Education in Islam
Introduction
Man, in principle and potential, is the Vicar of the Supreme Principle; it is the consequence of the blueprint of his theomorphic essence. Man’s vicegerency is both meta-historical, conforming to the vertical and dynamic pole of Walayah, and historical, anchored in the traditional doctrines traced on a horizontal, regressive time scale. However, for the fallen man, divine nature must be recollected, which is none other than through the participation of man’s Intellect in the ontological qualities of the Divine Intellect. This is precisely what it means to know God. Therefore, Man, firstly by his intelligence in its depth and breadth, and secondly by his relative free will, is able to know the Absolute. Made for the Divine, any endeavour that facilitates the attainment of the perfect geometry of the principles of sacred is considered divine and noble – that which allows such a matrix is only via knowledge – hence, the enterprise of knowledge that makes Man the perfect mirror of the Absolute in Islam and in tradition is considered the most noble and sacred. Consequently, education in Islam is often termed by words such as taʿlīm, tarbiyyah and tazkiyyah. These three terms can be constellated in two binaries, “taʿlīm–tazkiyyah” in the Qurʾān, and “taʿlīm–tarbiyyah” in Islamic tradition as put forth by contemporary Muslim discourse; serving as quintessential for the life of man and his transubstantial journey of being and becoming towards his celestial destination and end.
It is important to take recourse in the Qur’an to see how the triadic idea – taʿlīm, tarbiyyah and tazkiyyah – is presented in the Qur’an. The Qur’an, in its revealed architectonic structure, is not merely an instruction manual in the horizontal, discursive modality that is confined to the empirical, epistemic, cognitive substance and the quantitative aspect of anthropomorphic somatology; rather, it is a particular, constellated, Sacred descent of the Divine who has condescended to reveal to His creation of Himself – which is the very intrinsic essence of the Absolute, to know himself absolutely perfectly, and that means He must know Himself from infinite of infinities of imperfections and that completes the Divine knowledge of himself — The Quran then is the greatest theophany of Islam. In principle and fact, it is the Furq’an, the metaphysical discernment between Truth and falsehood, and the primordial principle of these discernments is the first shahadah. The inner tenor and the profound contents of its quintessential resonance can be found in the following verse:
وَقُلْ جَآءَ ٱلْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ ٱلْبَـٰطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ ٱلْبَـٰطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًۭا
And say, “Truth has come, and falsehood has departed. Indeed is falsehood, [by nature], ever bound to depart.” [17:81]
The Qur’an, with respect to the Divine utterance, discloses the vertical ontology in infinite reverberations to bring forth the soul to its archetypal home in its ascending degrees of Being. It is in this unfolding that taʿlīm, tarbiyyah and tazkiyyah find their quintessential meaning. It is to lead the soul from its tattvastic state to the sattvastic state, from the exiled state of forgetfulness to the final deliverance, the realization of Supreme Identity. In the final analysis, to educate is to initiate, to edify is to re-construct the temple of the soul geometrified with the principles of the Sacred and to learn is to recollect that which was always present in the very recess of one’s being and known to him since the pre-eternal covenant.
Here, we shall quote only but a few multitude of verses of the noble Qur’an that are witness to and a manifestation of this archetypal reality:
رَبَّنَا وَٱبْعَثْ فِيهِمْ رَسُولًۭا مِّنْهُمْ يَتْلُوا۟ عَلَيْهِمْ ءَايَـٰتِكَ وَيُعَلِّمُهُمُ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ وَٱلْحِكْمَةَ وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ ۚ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلْعَزِيزُ ٱلْحَكِيمُ
Our Lord, and send among them a messenger from themselves who will recite to them Your verses and teach them the Book and wisdom and purify them. Indeed, You are the Exalted in Might, the Wise. [2:129]
كَمَآ أَرْسَلْنَا فِيكُمْ رَسُولًۭا مِّنكُمْ يَتْلُوا۟ عَلَيْكُمْ ءَايَـٰتِنَا وَيُزَكِّيكُمْ وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ وَٱلْحِكْمَةَ وَيُعَلِّمُكُم مَّا لَمْ تَكُونُوا۟ تَعْلَمُونَ
Just as We have sent among you a messenger from yourselves reciting to you Our verses and purifying you and teaching you the Book and wisdom and teaching you that which you did not know. [2:151]
لَقَدْ مَنَّ ٱللَّهُ عَلَى ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ إِذْ بَعَثَ فِيهِمْ رَسُولًۭا مِّنْ أَنفُسِهِمْ يَتْلُوا۟ عَلَيْهِمْ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ وَيُعَلِّمُهُمُ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ وَٱلْحِكْمَةَ وَإِن كَانُوا۟ مِن قَبْلُ لَفِى ضَلَـٰلٍۢ مُّبِينٍ
Certainly did Allāh confer [great] favour upon the believers when He sent among them a Messenger from themselves, reciting to them His verses and purifying them and teaching them the Book [i.e., the Qur’ān] and wisdom,1 although they had been before in manifest error. [3:164]
هُوَ ٱلَّذِى بَعَثَ فِى ٱلْأُمِّيِّـۧنَ رَسُولًۭا مِّنْهُمْ يَتْلُوا۟ عَلَيْهِمْ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ وَيُعَلِّمُهُمُ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ وَٱلْحِكْمَةَ وَإِن كَانُوا۟ مِن قَبْلُ لَفِى ضَلَـٰلٍۢ مُّبِينٍۢ
It is He who has sent among the unlettered [Arabs] a Messenger from themselves reciting to them His verses and purifying them and teaching them the Book [i.e., the Qur’ān] and wisdom [i.e., the sunnah] – although they were before in clear error – [62:2]
From these and many other verses it becomes evident that the Prophet(s), as the hierophanic axis between the Heaven and Earth, fulfills the trinitarian function – taʿlīm, tarbiyyah and tazkiyyah not only historically but metahistorically in its archetypal reality. It is by him reciting, purifying and teaching that divine pedagogy flows into the temporal world.
An Etymological Analysis
Before addressing the issue of Islamic education, it is important to have a brief analysis on the three terms, taʿlīm, tazkiyyah and tarbiyah, which will properly orient us as we maneuver through the labyrinth of modern ideas of education put forth by the post-laspsarian man. It would be a great injustice to crystallize a sacred tradition – such as that of Islam – by a profane constellation which is the product of modernity where all sacred ideas have been inverted. Thus, to truly uncover the pristine meanings of such ideas, we must begin with their etymological meanings.
Taʿlīm, derived from the root ʿalima–yaʿlamu, signifies more than the transmission of data; it is the act of initiating consciousness into the order of meaning. To teach, instruct, educate or train is, in its sacred depth, to mark or to inscribe the soul with a sign (ʿalāmah) that orients it toward reality. It is to designate the intellect with a distinctive imprint that awakens it to the presence of Truth (ḥaqq), Being (wujūd), and Objective Reality — not as abstract notions, but as ontological horizons. Taʿlīm is thus theophanic instruction — a process by which the intellectus becomes conscious of its celestial homeland. It initiates awareness, not as abstract cognition, but as presence to meaning — a phenomenological opening to that which lies beyond sensory perception. To receive taʿlīm is to behold, in the imaginal vision, the mountain peak of Truth gleaming in the distance, while simultaneously being given a symbolic topography — the path traced in the soul — toward that summit. It is the first illumination of the hermeneutic journey, the moment the hidden Face of the Real casts its light into the darkness of ignorance and sets the traveller upon the sirr al-sayr — the inner path of ascent.
Tazkiyyah, derived from the root zakā–yazkū, which means to grow, increase, purify; to implement justice, righteousness, goodness. It is a process of ontological cultivation — a process of the centrifugation of the soul as it is refined and expanded, ready to begin its alchemical elevation oriented toward its telos in the divine order whereby it gets illuminated by the light of its origin. On a deeper psychological level, tazkiyyah pertains to compound awareness, such that one does not exclusively reside on the plane of cognition; rather, the spherical intensity of his consciousness allows him to permeate his degrees of cognition into varying degrees of conation in an indefinite dimension. The intersection of such a cognition and a conation produces a volition of the highest order carrying the soul to its celestial archetype. We must bare in mind that tazkiyyah is not possible without ʿishq — it is in this meta-moment that the soul perceives its hierohistory such that its inner divine guide residing in the orient of his heart moves eros to phila and finally to agape, impelling the seeker to act, to ascend, to narrow the gap between the self and the radiant peak glimpsed from afar.
The term tarbiyyah is etymologically rooted in several Arabic roots — rabā–yarbū, meaning to increase, exceed, breed, cultivate or raise; rabiya–yarba, meaning to grow, to come up, grow taller or longer, or to magnify; and rabba–yarubbu, meaning to be a master or lord, to possess, control or command, and to raise, rear, foster or perfect something through care and cultivation. According to Rāghib, tarbiyyah is the gradual and continuous transformation of a thing until it reaches the end it deserves. Similarly, Bayḍāwī describes tarbiyyah as the incremental perfection and value-giving to anything. Tarbiyyah, in its deepest ontological sense, is a process of inner theurgy — a hierohistory of the soul’s ascent. A self-disclosure of the divine lordship (rubūbiyyah) unfolding within the hidden recesses of being by which the divine pedagogue, the murabbī, exercises a sacred function akin to that of the Perfect Man (al-Insān al-Kāmil), guiding the mutarabbī — the soul in potentia — toward its ontological telos, its entelechy. The unio sympathetica between the murabbī and mutarabbī unfolds a pre-eternal archetypal blueprint inscribed in the meta-cosmic space, that presupposes the nostalgia for the encounter with the Divine, and thus it directs with complete fidelity towards the recovery of man’s full theophanic nature. In the final analysis, it is an anamnesis, a remembering of the soul’s pre-eternal image.
The problem that remains now is how one should translate these ideas from the Arabic language to its English counterpart, whereby the Idea remains immortalised such that it is not subject to any distortions. Here the two words that we will analyze are education and edification.
To apprehend the etymological structure of the term education one must commence from its verbal root educate[1]; a lexeme that first emerges in the mid-15th century issuing from the Latin educaten, primordially conveyed as the idea “to bring up” or “to train,” particularly in reference to children. It is derived from educatus, the past participle of educare — “to bring up, rear, educate” — which itself serves as an echo of educere, a verb with an initiatic resonance signifying “to bring out” or “to lead forth,” composed of ex- (“out”) and ducere (“to lead”). In its metaphysical sense, education evokes a metahistorical exodus that plays out the sacred art of psychagogy, the guiding of the soul in its vertical pilgrimage. To educate is to lead out — to draw the soul from the hereunder, the realm of the sensory and the particular, toward the hereafter, the domain of the archetypes and the universal. While educere in its older usage may have referred more to the bodily nurture or support of a child, educare became more frequently associated with the cultivation and the awakening of the noetic faculties. Thus, education in its fullest sense is not merely the transfer of knowledge but the soul’s exodus from the cave of shadows toward the light of truth — such that the seeker, led by the light of the intellectus, rediscovers the secret of his own divine image.
The etymology of the word edification[2] is from the Old French edificacion meaning “a building, construction, edification, a good example” and which is directly taken from the latin aedification (nominative aedificatio) meaning “construction, the process of building; a building, an edifice.” Thus, in the mid-14th century it was used in the religious sense meaning “building up of the soul.” To further elucidate the notion of edification with a more profound intensity, we commence by investigating the etymological and internal matrix of two words that is composed of namely edifice and facere. The term edifice, first attested in English during the late 14th century, originates from the Latin aedificium, meaning a building or structure, which itself has its provenance in aedificare — a verb connoting an act “to erect, to build,” with its lexical foundation in aedis (a variant of aedes), meaning “temple” or “sanctuary” — which is a single space without any partitions, divisions, fissures, fracturing primordially emblematic of “a place with a hearth.” Synthesized in conjunction with the form facere, “to make” or “to do,” the term evokes not merely a profane architectonic geometry activity, but an archetypal resonance that is imbued with the breath of the Sacred. The Divine energy of poiesis – a sacred praxis of making, creating, crafting, fashioning a theophanic locus is infused with the hierophantic presence.
In its sacred deployment within the Christian geometry in particular, the Greek term oikodomē, used in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 14), in a hermeneutical meaning signifies the intrinsic, sanctified, spiritual architectonic matrix of the soul and the communal corpus mysticum of the church – an ecclesial body consecrated and suffused with theophanic plenitude. To edify is a process described as the transubstantive motion of the human soul in his journey of being and becoming. It is a gradual, measured and intentional ascent and elevation of faith, character and inner being, transfiguring the human soul into temenus vivified by the breath of the Sacred. It is the inner purgatio – an alchemical purification by fire that incinerates the distorted gnarled egoic substance, psychic resistance and the luciferean intelligence which allows the microcosmic temple to not only possess a structural integrity; rather, it radiates with a luminous intensity.
Bringing this meditation to a terminus, one can conclude the ternary words – taʿlīm, tarbiyyah and tazkiyyah strongly resonate with the binary Education-Edification and in the final analysis, education in its etymological sense and proper meaning from one perspective is valid and operative in addressing the ternary.
Islam and Education
On account of the aforementioned analysis, it becomes evident that Islam and education are not mutually exclusive entities such that the two are reconciled in a syncretic manner, but that Islam is the education – the hierophanic pedagogy of the divine directed towards the theomorphic being of man in the proper sense of the word.
وَعَلَّمَ ءَادَمَ ٱلْأَسْمَآءَ كُلَّهَا
And we taught Adam all the names [2:31]
Islam in its primordial essence is the hierophanic encounter between The Supreme Principle and Man. To speak of the Supreme Principle is to evoke the idea of the Absolute qua Absolute. Envisaged, neither as Dues Absconditia that is beyond all names in His Supreme Darkness nor as He has epiphanized within a particular geometry, but inasmuch as the Supreme Darkness fractures his internal black light into the infinite of infinities – theophanic reverberation that is metahistorical – thus insofar as He is what He is and unveils by His nature. To speak of Man is not to evoke the idea of the post-lapsarian creature awaiting redemption vis-a-vis a historical, horizontal phenomenon, but man as a theomorphic being. Man is intelligence par excellence insofar he is capable of conceiving of the Absolute and is endowed with a will that has the power to orient itself towards the Absolute. Stated otherwise, Man heralds the ideas “theomorphism,” “transcendent intelligence” and “free will;” and thus appears a priori as a bi-unity receptacle made to receive the theophanic effusion of the Absolute. Islam, a specific constellation of the Truth, descends to permeate this ontological vessel, first with a doctrine of the metaphysical truth of the Supreme Principle and secondly with a law of the Supreme Principle – former attuning to the vertical pole, the noetic light of the intelligence and the latter resonating with the horizontal axis, the volitive motion of the soul towards its celestial archetype.
It is with this regard we say that the Islamic educational matrix pertains to the unio sympathetica of sacred pedagogy and spiritual anthropology, such that it prepares the ground for man’s union with higher dimensions of the cosmos, the metacosmos and ultimately with the Absolute. Thus, the goal of Islamic education is the very goal of Islam; that is, the spiritual perfecting of man – the making of the perfect mirror of the Divine, serving as the vicegerent of the Absolute; that is, the raison d’etre for his creation. In other words, the realisation of Reality and his final deliverance to that of the Supreme Identity. The methodology of it is via the cultivation and perfecting of the Intellect. Now, it must be added as a caveat that man is so made that his intelligence has no effective value unless it be combined with a virtuous character. Besides, no virtuous man is altogether deprived of intelligence; while the intellectual capacity of an intelligent man has no value except through truth. Intelligence and virtue are in conformity with their reason for being only through their supernatural contents or archetypes; thus, man is not fully human unless he transcends himself – for this, he must know himself. Nevertheless, it does not overlook the corporeal dimension of man, for it is in the corporeal domain that man must begin his journey vis-a-vis transubstantial motion and in the final analysis transmigrate and transform, becoming the Transcendent Man.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/educate
[2] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=edification