Supporting Modern Teaching in Islamic Schools: Pedagogical Best Practice for Teachers advocates the revamp of the madrasah system and a review of the Islamic curriculum across Muslim countries and emphasises training needs for Islamic teachers for modern instructional practice. Islamic schools across Muslim countries face 21st-century challenges and teachers need continuing professional development to help them keep abreast of modern teaching practice. Books, papers, educators and parents have consistently called for curriculum change to transform teaching and learning in Islamic schools. Divided into three unique parts, Part 1 of the volume focusses on content knowledge, pedagogy and teaching methods; Part 2 highlights professional development, responsibilities and lifelong learning; and Part 3 comprises chapters on Islamic curriculum review, reform and Islamisation of knowledge. Scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Africa review the Islamic curriculum to highlight areas for further improvement and provide modern techniques and methods of teaching for pedagogical best practices and effective outcomes in Islamic schools. With these contributions, this volume will be of interest to OIC countries, Islamic student teachers and Islamic teachers who work in international and local settings.

"This ground-breaking book is one of the most significant contributions made in recent years to Islamic education."—John M. Hull, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom New Directions in Islamic Education is a radical rethinking of Islamic education in the modern world. It explores the relationship between pedagogy and the formation of religious identities within Islamic education settings that are based in minority and majority Muslim contexts. Abdullah Sahin, PhD, directs the Centre for Muslim Educational Thought and Practice and is the course leader for the MEd program in Islamic education at MIHE in Leicestershire, United Kingdom.

Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations. Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex, evolving, and diverse in its institutions and practices. They reveal that a struggle for hearts and minds in Muslim lands started long before the Western media discovered madrasas, and that Islamic schools remain on its front line. Schooling Islam is the most comprehensive work available in any language on madrasas and Islamic education.

This is a comprehensive handbook which for the first time provides a general yet detailed discussion of contemporary Islam and various aspects of Muslim lives. It offers a much needed tool for an introduction to the world of contemporary Muslim life and debate, and a link of continuity between the Muslim world and Muslims living and born in the West. The reader gains access to articles by leading scholars who observe phenomena in a post-9/11 context and from a global viewpoint. The topics have been carefully selected to provide the reader with both the necessary general view that a good handbook must offer while presenting details and information, as well as ethnographic examples, to inspire further research and interest. Indeed, each chapter will offer topical reading suggestions from which one can expand the material discussed in the chapter. The approach of the handbook is mainly social-anthropological, but attention is given to other disciplines like history, geography, political studies, as well as gender studies and cultural studies.

The study of Islamic education has hitherto remained a tangential inquiry in the broader focus of Islamic Studies. In the wake of this neglect, a renaissance of sorts has occurred in recent years, reconfiguring the importance of Islam’s attitudes to knowledge, learning and education as paramount in the study and appreciation of Islamic civilization. Philosophies of Islamic Education, stands in tandem to this call and takes a pioneering step in establishing the importance of its study for the educationalist, academic and student alike. Broken into four sections, it deals with theological, pedagogic, institutional and contemporary issues reflecting the diverse and often competing notions and practices of Islamic education. As a unique international collaboration bringing into conversation theologians, historians, philosophers, teachers and sociologists of education Philosophies of Islamic Education intends to provide fresh means for conversing with contemporary debates in ethics, secularization theory, child psychology, multiculturalism, interfaith dialogue and moral education. In doing so, it hopes to offer an important and timely contribution to educational studies as well as give new insight for academia in terms of conceiving learning and education.

Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social and political forces in history. Over the last 1400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia. Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen and soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion and neglect some of these personalities and institutions while offering the reader a new narrative of this lost Islamic history. The Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans feature in the story, as do Muslim Spain, the savannah kingdoms of West Africa and the Mughal Empire, along with the later European colonization of Muslim lands and the development of modern nation-states in the Muslim world. Throughout, the impact of Islamic belief on scientific advancement, social structures, and cultural development is given due prominence, and the text is complemented by portraits of key personalities, inventions and little known historical nuggets. The history of Islam and of the world's Muslims brings together diverse peoples, geographies and states, all interwoven into one narrative that begins with Muhammad and continues to this day.

Helen N. Boyle takes an anthropological approach to Quranic schooling in examining the role of Quranic preschools in community life.