Analysis and evaluation of the Islamabad curriculum design :implications to educational theory and practice in the Muslim World

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the curriculum design offered by the Muslim scholars in the Second World Conference on Muslim Education, in 1980 in Islamabad with a view to assessing its ability to serve as a platform for an integrated educational system and bring to an end the dualistic educational state of affairs in the Muslim world. As the evaluation targeted the internal coherence between the different components of the curriculum construct, the study has adopted an analytical approach to the resolutions of the World Conferences on Muslim Education geared towards identifying the human outcome they promote and determining to what extent the organization assumptions underlying the Islamabad Curriculum Design (ICD) reflect the same portrait. The analysis has identified some inconsistency between the ICD`s theological/philosophical precepts and its design assumptions. The former upholds an active efficacious human product able to assume his leading role in the process of social change, while the latter is a recipe for a rather passive human product fully controlled by his environment without having any influence on it. The study concludes, in light of this finding, that although the ICD has featured a solid conceptual platform, it is more likely in its initial outline to cultivate dualism rather than end it, as it promotes simultaneously two conflicting human portraits. As the ultimate purpose of the study is to improve the ICD, the researcher reviewed a number of formulations which may be more compatible with the ICD`s philosophical/theological assumptions, namely the ideas suggested by Syed Mohammed Naqib Al-Attas during and after the Second World Conference on Muslim Education and the theories advanced by Majid Arsan Al-Kilani a decade later. While neither of the two formulations was found to be readily applicable in an Islamic context without problems, the combination of their distinctive principles allowed the researcher to offer a new model. The new formulation is centred on the concept of faith and has a tripartite structure, as it perceives the educational experience as an ongoing appreciation of the Quranic, humans and natural divine Signs geared essentially towards strengthening the learners` belief in their Cherisher and adjusting their lives to the requirements of the relationship between the Creator and the creatures.