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Madrassahs have flourished throughout Muslim lands for centuries teaching the sacred Islamic sciences and cultivating a cultural environment rooted in knowledge. The Nizamiyyah in Baghdad, al-Azhar in Cairo, and the Qarawiyyin in Fez produced some of the best and most outstanding scholars of our Ummah. As Muslims today seek to build communities on a traditional ethic of learning, we are forced to seriously consider the modern challenge of schooling and education. Should Muslims reach back in history for an educational model that worked then, or should they attempt to create a fertile synthesis between the traditional and modern methods of learning? In this three-tape set, Shaikh Abdal Hakim Murad takes the audience on a tour through the process of education, from the origin of knowledge (the teaching of the Names to Adam) to humankind's great "falls" and "reclamations" and finally to the Adamic ideal. Examining the underpinnings of modernity and by extension the Western social structure, the shaikh unveils the achievements and the shortcomings of this educational model. He establishes that today the only significant alternative to the Western educational model is the Islamic model. And by examining the Islamic model, one sees that education is the means by which Allah takes His servants from darkness to light. In this series of talks, Dr. Murad expounds the concepts of wilayah (sainthood), nafs (worldly soul), the types of knowledge, and aspects of a curriculum taught in traditional madrassahs, as well as the role of the female scholar in the classical Islamic system. These talks will be of benefit to not only teachers, but to students, parents, homeschoolers, and non-Muslims interested in alternative forms of education. These sessions were delivered at the 2001 Florida Deen Intensive Program in Fort Lauderdale.

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