Islam identifies happiness with a moral attainment as well as a fulfillment of human capacities— a self-fulfillment helmed by the faculty of understanding, of distinguishing between right and wrong. The Qur’an asserts that human success and prosperity depends on himself, “truly he succeeds that purifies the Soul, and he fails that corrupts it”(Al-Shams (91): 9-10). There…
Happiness, being the objective sought by each and everybody, lies at the center of the ethical issues. As mentioned by V. J. McGill, author of The Idea of Happiness, in such a moral framework, a good man is one who works to attain happiness or to further it, in the most…
Crass materialism and anti-intellectualism which manifest in any society betray the following fact: that the emphasis of its imbalance educational system is simply on the physical, material and quantitative aspects of man. In Islam, the objective of education emphasizes rather on the mind and soul, which define and refer to the reality of human being.…
William Godwin, a renown English political philosopher, once declared that man’s “moral improvements will keep pace with his intellectual” progress, as long as “sound reasoning and truth [are] adequately communicated” to him. Godwin’s statement is remarkably parallel to some aspects of Dr Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s definition of education in Islam. In the latter’s The…
Our previous article (“Adab defines Islamic education”) has clarified how adab manifests the beautification of ethics, whose fundamentals are ultimately based upon the worldview of Islam. This directly contradicts one of the integrals of secularization, namely the “relativization of all human values”. Islam disagrees with a secular view that each and every value system is…
In his essay “Modern Education and the Classics”, T. S. Eliot aptly observed that, “to know what we want in education we must know what we want in general. We must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life.” In the same vein, Muslim must think out his ideas about education as grounded…
Confusion and error in knowledge of Islam, as a religion and a civilization, are more harmful to Muslims than mere ignorance. The mind which is ignorant is simply in a state of privation of knowledge. Being ignorant in the simple sense of lacking in knowledge means one does not pretend to know. Here, one neither…
A group of Muslim jurists once got together, and because they could not think of anything better to do they proceeded to talk on trivial matters. One of them asked: “During a funeral procession, should one walk on the right side of the coffin or on the left?” Immediately the group was confused and extremely…
Struggle (jihad) has two aspects. First is the external struggle between the believers against the deniers of religious truths, their enemies and ill-wishers “who mock at Religion and make jest of it” (al-Ma’idah, 5: 57). Second, the internal struggle against one’s carnal self. In this spiritual battle-constantly engaged between ones’ intellectual faculties and the animal…
There was a group of people who, when it was said to them “do not commit corruption”, they responded, “we are but putting things right”. Whereas, in God’s view, they are the ones who are truly spreading corruption even though they admit that they are neither cognizant nor mindful of it. Even though those people think that…
