The Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013–2025 has made it clear that the Ministry of Education is serious in equipping students with higher-order thinking skills.
In so doing, emphasis has been placed on subjects of scientific and technological nature.
Unfortunately, while one can easily find such emphasis being clearly stated regarding subjects of that nature, one cannot do so in regard to subjects of religious and ethical nature.
The aforementioned ambiguity, if not utter neglect, also applies to such subjects dealing with Islam as are expected to be covered under Islamic Education.
Hence, serious and thinking Muslims might ponder: what does Islam have to do with scientific subjects which require such thinking skills?
Or, perhaps, what do such subjects requiring such skills have to do with Islam?
Yet, to properly address the above question(s) requires that they at least understand three inter-related items as delineated in the religious, intellectual, and scientific tradition of Islam: the nature of knowledge; the World-of-Nature as the object-of-knowledge; and thinking as an important channel of knowledge.
The term ‘ilm (Malay: ilmu), the most commonly used term in Arabic referring to knowledge, stems from a root comprising three letters, ‘ayn–lam–mim, giving rise to ‘alam whose basic meaning is that of ‘alamah (Malay: alamat), meaning “way sign” or “a trace (or a mark) by which something is known.”
The relation between knowledge (‘ilm) and way sign (‘alam) is particularly telling given the Arabian context in which the Qur’an was revealed.
In the desert especially, knowledge of way signs guides one on one’s travels and in the execution of one’s daily tasks.
In addition, ‘ayn–lam–mim is also the root for another widely used term, ‘alam (Malay: alam), which refers to the entire universe comprising not only all that is around us, but also whatever is in us, which can be studied and known.
In the aforesaid tradition as well, all the individual things and events in the universe are considered to be God’s ayats, viz. God’s verses, God’s signs and symbols.
An ayat (already part of Malay vocabulary) basically means “a manifest sign” which serves to indicate what is hidden, or not directly manifest.
Since ‘alam was a term originally used for anything instrumental and indicative in the obtainment of the knowledge of something else, these signs or ayats taken as a totality are referred to in that tradition as al-‘alam (the Cosmos; the Universe; the World-of-Nature), theologically defined as “everything other than God which points to Him.”
The entire Universe, in short, is an open, grand, created Book, comprising Divine Signs and Symbols.
For those who subscribe to such an understanding, doing science essentially becomes attempts to read and interpret the Open Book of Nature correctly.
In any true epistemic act, however, one cannot start from either what is unclear or what one is ignorant of, using it to grasp what is clear and understandable.
As such, knowing as an act has often been formulated as the progress of one’s mind from “what-has-already-been-known” to “what-is-still-unknown.”
To qualify as a valid epistemic act, therefore, any correct method of reading to be applied to the Book of Nature must reflect such a guiding formula.
Yet, reading involves thinking in most, if not all, cases.
Thinking being an integral cognitive component in science must also be guided and regulated by the same epistemic principle of progressing from “what-has-already-been-known” to “what-is-yet-unknown.”
In fact, it is in the light of this principle that thinking, in ‘ilm al-mantiq, the discipline of logic, is described as “the mental act of (1) arranging into correct and meaningful order (2) what one has already known in order to (3) attain what one is still ignorant of.”
Thinking in most cases involves the mind’s attending to signs such that what is yet unknown shall soon become known.
In fact, one of the Qur’anic terms for thinking is tawassum (al-Qur’an, 15: 75), being a derivative of the word wasm (meaning “sign,” “mark,” or “brand”) which is also the root word for ism (name).
The term as such signifies the mental act of scrutinizing the various signs or marks in the process of knowing.
As signs may take several forms, there is bound to be an intimate relation between the forms of thinking and those of signs.
For example, a sign may appear as “evidence-of-a-being” or as “indicator-of-outcomes,” these two by no means being mutually exclusive.
Depending on which of those two forms the signs involved are taking, thinking itself may take at least one of its two modes: one being tafakkur and the other, tadabbur (or tadbir).
The former is the mind’s attending to the signs-as-proofs, whereas the latter, to the signs-as-indicators-of-outcomes.
In this respect, tafakkur is more or less a synonym of istidlal (inference), which is another term for thinking which concentrates on proofs (dalil).
As such, to Muslims, the realisation of higher-order thinking skills in any field related to the study of Nature ought to culminate in one’s realising that the whole universe is real only insofar as it is understood as meaningfully interwoven signs and symbols of the One Real Being-Creator.
Otherwise, despite Bloom’s taxonomy, such skills cannot be regarded as those of a higher order!