Located in East London, just three hundred yards from Europe’s largest mosque complex, Ebrahim College—or EC—is establishing itself as a center of Islamic education in the West. EC’s central educational unit, the ’Alimiyyah program, trains men and women to become future “homegrown” Imams and ’alims who will serve the wider British Muslim community. EC’s slogan is “Seeking Knowledge: A Lifestyle Choice.” This paper examines the role of knowledge in constituting virtue within the pedagogical theory and practice of EC. According to my interlocutors at EC—where I conducted 18 months of fieldwork—virtue is living and being in accordance with that which one knows, and virtue alone creates harmony of the soul. I explore the manner in which knowledge-as-correct-action is constitutive of the virtuous Muslim subject, and also how notions of Islamic virtue come into conflict with modern, subjectivized notions of “right” and “wrong.” Drawing upon Alisadair McIntyre’s writings on virtue in the modern West, and how the absence of an overarching metaphysics creates fragmentary notions of “ethics” within the West, I argue that the Islamic model drawn upon by Ebrahim College, with its commitment to a metaphysics of certainty rooted in revelation, comes into conflict in a western milieu. The manner in which these (seemingly) divergent orders converse gives rise to what I call “apophatic virtue”: an articulation of one’s moral superiority (in mainstream western discourse vis-à-vis Muslims as well as within streams of Muslim discourse regarding “western norms”) by way of negation.

This paper examines how European knowledge and educational practices were indigenized in the operation of the Egyptian School of Languages, a foundational component of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s (r. 1805-48) educational reforms. I contend that examining this institution provides an ideal starting point for understanding how this Egyptian educational project of indigenizing knowledge required for technical progress and rationalizing its inclusion through moralizing legitimation strategies was foundational to larger literary, religious, philosophical and political trends in the Middle East in the latter half of the nineteenth century. First operating from 1836 to 1851, the School of Languages trained Egyptian students in the art of translation. Under the directorship of educational reformer and translator Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), the school’s curriculum was one of the first to bridge secular European approaches to language and humanities studies with Egyptian and Islamic forms of knowledge. The school also operated as a translation bureau, through which European texts necessary for the newly reorganized system of technical schools were selected for their utility and translated into Arabic, a process through which this “useful” knowledge was indigenized and made both morally sound and legible for the local context. This paper details the institutional history of the School of Languages, concentrating on how its administration transformed contemporary European educational practices to fit the local context in day-to-day decision-making. It will also catalog and discuss the material translated by al-Tahtawi and his cadre of translators. I aim to uncover what kinds of knowledge were deemed useful, how these definitions shifted as requirements of the government changed, and how the translation process legitimized this knowledge as permissible within the local context. To do so, this paper draws on published archival sources and bureaucratic memos housed at the Dar al-Watha‘iq al-Qawmiyya, catalogs of Arabic published materials, al-Tahtawi’s writings on education, and the educational journal Rawdat al-Madaris. Understanding how and why European knowledge and educational practices were chosen and “translated” – both literally and figuratively - for use in the School of Languages and the larger technical educational system will not only shed light on what Egyptians defined as useful and modern in this period of rapid change, but also contextualize how this knowledge’s inclusion informed both the discourse on modern education and early approaches to expanding ‘ilm in the mid-nineteenth century.

“Concerning Islam… it started dwindling little by little at the onset of colonialism in (East) Africa,” wrote Zanzibari-Omani historian Sa`id b. `Ali al-Mughayri. “Some of the Government Schools offered Qur’ānic instruction to the children for a short while, but this was merely a bait to lure them into a trap.” Al-Mughayri was referring to the education reforms instituted in Zanzibar by the British colonial government in the 1920s that introduced a minimal Arabic and Qur’ānic studies curriculum to colonial schools. In competition with the local Qur’ānic schools that had until then provided the primary education on the island, the Director of Education wrote in confidential missives that he included Arabic in the curriculum simply to increase attendance. Yet if Arabic and Qur’ānic instruction were indeed the bait, as al-Mughayri wrote, then what was the trap? This paper traces the question of morality within colonial and local Islamic discourses on education in Zanzibar by examining the Islamic curriculum introduced into colonial schools in the 1920s. This curriculum was hotly contested locally, and the educational system nearly collapsed over the question of teaching the Qur’ān. Yet these reforms nonetheless represent the juncture in which secular public education began to replace local Qur’ānic schools, and provides an historical example of how the paradigm of modernity as it emerged from Europe was strategically embedded in East Africa. Drawing upon Arabic, Swahili and English language sources from the Zanzibar National Archives, I explore Wael Hallaq’s discussion of the central domain of the moral within premodern Islam in the context of Islamic education. Moral questions and justifications remained at the forefront of colonial discourse, as the eradication of slavery was the primary justification for colonial incursion in Zanzibar, and “moral and physical degradation” the justification for compulsory colonial schooling. Yet nonetheless, I argue that the colonial educational reforms in fact relegated the moral to secondary status, valuing it only insofar as it served modernity’s central domain: economic and technical progress. Zanzibari parents sent their children to government schools in order to gain knowledge relevant to both “this world and the next,” only to find that they were being trained as “useful and loyal citizens” rather than pious and moral beings. The bait was Arabic and Qur’ānic education, assumed to be equivalent to that of the local Qur’ān schools. The trap was a paradigmatic worldview in which the moral became the handmaiden of economic progress.

In recent years, radical and violent Islamist movements – such as al-Qaeda and its offshoot the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – have seized the spotlight. A corollary of this preoccupation has been the proliferation of studies on the political thought of radical Islamist figures such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin-Laden. By contrast, scant attention has been paid to the thought of moderate contemporary Sunni Islamic scholars. This paper attempts to rectify this situation by focusing on the international relations discourse of a prominent Syrian Islamic thinker Sheikh Wahbah al-Zuhaili (hereafter Zuhaili). It focuses on Zuhaili’s three main treatises on international relations: Athar al-Harb (The Consequences of War) (1962), al-‘Alaqat al-Duwaliya fi al-Islam (International Relations in Islam) (2011) and al-Islam wa al-Qanoun al-Duwali al-Insani (Islam and International Humanitarian Law) (2012). Zuhaili was chosen for three main reasons. First, he presents a fairly detailed and systematic treatment of international relations from an Islamic point of view, while consciously seeking to relate his views to prevalent western notions, especially regarding war, diplomacy and the role of international law and international norms and conventions. Second, Zuhaili asserts repeatedly that concord – rather than conflict – is the foundation of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, thus setting himself apart from radical Islamists. Third, despite being renowned in the Arab world and the academically acclaimed quality of his writings, his works have not been translated yet into English; and his discourse has not been subjected to a systematic and critical reading that places it in its proper historic and ideational contexts, while relating it to the main traditions in studying international relations (primarily Realism and Liberal Internationalism). By shedding light on Zuhaili’s thought, the paper argues that radical Islamist ideology is at the periphery of contemporary Islamist conceptualizations of international relations while the epicenter is held by mainstream Islamists such as Zuhaili – and the better known Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the late Lebanese Shia cleric Sayyid Mohammad Hussein Fadlullah – whose perspectives on international relations are fairly compatible with prevalent western views, especially those emanating from the Realist school.