A month has lapsed since the official launch of the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (Pre-school to Post-Secondary Education) by the Deputy Prime Minister.
The blueprint has made it clear that in the Ministry of Education’s effort to equip students with thinking skills, one of the six key attributes needed by them to be globally competitive, emphasis shall be placed on the inculcation and enhancement of higher-order thinking skills (HOTs).
The blueprint also recognises that ethics and spirituality is another key attribute with which students have to be equally equipped.
Since moral deliberation necessarily involves thinking and employment of sound judgement and principles during critical moments, HOTs shall also be applicable in the inculcation of strong ethics and spirituality.
Islamic Education is certainly an important vehicle, if not the only one, to help such inculcation.
It is here, among others, that one will naturally raise the question: Are the teachers responsible for Islamic Education already possessing a mind-set that is conducive for HOTs?
Even more basic to that is: are their teachers—i.e., all the respective lectures at the various higher-learning institutions—ready for that?
Whatever their level of mental readiness is, such a conducive mind-set shall need to seriously attend to the relation that exists between the Islamic creed (akidah) and human mind.
One is naturally tempted to ask whether there is any positive relation between a Muslim protecting his or her Islamic creed and the enhancement of his or her mental capacity.
For those who regard creed as being essentially dogmatic, the positive relation between them is suspect and, at
best, mere rhetoric.
How can the relation be positive as the very essence of dogmas is that they are not subject to rational questioning and scrutiny, whereas reason’s very life lies in on-going examinations and analyses?
Perhaps, the popular dictum “I believe because it is absurd” is the most simple way to convey this so-called paradox in layman’s terms.
But should the Muslims, the Malays included, be in a dilemma regarding this issue?
Is what is truly referred to as the akidah really synonymous in every respect with what is commonly referred to as dogma?
One way to seriously address this is by way of explicating what the human mind actually is.
Is the “mind” simply another name for human “reason”?
Or has it been reduced to “reason” only in modern times?
What are the other dimensions of the human mind in its non-reducible mode, if there are any?
What about other names, such as “soul” and “spirit,” which are hardly mentioned in the so-called modern scientific community, let alone other Arabic terms, namely, ruh, nafs, aql, lubb, nuha, qalb, etc.?
No matter what one’s stance is regarding the answers to all these questions, it is hard to deny the sort of relation the human mind has with human reason.
As such, one cannot deal with issues pertaining to the rationality of the akidah without one having grasped the nature and reality of human reason.
Most of us would readily admit that “reasonableness” is the essence of “rationality” and that the opposite of “rationality” is simply “irrationality.”
As such, we have a strong tendency to simply regard “irrationality” as being equivalent to “non-rationality,” without being fully aware of the other sense of non-rational.
It is here that one should understand the sharp distinction between the two senses of “non-rational.”
There is, on the one hand, a sense which pertains to anything that contradicts the pure judgement by one’s reason, and on the other hand, a meaning which point to other valid sources, or means, of knowing available to man other than, but not necessarily or inherently hostile, to reason.
Non-rational in the former sense is better captured by the term “irrational,” whereas the latter, by “trans-rational” or “supra-rational.”
In relation to the Philosophy of Science, the former seems to be more related to what is usually called “the context of justification,” while the latter, “the context of discovery.”
It is this fine distinction that we have always been cautioned about by the various authoritative scholars deliberating and expounding on matters of the akidah as well as on other aspects of Islam.
In other words, for them, there are always things in the akidah which are supra-rational but are by no means irrational.
It is with the above rational framework that Muslim scholars expounded on the Islamic creed, including what the Muslims from this part of the globe commonly call “the twenty Divine Attributes” (sifat dua puluh Tuhan), something they readily commit to memory.
Those who have had the chance to peruse the traditional scholarly works on such attributes, works which contemporary Malays rightly or wrongly call kitab kuning, will not fail to notice that right at the beginning of such works, logical and rational categories are extensively discussed and are clearly differentiated from both the legal and the social categories.
And what is more telling is that by those attributes affirmed of God, or denied of God, scholars emphatically mean
the attributes which are arranged according to the logico-rational categories of necessity, impossibility and possibility.
In fact, in addition to the factor of puberty (baligh), one is said to be held accountable in terms of religion only when one is possessed of minimal discriminatory faculties (al-mumayyiz).
And this faculty is described by some Muslim scholars in basic logical terms as being one’s ability to discern the difference between what is necessary, what is impossible, and what is possible.
Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, most of the Muslims have lost the rational framework and basis of what they
memorized since childhood.
And it is exactly this framework and basis which can invigorate their minds.
Therefore, any sincere effort to enhance the Muslim minds and accordingly apply HOTs must involve a serious process of refreshing their minds with such aforementioned perennial wisdom.