Into a Traditional Islamic Education

By Maymona

Since my arrival in Fes I've imagined what it would be like to enter al-Qarawiyine university. Al-Qarawiyine is why Fes is called medinat l-'ilm: 'the city of knowledge'.  Constructed 1200 years ago, it was, for centuries, a great center of learning for scholars, mainly Muslim but also Jewish, from Islamic Spain, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Its prominence has declined in the past 100 years, but it is still home to a vibrant community of Islamic scholars.

Al-Qarawiyine has an imposing presence in the Old Fes. Physically it is huge. It is one of the city's largest landmarks, something you notice most when forced to navigate around its perimeter, dodging donkeys and hustlers along the way. Culturally, you notice its impact in how Fessis speak. Unlike most Moroccans, native Fessis, and especially those who live in the old Medina, converse readily in Classical Arabic, the language of Islam. Their speech emphasizes the already prominent sense of religiosity that permeates the medina's alleyways. All of this emanates from Al-Qarawiyine and its centuries of religious tradition.

As a student of Islam, I couldn't help but be drawn to such a place. The image of me sitting at the foot of some great Islamic scholar, in a halqa or study circle, frequently entered my mind this year. The experience of a traditional Islamic education appealed to me, knowing that it was something I couldn't get in America. Additionally, it would give me a new and very rich understanding of Islam, the study of which I hope to make a lifelong pursuit. So I ask a friend of mine with experience studying at al-Qarawiyine to explain exactly what a traditional Islamic education would entail.

Niaz, now living in Turkey, was an English teacher at the American center in Fes and had lived in the Old Medina for a little over 5 years. Along with teaching English, Niaz pursued studies in the classical Islamic tradition with Sheikhs in and around Fes.

One day I met with him to talk about his studies. He explained to my that in Morocco, Islamic scholars follow a particular curriculum that starts with Arabic language study and moves along to different areas of specialization, just as religious law or speculative theology. As he said, "the first step is Arabic, which is the miftah u'lum ad-din, or the key to the religious sciences. Without Arabic you have nothing."

Working within the Islamic tradition requires absolute mastery of Arabic. As a religious scholar you interpret the Qu'ran, Islam's holy text, which is written in Arabic and believed to be the word of God. In order to understand this word to the extent they are able, scholars first study books on grammar, syntax, rhetoric and logic.

Mastery of these subjects prepare yourself to understand all of the more specialized subjects. Quranic commentary and Islamic law are based on linguistics and logic. Without a solid foundation in Arabic, you can't engage with the Islamic intellectual tradition. How do you ensure mastery? Memorization.

"Your time with the sheikh is spent listening to him explain the parts the text you're working on," Niaz explained, "and then you go home and memorize it. Once you memorize a complete text you move on to its commentary, and you follow that progression: learning, understanding and then memorizing."

Memorization is looked down upon in America's education system. We try to create 'independent thinkers' and 'critical thinkers' and the we perceive 'rote memorization' as impeding these goals. If you memorize, you're not thinking and you end up merely reproducing the information you've learned rather than synthesizing it into new, fresh ideas. I witnessed this firsthand in my classroom this year. My students could repeat the previous week's lecture word for word. But when asked a critical thinking question or given a task that required them to synthesize information, they struggled immensely. The Islamic ideal falls somewhere in between.

Notice how Niaz described the learning process: "learning, understanding and then memorizing." An Islamic scholar is not expect to merely reproduce what he's learned, he's expected to apply that knowledge to new and unique intellectual situations. Memorization only comes after you understand what you're learning and how to use it. That information is then internalized so that it can be more quickly synthesized with other information, external or internal, to respond to a given intellectual situation.  The Islamic scholar has the potential to be a synthesizer and critical thinker because of, not despite, his reliance on memorized information.

There's something romantic about becoming this kind of intellectual: an unmediated world of information available to you at all times. No dependence on books or computers; information and ideas fused to your very being.

Technology has made an indelible impression on our relationship with information. Are the changes it has wrought necessarily good? Am I the only person who feels ashamed by my dependence on a calculator or on Google to give me the text of the Gettysburg Address? Can I truly participate in an intellectual culture if I have to look up its fundamental and most influential ideas online or in a reference book? Does that make me an independent thinker?

Needless to say, Niaz had me hooked.

Muslims believe that certain people have the gift of light from God, a certain special charisma that not only enraptures ordinary people but also guides them towards or along the straight path. Of everyone I know, Niaz has that light. It was he who helped a friend of mine convert to Islam, and it was he who helped me decide to stay in Morocc to pursue a traditional Islamic education.

The Call to Prayer: How Time Moves You in Morocco

The adhan, or call to prayer, is a unique facet of life in a Muslim country. In the Fes medina, where there's always a mosque around the corner, the adhan is unavoidable.

At home or in the streets at prayer time you hear a soft hum in the distance that crescendos steadily until a hearty "Allahu Akbar" blares from the nearest minaret. At first it is disarming, especially to Westerners unaccustomed to or unaware of prayer's central role in Islam. But after a few days or weeks, it, like everything else in Morocco, it assimilates into your life and you either respect it as an expression of Muslim piety, scorn it as an unwelcome early morning wake up call, or simply ignore it.

The call to prayer preludes each of the daily prayers that are included among the 'pillars' of Islam. There are five in total spread throughout the day: fajr occurs in the early morning before sunrise, dhuhur at midday, 'asr in the mid-afternoon, maghrib at sunset, and 'isha at night. The call is recited by a muezzin, literally an 'announcer', who traditionally would shout the adhan from the top of his mosque's minaret or in the streets. Today, most mosques are equipped with loud speakers.

In traditional Muslim societies, prayer times used to demarcate the different phases of the day. The phrase 'ba'd dhuhur' in classical Arabic translates to the English word 'afternoon', and literally means 'after dhuhur prayer'. In this sense, the 'afternoon' did not begin until dhuhur prayer was performed. The classical Arabic word for 'dinner' shares its root with 'isha, the last prayer of the day. Remnants of this influence on daily life can still be seen in the old medina. During the week, many shops close between dhuhur and 'asr prayers, and on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, a vast majority of businesses are closed as Moroccans take the afternoon off after their communal dhuhur prayers.

In many ways, this role of the adhan represents a different psychology about time, and our relationship to it. Last night at dinner my roommates, our guests and I had a conversation about the differences between religious time and the secular time. My roommate Chris explained how in the 19th century, governments in Europe began to use churches to signal the official beginnings and ends of the workday.

In that period, church bells were the most effective means of communicating information, especially in the agrarian countryside where farms and farmers were scattered over miles. Before these initiatives, churches used their bells for purely religious purposes, signaling religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter, as well as the hours for daily prayers. Much like prayer in Islam, Christian prayers determined the pace of daily life. By secularizing church bells, these governments not only stripped them of their sacred functions but also initiated a shift in the human relationship with time.

The key issue here is control.

Who controls time? In the religious sense, God controls it. When time is sacred, it cannot be controlled by people because then it ceases to be sacred. As a result, time is something we must obey. During Ramadan, Muslims cannot eat or drink between the pre-dawn (fajr) and sunset (maghrib) prayers. Because Islam uses a lunar calendar, this means that some years Ramadan falls during winter, and others it falls in the summer. The length of the Ramadan fast may be longer or shorter from year to year, but the rules do not change.

By secularizing time, people gained control over it. A day's length was standardized; the length of an eight hour work day does not change depending on the season. To regulate something is to control it. People now 'made' time instead of yielding to it.

I think we can see the influence of these points of view when we compare cultural conceptions of time in Morocco and the United States. In Morocco, time is view neither as rigid nor controllable. People arrive at their appointments when they arrive. Shops open when they open and close when they close. This morning I asked my dairy guy when he will have cheese. He said, "we'll have it when the cheese guys make it."

In the United States, and other Western countries, most people view time differently. Because we control time we possess it, and so we can 'make use' of it. If you do not 'make use' of 'your' time then you are 'wasting it.' We emphasize punctuality as well, so that we don't 'waste' the time of our friends or colleagues. If we are busy we can always 'make' time to see someone. And we mustn't let time 'slip away.'

At dinner, one of our guests asked Chris and I if we thought the adhan would ever change to announce secular time just as church bells had changed two centuries ago. We both said no. As Chris pointed out, it's easier to appropriate an object like a bell and change it's purpose than it is to change the purpose of a whole class of people. Additionally, I said that I didn't think such a shift could be justified in a Muslim context.

Thinking more broadly, the secularization of time has broad cosmological implications. If man controls time then he, to some extent, controls the universe. Or he at least considers the universe to be controllable (I think contemporary views about science's potential to tame nature are sufficient evidence of this point). To a Muslim, God controls the universe, and anything otherwise is unacceptable. That's not to say that Islam and rationalism are mutually exclusive, but rationalism to the point of replacing God with man is.

I can't imagine the Fes medina without the traditional adhan. If it were to change, and the blaring "Allahu Akbar" were to change to a cacophonous "It's now 12:00pm", it would lose all of it's meaning. What was once a rich symbol of Morocco's religious heritage and maintenance of tradition, would, essentially, become a talking clock.