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An excellent article. Usaama has highlighted one of the most key issues/solutions for Muslims of our time. We need more people with similar views, that is, to encourage Muslims to enter higher education to learn Islamic studies and also other religions and then teach it .
While we hear about Muslims who used to walk miles to recieve small bit of knowledge of Islam before, our era is witnessing a time consumed with lazyness and ‘modern’ issues/lifestyles or other more interesting stuff like celeb culture. Is this because WE are ‘living’ the life and they did not? Rather, it is the other way round.
What needs emphasis from this article perhaps is that Muslims going to higher education is not sufficient. Muslims knowing thier tradition and thier own teachings through Islamic studies at university before they are taught by the media and the local mullah. Learning about Islam should not be limited to knowing how to pray. Instead learning about the history and civilsation of Islam, the language and culture will enable one to become a model for the benefit of the soceity.
Furthermore, our heritage of Muslim etiquettes that we learn should manifest in our actions and behaviours not just with Muslims but with non-Muslims too. This will be the way then to teach Islam to the wider world for a better world. A lack of this has caused justification for the misconceptions of Islam and Muslims.
I feel this issue as a personal one since most of my batchelors degree was spent learning about Judaism when it was supposed to be about all three Abrahamic religions. This is, as the departmental-head reasons that, Muslim scholars simply dont enter academia to teach it, they just enter mosques. How much this is true is debatable especially when they were able to find a Rabbi to teach Judaism and a Dean to christianity – which shows the level at which other traditions are taught. However, the fact that there was only three Muslims studying religions/theology out of the whole university shows why the head of department may be right.
Like Usaama clarifies, I too think this is not expected of everyone. However, Islamic studies/Studies of religion is not really in our agenda. We value subjects according to prestige, money and power. The study of Islam should not come under the category of “interest”. But for a better future, study of religion should be our priority!