Return to tradition of knowledge
Monday, May 21, 2007
THE sheer amount of money involved is impressive. The ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has set aside US$10 billion ($15.3 billion) to wage a war against educational backwardness in the Middle East, saying the region has neglected education despite its oil wealth.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Jordan over the weekend, the prime minister of United Arab Emirates said the Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum Foundation will through its research promotion and scholarships focus on human development.
"(This) personal initiative aims at contributing to the development of a knowledge-based society, by supporting and empowering young minds and focusing on research, education and investment in the infrastructure of knowledge," the Sheikh said.
Maktoum said 18 per cent of people under 15 in the Middle East are illiterate and that number jumps to 43 per cent for women. He also said the Arab world spends 0.02 per cent of its gross domestic product on scientific research, while developed countries spend between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent. A Unesco 2002 report said that 40 per cent of adults in the Arab region were illiterate, and that projections show that if current efforts to eliminate it continue, 28 per cent of the region's population will still be illiterate in 2015.
"It is the ultimate form of negligence, to know why we lag behind and the dangers of doing so, and not to act," he said.
Our first comment is this: "It's about time". Dubai and the rest of the emirates are known for dazzling arrays of commercial centres that make the most use of the oil industry, not for intellectual pursuit.
Hence the deplorable statistics of illiteracy, especially among women.
While applauding the commitment and the vision for the advancement of the region, we are urging that the ruler and the authorities keep their sight trained on that particular expressions of "development of knowledge" and "knowledge-based society".
This will go beyond providing state of the art computers and laboratory equipments, the most expensive school buildings and a group of professors with strings of letters after their names. It goes beyond simply purchasing books for the research centres as shoving information down the throat of students does not a scholar make.
Instead, we wish to see that more people in the Middle East return to the tradition of knowledge rooted in the understanding that mankind is first and foremost a creation of God, and which makes no distinction between women and men in intellectual pursuit.
Education is both an obligation and a right for both sexes. All that money should in the end redress the existing educational gap between them.
After all, the Middle East, which has been over and over accused of being the least participatory for women in contemporary history, is actually the birth place of at least 8,000 female scholars, shaykha and female muftis dating back to 1,400 years ago.
According to the al-Azhar Scholar, Shaykh Mohammed Akram Nadwi, there are about 8,000 Muslims who have dedicated their lives to studying and teaching Islam from issuing fatwas to narrating hadiths.
Launching his study for the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in Britain, Nadwi has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Quran, transmitting hadith and even making Islamic law as jurists.
The 40-volume dictionary that Nadwi established following an eight-year study contains diverse entries which included a 10th-century Baghdad-born jurist who travelled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a female scholar or muhaddithat in 12th-century Egypt whose male students marvelled at her mastery of a "camel load" of texts; and a 15th-century woman who taught hadith at the Prophet's grave in Medina, one of the most important spots in Islam.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Jordan over the weekend, the prime minister of United Arab Emirates said the Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum Foundation will through its research promotion and scholarships focus on human development.
"(This) personal initiative aims at contributing to the development of a knowledge-based society, by supporting and empowering young minds and focusing on research, education and investment in the infrastructure of knowledge," the Sheikh said.
Maktoum said 18 per cent of people under 15 in the Middle East are illiterate and that number jumps to 43 per cent for women. He also said the Arab world spends 0.02 per cent of its gross domestic product on scientific research, while developed countries spend between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent. A Unesco 2002 report said that 40 per cent of adults in the Arab region were illiterate, and that projections show that if current efforts to eliminate it continue, 28 per cent of the region's population will still be illiterate in 2015.
"It is the ultimate form of negligence, to know why we lag behind and the dangers of doing so, and not to act," he said.
Our first comment is this: "It's about time". Dubai and the rest of the emirates are known for dazzling arrays of commercial centres that make the most use of the oil industry, not for intellectual pursuit.
Hence the deplorable statistics of illiteracy, especially among women.
While applauding the commitment and the vision for the advancement of the region, we are urging that the ruler and the authorities keep their sight trained on that particular expressions of "development of knowledge" and "knowledge-based society".
This will go beyond providing state of the art computers and laboratory equipments, the most expensive school buildings and a group of professors with strings of letters after their names. It goes beyond simply purchasing books for the research centres as shoving information down the throat of students does not a scholar make.
Instead, we wish to see that more people in the Middle East return to the tradition of knowledge rooted in the understanding that mankind is first and foremost a creation of God, and which makes no distinction between women and men in intellectual pursuit.
Education is both an obligation and a right for both sexes. All that money should in the end redress the existing educational gap between them.
After all, the Middle East, which has been over and over accused of being the least participatory for women in contemporary history, is actually the birth place of at least 8,000 female scholars, shaykha and female muftis dating back to 1,400 years ago.
According to the al-Azhar Scholar, Shaykh Mohammed Akram Nadwi, there are about 8,000 Muslims who have dedicated their lives to studying and teaching Islam from issuing fatwas to narrating hadiths.
Launching his study for the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in Britain, Nadwi has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Quran, transmitting hadith and even making Islamic law as jurists.
The 40-volume dictionary that Nadwi established following an eight-year study contains diverse entries which included a 10th-century Baghdad-born jurist who travelled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a female scholar or muhaddithat in 12th-century Egypt whose male students marvelled at her mastery of a "camel load" of texts; and a 15th-century woman who taught hadith at the Prophet's grave in Medina, one of the most important spots in Islam.
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