Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

4 6Islam i n World Cult u r e sthe form of numbered articles in an internationally standard legislative formatrather than in the forms used by traditional Islamic legal manuals, which weresometimes written as rhymes for easy memorization by legal scholars. Whereastraditional forms of Islamic legal reasoning and writing—including discussionof previous commentaries on legal principles, their difficulties, and the multipleand sometimes contradictory positions taken by other authorities in thepast—were highly decentralized, these modern codes remove “the authorshipof law . . . from the hands of individuals such as imams and virtuoso jurists and[make it] instead the collective responsibility of drafting committees and legislativebodies” (Messick 1998, 5). In both form and application, such practicesseem ever less “traditionally” Islamic. Since the mid-twentieth century, manyMiddle Eastern governments have enshrined Islam in their state constitutions(yet another institution imported from the West) as the official religion of thestate. Consequently, the common Western perception that “Islam” is a monolithicand unquestionable set of ideas and practices is at least as much an artifactof contemporary political organization as it is of a medieval Islamic heritage(Starrett 1998).By the early twentieth century, Ottoman educational policy had transformedthe way Islam was conceived of and taught in the region’s schools. Tr a-ditionally throughout the Middle East, the earliest phase of formal educationconsisted of study—or, more precisely, memorization—of the text of theQur’an. Although taking place in a group, instruction was individualized. Withthe help of a local teacher, students (mostly boys, but sometimes girls as well)would listen to and repeat the rhythmic cantillation of the scripture, learningto reproduce it exactly while at the same time acquiring the skills of readingand writing. Even in Arabic-speaking countries, students whose own dialect differedfrom the classical Arabic of the Qur’an did not necessarily comprehendthe text. The effort to learn the meaning of the text was postponed to lateryears, when the academically talented boys might travel to a m a d r a s a , w h e r ethey would learn, eventually, the sciences of textual interpretation and legalr e a s o n i n g .The Ottoman government’s establishment of a new system of schoolsbrought a revolutionary change in curriculum. New textbooks, new subjects,and new classroom activities began to stress, in new ways and from the earliestgrades, the government’s concern with directly regulating the personal behaviorof its subjects. This transformation incorporated the notion that the modernsocial order demanded of each student individual responsibility and effortto live an ordered life. Hygiene; patience; duty to parents, scholars, and officials;and loyalty to the Ottoman state were explicitly inculcated and linked tonew formulations of the Islamic character of society. These changes, identicalto those wrought by British and indigenous educators in nearby Egypt at thesame time, resulted in a long-term change in the ways the mass of Muslim stu-