focusing more on learning the battles of ideas and specifically where these agreements occurred, we would be forcing people to think critically rather than simply reciting chronicles of who was the sultan, and who died when and who did what. Because why should anybody learn that? Instead, you have to make your mind think about what you can get out of the past. I fully agree with you. Thank you for your remarks.

Dr Michael Hudson, Director of Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore: I was interested in getting your reaction to the possibility of inverting the title of your lecture. Could you offer a few words about the role of Islamic Education in History and in modern history in particular. I

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was wondering that, in light of the turmoil that has engulfed the Arab world today and certainly including Egypt, whether Islamic historians and Islamic educators, Islamic scholars have a role to play? And whether it had been played properly?

Dr Serageldin: I should have known that Michael Hudson would give me a tough one. Short answer, is no. I don’t think there is a significant body of intellectual thinking that does this, largely because the vast majority of people have been formed in the conventional way. They were trained in the conventional way, their tools are the conventional tools, which decry the noncritical acceptance of authority etc. which I tried to show that Ibn Haytham and Ibn al-Nafīs, in fact, wrote vehemently against, thousand of years ago, in the 11th and 13th century. So, they are still conventional, they accept what is in the earlier books etc. However, you can ask: what are you doing about it?

I can tell you what I am doing about it. I am re-issuing the classics of Islamic thoughts in the last two hundred years, from Muhammad Iqbal to Rifaʿ alTahtawi to Kassim Amin to Khirdina aI-Tunsi to so many others, to Ali Abdul Razak who said the Islamic system was a democracy not a caliphate in 1928 etc. And I have these books re-issued with a modern introduction, under the supervision of many eminent scholars and most of the people who write the introductions are young, in their 40s, most of them have had training in the west, whether in Europe or USA. Their introduction serves to explain who the author is, what the body of work is about, how and where does that particular book fit in the overall body of works, provide a brief summary of the text, discuss the impact it has had and conclude it with a section that says why it is still relevant today.

And then I bring young people, my non-expert panel and I gave them the original text and I say “here is the highlighter,” and these are kids in the end of high school who are about to begin college, and I gave them highlighters and ask them to read the text and mark anywhere that they find difficult.

And then we reproduce the work and we add footnotes, because the Arabic of the 19th century is very difficult for these students. It’s like asking average youngsters to read Shakespeare in old English; they will have difficulties with many words and in understanding the concept. I am hoping to produce over a 100 volumes; so far we have 50, 38 have been produced and are available as books and online. The other 14 are in press, so we’ll have 50 by the end of April 2014.

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Now, that’s an effort to bring back young adults who started, usually, with the primary education in the Muslim countries then travelled abroad pursuing their higher education. They confronted Western thinking, modern methods and so on. We brought them back and produced an amalgam of efforts that I am trying to document again. At least that is the contribution that Library of Alexanderia is doing in that part of the debate of Islamic education. And I am also working closely with the Sheikh of al-Azhar and his advisors. We have a joint panel to think of addressing some of these difficult issues, such as jihad and status of women, etc. They are currently being written in Arabic first and then later, we plan to translate them into English and French.

Mr Jawad Abdullah, Haji Yusof Mosque: I am trying to reconcile what you said earlier about listening and engaging with the unusual views – there are two key words that were said - modernization of our values and freedom of expression came up to me very strongly. While I can tolerate, how do you modernize values that are deeply rooted, taking into consideration that the common person does not apply too much critical thinking when reading the Holy Qur’an and hadiths, as they are not qualified. Are you encouraging them to apply critical thinking and freedom of expression to the Holy texts, on the assumption that everyone is responsible enough to look for the truth? This is problematic, because the truth is, there are three types of truth - my truth, your truth and the real truth and how do we reconcile this?

Dr Serageldin: Let me say two things about that. Firstly, to allow people to say what they think is the tax we pay for the freedom of expression. I allow people to attack me, short of libel laws that may exist somewhere but differences in opinion must be tolerated. That is how the contrarian views get heard. That is what Ibn al-Nafīs was talking about where I cited that he said it would be folly to reject it. He said not only should it be tolerated, but you should also engage with it because it may turn out to be the truth. So as an important part of our heritage and our history, you asked about the modernization of values. Yes, there are lots of values that the Muslim community practices that are, in fact, contrary to the spirit of Islam. There is enormous concern about the families in the upper Egypt, for instance. They have feuds, battles between families, tribalism etc. You have differences of views between the Shi’ites and other Muslims which are leading to blood bath, in the number of countries, as you well know. Now, who on earth, would be able to justify that such practices are part of Islamic values, as properly understood.

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Finally, what happens when people attack such entrenched values? And what they should be? They write mischievous things and so on? So let it be. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, a great philosopher said, “I allowed the confrontation of your rights, his rights in order to arrive at The Right and what is correct. It will only be arrived at, through discussion and evidence and critical thinking and being able to see that.” That is what I mean by the modernization of values and when we do that, they will also be the values of modernization, because modernization is constantly changing. It’s not a state that you arrive at; rather, it is a state of constant evolution.

Since the Minister is in charge of communications, in the last ten years, the world has been transformed. Who would believe how Facebook, in 2004, could have more than a billion people before 2014? Who would believe that there will be six billion mobile phones in the world, convergence between mobile platforms and the Internet? Who would believe that an engineering design could be multiplied by million fold and could still stand robustly as the Internet does or mobile technology does? Our world is changing rapidly and what I am trying to say is that in the medieval period, from the time of Prophet Muhammad, sending somebody from Hejaz to Yemen, he said you would find things in Yemen, which you will not be able to judge by my example, or by what you find in the Holy Qur’an, so you will have to think for yourself, what you should do. ʿUmar al-khat t ab, six years after the death of the Prophet said ˙˙ that, “things have changed.” How about in our rapidly changing world, that we all know about, you want people to still stay locked into what these great scholars said a thousand years ago? I always tell them I don’t care about what they said a thousand years ago. I want to know what Imam al-Shafiʿī would say if he was with us today, because he was a very intelligent, open-minded guy, who upon moving from Baghdad to Cairo, he said that his fatwa has "changed." Yes, it is a different city, different location, so different problem and a different solution. He could see that in his own lifetime, he would be the last to tell us, neither the Prophet (Peace be Upon Him), nor the great scholars nor his companions would tell us to keep frozen in the past.

That’s how we will modernize ourselves. And by adopting these values, these changed values, and not by these mistaken set of values that had been frozen in that image of the past, it is by changing that would we become producers of knowledge, not consumers of technology and that’s what we need to do.

We did it before and we can do it again. And if our brothers in the West

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and Asia have gone ahead of us, so be it. Let us take our place by their side through hardwork and by reapplying principles from the lessons of history to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Dr Noor Aisha, Associate Professor and Head of the Malay Studies Department, National University of Singapore: I think one of the major distinguishing features of the past compared to the present that you raised just now is that there were a lot of diversity of individual thought and judgement especially in the realm of jurisprudence and law. And you said that one of the major challenges that we, contemporary Muslim society are facing today, is the capacity for us to be able to utilize these principles and apply them to the problems we are confronted with today, in our concrete socio-historical context. Do you think that this whole problem has got to do with some kind of institutional ruptures, especially the demise of the waqf institution that supported the class of jurists, who were able to formulate laws and to express them in ways that were very relevant for their times. And today's Islamic education is to a large extent, controlled by governments and centralised systems.

Dr Serageldin: Waqf is an older form of, what we would today call, a trust, or a foundation. And these are instruments that exist in many countries in the west and the east and they can be revived. There is no reason not to think that they could be revived as needed. However, I think it is not the lack of funding for the scholars, it is the inadequacies of the majority of the kind of training they have had. I think, Professor Michael Hudson was right.

The majority had been too uncritical, too conventional, and those who have the capacity, frankly, are intimidated. I mean, if I start saying things, that the majority of my colleagues, with whom I have to live and work every day, would be considered terrible - they will ostracize me. So maybe, I shouldn’t speak up. That is why we should be reminded whether it is by quoting Ibn al-Nafīs or ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī that we need to have debate and confrontation and that is how you advance. Anything less than that, you don't.

I cited to the Minister earlier, a beautiful example of how two of the great Imams of the Sunni Jurisprudence, debated issues that were quite serious yet their debates are reported in conservative chronicles. The amazing thing is that sometimes, you have to bring to people’s attention something that they already know but they don’t realize. One example, there is a famous story

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of ʿUmar al-khat t ab, where at one point of time, he wanted to abolish the ˙˙ dowry. He said, a rich man can pay a big dowry, but a poor man can't. So to be equal, dowry should be abolished altogether. He called upon the Muslims in Medina and they gathered after congregational prayers. According to the narration, as he was presenting his proposal, a lady from the audience said to him “by what right, do you take away the rights that God has given us?” To that, he responded, “this lady is right and I am wrong.” This story is very well documented everywhere even in the most conservative sources. I would like to point out: firstly, for her to say that, she must have been sitting amidst the men. She wasn’t ostracized and put in another building. How else could she have answered ʿUmar al-khat t ab? Secondly, she was not a prominent person ˙˙ in society because had she been, we would have had a name recorded in this narration, but the sources only state a lady. They don’t realise such realities of the past when they talk about absolute segregation. So, when they talk about segregation, I keep asking: but why? I mean, I will not cite one of our neighbourly Kingdoms, where professors speak in an empty auditorium and the girls will be seated in another auditorium and see him via video. We need to change all of that.

Let’s face it, some of these things have to be looked at from a fresh perspective.

I am convinced that we have the capacity and we have rebounded, just as Muslims of an earlier period, and we will rebound from this one too. I am a great believer in youth and the youth are going to transform this society, way beyond what the elders ever dreamt was possible.

Dr Yaacob Ibrahim’s Closing Remarks Well on that note, I would like to close this session and I will not attempt to summarize Dr Ismail’s lecture and his responses but I think it is good for us to think of some of the key points, especially our ability to be critical, not only of the past but also of the present. To be able to reflect further on how those principles can be applied to the current problems that we face today. I think those are some of the key takeaways that we have to reflect on. We should attempt to teach history to the younger and the existing generation, also in a critical way rather than just memorizing the facts. These are some of the things we can reflect together as a community.

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ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS COUNCIL OF SINGAPORE (MUIS) The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis) is a statutory board under the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) and comes under the direct purview of the Minister-incharge of Muslim Affairs. Muis' main role is to advise the Singapore Government on all matters pertaining to Islamic affairs in Singapore and to manage all aspects of religious life of the Singapore Muslim Community.

Its aim is to establish a Muslim community of excellence that is religiously profound and socially progressive, and that thrives in a multi-religious society, secular state and globalised world. Its priority is to set the Islamic Agenda, shape Religious Life and forge a Singapore Muslim Identity, is progressive, inclusive, adaptive and contributive.

It champions forward-looking discourse in Islam and promotes interfaith understanding through community engagement initiatives to enhance the social cohesion and well-being of the nation.

Muis Academy Muis Academy (MA) is the research and education arm of the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore. The Academy aims at building the leadership capabilities of the socio-religious community so as to shape a progressive religious life of the Muslim community. It promotes a deeper understanding and progressive discourse on Islam and Muslim society in the modern society to support the vision of establishing a Muslim Community of Excellence in Singapore.

This is realized through multi-disciplinary courses, workshops, roundtable discussions, seminars and conferences. In addition, the Academy conducts research and publishes commentaries on contemporary issues on religion and discourses on Islam and Muslims in the Modern World.

In addition, the Academy actively engages different sectors of the society, such as religious leaders of all faiths, community leaders and public officers. This is achieved through partnerships with reputable institutes of higher learning locally and internationally.

The Role of History in Islamic Education

OUR VISION

The Muis Lecture 2014

A Muslim Community of Excellence that is religiously profound and socially progressive, which thrives in a multi-religious society, secular state and globalised world.

The Muis Lecture Series is organized by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis). It features eminent statesmen, intellectual leaders and thinkers of international standing who will deliver the Muis Lecture on topics relating to Islam and its relationship with the modern world. The Muis Lecture Series will also focus on the new trends in Muslim thoughts and ideas in dealing with change and modernity in the context of changing global challenges of the 21st century.

OUR MISSION

To broaden and deepen the Singapore Muslim Community’s understanding and practice of Islam, while enhancing the well-being of the nation.

The Muis Lecture Series

Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore)

OUR PRIORITY

To set the Islamic Agenda, shape Religious Life and forge the Singapore Muslim Identity.

DR ISMAIL SERAGELDIN Muis Theatrette ¡ Singapore