The Madrasa Curriculum in Context
The traditional madrasa was a global academic community that developed religious sciences such as Sacred Law, kalam, legal theory, Qur’anic exegesis, Arabic grammar, and hadith criticism in a conversation with the most advanced philosophical, scientific, social, and political sciences of its time. This monograph describes the subjects, textbooks, pedagogy, and goals of the curriculum of the traditional madrasa, the social functions for which it prepared its graduates, and other kinds of religious education that used to complement it, all in the social and intellectual context of the traditional world in which it lived. The author looks back at how things used be in the past to understand why they were that way, particularly in areas that seem strange or different, in the hope that this monograph can be a stepping stone towards a critical examination of the madrasa tradition in order to bring that tradition into full conversation with our world just as the luminaries of the past brought it into conversation with theirs.